The other happening is that every singe woman I know posted the Atlantic article by Anne-Marie Slaughter. (OK: maybe it just FELT like every woman I know. It might have been fewer.) Before I send anyone screaming from their computer or writing angry comments on this post, I'll say that the piece is excellent and that Slaughter does a tremendous job picking apart the difficulties that face my generation's women as they try to navigate the socially very complicated tradeoffs between career and family. But I do have a couple of questions/queries/criticisms about the piece.
I have three, to be specific. The first is that the tradeoffs Slaughter points out apply to men as well as women. Much to her credit, Slaughter recognizes this and does a great job highlighting some of the social norms that make the choice to choose career over family seemingly easier (or at least more knee-jerk) for men. Nor does Slaughter claim that the economic and societal structures that make the choice more socially problematic for women cannot apply to men as well. Here, I just want to highlight that a man who values family life and children faces similar constraints. Most men work jobs that require a huge number of hours, and that necessarily makes it more difficult to spend time with their kids. Simply because they tend not to be as reflective on this dilemma - or to feel like "bad feminists" when they choose one over the other - doesn't mean it ensnares them any less.
This speaks to a second, broader question: why does anyone assume we are entitled to "have it all?" Slaughter presents the obstacles to having a social life AND family life AND professional life, but seems not to consider the possibility that life sometimes simply requires us to make sacrifices. I admire the ambition behind the sentiment - and there's a degree to which I share it - but I wonder if its attempts to eliminate the idea that we might have to make choices is ultimately harmful. Slaughter is right to point out that our societal values work against a balanced life, but there are aspects of this that aren't malleable. A few propositions: 1) we are always going to want experts to be, you know, really good at what they do; 2) this requires experts to spend a lot of time doing something, and in competitive positions it requires them most often to spend more time than other people, 3) as a result, something of an intellectual arms race for exalted positions seems inevitable. If I'm about to have brain surgery, I want one of the best brain surgeons around to do it, and I probably couldn't care less about that person's work/family balance.
It isn't just that we undervalue family life - though I think we do, especially for men - it's that the logic behind being the best at anything often requires an enormous amount of time spent on that one thing. Slaughter is undoubtedly right that being "time-macho" is prevalent, and probably counterproductive, but this hides the simple fact that being really good at something takes a lot of time. Being good enough at basketball to play in the NBA, or at medicine to be a cardio-thoracic surgeon, or at law to be the Dean of the Wilson School at Princeton, requires an enormous number of hours of practice, which have to come at the expense of something because there are a finite number of hours in a day, days in a week, weeks in a year, years in a lifetime. If you had a friend who said he didn't want to have to choose between two careers - say film directing and being a high-powered lawyer - you would almost certainly remind him that both of those require a high degree of time and expertise, and that it will be difficult or impossible for him to do both. He has to make a choice, a sacrifice. Why would we expect other life choices to be any different? If "having it all" means getting to do everything you want with your life without having to make choices or sacrifices, then no one can have it all, man or woman, because we do have to make hard choices about our lives.
Let me illustrate part of this with my third, narrower point. Slaughter says that we ought not to privilege parents over other workers - which I think is right - and that because women tend to be the primary caregivers, being a parent most often places the burdens of extra work on them rather than equally on both partners. In a two career family, this makes it harder for the woman than for the man. No argument with either of these points so far as I am concerned. But a parable from Slaughter's time at Princeton makes me question how committed she is to the notion that we don't or ought not to privilege parents. She notes that any tenure-track faculty member - male or female - who has a child while at Princeton automatically gets a year added to the tenure clock. I think a lot of us - myself included - reflexively say "that's great!" But why?
My roommate - who really ought to get joint author credit for this post since I'm stealing a lot of his points - made me question why I unflinchingly assumed that new parents ought to get that extra year. Now, there are reasons like "so they can spend more time with their kids" that are obvious, but his critique runs deeper. By enabling new parents to both spend time with their kids and get tenure, we are implicitly saying "having a child is not a choice that should interfere with your career prospects." Again, I think a lot of us say "how great" without actually reflecting on this that much. WHY do we feel that having a child is a choice that shouldn't require that kind of sacrifice? There might be some very good reasons for this; I haven't thought about it enough to say for sure what some of them may or may not be. The point is that we don't feel the need even to articulate such reasons.
