A couple of years ago, Lisa Belkin wrote a controversial Times magazine article about high powered business women who dropped out of the workforce after having kids. Well, the women of Yale read it and took notes. Today, the Times writes about young Yale students who are planning to stay at home and raise kids; unlike Belkin’s mothers, they have no career aspirations.
At Yale and other top colleges, women are being groomed to take their place in an ever more diverse professional elite. It is almost taken for granted that, just as they make up half the students at these institutions, they will move into leadership roles on an equal basis with their male classmates.
There is just one problem with this scenario: many of these women say that is not what they want.
Many women at the nation’s most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others, like Ms. Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.
This morning, my mom called me to tell me about this article. I skimmed it and thought little of it. Women choosing to be parents? Sounds great. No big deal. Yet, apparently it is. Check out the hubbub at Crooked Timber.
UPDATE: Kieran said that I misunderstood his post. Fine. My mistake.
Apt. 11d 
Yes! Yes! Give ‘im hell! Let’s you and him fight, I’ll hold your coat…
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Now, now, don’t you worry your pretty little head. It’s not like raising a kid is a round-the-clock job with no weekends, no vacations, and no sick days. Oh wait…hmm…maybe we oughta form a union…
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THIRD SECTION:
The view from 11-D.
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I was waiting for your post on this. But I figured you were so busy with all those tasks around home that you didn’t have time! Anyway, you’re right, of course, that nobody who is raising children needs to apologize to anyone.
Can I also vent about how a few anecdotes now pass for a “trend” and can apparently sustain a front page article in the NYT. Bad enough that the NYT Mag is constantly filled with lead articles claiming the latest “trend” — like “girls who bully” — based on, oh, three examples. But was there actually “news” in that article? There certainly was not any analysis. A sad state of affairs for the MSM. And that’s without mentioning the “premium content” that now appears on their web site.
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Kiernan says that it’s fine for these women to stay at home; they’ll have rich husbands. But what about all the poor mothers who have to work?
Laura, go and read the original post, will you? Practically the whole damn thing is about how choices which are easy for rich women to make just aren’t available to poor women, and this is a public policy problem not just a matter of private preferences.
women alone shouldn’t be burdened with these work-life issues, but we are. Don’t see why he’s blaming the victim for that one.
What? Yes, women alone shouldn’t be burdened with these choices! That’s why I wrote “as usual, the article is steeped with the standard way of framing the issue, viz, only women have work-family choices. It’s up to them to be “realistic”, while of course the male students do not have any work-family choices at all.” How is this blaming the victim? The whole point of the post is that focusing on the individual choices, especially those of a few privileged women, is a waste of time because all of the insitutional context and power issues that allow them to have their plans get pushed aside. This includes their tacit assumption that they’ll have no trouble finding a wealthy husband, whom of course they’ll never divorce, to pay for the model home they imagine.
I see an underlying judgment in his post against women who stay at home
Really? Despite my saying things like “Now, let’s be clear about why the article is annoying. I don’t begrudge these women their choices in the slightest. I hope they make happy lives for themselves. In many ways they get the absolute best deal possible” or “Again, I emphasize that what’s wrong here is not these choices as such—which many of us would like to be in a position to make—so much as the constant, wilful neglect of anything except that pristine, individual decision…” Are you a fan of Leo Strauss or something?
cheerily plan on being out of the workforce in ten years having a grand time at home with the children.
Man, you’ve got no clue. Raising kids is work. Say it with me. Raising kids is work. It is rewarding work. Much more rewarding than 99% of the other jobs out there. But it is work. To portray raising kids as a rich person’s way to loll away the time is uninformed and rude.
Laura, just read the post that’s on the page, will you, instead of the one you’re imagining I wrote? It’s these rich young women, not me, who imagine it’ll be a relaxing and fulfilling breeze hanging around the house with their imaginary brood of happy, always-rewarding children and no financial problems. They clearly imagine that having a family is like an easy early retirement. I don’t think any such thing. I have a 20-month-old daughter and my wife works full time in the same profession as me. So don’t lecture me about how raising children is really work. And the next time you’re itching to launch an attack on someone, pick a better target — picking someone one the opposite side of this issue from you would be a good rule of thumb.
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A union wouldn’t be a bad idea. But given the current political climate (conservative “moral values” sermonizing in the service of libertarian/dog-eat-dog economics), the only solution I can think of is for women to expand and intensify the “baby boycott”.
