Naomi Lakritz wrote a funny piece published in yesterday’s Citizen about gender equality. I guess my marriage has arrived since I often find myself at the sending end of the cell phone call going “The peanut butter, you want it crunchy or smooth???” On the other hand I often write detailed grocery entries to my husband’s attention reading: “2 cans of crab meat in tuna aisle, not in frozen fish section. If only frozen avail. 1 can of crab meat will do. Strawberries: preferably not rotten. ” And so on.
But to be honest, the fact that my husband and I work as a team to feed the kids, change the kids and drive the kids is of little comfort in a society that I still perceive as profoundly sexist. Yes, women have more opportunities than they used to and they can be mechanics or doctors or vice-presidential candidates just like the guys do. But unlike the guys, they can expect brutal scrutiny into the why, the how and the where of their career/family choices. And I am not talking only about Sarah Palin, who is a readily available example of this sad situation (on that topic, I found that column right on the money) . When my husband took a sabbatical to look after our 5 month-old son while I went back to school full-time, I faced a barrage of criticism – including the silent treatment – from friends and acquaintances who couldn’t believe, in turn, that I would do this to my kids or ask this from my husband. The fact that he was looking forward to his “pat” leave did nothing to assuage their sense that I was somehow cheating my family or going against the natural order of things. At the same time, one of my university professors was confiding that when her husband asked his employer for parental leave, his superior instead offered him a pay raise with the advice to hire a cleaning lady. Equality, yes but…
In the interest of full disclosure, I must say that I didn’t always approve of “working mothers” (by the way, I profoundly dislike that term. Working mothers. As opposed to what? Women of leisure? Since I joined the ranks of the “working mothers” not only do I get a lunch break but I can go pee when I need to, so there.) But I realised that the vehemence with which I criticized mothers who left their children in daycare was nothing more than the energy I needed to justify my own choice to stay at home to myself. It seems that this attitude has become pervasive, with each woman becoming an illustration of the way things should or shouldn’t be when in reality, individual choices are made for very personal reasons having nothing to do with a social statement. We will have reached full equality when women no longer bear the sole responsibility of making the world go round.
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Rebecca adds: What I’ve noticed about the stay-at-home/work-outside-the-home dilemma is how hard it is to predict, before the fact, what will work for you. I have friends who had serious careers in which they’d invested years and thousands of dollars of tuition, who decided, to their own surprise, to stay home, and at least one friend who was very snippy about daycare until she had a baby and thought she’d go nuts if she didn’t go back to work after the first year. As for me – I thought when I was expecting my first that I’d put him in daycare at 12 weeks, the soonest they take them in Manitoba. Then when he actually arrived, the thought made me sick to my stomach, so I was a full-time SAHM for a while. Since then, I’ve somehow muddled into a compromise that involves working (largely) from home, grad school part time (night classes) and a part-time nanny whom I adore who takes care of the baby at our house, often when I’m working in a different room. Most days, this seems like the best of all possible worlds – in the same place as my kids most of the time, intellectual gratification, slow but steady work on my degree, and not putting the baby in an institutional daycare, which I think is a different set of pros and cons than for toddlers. Of course, some days it seems like I get all the cons – deadlines and pressure and seminar reading, while juggling kids and, as Véronique points out, no guarantee that I’ll have time to use the toilet, let alone eat a balanced meal.
So I’ve learned, at the end, that not only can you not know what’s right for other women, it can take a while to figure out what’s right for you and your kids. And it doesn’t bother me that other women make different choices, or prefer different trade-offs than I do.
And speaking of Sarah, one of the things that delights me about her is that she is a feminine, fulfilled woman running for high political office. It’s nothing new for women to be able to achieve what they want, despite NOW’s claims to the contrary. We’ve had women astronauts (two of them Canadian), Secretary of State (Condi), head of major earth-shaking corporations (Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman come to mind) surgeons and generals. Few of them, though, have families.
Whole books have been written about how super high achieving women are much less likely to have children and solid marriages. No, what’s new is for a young woman, with an adoring husband, a large (five children!) family, who is, let’s face it, stunning and could pass for a decade younger than she is, to be a serious contender for Vice-President of the USA. Sarah Palin isn’t forced to pretend to be a man in drag, or even to make her candidacy one built around gender. Canadian women of my generation were brought up being told that we could be whatever we wanted, and that was true, as far as it went. Our children’s generation will see that little girls can grow up to be whatever they want, without giving up marriage, family and femininity. You know, as has always been true for men (mutatis mutandis.)
Does that make me a feminist?








Véronique,
Thanks for sharing your frustrations and the critical comments you received after going back to work from people who were critical of your decision.
What’s interesting is that I have heard the same from stay-at-home moms as well. Apparently, women who decide to stay home with their kids also experience quite a bit of negative criticism for “wasting” their talents at home, when they could be doing something more useful like changing the world through professional work.
Aside from this criticism that women face from other people, they also tend to attack each other for different choices. So this is a very emotional debate, and each side tends to get judgmental of the other.