Consider the following four scenarios:
1) I put work on the back burner for a year because I just had a child.
2) I put work on the back burner for a year because one of my parents is sick and I move back home to help out around the house.
3) I put work on the back burner for a year because I don't have time to read the classics as avidly as I would like, and I think that I will be a better person and a better academic if I take a year to read and reflect on the classics of world literature (which is, I think, a perfectly colorable argument, by the way).
4) I put work on the back burner for a year because I haven't travelled that much and I think I will be a better person, a more reflective academic, and better cosmopolitan citizen of the world if I visit all seven continents and learn more about cultures in other places.
Each of these represents a life choice a person could very reasonably make to enjoy their life more, enrich their views of the world, nurture familial relationships, be a better person, etc., etc. But the rule that Slaughter finds so much value in at Princeton decides that only one of these choices is one that shouldn't have to interfere with your career (maybe #2 as well, depending on the workplace; but good luck getting your tenure clock in Biology extended to read the complete works of Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, no matter how great a person that might make you). If I end up as a single academic without children, none of the choices I can make to enrich my life at the expense of my work will be one that my university compensates for by ameliorating the negative effects on my career.
Again - I really can't emphasize this enough - we might, on reflection, decide that there are really good reasons to minimize the effect having children has on new parents. If nothing else, people are going to have children, they simply are, no matter how the purported cost/benefit balance is structured. As an old professor of mine put it, "if people thought rationally about having children, no one would ever have any." Given this social/biological fact and its prevalence, we might say that we want to ensure that people can be good parents without abandoning other pursuits. The point, though, is that we don't reflect on it. We tacitly assume that having children is a choice that ought to impact your career as little as possible when we can help it. Why do we assume this? This isn't a rhetorical question meant to imply that we shouldn't; I'm seriously asking what the underlying reasons are. They may require some examination.
Slaughter does such a great job emphasizing the background social norms and default assumptions that make the choices we have to make more problematic for women that it makes it all the more surprising when she doesn't examine nearly as critically the fact that we do privilege married couples and parents at the expense of single people (tax breaks for married couples, for children, leaves of absence or extensions for having kids, etc., etc.; those dollars come from single people, too), even as she says we shouldn't. Especially when the people who make the rules about these things tend to be married people with children, oughtn't we at least look critically at the self-authored rules that privilege their position?
At root, I don't have any real problems with the arguments Slaughter makes, but with the unexamined assumptions that hide behind them. WHY do we feel that we ought to be able to "have it all" without having to make hard choices and sacrifices? WHY do we think that having children is the sort of choice that shouldn't impact your career? Do we have good reasons for these baseline assumptions? And, if not, how does that impact Slaughter's related arguments?
Rules like the one Slaughter favors matter precisely because they privilege one choice (and people who make it) without necessarily encouraging reflection on those privileges and why they are or are not justified. This gets especially dangerous and prickly when we think of something as "natural." Now, I'm pretty sure that procreating is about as natural an activity as we're likely to find, but doing it in marital pairs is subject to (and the result of) all sorts of social norms and pressures (doing it in biological pairs was utterly unavoidable until about thirty years ago). But it's the very description of something as "natural" that encourages us to take it as a given and stop reflecting on how we build our social rules around it.
At root, I'm just encouraging everyone to A) read Slaughter's piece if you haven't already, it's great, but B) consider whether Slaughter's fantasy world without hard life choices is one that can ever exist, and C) critically reflect on the position we place childbearing and rearing in in our political and social spaces, and why we have rules that privilege that choice at the expense of others.
Comments, counterarguments, and the good points I inevitably missed are always welcome, but even more so today, when I have questions that aren't remotely rhetorical.
A good and interesting post. The hard work/life choices exist, and they exist for all people regardless of sex and gender. A man with children will have less time to devote to his career than a man with no children - that's just true, and that's a choice he has to make just as a woman does.