It shouldn’t be too difficult to organize. After all, even in the absence of anything like an organized plan or self-conscious strategy, the numbers look very promising. As Stephanie Mencimer reports in the above-linked article:
“Between 1976 and 1998, the number of women between the ages of 40 and 44 who were childless doubled. Now, 20 percent of baby boomer women are childless and likely to remain so, and demographers predict that as much as a quarter of American women born between 1956 and 1972 will never have children. The numbers go up with education and income levels; fully one-third of women in their late 30’s with graduate degrees have no children. Meanwhile, the number of women with only one child has doubled since 1976, to 18 percent, and the Brady Bunch has gone on the endangered species list. In 1976, a whopping 36 percent of all women had a brood of four or more kids. Today, that number has shrunk to less than 10 percent, according to U.S. Census data. For all the prosperity of the last eight years, a significant percentage of women of all races and ethnic backgrounds are behaving as if the country were in the midst of a famine.”
And all of this has been achieved without a campaign! Imagine what the numbers might be if someone organized a real, honest-to-goodness boycott. Old-fashioned in its purpose, but up-to-the-minute in its methods. I’m thinking slick advertising, edgy logos, catchy slogans (“Parenting is for Suckers;” “Can you really afford to pay the price of motherhood?”), t-shirts, weblogs and webrings, the whole works.
I’m not sure what the goal would be in terms of actual statistics (30 percent of women over 40 childless? 40 percent?), but the overall aim, obviously, would be to create a “tipping-point” scenario where people (people other than demographers and feminist economists and various other policy wonks, that is) would realize that people — workers, consumers, taxpayers, and even, yes, citizens, not to mention people to reproduce more people — don’t spring up like mushrooms or grow more or less naturally on trees, but actually have to be produced (and then cared for, and educated and socialized and so and so forth).
Alternatively to (or perhaps in conjunction with) a serious baby boycott, and much as I oppose the scheme on just about any other grounds you could mention, I can’t help wondering whether parents should not only support the privatization of social security (create your own retirement workforce), but even push for a much more extensive privatization of social and economic life in general. Need workers to staff your firm? No more free rides, corporate America! You’re going to have to not only pay the workers (well, duh) but also, and perhaps more significantly and almost certainly more expensively, pay for the initial (and lengthy and costly ) production/reproduction of those workers.
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Kiernan — I just added an update that I misunderstood your post. And added some further comments on CT.
I would like to talk more about this, but I feel that you’re too upset with me right now. Perhaps we should do this another time.
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I think Kiernan is not reading the women interviewed in the article fairly, though.
I think that to some extent, the women themselves (and their peers) are passing judgement on being raised in upper-middle-class families that tried to have it all. There’s a bit of the Buddenbrooks thing going on here, the slight downward mobility of the next generation of the bourgeois, made possible by the accumulation of the previous generation. Made me think a bit about why I was clear I didn’t want to be a lawyer like my father, because it simply seemed to have drawn the lifeforce out of him at times–but of course my ability to become an academic without enormous personal or financial sacrifice was made possible by him. Same thing here, I suspect, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take seriously what these women are suggesting about their own experience or observation of family life in ambitiously professional two-career families, that they see a cost they’d rather not pay. They’ll probably feel differently when they see the costs on the other side of their own choice, but don’t we all? And of course Kiernan is right that poor women don’t enter into this choice at all, but I do think he’s just setting the women in the article up as straw figures to beat on, holding them partially accountable for general social contradictions. I’m more inclined to start with a more open curiosity about what the women themselves are thinking, what the experiences they’ve had might be that are conditioning this reaction, than making them out to be class enemies from the outset.
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OK, look. Sorry about the outburst: your comment came at the end of what I could only see as wilful misreadings.
I don’t think we really disagree.
On Crooked Timber you ask whether I’m right to think that the women in the article think motherhood is easy:
I did hear them saying that working full time with kids is really hard.
I heard them (and their moms) say explicitly that working full time with kids is bad for the kids. “I’ve seen the difference between kids who did have their mother stay at home and kids who didn’t, and it’s kind of like an obvious difference when you look at it” and so on. I’ll say more about this in a second. You also say,
I have no clue why anyone should care whether some college girls want to raise their own kids.
