review: The New Feminist Agenda

While I was reading Elisabeth Badinter’s The Conflict (reviewed previously), I cast around looking for reviews to see how other people had responded to the book. In doing so, I happened upon this review in the New York Times by Judith Warner (author of Perfect Madness, a journalistic skewering of the ideology of the perfect mother as practised among middle and upper-middle class white women in the USA). Warner actually reviewed two books: Badinter’s, with which she had some issues while simultaneously being seduced by the elegant writing, and former Vermont governor and US ambassador Madeleine M. Kunin’s 2012 book The New Feminist Agenda: Defining the Next Revolution for Women, Work and Family. While Warner compared Kunin’s dry plain-speaking style unfavourably with Badinter’s, she much preferred Kunin’s ‘concrete, realistic’ politics, writing: 

Kunin’s is not a book of literary value, like Badinter’s. The writing is unremarkable, and there are no big, interesting philosophical ideas. Yet whereas Badinter’s argument is beautiful and essentially wrong, Kunin — Pollyanna-ish faith in the family-friendly nature of female politicians aside — is almost unimpeachably right, as she diagnoses what we in America need, why we’ve never gotten it, and how we may have some hope of achieving change in the future.

I too had some issues with Badinter’s book, although not quite the same ones as Warner, and thought it might be interesting to likewise read Kunin’s book in order to gain some insight into ‘concrete, realistic’ solutions.  Unlike Warner, however, I was less enamoured of Kunin’s book. I concede, however, that this may well be because I am not from the United States. I don’t mean that in an obnoxiously knee-jerk anti-American way. I mean rather that I found this book, while interesting, of limited use to those outside the US.  Instead, it made me very glad that I lived in a country that does not do the following:

• have no paid parental leave whatsoever (the only OECD country which does not)
• have slim to no paid sick leave for anybody, let alone parents of small children
• fail to protect unpaid parental leave for more than three months (after three months, parents seem to be at the mercy of their employers)
• fail to provide free healthcare for small children
• fail to provide new parents with professional support in the first weeks after having children 
• consider a forty-hour working week to be ‘part-time’
• have no right to request flexible working legislation
• tax spouses (usually mothers) at a marginal tax rate meaning proportionally more tax is taken from them, thus making it even more unaffordable for women with children to work
• does not provide proper regulation of early childhood education leaving some of it dangerously inadequate, and ensures that this sector remains one of the most poorly remunerated in the country (unless you are privileged to work for the Department of Defense)

And the list continues (and I will concede that there are New Zealand politicians now in power who seem hell-bent on eroding some of the protections we currently do enjoy, particularly in respect of single parents on benefits). Quite properly, Kunin is outraged at this laundry list of societal failings and her pragmatic aim is to set out a programme for women to take up the call and demand change.  She even begins her book describing her anger:

in my seventies I’m still dissatisfied with the status quo and harbour a passion for change. Old age allows me the luxury of being impatient - there isn’t much time left - and it permits me to say what I think, to be demanding, and, best of all, to imagine a different world where there is true gender equality in the workplace, the home and the political arena. (p 1)

Kunin then details a list of her expectations, developed through her involvement in second-wave feminism, that she sees as remaining unfulfilled. At the top of this list is the elusive goal of balancing career and family. Indeed, she was motivated to write this book by concluding that ‘many women who have careers that we could never imagined for ourselves are still flummoxed by the most age-old problem: how to have a job and take care of the children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled.’ (p 2)

She then proceeds to systematically deliver the evidence of maternal disempowerment in the US, both in the workplace and on the home-front. She looks to international models (France, Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, Canada, the UK, and Australia) not simply to find the US lacking but to compare and contrast how other countries’ social policies would translate in the US environment (with difficulty, apparently). Her political acumen is to the fore here and the programme she develops from this analysis is nothing if not pragmatic: don’t go for ‘paid parental leave’ (who will support the idea of women being ‘paid to do nothing’ - aarrgh!) but ‘family leave insurance’ (a tactic which was apparently successful in New Jersey); appeal to business’s self-interest rather than their moral duties (here she looks at examples of companies who have implemented family policies and how it has benefitted rather than disadvantaged their businesses) and building bipartisan coalitions across different interest groups (people with disabilities, the elderly and men) in order to re-define what the rhetoric of family values means in practice.

She is obviously way more cognisant of the terrain of US politics than I will ever be, and her proposed programme sounds sensible. And yet even Kunin recognises that it may be too unachievable: “Could we hold a march for family­/work policies in Washington? Would anybody come? Or would they be too tired, too busy, too scared of losing their jobs to attend?” Warner thinks what’s needed is a new glamourous multi-tasking Gloria Steinem as a figurehead to inspire and rally everyone. I’m not so sure.

My issue with Kunin’s programme is that it still deeply enmeshed in specific ideas about what constitutes ‘real work‘ and looks primarily to self-interest (particularly in the business world) to provide the answer. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for paid parental leave, flexible working and so on, and I think business has a key role in this - but not to the exclusion of a strong social safety-net provided by a functional welfare state. And I’m frankly disappointed that her pragmatic suggestions appear to perpetuate the myth that stay-at-home parents don’t work (which is why looking solely to business will only ever provide part of the solution).  

