Letters to the Editor
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To Tom Deluca
You're right about the class nature of this discussion. It's worth noting that feminism has always had this problem. From the time white suffragists spurned voting rights for their African-American counterparts to Betty Friedan's conversations with her Smith College classmates being the impetus for The Feminine Mystique, feminism has mostly been about educated white women talking to each other. And working class women have resented it, and, if the responses to the Kate O'Beirne interview are any indication, still do.
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O'Beirne is incompetent
Traister got her when she discussed the other anti-feminist woman's take back of her advocacy of staying at home. O'Beirne outright lied in her characterization of it, was called on it, and backpedalled ineffectually. She cites no sources. She doesn't speak for all woman. As for her Larry Summers' remarks and women "innately want to stay home" stuff, let me help her: China, Russia, and India all have more female scientists than male, and they use higher standards for entrance into grad school. Are these other nations women not female? It's called social conditioning. In underdeveloped countries women jump at working to support their families, because men die, leave, or become incapacitated. Work is fulfilling on it's own, and it saves you from poverty.
Perhaps if Linda Waite had been the interviewer, this would have been the fight people seem to want. O'Beirne's comments about wages would have been immediately refuted (Waite et al have shown that white female mothers make less; black female working mothers suffer no loss of income. O'Beirne's comments can't explain that abnormality. WOrking fathers make more because working mothers take the hit.)
The real problem for O'Beirne is that most men understand that their children need their presense at home, too. These men do more now, especially with their kids. Men parent differently, and children need both types of parenting. O'Beirne also has a problem called relaity TV. Wife Swap and Trading Spouses don't exactly portray stay at home moms very well (lazy would be the kindest epitaph on the Fox or Television Without Pity boards). Stay at homes are increasingly being portrayed as self-indulgent on these reality shows. More people watch those shows than will ever read this woman's book. Add the reality of layoffs, and staying at home looks like a big risk today.
O'Beirne's already lost. 60%+ (by Census) of women with small children work outside of the home. Stay at homes are increaingly higher income women who can afford to. The studies show most of these women are staying at home because they were in jobs that were not flexible for motherhood (law, certain business, etc). Survey after survey shows that stay at home mothers want flexible jobs; they would prefer to work part or full time flex jobs, not just "stay at home ALL workers want more flexible jobs, but especially ALL mothers.
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Antifeminist pundit, meet logic 101
So the good things that have happened to women over the last few decades would have happened anyway, and are the product of a historic process, but the bad things are all the fault of the bad feminists? Um, yeah, sure...that computes.
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Kate O'Beirne makes things worse. . .
She's just what the world doesn't need--another angry white conservative hypocrite who thinks she owes nothing to the women who paved the way for her success and enabled her to escape the home to which she'd now condemn all women becuase that's the way nature wants it. Like most so-called conservative "intellectuals," she glosses over the aspects of history and culture that refute her thesis and sticks to the same simplicities which, she seems to think, if repeated over and over again at loud volume, will somehow become true. Argument by bombast at its finest--a trick the right has mastered. Heaven save us from women like her.
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Neolithic working women in Catal Huyuk
In Scientific American back in the nineties there was a big article about a dig in Catal Huyuk, a neolithic community in what is now Turkey. They found a burial chamber where the dead were all women who had the same patterns of wear in the bones in their feet and hands. The remains did not show signs of abuse, and the grave goods indicated the women enjoyed a certain degree of personal wealth, and were held in high esteem by their community.
After much scientific investigation of the remains and the surrounding artifacts, it was determined that these women worked in the profession of grain grinding, an arduous task that demanded long hours of concentrated labor together in a closed room.
I don't recall what the article said about their family lives but they weren't buried with their families, they were buried together.
Perhaps they sacrificed their reproductive futures for their communities so that the grain could get ground. Perhaps their primitive communities honored this sacrifice and that's why their grave goods and appointments were so rich.
What one can learn from these examples is that ancient people had a wide variety of gender roles and behaviors that were adaptive to the economies of food and trade and technology in the times in which they lived.
It is not "natural" for humans to live any one particular way, because such hard wiring in our social instincts would be maladaptive -- that is -- we'd be more vulnerable to sudden changes in our external conditions if we were hard wired to prefer only one version of family life and one set of roles that could be inhabited by men and women.
Look at the Sarmatian tribes of southern Russia and northern Iran. The women were warriors, they grew up on horseback and fought with swords and arrows. The Sarmatians dominated the steppes for many centuries with their way of life that is so very different from the way of life that people like O'Beirne believe is ordained by nature.
Humans are very inventive and creative and adaptive and we do whatever works for us at the time.
If being a stay at home mom works for you, then that's what you should do. If it doesn't work then don't do it. That's being an adaptive human, that's doing what nature ordained.