Letters to the Editor

• Here's why O'Beirne is wrong and women need feminism.

  [Read the article: My lunch with an antifeminist pundit]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  So let's say you have a good career. You make good money, you're pulling your own weight. But now you're pregnant. And you feel like it's important to take care of your baby. So you quit your job and spend three wonderful years bonding with your infant and breastfeeding and taking care of the household. You realize that the working world, frankly, sucked, and you enjoy the rest and relaxation of being able to get up at 9 am instead of 6:30, not having to commute, and so on.

  But now the baby is a toddler, and eager for social interaction with other children. So you decide that preschool is the way for your baby to go. She's smart, she likes other kids, and you can't provide the enrichment in your home that a good preschool can, so you look around.

  Your first problem: there is no good preschool, because anti-feminist forces casting themselves as pro-family have fought every initiative in your state to have day cares and preschools verified and held to quality standards.

  Your second problem: You find one, finally. It costs $11,000 a year. Now you're going to have to go back to work to afford it.

  Your third problem: You've been out of the workforce for three years, and despite the prevalence of layoffs and people actually being unemployed for three years because no one was hiring in their field, the corporate world now considers you worthless because you took three years off. Never mind that you did, in fact, acquire useful multi-tasking skills, improve your patience and your ability to manage crises, while being a full-time mom; everyone knows that being a mom requires no brains whatsoevr, so obviously you have turned stupid and no one wants to hire you.

  So your dream of a good preschool for your baby dies. You continue to struggle to find a job, but the best you can find is worth a lot less than the jobs you used to have before your pregnancy.

  Meanwhile, your husband is having a nervous breakdown because, while he thinks providing for his family is the right thing to do, he's terrified now that he's the only breadwinner, because he knows you can't get a job and pick up the slack. If he's laid off, your family tumbles into poverty. So he is unbelievably stressed. He feels he has to work insanely long hours to prove his worth to the company so they won't lay him off. So he's never home to enjoy his baby or to help you. You resent him because he's never home to help. He resents you because you get to sleep in and you're not under the stress he is and you're not helping him with bringing in money. Your marriage is strained.

  Then the baby goes to school. Now you have nothing holding you back from getting a job except the fact that after five years out of the work force, no one will hire you. Maybe you take a much lower paid job in hopes of working your way back up the corporate ladder, but you resent that you have to, because you see kids out of college with far, far less experience than you being hired in over your head with more money.

  Maybe if feminism had been a better success, you'd have been able to get a good job after two-three years out of the workforce. After all, an experienced person who's been gone three years is still more experienced than a kid out of college, and will catch up quickly. No, maybe a person three years out of work doesn't deserve the same pay as the person who has worked the same number of years and *not* taken a hiatus, but they certainly deserve the pay as a person who started in the job three years after they did -- same length of time in the workforce, same experience. But because people are penalized *specifically* for taking two years -- which, out of a forty year worklife, is five percent, just so we're clear -- to raise an infant (and it's not just women; men suffer a *worse* penalty for trying to do the same thing), women cannot be stay-at-home moms while their babies really need them and then go back to work. I mean, some can, obviously, but the trends are not in their favor. So you end up with this either-or choice -- breastfeed into a pump in the bathroom stall at work and never see your infant, or quit, and watch your marriage fall apart as financial stress shreds your husband's sanity to shreds because when he married you he expected you to help him out with the breadwinning, and nowadays only the upper middle class can afford to support a family on one salary.

  This is a feminist issue. The denigration of motherhood, which O'Beirne puts down to feminism, is actually a cultural thing that feminism *fights*. Yeah, there are feminists, usually not mothers themselves, that put down motherhood and SAHMs, but the majority of women *would* prefer to be able to spend some time with their babies and *then* go back to work. It's not feminism's fault that they can't; we've been fighting that battle, but we haven't won yet. The corporate world refuses to acknowledge that motherhood is in any way valuable or offers any skills applicable to paying jobs. And people like O'Beirne, who refuse to acknowledge that there are societal forces pushing people into doing things they wouldn't otherwise prefer to do, are part of the problem. As long as every mother who has to stay home for the rest of her life is told that's her choice because she *could* have pumped milk in the bathroom at work instead for a year, and no one acknowledges that the fact that those are the only two choices that *is* the problem, it won't be fixed and neither women nor men will truly be free.

  Permalink Tuesday, January 17, 2006 11:52 AM