America hates babies!
No, really. Having a baby seems like a set up for social pressures that don't allow anyone to win, male or female, regardless of what choices they make.
If you are a heterosexual couple, and neither of you is self-employed or works for a small business, you are both guaranteed unpaid "family leave" under the Family and Medical Leave Act, for up to twelve weeks. Not so great, but hey, at least your boss can't give your job away!
If you are a woman and your family has enough resources that you do not need to go back to work, you are faced with tremendous pressure in two different directions: going back to work (which makes you a bad mother and too career-oriented) and staying home (which makes you a victim of social pressures and not career-oriented enough). Of course, if your family doesn't have those resources, you may have no choice except to go back to work, in which case you urgently require childcare, an expensive commodity.
If you're a man, you're also faced with tremendous pressure, but nearly all of it is in the direction of taking minimal leave and going back to work as soon as possible.
If you are not a heterosexual couple, there are additional obstacles in assuring that you and your partner are even legally established as parents of your child, thereby gaining access to important rights of which family leave is only one.
Feminism both helps and hurts in this scenario. I absolutely believe that in a perfect feminist world, everyone would have the resources and freedom from social pressures to choose freely about whether they wanted to stay home with children or work outside the home, and would have a lot more flexibility about how both of those things could happen. I also believe there are women who now make this choice in ways that are deeply meaningful to them and that reflect their personalities and desires: in fact, I know some.
It seems unfortunate to me that feminism is sometimes used as a lever to exert social pressure on women, particularly progressive feminist ones, to continue to work outside the home while raising children, regardless of their personal wishes. But despite the progress made so far, I still think there's a great deal of social pressure for women in particular to stay home and raise kids and men in particular to work, and so I feel firmly that feminism's work in this arena is not yet done. To me, the missing piece is an acknowledgement of those pressures and the ways in which the mainstream world still conditions us to give in to them. To acknowledge this is to confirm the value and validity of both the feelings of individual women and men and of the feminist project of continuing to advocate for the widespread aceptance of a wider range of solutions to the combined demands of career and children for everyone.
If you are a heterosexual couple, and neither of you is self-employed or works for a small business, you are both guaranteed unpaid "family leave" under the Family and Medical Leave Act, for up to twelve weeks. Not so great, but hey, at least your boss can't give your job away!
If you are a woman and your family has enough resources that you do not need to go back to work, you are faced with tremendous pressure in two different directions: going back to work (which makes you a bad mother and too career-oriented) and staying home (which makes you a victim of social pressures and not career-oriented enough). Of course, if your family doesn't have those resources, you may have no choice except to go back to work, in which case you urgently require childcare, an expensive commodity.
If you're a man, you're also faced with tremendous pressure, but nearly all of it is in the direction of taking minimal leave and going back to work as soon as possible.
If you are not a heterosexual couple, there are additional obstacles in assuring that you and your partner are even legally established as parents of your child, thereby gaining access to important rights of which family leave is only one.
Feminism both helps and hurts in this scenario. I absolutely believe that in a perfect feminist world, everyone would have the resources and freedom from social pressures to choose freely about whether they wanted to stay home with children or work outside the home, and would have a lot more flexibility about how both of those things could happen. I also believe there are women who now make this choice in ways that are deeply meaningful to them and that reflect their personalities and desires: in fact, I know some.
It seems unfortunate to me that feminism is sometimes used as a lever to exert social pressure on women, particularly progressive feminist ones, to continue to work outside the home while raising children, regardless of their personal wishes. But despite the progress made so far, I still think there's a great deal of social pressure for women in particular to stay home and raise kids and men in particular to work, and so I feel firmly that feminism's work in this arena is not yet done. To me, the missing piece is an acknowledgement of those pressures and the ways in which the mainstream world still conditions us to give in to them. To acknowledge this is to confirm the value and validity of both the feelings of individual women and men and of the feminist project of continuing to advocate for the widespread aceptance of a wider range of solutions to the combined demands of career and children for everyone.
posted by Sarah at 8:41 AM
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