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3) Finally, what about the men? I scanned back through that Times Magazine cover story and did not come across a single quote from a male source. At the very end the piece mentions the rise of stay-at-home dads, but otherwise this article and others completely ignore the question of why working fathers aren't feeling just as guilty about their work patterns and their responsibility to be nurturing parents. The media's poisonous messages to men—young men especially—that care and family aren't macho enough to concern them—go mostly unexamined. My jaw dropped when I read the subtitle of a Fortune magazine cover story a couple years ago on the stay-at-home husbands of female CEO's. Trying to be cutesy with the term "trophy husband," the tagline read: "They deserve a trophy for trading places." They do? Why? Because they "stooped" to the "lowly" level of parent? The male provider and female caregiver seems to be a more enduring and embraced norm than we care to admit.
It should be said that another blind spot in this discussion is single mothers, who do not have the luxury of choosing between work and family. And women who never marry or give birth, who, all these years after second-wave feminism, are still made to feel like inadequate members of society (despite this Time magazine cover story on single women, entitled "Who Needs A Husband?")
- For the supposedly liberal New York Times , the "Opt-Out Revolution" story takes some severe swipes at feminism (the second-wave kind, it neglects to clarify). It subscribes to the militant feminism stereotype, talking about "soldiers of feminism" and flatly stating, "The women's movement was largely about grabbing a fair share of power—making equal money, standing at the helm in the macho realms of business and government and law. It was about running the world." This was a power grab, you see, not a matter of social justice. The article does include the startling statistics which show that for all the progress women have made into the halls of power, far fewer have "arrived"—only 16 percent of law partners and corporate officers are women, only eight Fortune 500 company CEO's are female, and so on. The conclusion writer Lisa Belkin reaches is that women simply want out of the workplace, and then she makes the leap to the assumption that men will soon follow their example. "Why don't women run the world? Maybe because they don't want to," she writes.
- A letter writer responding to Belkin's story points out that this may not be a question of gender, but of quality of life in a capitalist society (sentiments echoed at MothersMovement.org). "What is needed is not another revolution on behalf of women; we need one for everyone." The writer may have read Joan Williams's academic treatise on the subject, Unbending Gender (reviewed here). The problem, Williams suggests, has less to do with gender than with the norms of the workplace. Companies operate with the idea of the "ideal worker," one who is free from family responsibilities and can slave away for 70 hours a week. Since women who wish to have children cannot meet this expectation, they don't really have the option of a career if they want to be mothers. To give them one, companies would have to ease their grip on the idea of the "ideal worker" and accept more part-time workers, male and female, who are living more balanced lives, having a career and being parents. (If this sounds quasi-Marxist for its critique of industry, Williams also makes a thorough argument that part-time workers are more profitable.) Reduced worker weeks, it may be added, would be more consistent for a nation that prides itself on "family values."
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