The Mommy Myth

Surveying my Smith class of 1991, one thing is clear: each woman must be a pioneer, navigating her path of work and family as if it's never been done before. The media doesn't help -- presenting case after case of upper-middle-class women -- like my Smith alum -- who "choose" to stay home with their kids. And even if it's not true that women are mass exiting work life for home life, it's easy enough to believe because, well, it is hard to balance work and family.

Lisa Belkin's 2003 New York Times magazine article on fellow Princeton graduates who on the face of it were "choosing" to leave their killer careers because of the killer hours were forming an "opt-out revolution" to stay home with the kids instead.

To pile on the guilt for this miniscule demographic (although no doubt making up a large number of readers of The New York Times) these very overeducated stay-at-home moms are being chastised by the book "The Feminine Mistake," which warns that women who stay home put themselves at finaicial risk by staking their homemaker claim on rich husbands who will not divorce them.

Of course, balancing career and family is a huge problem for many women to work out -- but that doesn't mean women aren't working. On the contrary, a majority of mothers in the U.S. are working. And if they "opt out," they're having kids later in life, after they've been working for some time. Which isn't exactly opting out.

E. J. Graff, who spoke at the Women, Action and Media conference I attended last month in Cambridge, MA, wrote a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review that sheds some light on the history of this media myth of the stay-at-home mom, which will not die.

Graff writes,

The opt-out stories have a more subtle, but equally serious, flaw: their premise is entirely ahistorical. Their opening lines often suggest that a generation of women is flouting feminist expectations and heading back home. At the simplest factual level, that’s false. Census numbers show no increase in mothers exiting the work force, and according to Heather Boushey, the maternity leaves women do take have gotten shorter. Furthermore, college-educated women are having their children later, in their thirties—after they’ve established themselves on the job, rather than before. Those maternity leaves thus come in mid-career, rather than pre-career. Calling that “opting out” is misleading. As Alice Kessler-Harris, a labor historian at Columbia University, put it, “I define that as redistributing household labor to adequately take care of one’s family.” She adds that even while at home, most married women keep bringing in family income, as women traditionally have. Today, women with children are selling real estate, answering phone banks, or doing office work at night when the kids are in bed. Early in the twentieth century, they might have done piecework, taken in laundry, or fed the boarders. Centuries earlier, they would have been the business partners who took goods to market, kept the shop’s accounts, and oversaw the adolescent labor (once called housemaids and dairymaids, now called nannies and daycare workers).

I hope the media starts getting the word out. But I doubt it. It's easier to believe the myth then have to deal with the reality.