FEMINISM: A COUNTER-REFORMATION?

If I took a job in public relations, I'd know just who my first two clients would be. Few reputations have suffered in the media and popular culture lately as this beleaguered pair. My first client would be the Fifties, that supposedly Velveeta era of Eisenhower and tract housing. In the past few years, the movies Pleasantville and Far From Heaven have taken that decade to task for its fusty conformity (never mind that the Fifties were actually the decade of Rosa Parks, Allen Ginsburg, and the H-bomb). Now Mona Lisa Smile has joined in, sternly reprimanding the Fifties for its stiff gender roles. As usual, the New Yorker's David Denby put it best: "The movie's indignation feels superfluous."

My next client would be Feminism, whose approval ratings are in the cellar. The image of feminists as humorless 70s-era radicals is so pervasive that people who identify themselves as feminists tend to do so apologetically. I would be a bad publicist, because I would acknowledge the faults of my client. Yes, the feminist movement tended to have an "anti-maternal" tone to it, as Jean Bethke Elshtain wrote recently in B&C, and it did—in effect if not intention—make the ill-advised decision to pit "justice" against "care," as she contends. (I would challenge Elshtian's claim that the family was considered "the source of all political evil"; the halls of power were the bigger culprit). And yes, feminism was then and remains now most demonstrably a cause for affluent white women. We can all—even the dogmatic Barbara Ehrenreich, who witnesses this first-hand in her illuminating book Nickel and Dimed—appreciate the irony of ivory tower feminists employing low-income women as housekeepers.

Few social movements have enjoyed such relatively swift triumphs—nearly half of medical and business students are now women—with such little popular acclaim. Especially now that a new women's movement is widely said to be afoot: what a New York Times Magazine cover story last fall called "The Opt-Out Revolution." More and more women, it said, are opting out of the workplace in favor of full-time caregiving. Apparently the saying has stuck: no one on their deathbed wishes they had spent more time at the office. This trend is the subject of numerous articles and essays, a fraction of which are sampled below. Even the brainy law student in Mona Lisa Smile has evidently read this material, rehashing it in a climactic scene of the film.

As we will see, this glut of writing proceeds mostly in oblivion to three crucial points:

1) "Feminism" is one of those incredibly slippery terms that no one can easily define despite its strong connotations. Historians helpfully talk about waves of feminism—the suffrage movement was the first wave, Steinem and company were the second wave, and today's far more ambiguous female role models (from Mia Hamm to Sarah Jessica Parker) represent the third wave. Where the second wave had a specific political agenda, the third wave celebrates American individualism, holding that whatever a woman wants is what she should have—it's the American way. Still, "feminism" most often connotes second wave feminism.

2) In keeping with third wave feminism, the "Opt-Out Revolution" is being hailed as a triumph of female independence. Women are choosing motherhood of their own volition over a full-time career, because now they can. But given the absurd demands of the working world, of a commuter culture, and of a parenting culture which prizes overachieving children, what kind of choice do women truly have? Are not work and family more inherently incompatible than they would be in a more balanced society?

3) Finally, what about the men? I scanned back through that Times Magazine cover story and did not come across a single quote from a male source. At the very end the piece mentions the rise of stay-at-home dads, but otherwise this article and others completely ignore the question of why working fathers aren't feeling just as guilty about their work patterns and their responsibility to be nurturing parents. The media's poisonous messages to men—young men especially—that care and family aren't macho enough to concern them—go mostly unexamined. My jaw dropped when I read the subtitle of a Fortune magazine cover story a couple years ago on the stay-at-home husbands of female CEO's. Trying to be cutesy with the term "trophy husband," the tagline read: "They deserve a trophy for trading places." They do? Why? Because they "stooped" to the "lowly" level of parent? The male provider and female caregiver seems to be a more enduring and embraced norm than we care to admit.

It should be said that another blind spot in this discussion is single mothers, who do not have the luxury of choosing between work and family. And women who never marry or give birth, who, all these years after second-wave feminism, are still made to feel like inadequate members of society (despite this Time magazine cover story on single women, entitled "Who Needs A Husband?")