ReplyDeleteBut I think a lot of what Slaughter is responding to here is that, for years, her generation of career-ambitious women has told our generation of career-ambitious women that it's no problem to have kids and be at the top of your field as long as you're willing to work really hard. I remember attending a talk while I was in college (late 1990s) where a visiting female researcher got the work-family balance question from the audience and bluntly stated that women must choose to privilege one over the other in a way that most men don't have to. It was the first time I had ever heard a woman actually say that.
For me, at the crux of Slaughter's piece was the reality that most men in high positions of power (within government/public service) have a spouse and children, while the most successful and powerful women in public service are disproportionately without children. There are many, many reasons that's the case, including societal inequalities, and including something Slaughter points out that sounds anti-feminist but seems to be true: that more women than men want to be the primary caregiver when there are children to raise.
I know a woman who gives talks to women's groups about her wildly successful career and how she balanced it with children; she never mentions that her mother lived with her family and raised her children for her, leaving all in the audience assuming that she did it all without help. Slaughter is pulling back the curtain a bit and indicating it's not simple, and the women who insist it is are doing all a disservice.
tl;dr
ReplyDeleteAre we entitled to have it all? Probably not. While it is nice to aspire to know a lot of things and to try new things, there is the immediate dilemma of trying to do MANY things and trying to do them WELL. I’d venture a guess that people with diverse, well-rounded interests are happier and more productive, but perhaps this is the liberal arts in me speaking. There is something to be said for specialization, and spending time trying new things, visiting new places, and meeting new people inevitably means that you are not practicing and perfecting your specialty.
ReplyDeleteEvery time you say “yes” to something, you are implicitly saying “no” to something else. It may sometimes be obvious (eg. I am going out with my friends and therefore will not be home for family dinner) or it might be less so (eg. I am accepting a new job and therefore I won’t find other – maybe more exciting – opportunities). Big life choices, such as having a child, affect everything, including your career. While I have never questioned the “it-shouldn’t-change-your-prospects” mentality, now I find myself wondering. For starters, I agree that all four of your scenarios (having a child, caring for a sick family member, reading the classics, travelling the world) have the potential to develop a person. I am tempted to say that we should either give paid leave for all four or none. All four seem to represent the type of choice that reflects diversifying in favor of specializing, or at least the idea that developing the “whole person” will make you better at whatever your specific tasks might be. We assume that we “have a right” to have children and that we should be able to continue our other pursuits before/during/after, but I start to wonder if that is a fair assumption. Continuing the human race is about as natural as it gets, but there are other in-some-ways-comparable commitments (having your own garden to grow all of your own fruits and vegetables) that are viewed differently in our society.
Slaughter makes some great arguments, but she is not quite ready to say we can’t have it all (which we can’t). I’ve watched the talk given by Facebook’s Sandberg numerous times, and my reaction to it has slowly changed. At first, there is the typical feminist outrage at the appallingly low number of women in top positions. Then there is the head-nodding in agreement with the advice that women must not “start leaning back” as they think more about family and children. Finally, I realized that’s easier said than done. You can’t always control your thoughts, and a distracted person is not necessarily a lazy person. Have women in the work force somehow gotten more than they wanted?
I agree with you that the tradeoffs Slaughter points out apply to men as well as women, but they apply in different ways. You also say that “most men work jobs that require a huge number of hours, and that necessarily makes it more difficult to spend time with their kids.” I would argue that “most men” is quite a bold statement given the topic at hand. I think, too, that the choices involving work/family balance are different for men not only because they don’t feel like “bad feminists” but also because men are genuinely not affected in the same way (psychologically, etc.). Slaughter argues that it’s not always true that “it’s possible if you are just committed enough.” In fact, I think it is…but that it depends on what you are committed to and what your life goals are.
Finally, there is a lot of cultural context. As Americans, we live in one of only four countries in the entire world that does not nationally mandate paid time off for new parents. I am not saying that (a) individual states/businesses/universities don’t voluntarily provide it or that (b) those few months before and after birth are the only ones that count, but rather that (c) it might say something about our priorities. In Switzerland, for instance, the mother gets up to 16 weeks paid maternity leave and in Sweden the couple gets 16 MONTHS to share between the two parents as they please. Okay, I’ll stop now.