This is why we are actually on the same side. For the nth time, it’s not the individual choices that are the issue, but to read the NYT you’d think it was all that mattered — a few women changing their mind about how to make work/family choices. What’s really important are the institutional arrangements that make some choices unavailable to some or very difficult for many, to the point where the only people in a position to have a real set of choices are the very wealthy. It doesn’t have to be like this, as comparative evidence shows very well. None of the women even mention the fact — and it is a fact — that the life they have in mind for themselves and their children will require a high-earning husband. They just take it for granted, because they can. This is what I mean when I say that they have the luxury of complacently contemplating an particular kind of home life — one that many people would happily choose, if only they could afford it.
I say more about this stuff in this post, which has links to scholars who advocate in detail for the kind of choice-enhancing social policies I have in mind. I assure you, the very last thing on my mind is condemning individual women for their choices. I just want us to see the political and institutional context that structures the menu of options we get, and to think about how this menu could be improved. It’s not impossible, it’s just that in the U.S. the issue is constantly reduced to a matter of individual preference. This is the wrong way to think about it, because it only leads to useless slanging about whether my decision to raise my children this way is better than your decision to raise them that way. As I said in the original post, it must be empirically true that there are multiple child-rearing pathways to a successful adulthood, and so the best thing to do is to make it easier for people to make what they think is the best choice.
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I do think he’s just setting the women in the article up as straw figures to beat on, holding them partially accountable for general social contradictions. I’m more inclined to start with a more open curiosity about what the women themselves are thinking, what the experiences they’ve had might be that are conditioning this reaction, than making them out to be class enemies from the outset.
Again, I don’t think this is a fair assessment. We got a good sense from the article about what the women were thinking, and I suggested it was clear why they were in a position to be thinking that. I also suggested that the tremendous endogeneity of views about childrearing (“I turned out OK so that must be the right way to do it”) seemed to be driving a lot of their views. But here again Tim — like the NYT — wants to make the debate about the personal experiences of these women and the preferences they have because of it. I don’t see how arguing, as I have done, that this is not a productive way to understand what’s wrong with work/family debates in the U.S., implies that I must see these women as “class enemies from the outset.”
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Kieran, the one thing I think you’re missing is that there is also a collective character (potentially) to the choices that you’re insisting we treat as individualized in the article: that this is a sociological commentary by one generation of upper-middle-class people on the parenting choices of the previous generation, that they’ve seen the stresses that a certain ideology of heroic womanhood has placed upon many ambitious professional women and decided pre-emptively to resolve those stresses in advance. They may well end up recreating the dilemma of a previous generation of women, or maybe the professional job market is now far more adjusted to the cyclical presence of women, who knows? But just in terms of the sociology of the professional class, this isn’t just individual choice, I suspect.
I also think you’re not entirely copping to the extent to which you did exactly what you say you did not wish to do, which is to scapegoat the women themselves for their choice. Re-read your post and some of your comments at CT early in the thread: I think you make the women quoted your target at certain points.
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I would love to see some actual numbers on family income and mothers in the work force. It’s only anecdotal evidence (though good enough for the Times), but in the working class families from my town, the mom stays at home and in the white collar families, both parents work. The blue collar mom would never make enough money to cover childcare costs and she also tends to have more children than the white collar mom. I think it’s wrong to assume that only wealthy women stay at home.
MCM, mothers unite! (I owe you a gossip filled e-mail.)
I emphathize with these Yale women who see only tough decisions ahead of them. We let them go through years of college and graduate school, but in their mid thirties they’re given terrible choices — forgo children or 50 hours of child care and constant exhaustion. Things just aren’t set up all that well for working moms. No wonder that many are not even going bother with the career. Also, it is okay to not want to have a career at all.
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damn. you guys type much faster than I do.
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I think you make the women quoted your target at certain points.
As I’ve consistently said, I think they sounded very complacent, especially as examples of the smartest kids in the country. I’m happy to cop to that. Again, this doesn’t mean they should have different preferences, but they might have sounded a bit more informed — if only about the chances that their plans might prove more difficult to implement than they expect.
there is also a collective character (potentially) to the choices that you’re insisting we treat as individualized in the article
No, I’m saying the article treats them as individualized choices, as do the women themselves. I can see how their preferences might be partly the result of a backlash against the “stresses that a certain ideology of heroic womanhood has placed upon many ambitious professional women.” Although I think you’ll find that the women interviewed said they wanted to do just what their mothers had done and stay at home with the children. This is the endogeneity problem again: you can create plausible pathways from any start point to any preference. If the women had stay-at-home mothers, then this can explains why they also have a preference to raise their children in the same way. But if they had mothers who worked in the formal economy, then that too can plausibly explain why they want to stay at home themselves, for the reasons you give.
