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.

eating your cake too?

As I’ve been experiencing, thinking, reading, and writing about motherhood and feminism, there’s been something that has continued to bug me. The more I encounter the language of ‘income penalties’, ‘mommy tracks’, ‘balancing acts’, and ‘having it all’, alongside the demands for high-quality childcare, extended paid parental leave, and family subsidies, the more it bugs me. And what might ‘it’ be?

It’s cake. The having of and, more especially, the eating of it too.

As I read Rebecca Asher’s book Shattered, which articulated policy programmes for more equitable parenting parental leave, I found myself questioning her assumptions. She talked about ‘income penalties’ faced by mothers: assuming a heterosexual, stable couple - not always a given - one or other parent would suffer an income penalty by staying at home, for however little time, to look after young children in terms of lost earnings and opportunities. But, even if our hypothetical couple were able to get their young child into high-quality childcare so both parents could work full-time at demanding careers without any discernible penalty, someone pays the income penalty. Parents pay less than they earn to the carers of their children: early childhood care is still an overwhelmingly female occupation, and still a comparatively poorly-paid one. Based on this policy solution, solving ‘income penalties’ for one group of parents, means shifting the financial penalties of parenthood on to someone else.

I also wondered about measures of success based solely on income. If I take my own example, measured solely on income, I have lost very little  by staying at home for over a year. My income has risen as it would’ve whether I was actually doing my job or not. Despite the lost earnings over a few months, the threat to my career is fairly negligible. I appreciate that that is far from the case for every mother, even ones in similar positions to me. But it does make me wonder about the narrow definitions of success: income level (high and continually rising), career trajectory (aim for the top and keep going till you get there) and conspicuous consumption (buy as much as you can for as much as you can). Without being naive about power and how it is exercised, isn’t this buying in to extremely narrow patriarchal definitions of success? 

I think this is true, but, at the same time, women do earn less than men (even if they don’t have children), and there are fewer women in power. Patriarchal definitions of success might be narrow, but they are still powerful and pervasive. It is still depressingly common to hear of women who are fired, demoted or otherwise pushed out of their careers by getting pregnant or having children. In Emily Monosson’s edited collection Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory: Women Scientists Speak Out (2008), a graduate scientist describes being fired for getting pregnant .... in 2006. She has successfully taken action against her institution, but warns others that sex discrimination based on motherhood is still a real and present danger, even in apparently liberal academic institutions. 

Other essays in Monosson’s fascinating collection detail the lives and choices of women scientists who are trying to balance careers and motherhood. Covering a period from the 1970s - where women scientists were still a relative rarity - to the 2000s - where young women make up around a third of science graduates, the book describes varying routes to success. Some of these involve the traditional route, with high levels of support from partners, extended family and quality child-carers (all, I note, to make the impact on the institution rather than the families negligible). Others involve paths less taken that were not in any way planned or expected.  

One could argue that the authors of the essays are at pains to champion their own choices and inevitable compromises, but I think there is more to it than that. After having children, priorities change, and passions can become more focussed: while all of the women in this book are scientists - in the broadest definition of the term - many have turned their passion for science into policy, teaching, advocacy, and research that can be conducted outside the laboratory. They do so partly in the hope of making the world a better place, partly because there is better flexibility in public service, teaching and non-laboratory-based work, and partly because they want to role-model female career success for their children (especially their daughters). 

Inspiring as these stories are, they also got me thinking. These women are highly-educated and ambitious, yet most have made sacrifices to start families and maintain a career. With one or two exceptions in the thirty-four stories on offer, their partners did not sacrifice to the same level. Is it then the case - however much we might not want to admit it - that it isn't possible to have your cake and eat it too?

Anne-Marie Slaughter, professor of politics and international relations at Princeton University, is no longer so sure that it is possible, at least not without serious societal change. Imbibing the second-wave feminist mantra that women can have it all, Slaughter was able to balance her academic career and family to some extent. Until she took up a powerful position in Washington DC at as the first female director of policy planning at the State Department, that is.  After two years of relentlessly long hours, and continual travel, she gave up her role, returned to her teaching job at Princeton, and wrote a provocative article, published in July 2012 in the Atlantic: ‘Why Women Still Can’t Have it All’.

Slaughter frankly says:

Women of my generation have clung to the feminist credo we were raised with, even as our ranks have been steadily thinned by unresolvable tensions between family and career, because we are determined not to drop the flag for the next generation. But when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating “you can have it all” is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk.

Slaughter believes that It is time for women in leadership positions to recognise that ‘although we are still blazing trails and breaking ceilings, many of us are also reinforcing a falsehood: that “having it all” is, more than anything, a function of personal determination’.

She then identifies a series of ‘half-truths’ women tell themselves about having it all, all of which try to address structural problems at the individual level:

• ‘It’s possible, if you’re just committed enough’: and if you can’t balance career and family, and let the former slide to focus on the latter, you are ‘letting the side down’.
• ‘It’s possible, if you marry the right person’: sure having a supportive partner is great, and a woman’s career can flourish if her partner is effectively the ‘stay-at-home mum’. It’s more unusual, but it is still essentially the same breadwinner-homemaker model.
• ‘It’s possible, if you sequence it right’: have babies young, then try to get ahead (um, then you’ll be at least a decade behind everyone else, and be battling ageism as well as sexism) or progress your career first, then have babies (fine, but then you might experience physiological problems you hadn’t anticipated or risk being marginalised during a crucial career advancement period). Bottom-line? There is no right time.

To be clear, after dealing with these ‘half-truths’, she does not then go on to say women can’t have it all, so why bother trying? Instead, she offers some hard-won insight on what cultural changes need to be made to enable women - or more particularly, women of her demographic (i.e. ‘highly educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place’) - to be successful at home and at work. These include: changing the culture of ‘face-time’; revaluing family values; redefining the arc of a successful career; rediscovering the pursuit of happiness; and enlisting men. 

As a teacher, she sees a role for herself in creating future generations who will be able to have it all:

I continually push the young women in my classes to speak more. They must gain the confidence to value their own insights and questions, and to present them readily. My husband agrees, but he actually tries to get the young men in his classes to act more like the women—to speak less and listen more. If women are ever to achieve real equality as leaders, then we have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal. We must insist on changing social policies and bending career tracks to accommodate our choices, too. We have the power to do it if we decide to, and we have many men standing beside us.

After reading about the women scientists, and about Slaughter’s experiences, I sat looking at my own piece of cake. I opted to stay at home with my baby for nearly eighteen months, during which time my job was held open for me. I was only paid for a fraction of that time, but I have still received incremental increases in my rate of pay. I had the option to determine when and how I would return to work: full-time, transitioning from part-time to full-time, or part-time. For now, I have chosen to return part-time, and have a job-share partner, who also has a young child. It may not seem like a high-powered return to work, but, for now, it is working for me and my family. The time out has made me really think a lot more - and in concrete and practical ways - about what I (and we) want our lives and priorities to be. I want a successful career - and I have a few ideas up my sleeve about how that might unfold in the next three decades - but I also want a successful family too.

So rather than having my cake and eating it too, I think I’ll have a small piece for now, and save the rest for later.