Letters to the Editor
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Career Ambivalence Does Not Equal Career Abandonment
I found myself nodding in agreement with Kipnis' characterization of "ambivalence" as the defining condition of modern womanhood. Finally, I thought, a feminist who isn't a polemicist that is too busy blaming other women for not doing things the "right" way; someone who can add value to the discussion by defining the problem itself.
But then of course I read the part about how "those young, Ivy-League women who are now abandoning the career track to be stay-home moms" were finally put in their place by Kipnis who stated: "Somehow, as highly educated as these girls are, they don't seem to have heard about the 50 percent divorce rate! Somehow, they imagine that their husbands' incomes -- and loyalties -- come with lifetime guarantees, thus no contingency plans for self-sufficiency will prove necessary ... "
I bristled at this. First, because I am a 27 year-old Ivy League graduate and practicing attorney who recently married, took my husband's name (gasp!), and contemplates having children at some point during the next 5 years. (As an aside, I am quite defensive about my name change because I find myself constantly under attack from other feminists, who liken me to a gun-toting pacifist, like I violated some strict "code" of feminism.) I regularly find myself caught up in lengthy discussions with other "highly educated" females about the dilemma of choosing to leave the career track to stay at home with children for any length of time. Apparently we all must be delusional since any rational highly educated woman would recognize that staying at home equated blind faith in our husbands and death to our careers forevermore.
It seems to me that Kipnis is missing her own point. Doesn't her whole thesis revolve around modern woman's "ambivalence" between our recently-adopted feminist strides and our "inner woman" who perhaps longs for nesting with her infant? How then does Kipnis conflate the 50% divorce rate/supposed fantasy as to our husbands' incomes and loyalties with this inner ambivalence to working vs. motherhood?
Additionally, even if I or other "highly-educated" females were to choose to stay home with the kids, how is it that we would be left without a "contingency plan?" I find that my ivy league diploma and law degree provide me with a high degree of self-sufficiency, along with the luxury of choosing to perhaps stay home for a few years since my credentials are so marketable. Whereas if I were not so highly educated, perhaps I would have reservations about "abandoning" the workplace.