Any set of decisions by women of the present generation can plausibly be presented as a commentary on the choices of their parents. I think a better way of thinking about it is that these women are amongst the very few who are structurally in a position, if they choose, to opt-out of the ideal-worker norm of a corporate career. And now we see many of them planning to do so. But nothing in the article, or the quotes from the women, spoke to why they might be in this position (but not their future husbands or other sorts of women). Instead, it was all “I think this is the best way to raise kids” etc.
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[TB}there is also a collective character (potentially) to the choices that you’re insisting we treat as individualized in the article
[KH] No, I’m saying the article treats them as individualized choices,
I see I’ve probably misread you here, because of the “we treat as inividualized in the article” clause — you men “we treat as individualized by the article” right? What I say in the rest of that paragraph is in any event a response to your claims about whether there’s sociological significance to what they say, so it’s really not that important.
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Even if these women aren’t necessary looking at their mothers’ experiences and reversing direction, they have certainly met other working-mothers. It’s not really a secret that having a family is difficult to combine with a job.
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It’s not really a secret that having a family is difficult to combine with a job.
No argument from me there. Let’s grant, for the sake of argument, that it’s better to have a parent at home full-time with the kids and that we’d all make that choice if we could. (For the sake of argument, I said.) I guess what really ticked me off about the piece, even given that assumption, was the complete lack of acknowledgement of why these women were in a position to comfortably contemplate this choice without the threat of losing their own social status (comparison case: a male Harvard student with the same plans), or without any real worries about financing this kind of life (comparison case: most other people trying to make a living). For me this is what’s pernicious about abstracting the private choice (What kind of parent will I be?) from the external circumstances the choice is made in.
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I wonder why these women aren’t thinking of marrying a man who will stay home with the kids? If one parent is to stay home, why not the father?
There was an author named Rhona Mahony, who wrote a book called “Kidding Ourselves: Breadwinning, Babies, and Bargaining Power” whose thesis was that women should “train up and marry down” – that is, train for high-earning careers and marry nurturing, low-earning men. While not everyone is suited for the kind of career that typically pays a high salary, Mahony does have a good point when she notes that the “nice” guy is a far better bet than the rich one.
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Kieran — Don’t worry. I know where you are coming from. If the article had written about the same type of women but from a state college like Rutgers, you might have had an entirely different reaction.
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See, I think in part what may be going on (without any certainty at all about just how representative these women are, or whether their thinking is any deeper than it appears in the article) is also a resurgence of elite higher education as a “finishing school” which these women value because it gives them the appropriate social identity to be part of the professional classes (and to marry within them) even if they’re not focused on the conversion of that education into an ambitious career trajectory. That observation is certain to infuriate feminists of a certain generation since the entire “finishing school” ideology was a major target of middle-class feminism. But liberal arts education actually encourages its reappearance in an odd kind of way, with its typical language of self-actualization and character-building–most liberal arts institutions complicatedly efface the extent to which the education they provide is directly connected to professional work, especially in the humanities, and instead talk about how it remakes people to be better citizens, critical thinkers, and so on. Which in another guise is the finishing school: it makes the culture of the professional classes, and any young woman (or man) who wants to be part of the culture of the professional classes usually imagines having a partner who is also part of them by some pathway or another.
The women interviewed probably also know, somewhat accurately, that the degree will make cyclical work of various kinds possible to them for most of their lives, that they can come in and out of the professional job market in niches that exist outside the highly competitive tracks. The non-profit sector, for example, has a lot of jobs of this kind. So there is some degree of economic rationality here, a recognition that a satisfying condition of possibility, comfort and autonomy in life doesn’t require a form of equity in which male and female lifeways are exactly and precisely parallel.
All of which, as Kieran says, is about the professional classes and not the wider social problem of balancing work and family, which has little to do with choice. The only problem I have with his thoughts on this point is that he’s trying to isolate that response to the work/family one when it’s really a critique of class privilege as a whole. This is hardly the only issue where the professional classes think about choice and everyone else thinks about necessity. Kieran should be just as exercised about job fairs at universities for spring-semester seniors: here they are making choices again that others cannot make! Or any context where middle-class 20-somethings fret about their futures, really. Or middle-aged men and women feeling the anomie of being academics, or worrying about their paunches and wrinkles, or wondering what restaurant to eat at in New York at their next meeting, and so on.