As unpaid - or low-paid - carers of children, the chronically ill and the elderly, stay-at-home parents (usually mothers) work too, and in doing so contribute immeasurably to the economy. ‘Immeasurably’, that is, in the sense that it isn’t systematically measured - there are many examples of calculating the costs of a mother’s unpaid work: here in Canada and here by the International Labour Organisation. Where is the part of Kunin’s programme that calls for the substantive recognition and valuing of this work?  Sure, she gestures at in places - for example in the chapter, ‘New Family Portraits’ which looks at shared parenting, stay at home dads, and how to explain ‘resumé gaps’ - but when she espouses calling for ‘family leave insurance’ because people will be turned off by ‘paid parental leave’ (because who wants to pay someone for ‘not working’ - aargh!), it may be pragmatic and politically palatable but it’s still reinforcing the idea that the unpaid work of caring is not productive work at all. 

I recently had some insight into this distinction. Having just bought our first house, my husband and I decided it would be prudent to look into life and income protection insurance. Our insurance advisor - a working mother herself - recommended insuring my husband’s income only (even though I too am working). While she was aware that this might come across as offensive to me, nonetheless the advice was couched in terms of the problems we could face if my husband couldn’t work for whatever reason. I’m not disputing that: it would totally suck if we didn’t have access to his income. But later on it got me thinking - well what if something happened to me and we not only lost my income, but my ability to care for our child for no pay whatsoever? If we had to pay someone to care for her without my income to cover it, or for my husband to reduce his hours so he could do it, then we would also face problems (which would, admittedly, be ameliorated to some extent by the safety-net of the welfare state - as would his unemployment or disability). But that unpaid care is apparently not worth insuring because it has no monetary value. 

This is patently nonsense. In a family with dependent children - and overwhelmingly so in the US, I would guess, with the thin social safety net provided - the unpaid work of the primary care-giver enables the other partner to be economically ‘productive’. And this is even more the case for single-parent families: participating in the paid economy is somehow - unbelievably - valued more highly than being able to provide parental care in the home. The limits of Kunin’s analysis in this respect are problematic, yet how to recognise the value of unpaid or low-paid care-work is canvassed at length in earlier work by Ann Crittenden in The Price of Motherhood (2001) and New Zealand’s own Marilyn Waring in If Women Counted (1988). 

While there is much of interest and value in Kunin’s book, perhaps this blind-spot shows up the limits of a politically pragmatic approach, rather than one that takes fundamental issue with the ways in which a national culture operates, and, on that basis, demands laws, policies, practices and institutions to show it values families in fact, not just in rhetoric. After all, if your starting point is compromise, then surely you only end up with small wins at best.

'free to be you and me?'

‘There’s a land that I see

Where the children are free

And I say it ain’t far

To this land from where we are.’

So begins the bouncy title track by the New Seekers from the album Free to Be You and Me by Marlo Thomas and Friends (first released in 1972). 

Quite apart from the fact that I’m quite a fan of the plinky-plunky ‘70s sound of this song and recommend you give it a listen, I thought I’d take a moment to think about children’s songs as one form of didactic narrative that children encounter in their early years. 

I’ve ransacked the local library’s CD collection (‘records, mummy, what are those?’) and come home with many different child-friendly tune collections to pass the time away. Many these days are touted as being ‘educational’. Baby Einstein, for example, introduces us to famous classical composers via simplified arrangements in Baby Beethoven and Baby Mozart. Simplified classical music - the proper arrangements deemed too stimulating and complex for very young children - is also used in allegedly sleep-inducing CDs such as Music for Dreaming and Sweet Dreams for Children (it seems like a bit of a contradiction to educate - and, presumably, stimulate - children with the same kind of music that is also supposed to send them to sleep). There are collections of the more traditional nursery rhymes and songs, such as ‘B-I-N-G-O’, ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’, and ‘If You’re Happy and You Know It’, performed by everyone from the Wiggles to your local pre-school to Rolf Harris. Putumayo Kids has a wide range of world and folk music, many with messages of love and peace and ‘why can’t everyone just get along?’ Drawing on the success of simplified arrangements for other kinds of music, there’s also a a growing range of lullaby renditions of famous rawk bands - treat your child to Nirvana interpreted on the glockenspiel or the Ramones played on the triangle! (If Courtney Love had a problem with the Muppets doing a tongue-in-cheek version of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in the recent movie, who knows what she makes of these?)   

My favourites among the ones that I’ve found so far are the weird imaginings of They Might Be Giants  on No! and Here Comes the ABCs (who knew the folks behind ‘Particle Man’ would reinvent themselves as really rather good children’s musicians?) and the compilations For the Kids and For the Kids Too. In the latter two compilations, contemporary indie artists take on classics like ‘Rainbow Connection’ and ‘My Favourite Things’ as well as offering up brilliant new ones like ‘Your Attitude Towards Cuttlefish’ and ‘John Lee Super-taster’. I’ve also re-visited the 1970s' anarchy of The Muppets, and become acquainted with The Wellington Ukelele Orchestra. 

