One
Tuesday earlier this year, I was watching Oprah while my son and I cooked dinner. Dr. Phil--he
of blunt opinions and homespun aphorisms--was trying to figure out
why the couples on the show weren't having sex. No-sex-for-six-months,
no-sex-for-two-years kind of not having sex. He listened to one
woman describe her full-to-bursting life: mothering, a job, school.
It turns out the couple didn't have all the typical Oprah problems:
trust issues, childhood abuse, spiritual bereftness. The woman was,
Dr. Phil said, just too busy for sex.
"How many times
have you heard a woman say, 'I'm so lucky… ' and they're talking
about the little crumbs they have. You know: 'I'm so lucky I have
a husband' or 'I'm so lucky he makes a living' or 'I'm so lucky
I have a job that doesn't destroy me and destroy our family,'"
Ann Crittenden recently mused. She had just given a speech in a
Washington, D.C., suburb as part of a conference on caregiving.
"But they're not saying 'I deserve to have the right to have
my profession and time with my child. I deserve public support the
way elder people have public support from society.'"
Crittenden, a former
New York Times reporter and Pultizer Prize nominee, wrote
The Price of Motherhood after experiencing first-hand the
lack of respect full-time caregiving gets: After she left the Times
to be with her infant son, someone asked her in all seriousness,
"Didn't you used to be Ann Crittenden?"
In The Price of Motherhood,
Crittenden peers into the vast divide between the lip service paid
to mothering and the economic reality of mothers: "Motherhood
is the single largest risk factor for poverty in old age,"
she writes. In a compelling economic analysis, she details how mothers--whom
she claims contribute up to eighty percent of this country's unpaid
labor--get, in a word, screwed. The list is long and, frankly, a
little depressing: It begins with the unpaid six weeks of maternity
leave available to most women (the U.S. is one of the five industrialized
nations left that doesn't offer paid maternity leave, she says).
After the magical six weeks are up, our choices in work arrangements
are pretty slim; without a "rich and vibrant part-time labor
market," the choices seem to be full-time employment or none
at all. Perhaps most disturbing, though, is the economic fate of
those of us who caregive full-time: loss not only of wages (and
the pay raises that come with time spent at a company), but of Social
Security benefits. Holes in resumes that may one day be submitted
to employers who might regard child-rearing as nothing more than
babysitting--the old bon-bons-and-soaps vision of motherhood. And,
should divorce happen, the negating of that "choice" the
spouses made together, the choice that one would stay home while
the other brought in a paycheck. With no compensation for the time
the caregiving spouse took out to raise the children, forty percent
of all divorced women in the U.S. "tumble into poverty,"
she writes.
While American parents
scramble for that precious commodity--time--the rest of the First
World countries are managing more life balance with some grace.
Near the top of the who's-got-it-good list is Sweden, where the
government subsidizes a full year of paid leave for mothers at seventy-five
percent of their salaries, where every parent with a child under
the age of eight has the right to an eighty-percent work schedule
(that's four days a week), and low-income families get checks to
cover the cost of child care. And, Crittenden writes, "The
very suggestion of cutting mothers' and children's benefits, I was
told, 'would be political suicide.'" In contrast, the major
U.S. program designed to help poor mothers and children, Aid to
Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), was abolished in 1996;
so-called welfare queens--whose checks were treated as handouts
in the first place, not compensation for caregiving--were told to
get back to work. In its sixty years of existence, this aid never
amounted to more than one-half of one percent of the Gross Domestic
Product.
So, is it time to develop
a taste for gravlax, or might the U.S. take a clue from Swedish
policy?
"We're never going
to be a Sweden. We'll have to do it in our own way," Crittenden
says of this land of capitalism and cowboy mentality. "We have
this cultural sense that we're all individuals, that we're not really
in this together, that we're all going to make it ourselves, we
don't need any help. That ethic of the individual. And it's a strength;
it explains a lot of our success economically, that entrepreneurial
spirit. But it's a huge weakness because we don't really fully appreciate
how we are indeed all in this together. I think [our country's]
being heterogeneous, it makes it a little harder to see other people's
children as our children and understand that, 'If all these other
people's children are well-raised, it's going to help me.'"
By Crittenden's figuring,
if we live eighty years, we're dependent over forty percent of our
lives: the first twenty years and the last fifteen. "So who's
taking care of those dependents?" she asks. "A good chunk
of people in the prime working age. So the idea that we're all independent
and don't need each other's help is just a myth. Women need to make
that point very loud and clear: We're caregivers and we need a caring
state. But I think it's going to take another women's movement to
get that across."
Crittenden's book may
be the push that gets this new movement rolling. At the end of The
Price of Motherhood, she offers some solutions: Employers should
redesign work around parental norms, including offering the right
to a year's paid leave, shortening the workweek, and providing equal
hourly pay and pro-rated benefits for part-time work. The government
could do much to create a caring state, like offering on-the-job
insurance to those of us who do the unpaid work, setting up universal
preschools for three- and four-year-olds, and providing a "child
allowance," instead of a tax deduction or credit. (A deduction
does nothing for the thirty percent of low-income parents who don't
pay taxes, and credits don't help families where one parent is the
caregiver.) One of my favorites of Crittenden's ideas is that, upon
the birth or adoption of a child, a family should become a formal
financial unit, like a business. Members of the family would have
equal claim on the income. Along the same lines, Social Security
credits would be split between the adults of the household, no matter
who's bringing in the paycheck and who's doing the lion's share
of childrearing. This would benefit "working and stay-at-home
mothers alike, and …divorced women, who are among the poorest
old people in the country," Crittenden writes. |
