There it sat on the dining room table exuding kryptonite: the Sunday New York Times Magazine with the cover headline: “Q: Why Don’t More Women Get to the Top? A: They Choose Not To.” The subtitle read, “Abandoning the Climb and Heading Home.” An angelic white Madonna in her Ann Taylor outfit with what appeared to be the Hope diamond… return to article
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Reader Comments (22)Page 1 of 1 pagesThe NY Times story, I read it or something like it in lots of different publications. It’s much too simplistic. Sure, some do as it said. But many don’t. The issue is many- sided and the roots are multiple.
Posted by Susan Longtin on Nov 17, 2003 at 8:16 PM I’d rather be at home than working at some corporation. I really don’t care about figuring out how to sell more widgets than the competition.
Posted by J. D. on Nov 17, 2003 at 10:08 PM Right on! I completely agree. Of course women with priviledge who can afford to stay home with the little ones will do so because 1. they can and 2. they’re respected for doing so. Moms who can’t afford to stay home with their kids are looked down on as lazy and a drain on the system.
Posted by Elaine Vigneault on Nov 17, 2003 at 11:45 PM Why are you so threatened by the idea of some women choosing to stay home? My fiancee studied at Georgetown and UCLA School of Law, has a job in a prestigious law firm, and is one of the most politically progressive people I know. Yet she plans on staying home with our kids, and I see nothing inconsistent about this.
Your tone comes across as defensive, insecure and ugly.
Posted by Andy on Nov 18, 2003 at 11:04 AM The story clearly states, that your economic status determines whether or not on has a “choice” to be a stay-at-home mom or dad, a “choice” out of reach for the majority of Americans. The narcissistic tone of some of these women, who seem to think that theirs are the normative standards by which feminism stands or falls, is striking in its self-absorption.
Posted by Eric on Nov 18, 2003 at 4:10 PM Thank you, thank you for writing this story. I read the NYT piece and thoughts “This is a bunch of princesses who don’t know why people work.” Thank you for elucidating the insanity of the NYTimeshead-in-clouds attitudes. I loved your piece.
Posted by Evelyn Kaye on Nov 18, 2003 at 4:12 PM For the benefit of Andy and others who might be tempted to skim this article, I believe that Susan’s point is the following:
Regardless of how many mothers freely choose to stay home, many are forced to due to punishing work loads with inflexible workplace policies that make normal life difficult even without the stress of parenthood. The NY Times article created an “anti-feminist backlash” strawman and supported it with anecdotes, logical fallacies and misused statistics.
Do you agree? I do.
Posted by Noel Blake on Nov 18, 2003 at 4:14 PM Why is the choice of a woman to stay at home with little ones presented as a flight away from the work-force? I’m home with my little ones for a while - but they won’t be little for long, just a few precious years. I would say, nearly all women who quit work to take care of little ones will be back when the children go to school. Full time parent ing is no longer a life-long career choice, nor do women treat it as such. One parent or another, taking a few years to look after little ones, where practical or possible, should be treated as a sesnsible option, not a return to 1950’s style Ladie’s Lives.
Posted by Lisa M on Nov 18, 2003 at 11:29 PM I’m glad to see this reaction to Belkin’s article, which essentially boils down to, “Rich people who don’t need to work for a living sometimes choose not to work.” She might as well have excerpted women’s testimonials from a “You can buy property with no money down” infomercial to support her thesis. Interestingly, I don’t recall Belkin asking any of these women, “What would you do if you or your husband wanted a divorce?”
I’m happy to report that the Letters to the Editor in NYT were overwhelmingly negative about the original story, too.
Posted by Nick on Nov 19, 2003 at 11:31 AM Thanks for your incisive critique of an article shaped by the narrow presumptions of its author. The workplace today is even less forgiving than it was 15 years ago. I’m one of the lucky few who can work part-time (three days a week) in a professional position, but many women face an untenable choice: neglect your family or neglect your career. For some women, it’s not even a choice of career vs. family, it’s a matter of family survival; they work because they must. Those women who choose full-time parenting over the partnership track are indeed fortunate that they can make that choice, but as you point out, it’s a choice available to the privileged.