So, taken together, what do all these kinds of musical narratives mean for small children? First, there is the familiar Western lexicon of twinkling stars, farmers in dells and putting your left arm in and shaking it all about. Everyone likes to be singing from the same song-sheet at some point in their lives. Second, there is a perpetuation of the kind of music educated people should know about: Beethoven, Mozart, the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, Peter and the Wolf, the Dance of the Sugar-plum Fairy (you see where this is going ...). Third, some of the ‘let’s all just get along’ music has some problematic sentiments: on Putumayo’s Acoustic Playground there’s a song about the love train that travels around the world - even Russia and China too! - that sounds patronising, at best, and ethnocentric, at worst. Last, there is more diverse music on offer: songs in te reo Māori and Gagana Samoa, for example. While this is a welcome development on the whole, dropping 'Te Aroha' into a collection of otherwise English songs can seem like the ‘ethnic spice’ (as feminist critic bell hooks has described it in ‘Eating the Other’) in the mix that serves to shore up the position of the dominant culture and its values. Whether we like it or not, whether its overt or not, children’s songs and music are also narratives with an ideological agenda.

At the risk of killing everyone’s buzz a little more - and let’s face it, songs and music are meant to be enjoyed without too much over-thinking - I want to look at the thing that’s missing from a lot of this music: any overt messaging about behaviour. And, in the general spirit of this blog, of feminist messaging about gendered behaviour. Which is where we come back to Free to Be You and Me.

Like me, it is a product of the 1970s. And second-wave feminism.

Without wanting to sound like an infomercial, let me tell you more about it (you can watch most of the tracks off the album on youtube; they appeared in a television special in 1974, so there are visuals to go with the sounds). Actress Marlo Thomas - most famous in the early 1970s as TV’s That Girl, but maybe more familiar these days as Rachel Green’s mother in Friends - was searching for a new kind of bedtime story for her niece Dionne. Thomas says, however, in the liner notes, ‘I was saddened to find that all of her books ... put her and her mind to sleep. I started to look through stores and found, with few exceptions, shelf after shelf of books and records, for boys and girls, which charmingly dictated who and what they must be, colorfully directing new minds away from their own uniqueness.’

I could point out the ideological ramifications of ‘freedom’ and ‘individualism’, particularly during the height of the Cold War, but that would be missing what is both charming and instructive about Thomas’ project. Some of the proceeds from the record went to the newly-established Ms. Foundation to support a range of projects ‘aimed at improving the skills, condition and status of women and children.’ Comments in the liner notes come from Gloria Steinem and Dr Dorothy H. Cohen, the latter of whom says:

Recognizing that the new male and female image will emerge in coming generations if children can be freed from the stereotypes of the past, the many gifted participants in this work have poked fun with undisguised pleasure at attitudes that have been taken seriously for centuries.

In addition to celebrating every child’s creativity, then, Free to Be You and Me was also a feminist project. Other tracks include ‘William Wants A Doll’ (voiced by Thomas and Alan Alda. Yup, thats right, Hawkeye from M*A*S*H), about a boy who wants a doll, but isn’t given one because it would be ‘cissy’.  That is, until his wise grandma points out that it’s good for him to have a doll, because one day, he’ll be a daddy and he should know how to nurture a baby (well, okay, it has some limits). There’s also ‘Parents are People’, which lets kids in on the big secret that their mums and dads aren’t just mums and dads, but people too, and ‘there are a lot of things that a lot of mommies can do, and a lot of daddies can do, and a lot of parents can do.’ Another song ‘It’s All right to Cry’, sung by former New York Giants’ footballer, Roosevelt ‘Rosey’ Grier, lets both boys and girls know that it’s okay to have emotions and to express them, because ‘it might make you feel better’ (sidenote: Grier seems to have had a rich and varied career: post-football, he was a bodyguard for Robert Kennedy, and was guarding his wife when Kennedy was shot. He subsequently had a TV career, promoted non-traditional masculine hobbies such as needlepoint and macrame, and became a Christian Minister who works with inner city youth).

Another tells the story of ‘Girl Land’, envisaged as a kind of amusement park:

‘Welcome to Girl Land, 

My Good Little Girls

Admission’s a Wink

And a toss of your curls

There’s fun for all

From Eight to Eighty

You go in a girl 

And come out a Lady.’

But ‘Girl land’ has been closed down, because ‘it was never much fun’ and ‘always a bore’ and ‘you never get out’. 

The simple joy and hope in many of these songs is not only still quite catchy, but almost heart-breaking. At least, to me. Why, you may ask?

Because, if we fast forward forty years to 2012, ‘Girl Land’ has not only been re-opened, but it’s had a fresh, new makeover (I bet Marlo Thomas didn’t have to deal with Playboy-branded clothes marketed at young girls or the internet’s role in the pornification of culture, for example). And mommies, at least, are no longer people, they’re ... well, mommies (unless, of course, they work, in which case, they are bad mommies). William can forget about that doll, and he better not cry about it either. 

Rather than‘it ain’t far from where we are’, I’d say that we still have some way to go to that land where ‘you and me are free to be ... you and me’.