Bitch. ph.d. writes about the gendered assumptions behind attaining the American Middle Class Dream. It’s a very good post - and one which highlights the problems with assuming that life, happiness, and success are all a matter of working hard enough to get them. Which of course forgets all about the fact that there is a lot of unpaid or very badly paid labor that goes towards ensuring that someone can work hard enough to get success and happiness. In what follows I am intermingling my personal situation with larger questions I got to thinking about after reading Dr. B’s post.
You see, I’ve also been reading the controversial Amanda Marcotte book, and quite frankly, I feel that some of it is nearly as hostile as the upheaval surrounding it was within the feminist blogger community (I can’t even begin to link to everything that went on and won’t try here). There’s only a short bit in the book about women having careers vs. “opting out” and staying home with kids instead (see Lisa Belkin and her problematic Opt-Out Revolution), acknowledging that claiming all these women are really “opting out” is a fallacy - in one way or another, it’s more accurate to say women are typically forced to leave the work they are presented as opting out of. There is, however, nothing at all about the fact that there are realities specific to women’s lives because of which being a stay-at-home mom for some period of time should really be an option that can be chosen freely by women.
Personally, I’m tired of feeling bad about wanting the feminist collective to acknowledge these, to my mind, usually particularly feminine realities.
You see, I actually want to spend some time away from away from the workplace to take care of my child. Not an infinite amount of time but enough time not only my body to heal but for us to adjust to being a family. So for the first year or two of her life, until she is old enough to start spending chunks of time with other kids, without either of her parents there.
Now, not all of this is contingent on me, a woman, taking time off from a working life. But a lot of it is: I am the one whose body goes through pregnancy and labor, I am the one whose body will - hopefully - produce breastmilk to feed my baby, and I have absolutely no problem with that. In fact, I find it amazing and wonderful.
When it comes to the part about someone being at home with a baby to take care of her beyond breastfeeding, that part is not necessarily contingent upon women. In our case, however, I want to be the person who does this. I love being with small children, always have, and I’ve always imagined doing this part of family life myself. And also, I’m not sure I’d like to support all of us on adjunct lecturer wages, and adjuncting is really the only kind of employment I could get with any certainty at the moment. I suppose it’s lucky that A. can support us. And I suppose it’s also lucky that I’ve known for a long time that I’d be happier outside academia than in it… and so it’s just fine with me that I can make having a child be the beginning of a career shift for me.
But according to much of American feminist ideology I should not have had such an easy time deciding to have a child instead of continuing on with my academic career, and certainly I should not feel quite so good about my choice. I should instead be arranging to go back to work just three or so months after giving birth, desperately looking for child care as I do so.
But after three months, I doubt very much that I will be ready to be apart from my baby for quite so much of the time. And then, too: there’s the financial nitty-gritty. To make my point, a comparison: do you know how much it costs to pay for one child’s full-day, lunch-included childcare in Hungary? Two dollars per day. I could pay that on an adjunct salary. And then, too: no health insurance needs to be bought because: universal healthcare. And incidentally, adjunct teaching is considered real and actual work in Hungary so by virtue of having done it already, I’d be eligible for the government-payed monthly parenting stipend that either a mother or a father can take for not just a few months but two years, per child.
By contrast, adjuncting here is not really considered work so it does not come with “fringe” benefits like health insurance. Now there’s something that sounds utterly wrong to me: being able to take care of potentially life-and-death problems like health problems is a “fringe” benefit of work, and only of particular kinds of work. There are other, better, more legal and official ways of putting this but the bottom line is that in this country, some jobs are not “real” enough to merit taking care of the life-and-death problems that the workers who do those jobs face. Yet they face those problems with about as much frequency as people do who have the “real,” benefits-eligible kinds of jobs.
If I sound bitter about this - it’s because I am. I’ve known for a long time that as far as societal support for parenting goes, the U.S. is the pits. But you never think about the ramifications of your decision to immigrate here until you’re actually faced with them. And I like living here. In fact, I prefer living here: I can be myself in a way that I was never able to in Europe.
What’s more, I believe in a lot of the values that, for example, American feminism represents and fights for, and a lot of the things American feminists have achieved tangibly make women’s lives better and are really and truly important.
But I resent, from the bottom of my heart, that I have to have this tangled sense of guilt about wanting to stay at home with my child for the first part of her life. And I don’t see much of feminism moving towards considering the fact that mothering maybe really is important enough that those of us who want to make it our work for a year or two should be financially supported in doing so, instead of passing our children off to other women to care for while we pay them to do so.
You see, the money element is there - right there: if I go back to work while my baby is still young, I have to pay someone to take care of my child. If I decide to care for her myself, then no one pays me… And feminist ideology mostly only focuses on the part of this picture whereby I am then accepting dangerous economic dependence on a man.
Yet many women feel they’d prefer to care for their babies themselves rather than pay someone else to do so. Many don’t have a choice about it and have to go back to work anyway. And then there are many women who would prefer to go back to work but because of the prohibitive cost of childcare, cannot afford to do so. The two non-choices are related: both have to do with how much being a mother is generally undervalued in this society, by conservative lawmakers and feminists as well. Because in neither of the above cases do the mother’s needs and desires count.
And that’s where my problem is: shouldn’t feminism be about creating possibilities for ALL the different ways in which one can be a woman?
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