• For the supposedly liberal New York Times , the "Opt-Out Revolution" story takes some severe swipes at feminism (the second-wave kind, it neglects to clarify). It subscribes to the militant feminism stereotype, talking about "soldiers of feminism" and flatly stating, "The women's movement was largely about grabbing a fair share of power—making equal money, standing at the helm in the macho realms of business and government and law. It was about running the world." This was a power grab, you see, not a matter of social justice. The article does include the startling statistics which show that for all the progress women have made into the halls of power, far fewer have "arrived"—only 16 percent of law partners and corporate officers are women, only eight Fortune 500 company CEO's are female, and so on. The conclusion writer Lisa Belkin reaches is that women simply want out of the workplace, and then she makes the leap to the assumption that men will soon follow their example. "Why don't women run the world? Maybe because they don't want to," she writes.
• A letter writer responding to Belkin's story points out that this may not be a question of gender, but of quality of life in a capitalist society (sentiments echoed at MothersMovement.org). "What is needed is not another revolution on behalf of women; we need one for everyone." The writer may have read Joan Williams's academic treatise on the subject, Unbending Gender (reviewed here). The problem, Williams suggests, has less to do with gender than with the norms of the workplace. Companies operate with the idea of the "ideal worker," one who is free from family responsibilities and can slave away for 70 hours a week. Since women who wish to have children cannot meet this expectation, they don't really have the option of a career if they want to be mothers. To give them one, companies would have to ease their grip on the idea of the "ideal worker" and accept more part-time workers, male and female, who are living more balanced lives, having a career and being parents. (If this sounds quasi-Marxist for its critique of industry, Williams also makes a thorough argument that part-time workers are more profitable.) Reduced worker weeks, it may be added, would be more consistent for a nation that prides itself on "family values."
• The manifesto of the Opt-Out Revolution may be the best-seller I Don't Know How She Does It, by novelist Allison Pearson (wife of another witty writer, New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane). Says Pearson's protagonist, Kate: "The non-working mother looks at the working mother with envy and fear because she thinks that the working mum has got away with it, and the working mum looks back with fear and envy because she knows that she has not. … Who wants to sit at ludicrous meetings in some testosterone jungle and think of our children as problems to be handled?" Observed Margaret Carlson bluntly in Time magazine, "Feminists may hate the fact that Kate quits her job after deciding that you can't have it all. But … [it's] merely childish to think otherwise." (Not so, saidSalon; all it takes is money, whether or not anyone admits it.)
• Supporting the suspicion the most accomplished women tend to give some of the least convincing advice on how working motherhood really works, see this essay in First Things on being a Christian working mother by Mary Beth Celio, a senior research fellow at the University of Washington. Reflecting on a career as an academic and mother of five, Celio approaches the question of "opting-out" as methodically as she might her research. Make a plan, find good help and good schools, choose a flexible profession, and you're all set. Celio does state that "sitting in a rocking chair or lying in bed snuggling with the baby" rate as her most rewarding moments, but the frenetic lifestyle, myriad frustrations, and random demands of parenting go mostly unrecorded. "Women would also be wise to resist the seductions of full-time work altogether," Celio advises, given men yet another exoneration from expectation of sacrifice. Meanwhile, a more dizzying and plausible account of working motherhood comes from author Jeanne Marie Laska in the Washington Post. (Here I should hasten to note that I do not speak out of experience; I am recently married and anticipating being a stay-at-home dad someday.)

The Post's Ruth Marcus, meanwhile, writing on Mother's Day last year, noted that being a working mother would be a lot easier if other family members picked up the slack. The pressure on working mothers may not be that they "want it all," but rather this realization: if you want something done, you have to do it yourself.

Articles mentioned:
Who cares about care? from B&C
The Opt-Out Revolution from the New York Times Magazine (articles and letters in response)
Jobs and Babies from First Things
Change of Heart and What Mommies Want from the Washington Post
Related links:
Feminism: What Went Wrong and Wendell Berry on feminism from CrossCurrents
Sandra Tsing Loh on the commodification of care, Caitlin Flanagan on Irma Bombeck as vindicated non-feminist, and Karen Kornbluh on the rise of working couples from the Atlantic Monthly
Out of Step and Having a Baby from the Times' Sunday Style section
Remembering Lillian Gilbreth, early 20th Century supermom, from Slate
Review of Susan Faludi's Backlash from the Columbia Journalism Review
My columns on Christian feminism and Kuyperian family values from the Calvin College Chimes

PLACES & CULTURE

From The Economist:

STROLL through the foothills of Mount Wanale in central Uganda, and you may be surprised to meet children greeting you with a cheery "Shalom." The village of Nabugoya is home to one of the world's least-known Jewish communities, replete with its own brick synagogue, marked in chalk with the Star of David. Unlike the 18,000-odd remaining Ethiopian Jews, whom Israel recently promised to airlift to Tel Aviv, the Abayudaya of Uganda do not claim a lineage dating back to King David. They converted to Judaism less than a century ago. "It began in 1919," explains Rabbi Gershom Sizomu. A local chief, Semei Kakungule, … obtained a Bible in Hebrew and English from two Jewish traders. For the next 35 years, his people studied the scriptures in Hebrew and in complete isolation, before being discovered by Israel's first ambassador to east Africa. By 1961, the Abayudaya had 3,000 members and 30 synagogues.

EVERY October, on the night of the full moon, small globes of light rise from the Mekong River along the border of Laos and Thailand. One theory holds that methane drawn from the riverbed by the gravitational pull of the moon causes the "Naga fireballs", as locals call the phenomenon. The devout, on the other hand, consider it a sort of spiritual firework display to celebrate the end of Buddhist Lent, while sceptics say that it is all a hoax, perpetrated by Laotian monks to put the fear of god into their flock. The event is emblematic of the Mekong in general. It may rank only eighth among the world's rivers in terms of flow, 12th in length and 21st in the size of its basin, but few can top it for sheer peculiarity. More conventional rivers, for example, content themselves with flowing in a single direction all year round. Not the Tonle Sap, a branch of the Mekong that runs through central Cambodia. … [Now] the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is promoting a scheme to integrate the economies of the "greater Mekong sub-region". Two north-south highways are under construction to link China and Thailand, one via Laos and the other via Myanmar. So are five east-west routes linking Thailand and Vietnam, three via Laos and two via Cambodia. A tie-up of electricity grids and telecoms networks is also getting under way.

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Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant at Books & Culture.