Letters to the Editor
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one reason the disccussion is all falling on women and contains all this underlying tension
is that everyone, somehow, senses have having equal numbers of male and female "stay at home or work part time" "moms" just isn't really going to work, but nobody can figure out an acceptable alternative. On top of this for the ideologically commited it isn't even possible to honestly discuss the fact that it won't/can't work on a large scale.
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I LEAN TOWARD
the idea that women, being more emotionally and socially open in society, usually act like they need guidance, or assistance, or some sort of direction, or at least that they are open to it and invite it.
Men mostly act like they shape their own destiny and a man who asks advice is seen as weak and not man enough in many ways. This is not to say that men do not seek out advice, but the social conditioning and social expectations revert to such stereotypes.
Also, as the other letter said, it is more complex to juggle two competing types of life roles such as career and motherhood and women are still expected to juggle both. Though lots of men would like to be stay at home dads, society (women mostly) does not accept this.
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Though lots of men would like to be stay at home dads, society (women mostly) does not accept this.
I think women would accept it IF they could rely on men knowing their place and keeping to it in such a situation, which is why everyone knows it won't work.
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So Let's Change The World Then
Graff calls it "my friends and me journalism," writing that inflates the issues of a tiny percentage of mostly white, straight, privileged women and pretends they're global. Bennetts' book may be the ultimate example of the "my friends and me" approach, and yet I agree with her, and with Hirshman, about why these privileged women's choices matter to all of us: because they're disproportionately visible to the privileged men who run the world -- they are their wives and daughters and, if things continue, their mothers. And as long as affluent women opt out or get pushed out of top jobs and decision-making positions in order to raise children, men with stay-at-home wives and daughters and mothers will continue to make rules that make it hard for less privileged women -- and men -- to balance work and family. So these advantaged women and their decisions do matter.
Sorry for the extensive quoting, but I wanted to make sure we are on the same page. You do realise, Joan, don't you, that the reason why a good number of us Salon readers are here at at Salon, a home of left wing journalism on the web, is so we can read, discuss and work towards changing the world to increase opportunities, liberty and justice for all people and we are not here to fatalistically accept the idea that affluent women (or men) are more important than poor or middle class women (or men), so we should spend a disproportionate amount of time studying the choices they (the affluent) make. I want to see fair representation for all, if I want to concentrate on the Ways of the Affluent I have pretty much the entire mainstream media to service my requirements. I wouldn't mind about the argument in this paragraph so much if there wasn't such a bias in Salon lifestyle pieces, which tend to be written by and/or about affluent women. I absolutely don't mind Salon having a lifestyle section (I even wish you'd bring back the sex section) but I do wish it was more representative. I love it when you break the mould and feature some lifestyle pieces by the broke, the disenfranchised, the geeky, the male. And you could further balance things out by hiring more women to cover the hard news and serious journalism, there's so many women out there already doing great work in this field and you could use Salon's resources to help develop some more.
Another assumption you make in this paragraph is that if women were in charge the rules they would make would definitely, without question, benefit the poor more than those rules made by men with lots of female dependents. As a feminist I would love to think this was true (and there was a time that I did) but may I please refer you to Margaret Thatcher who is a living (still, just about, though she's very poorly) refutation of that argument. She wasn't known as "The milk snatcher" for nothing, you know, taking milk from the mouths of babes (ok, 7-11 year olds) was one of her first acts in government. History does not provide a lot of support for the idea that female leaders are naturally more caring of the disadvantaged than male leaders. Probably because both men and women are people.
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The real question
I think the real - and more interesting - question is why are women always being told they're doing something wrong by other women?
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Men are often perceived (and they tend to perceive themselves) ...
...as not having realistic "choices," when it comes to the pursuit of a career. Men are expected to just suck up and go for it. Of course, they have a choice when it comes to what TYPE of a career they'll pursue, but, unless they're in an "exceptional" situation, they have to support themselves one way or another.
A woman who has a man who is willing and able to support her has options. And BECAUSE such a woman has options, the options that she chooses are seen as being her responsibility if she's dissatisfied with her choices in the long run.
But the fact is that EVERYONE can be haunted by the specter of "The Road Not Taken." The making of a choice automatically precludes some other choices: Such is life.
It may be helpful to remember that women didn't always have the option to not work outside of the home. There is a long tradition of working in the fields, with ones children in tow. Young mothers--and sometimes their children, as well--commonly worked machinery at the dawn of the Industrial Age. People have always done whatever they had to do to survive, and we didn't always have a wealth of options. People have always been dissatisfied with their lots in life; but because they didn't have a whole lot of options open to them, there wasn't a lot of finger-pointing and/or self-blame when things didn't work out optimally.
Nowadays, if a woman doesn't like what's happening in her life, it's "her fault." But if any woman who finds herself blaming herself--or being blamed by others--for things that have gone sub-optimally realizes that this state of being blamed originated from having had the luxury of choice, I seriously doubt that she'd opt to return to the "bad old days" of blamelessness coupled with NO CHOICES.