Posted by Dolores Gregory on Nov 19, 2003 at 12:19 PM This article is a response to an attact on feminism, though it illustrates a problem, the inability of most men AND women to have the “choice” to stay home. Additionally, the slave driving mechanism that is inherantly engrained in the capitolistic system. These issues are HUGE and Susan addresses them quite brilliantly.
Posted by Tamar Elvick on Nov 19, 2003 at 4:28 PM An interesting story about the distortions that creep in all the time about this question. I was fortunate enough to be able to stay home when my children were home, and later pursue a rewarding career when they were older, with the support of my husband in both choices. I think the whole debate has lost its way. Women are people, and happen to be the ones who bear the children, but they don’t do it without some assistance from the opposite sex! So if people can only be reasonable - which is of course asking for the moon - these role problems can be worked out. And Big Business has a long way to go!
Posted by Ane Hanley on Nov 19, 2003 at 4:59 PM As Douglas wisely notes, the “decision” to stay home is dictated not only by pressures in the workplace which often make it impossible for one to be both a decent parent and productive participant in the workplace but by a woman’s choice in a partner. How much choice is there in that? Even the choice to stay home for a few years requires a spouse that makes enough money to tide the family over during those years. Clearly, the stay at home parent is in a priveleged place, economically speaking.
At the same time, stay at home moms do NOT enjoy special social esteem. The culture offers lots of lip service to the stay at home parent, but in reality s/he is nothing short of invisible. If you don’t believe me, go to a dinner party some time. My husband, a writer, and former grad student who dropped out at the birth of our baby is vitually starved for conversation when we go out. His lack of a “career” apparently diminished his IQ in the eyes of even those who know him well. The obligitory “what have you been up to?” is the best that most can come up with.
Stay at home moms have been dealing with this almost forever and feminists have done little to make it better. The fact is that parenting is a damned hard job, privilged or not.
It seems to me that our agenda ought to address both the economic and social issues which render real “choice” in this case much more difficult.
Posted by Jenny T on Nov 20, 2003 at 5:50 PM No one has a problem with Andy’s fiancee or her choices - choice being the key word in that sentence. What some of us do have a problem with is the fact that this NYT article, as has the general discourse on women in the workplace, did not even include mothers who work because they don’t have a choice. As a side note, need I mention that during the feminist movement, heterosexual, white, wealthy women were out fighting for “women’s rights” when poor white, Black, Latina and/or Asian women - who have always had to work - were cleaning their houses and raising their children. While this, of course, is still going on, we are now also dealing with the fact (among others) that people of color still are denied the jobs and salaries of their white counterparts, as well as the struggles for gay couples with children, where both parents must work because they are denied the privileges that are conferred on married couples. Another issue which Ms. Douglas raises is that of biology which has effectively been used to reduce women to the fact that only they have reproductive organs and therefore, in life, must aspire only to reproduce and act as the primary caregiver. Of course, nowadays, a woman’s worth is determined by whether or not she can acquire “it all”: the job, the man, the kids. Dare I risk to repeat myself by saying that this “all” is available only to women who have several choices at their disposal. This creates a interesting dynamic then as all men, regardless of race, ethnicity, class backgound, are judged only by how well they can provide for a family. Which is frankly why I’m confused about Andy’s assertion that “women choosing to stay home” is “threatening” when it’s quite clear that we live in a society which is threatened by women who work and thus puts pressure on them to attain “it all,” which inevitably they cannot. But, again, this applies only to those certain married women who can afford to acquire those law degrees, which 1. they will never use in order to maintain their households, or 2. will use while paying others to raise their children and keep their houses clean. But before Andy gets all defensive again, I feel the need to reassure him that not only is there nothing wrong with women choosing to stay home, there also is nothing wrong with women getting a little help - this is something that poor working mothers have known all along, thanks to their extended families, friends and neighbors.
Posted by Sonja Uwimana on Nov 21, 2003 at 5:24 PM I must conclude by adding that, what is wrong is articles like those in the NYT, as well as some of the women it portrayed, which advance this “post-feminist swill” and purposefully disrespect and cast a long shadow over those women who do work, whether by choice or necessity, further dividing all women and limiting the possibility for a continued, transformative (thereby all-inclusive) feminist struggle.