I don’t say this to be snarky: I say it only because if Kieran wants to insist this is about the wider social issue, that he’s not really second-guessing individualized choices by particular people, that he doesn’t play that game and everyone else does, it’s actually hard to explain why he lands on the issue that he does with the intensity that he does. His wider critique, if it is a critique of anything, is of a state-society relation that does not distribute choice equitably, whether about family or anything else. This is a legitimate argument to take, but its implications go well beyond the work-family dilemma.
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“The only problem I have with his thoughts on this point is that he’s trying to isolate that response to the work/family one when it’s really a critique of class privilege as a whole.”
To turn this around: the problem with this piece (and also, and especially with the Lisa Belkin piece that the Times published a couple of years ago) is that isolates one kind of privileged response to a much broader issue (the work/family dilemma), and then attempts to draw wider sociological conclusions (e.g., to suggest a new trend: motherhood as career path, or whatever) that are supposed to apply to the issue more broadly. I don’t see why Kieran should be faulted for objecting to this all-too-common move, to the tendency to frame the work/family issue as a matter of individual choice.
Sure, it’s all tied in with class, is “hardly the only issue where the professional classes think about choice and everyone else thinks about necessity,” and can be seen, from one perspective, as just another subset of broader inequities in choices, chances, expectations and so on. But there’s something particularly irritating about the language of individualized choices in relation to this issue precisely because this issue, as it relates to the many, is so frequently framed in relation to the choices available to the relatively few.
“Kieran should be just as exercised about job fairs at universities for spring-semester seniors: here they are making choices again that others cannot make!”
But again, as I read him, it’s not so much the choices that exercise him so much as the *report* on these choices as some kind of broader social trend. Would the NYTimes report back on a hiring fair at an elite university that despite recent gloomy economic indicators, growing concern over Americans’ increasing personal debt load and so on and so forth, young people seem relatively optimistic about their future professional/financial prospects? If they did do so, presumably Kieran and/or others would point to the problems with isolating the life chances of the privileged few and then applying to the life chances of the non-privileged many. Of course, the Times is unlikely to publish such an article, because it would be too obviously silly. But this kind of reporting is all too common in the “mommy wars,” “nanny wars,” work/family area.
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I will let Kieran speak for himself, but I just wanted to question a couple of things:
MCM writes “But there’s something particularly irritating about the language of individualized choices in relation to this issue precisely because this issue, as it relates to the many, is so frequently framed in relation to the choices available to the relatively few.”
Yeah. I don’t know about that. I’m not sure that only a few women have the choice to stay home now or not. As I’ve said earlier, I know a lot of blue collar stay at home moms. They’re not living the high life with maids and nannies. They’re living on incomes that you or I might not think sufficient. They just want to take care of their kids, they have no career options, and they can’t afford childcare.
Yes, there are many families that really can’t put food on the table without two incomes and there are also many one income families where they are making enormous economic sacrifices to do what they do.
There are many economic factors that enable families to survive on one income — that one income, regional cost of living, home costs, number of children, and personal preferences.
It’s just more complicated than rich/home and everyone else/working.
The Times isolates the behavior of the rich all the time. What is their Style Section, but an enormous love letter to rich people? “Muffy weds Trip” How about their Travel section? Who can afford to go to any of those places? During the tech boom, how many articles did I have to endure on the new, young millionaires as I was slugging it away in grad school. The Times is not the place I go to when I’m looking for a healthy critique of class privilege.
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Mary, good points, but I think what you observe is kind of what I’m suggesting to Kieran: that the fact that this kind of reporting is common in the mommy wars, but not in other kinds of socially constrained “choices” means that the issue really is about family, children, motherhood, gender, not about the social privileging of choice–that the smoke that is always rising from this particular fire suggests that there are some emotions and contentions being stirred up here that are specific to those issues, not generic to social privilege.
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Sorry, MCM. I misread you the first time. Yes, yes, Good points. Every time a newspaper writes about fancy cars, would we expect them to point out that only a small number of people can afford them?
Anybody got any ideas why this topic always makes us bananas? I bet that CT gets more comments on their work-family posts than any other. I know that’s what happens here.
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THIRD SECTION:
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Looking back 35 years when my children were young, I envied women who had interesting jobs and didn’t have to spend their days talking baby talk. None of my friends who had children had jobs. It was frowned upon those days. Women today are lucky. They can make a choice. Huraah!
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