One of my favorite quotes of all time is from former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, who once said, "Women's careers don't move in straight lines. They zig-zag all over the place." I was reminded of this today when I saw Joan Walsh's review of Leslie Bennett's new book, The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? in today's Salon.
"If female fear and self-doubt were ever eradicated," Walsh writes, "the publishing industry would collapse." Honey, you got that right. Here's a book about the joys of having challenging work that is financially and intellectually rewarding, and about how women who dump their careers to stay home with the kids are making the biggest mistake of their lives, and you know women will read it and then find themselves staring at the ceiling at 2 a.m., having those horrible, gnawing thoughts about whether they've made the Right Choice. As if there IS a Right Choice. As if it's not bad enough that we already have Linda Hirschman hectoring us over this issue, or Caitlin Flanagan on the other hand ripping us a new one for being so selfish as to want to do anything besides stay home and make those cupcakes. It all makes me want to say, Can we please get over this One Size Fits All lockstep approach? This is life we're talking about, people. It is, by definition, messy.
The fact is, women's lives tend to come in definable segments, and different women are quite likely to have segments of differing length. There's childhood. There's adolescence, which takes us through high school and (often) college. Then there's what I call the Mary Tyler Moore phase, where you go out in the world and get that first apartment and the first job and the second job and learn how to pay bills, how to survive a fender bender, how to establish your first savings account, and so on. Then there's the Career Years, in which you reach cruising altitude on the job and attain that first important position or win that first important award. Co-existing with these last two is Important Relationship/Marriage (and I put it that way because I have gay friends who are not accorded the legal recognition of marriage but whose relationships have the same social significance) and Motherhood, which is not a status every woman achieves or wants to achieve but which, when it does happen, tends to take precedence over all other endeavors, at least during those intensive first years. Then the demands of motherhood recede, at least a little, and you reach what I call the Middle Years, in which Career and Family must reach some kind of peaceful detente, and your own children (assuming you have them) get launched into the world. Then there are the Later Years, in which the demands of the body gradually supersede Career, and you either are lucky enough to reach retirement age with enough funds to retire or you figure out some way of continuing to drag your carcass to that greeter's job at Wal-Mart that you need to pay the mortgage. And, finally, Old Age.
And here's the thing: there is no set pattern for doing this. I am just getting launched into my Middle Years, and I'm 51, but that's because I didn't have my first child until I was 40; you may be well into your Middle Years at the age of 35. Throw in the distinct possibility of divorce, and what you have is a very broad template indeed.
For men, in our culture, it's similar but considerably simpler, for the simple biological fact that men's bodies do not gestate, give birth, face the need of recovering from the physical demands of that process, or lactate. These are just facts. And until we figure out some other way of perpetrating the species, these are the set of facts we're going to have to work with.
My problem with the Linda Hirschmans, Caitlin Flanagans and Leslie Bennetts of the world (and why is it all the people telling women they are screwing up are other women?) is that they are so eager to tell us what we're doing wrong, and so utterly unable (it seems) of addressing the two elephants in the living room, so to speak: Inflexibility and Ageism.
Inflexibility is the bane of every working mother's existence, and it's the reason tons of women (including me) drop out of the paid labor force in those first demanding years after bringing a new person into the world. Show me a college-educated mother who has "opted" to stay home full-time with her children, and I'll show you a woman whose boss refused to seriously consider telecommuting, job-sharing, pro-rated health care benefits or part-time hours. I'll grant you that some jobs (and mine was one) lend themselves less well to this kind of thing than others; you simply cannot, for instance, be a full-time beat reporter at the Washington Post on a part-time basis. The news business is competitive, and while you're at home playing peek-a-boo with your little cutie pie, your competitors at the local TV station will clean your clock. On the other hand, there's absolutely no reason that you can't cover city hall, take a few years in mid-career to work in a low-profile, part-time slot in the Real Estate section and then, once your kids are in high school, come back to cover the Central Intelligence Agency. This doesn't happen, of course, but the reason it doesn't happen is a stupid one: "We've never done it that way." And I'm not trying to single out the Washington Post here, either; the news business has no corner on inflexibility. Investment bankers, doctors, academics--there's any number of professions where you drop out at your peril. American culture venerates motherhood, it's as American a value as apple pie, but just try taking time to actually do it.
And this leads me to the second issue, which is Ageism. Suppose you hit those Middle Years and that job/family detente was not to be found, and for you the best option was to drop out of the paid labor force for awhile. Or suppose you were never in a line of work that paid well enough for working outside the home to offset the (prohibitive and non-government subsidized, natch) cost of child care. So you became a SAHM for a while--10 years, 12, 15. Then comes the day when the kids start high school or leave for college and you suddenly realize there is absolutely no need for you to be at home between the hours of 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., and that you'd very much like the intellectual stimulation, not to mention the money, of working in an office again. So you set out to look for a job....and discover that if you are over, say, 45, you might as well stand on the street corner and ask passers by to hand you their wallets. Because health care is tied to jobs in our culture, employers tend to look at older workers not as people with valuable experience, but as walking doctor bills. This means that even if you are a splendid physical specimen with not a health problem in the world, and we all know how likely that is, you are at a disadvantage from the get-go with a 23-year-old applying for a similar position. In a society where health care is negotiated through the employer, the value of job experience--or hell, even just life experience, for that matter--is quickly trumped by the youthful glow of a job applicant whose arteries are still several decades away from being clogged. My sister found this out when she was laid off from her job as a medical laboratory manager for a medium-sized medical practice in a medium-sized Georgia town, after some 15 years on the job. She had finally reached a level where she was getting a decent salary, and the office bean-counter called her in on Friday and said, "Don't bother coming in on Monday." In a way, she was lucky; she didn't have any advanced post-graduate degrees and had never qualified for a really high salary--otherwise, it might have happened to her several years earlier. In any event, she found herself on the job market at the age of 53 and discovered that on Friday she was good enough to manage a lab with roughly a dozen employees--but the following Monday she wasn't good enough to get hired as a lowly bench technician.
Inflexibility and Ageism are facts of life that women have to contend with right up there with menstruation, pregnancy and menopause--but somehow, oddly, they never get discussed. Instead we get book after book telling us how we are screwing up our lives--as if everything were totally in our control, and the only thing standing between us and complete fulfillment is the fact that we are just too dumb to cross the street by ourselves. And, as I noted, it's women doing this to other women; men seem quite happy to keep to the sidelines in these discussions. This is because "Let's you and her fight" is a whole lot preferable, at least in the short term, to actually dealing with some of these issues.
Well, I've had it. Leslie, Caitlin, Linda--all you women out there standing ready to tell me how I am screwing up my life by working/not working/opting out/being too ambitious/not ambitious enough, you can all jump off a cliff. Come back and talk to me when you're ready to discuss all these other people who are dancing this Zig-Zag Two Step with me, and when you're ready to give me some concrete ideas about how to convince them it takes two to tango. Until then, I have some advice for you: shut the fuck up.