Posted by Sonja Uwimana on Nov 21, 2003 at 5:43 PM Sonja-- There is no better illustration of the reality of gender equality than your response, because damned if I am smart enough to understand it. (self-deprecation, not a backhanded compliment)
So let me see if I have this straight: The chief complaint is that the article focuses on women who are in an economic position to choose whether or not to stay home, when the real issue is not these few women who truly do have a choice, but the vast majority for whom economic pressures make that decision for them. Essentially it is a condemnation of the demands of the modern employer and the consequential limitation on women’s lifestyle choices.
Did I get it? If so, then I say right on to Sonja, Susan & the funky bunch. Due to technology and business reform we have become many times more efficient than out counterparts of 40 years ago. Yet it seems we work harder (at least more hours). In the 1960s articles were published raising the concern that by the turn of the century we would be hard pressed to fill all of the free time we would have a s a result of our increasing workplace efficiency. Unfortunately that free time has unexpectedly decreased with employers demanding more, not less, of their workers. For those workers fortunate enough to be covered by labor contracts, wage stagnation forces many women (and their husbands if they are around) to work significant overtime or a second job just to provide their children with the standard of living they enjoyed as a child.
My concern however is the feeling I get from many of my progressive colleagues who feel that a woman who does have the choice to stay home for a few years to raise her kids, and chooses to do so, is somehow letting her gender down. This position is one that serves to alienate a lot of feminists, myself included (second only to the time I opened a door to an office building for a woman � not because she was a woman, just because I got there first and she refused to enter, telling me that I shouldn�t assume that because she was a woman she was incapable of opening her own door.)
I just fear that some in the feminist quarter go too far and lose sight of who the common enemy is. Staying at home with children is not intrinsically bad. I�d say it�s intrinsically good, but you don�t have to agree. But the enemy is not those women who do exercise their right ot raise their children, but the employers and governmental policies who remove that choice from them.
Posted by Andy on Nov 23, 2003 at 5:48 PM Thanks all for these comments. To Andy, I say that I would never criticize a woman, or man, for choosing to stay home with children and care for them. Parenting is one of the most important and difficult tasks there is. As the other writers have noted, my criticism focused on how the Times presented these women’s situations, first as totally “free” choices, and as some huge trend indicating that in the end, when given the “choice,’ most women somehow naturally prefer to leave the workplace and tend to children instead. Well, some do and some don’t, but the government and corporate America give parents very few real choices here. So I agree with your last comment completely. The way these women were presented in the Times subtly set up a working mothers-versus-opt-out mothers battle, when the real struggle is between all of us and a political economic system that does less to help families than any other industrialized nation.
Posted by Susan Douglas on Dec 3, 2003 at 1:55 PM “For decades, the federal government has refused to provide a quality national daycare system, decent maternity and paternity leaves, or after-school programs.”
Sorry, if having (or not having) a child is a choice, then there is no way that these proposed entitlement programs are constitutional, nor is asking the U.S. taxpayer to fund child-rearing in order for a mother to pursue a career. It is a matter of choice, and of personal responsibility. If a woman chooses to have a child, she can still pursue a career. Many do it, and do it well. Many do not, and we give up our lifestyles to do so. It is a CHOICE, and isn’t that what we are all about?
Posted by hargis2 on Dec 3, 2003 at 11:43 PM What I would prefer to see is a world where men could make this same choice to stay at home and raise their children and perhaps let the wife with the MBA go to work. That, I think, is a legitimate complaint, and women as well as men will need to undergo a change in attitudes. Until then, while I deplore the attitude some cultural conservatives take towards this sort of story (that women really do not belong in the workplace) I am glad to see the issue brought up. Liberation is a two-way street.
Posted by James H on Dec 14, 2003 at 11:05 AM Wow, it has been some time since I read anything that I would call pro-feminist. I am also a 50 something feminist. I am saddened by the trend toward male-fantasy women. So reading this article gave me hope. I like it.
Posted by Michele Nichols on Jan 1, 2004 at 7:12 AM >>"the federal government has refused to provide. . . . “>> (it took you until the end to acheive it, but your point finally imploded when you admitted your maternalistic crush on the government. afterall, it doesn’t talk back and just keeps writing those checks!!
Posted by GoJonny on Jan 15, 2004 at 12:02 PM “men could make this same choice to stay at home and raise their children and perhaps let the wife with the MBA go to work”
You can do this today - but only if the wife let’s you.
Posted by Nus on Feb 9, 2004 at 3:02 PM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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