The Unfinished Business of the Women's Movement

Ten years ago, when I moved to a suburb outside of Boston, my neighbors invited me to join a mother's group. Most of us had young children. Most of us also worked at careers we had spent many years at school to master and about which we cared passionately. But when I go to our annual holiday gathering in a couple of weeks and look around me, I'll probably be one of the last working women left standing. Nearly everyone now works part time or has dropped out of the work force all together.

What's happening here? First, let me say that I am talking about a group of primarily upper-middle class women who have the luxury to stay home if they want to. They are fortunate to have husbands who earn well. Second, let me say that I believe in a woman's right to choose. If a woman wants to stay home and has the where-with-all to do so, she should. But, like Hobbes told us long ago, there's free will and then there's free will. I'm not so sure that women are choosing as freely as they think they are.

That's because of the women's movement's unfinished business. Most upper-middle class husbands understand and even expect their wives to work outside their homes. They've learned that it's their job to cook and clean, do the laundry, and go to the grocery store, too. What they haven't learned is to do the emotional labor it takes to keep families and neighborhoods healthy. An awful lot of schmoozing goes into making life run not just smoothly, but well, and that's still primarily women's responsibility.

You know those parents -- almost always women -- who wait outside the elementary school door to pick their children up everyday? What do you think they're talking about? They're exchanging information about pediatricians, music teachers, and tutors. They're discussing the local school board candidates. They're also building the kind of relationships that allow you to call one another when you're running late or have to go out unexpectedly and need someone to watch your kids. In some cases, they're even making friends for their children because it's often the moms who become friends first when kids are very young. It takes work to build relationships with the family doctor and dentist. It takes time to send greetings cards and presents to umpteen cousins. It takes work to get to know your neighbors well enough that you feel free to ask them to pick up your mail when you're away and know that they feel free to do the same. It takes energy to make friends with the other soccer parents so you can carpool together. This is the stuff of community building -- the grease for life's wheels --- that largely goes unnoticed. And, to this day, it's mostly work that's done by women.

When both parents have jobs, its just this work that falls through the cracks. Ironically, the families most in need of these strong social networks are the most hard-pressed to build them because it takes time and energy that they just don't have. So, one by one, many women decide that it's just to hard to work and raise children. The commute is too long, their husbands earn enough, or they want to be home at the bus stop for their kids. But the demands of emotional labor are also part of the reason. These families become isolated from the exact kinds of social supports that would enable a woman to keep working if she wanted to.

So , along with the dishes and the laundry, many men also have to learn that it's part of their "do community" as well. They need to help out making play dates, managing the family calendar, and remembering that it's time for the annual physical. It's not, by any means, the entire reason why women leave the workforce. But a women's real right to choose, and her entirely family's right, for that matter, depends on it.

Comments

[cylindar]

That is a very good issue you raise. I had never thought of that, or it's importance. However what you say probably won't work as most women do not like to talk to men about such things as they consider it a come on. Gee, could you pick up my mail for me is seen by many women as something other than it is plain and simple. This is very real and most frustrating. Women need to take men seriously in this arena or be doomed to be the only ones able to operate in this sphere. What you say is nice but you need to get your sisters looking at men in a different light as well as getting men to look at themselves in a different light before this can get out of fantasyland.

[Pandu]

This is the modern hippie culture; forget your responsibilities, just do what you want. With so much swapping of duties, it seems like we're well on our way to an androgynous society. Yuck.