That is why it may be best to stick to the facts: what has the research shown regarding how children respond when mothers are either home or working? In other words, what is best for our children?
Personally, I don’t view the question of working women as a question of equality. That would assume that equality will only be achieved when women are completely indistinguishable from men – as if men are somehow the standard that women must conform to. I believe that women can be fully equal even if our role and function in society – and in the family – is not identical to that of men. Our biology is different, our role in the family is inevitably somewhat different too – and this MAY lead to differences in how we are called to contribute within our families and to the world – and that would be okay with me.
Lea,
Thank you for your comment and for giving me the opportunity to make my position clearer. I don’t think that equality is so much in the “working” as in the “choosing.” I think that women face more criticism for their choices — including the choice to “keep” an unintended pregnancy or the choice to stay-at-home and raise their children — than men do. And when things go wrong, we are quicker to point the finger at the mother — she was there too much or not enough or not the right way — than at the father. In that sense, women fall prey not only to standards of “manhood” but also of ideal motherhood. And they loose either way.
That being said, I completely agree that women and men are not called to contribute to society and to their families in the same way. If they were, I’d be the first one to pass-off pregnancy and childbirth duties to my beloved. However, I also caution against molds and the temptation to fit individual families into the same one.
Véronique,
I agree with you that women have it tougher than men in this way: they are measured (and they measure themselves) not only to the standards of “ideal motherhood” but ALSO to the standards of “manhood.” And of course, this sets women up for a perpetual feeling of failure and inadequacy, because they inevitably fail somewhere unless they achieve it all (which Palin shows may be humanly possible, but most people find quite difficult).
There are two ways to make our burden equal to men here: either lift one of these standards from women, OR start comparing men to “ideal motherhood” too. Perhaps there is a third way: to create “unisex” standards that will be applied to both men and women, who will be expected to pitch in equally in both the area of family and professional work. The fourth possibility would be to eliminate any standards at all, and have no expectations of women or men – but human nature being what it is, I doubt we can be so laissex-faire, and doubt that we should be.
Personally, I doubt that any of these solutions is possible. While women now aspire to “manhood” in a sense, men have never aspired to “motherhood.” And it seems too contrived to create artificial “unisex” standards. So it may be that women have just created a bigger burden for themselves, and insist on living under it – it may not be fair and it may be really heavy, but it’s better than any other alternative. It is not necessarily the world that expects women to run it, it’s women that aspire to run the world.
Lea, interesting discussion. I want to comment on this:
“The fourth possibility would be to eliminate any standards at all, and have no expectations of women or men – but human nature being what it is, I doubt we can be so laissex-faire, and doubt that we should be.”
I agree that we should not be so laissez-faire, but I am not so sure that we have not, in some social circles, eliminated any standards at all to ensure equality. Could not the enforced-tolerance of promiscuity and sexual experimentation, the proliferation of non-marital pregnancies, terminated or not, skyrocketing rates of deadbeat and outright disappearing fathers, and unwed motherhood represent a simple giving up on standards at all? It’s true that custodial parents are expected not to abuse their children, to feed them and clothe them and get them to school on time. But nobody is expected to ensure that their child has two married parents, that the child is provided for financially (the government will help if parents won’t), that the child grows up in a stable and reasonably calm household, without a parade of parental sexual partners traipsing in and out, and so on. To me, that looks like defining bad parenting, whether motherhood or fatherhood, way, way down.
Rebecca,
What you say makes a lot of sense. You’re right, all of the social problems that you list do seem to indicate that there has been a serious lowering, or even an elimination, of standards/expectations upon men and women in the areas of sexuality, relationships, marriage and parenting.
But if that is the case, why do so many women still seem to feel the pressure to “do it all” – be supermom and superprofessional at the same time? It seems that women have not really stopped applying standards to themselves and to each other (witness the hard-core feminists going apoplectic at Palin being a working mother – even THEY have dug up the ol’ standards from somewhere).
So on the one hand, it seems that standards have been eliminated; on the other hand, they seem to be alive and well in the hearts of many women, and even in the hornet’s nest of hard-core feminism. How to explain this contradiction?
One answer may be that the standards haven’t really gone away, because it’s impossible to make them go away – they are just being much more frequently disregarded. The ideal visions of good mothers and wives, and good fathers and husbands, can’t be permanently erased because they are based on natural, real needs that will always be there – the basic needs of children and families won’t change, and all ways of responding to these needs are not equal in practice.
However, in a society that values individual autonomy and fulfillment above all, these standards have become a stumbling block, and so we’ve started ignoring them. In a “me” world, we’re much more willing to let people (including ourselves) do whatever floats their boat and makes them “most happy”, even at the cost of their children and families. Men who run away from their families, as well as women who have abortions, can use an almost identical excuse to which our society is deeply sympathetic: they really “needed” to do it because they weren’t “happy,” and if they weren’t happy then how could that have been the best solution for anyone?
Our society is in crisis because it focuses on individual rights and freedoms with barely a fleeting nod to the corresponding social duties and responsibilities.