February 25, 2004

• And so I can dominate the discussion completely ;) a few words child care in general: Flanagan doesn't seem to talk about the compromise between a nanny and daycare - taking your child to an in-home daycare. I'm really familiar with these (at least from a child's perspective), because I was in one when my mother was in college full-time, and my mother also did in-home daycare on and off, before working full-time outside the home.* It's where instead of coming to your home as a nanny, you go to their house, along with children from other families. At one point my mum had two toddlers and three school-age children, in addition to my brother and I, and I remember really liking it. I had so many "siblings". It let her be there for us before and afterschool, and it meant that each individual child's care was much cheaper. (It was subsidized daycare, which meant that she was being paid by the government, but it was still meant she could make more money even though she received very little per child). You get the cleanliness and friendliness of home, but the efficiency and socialisation of daycare. Your children learn how different homes have different rules, and that they have to share and be polite, and all this good stuff. You have to be careful about who you choose, because homes aren't regulated like daycares. And it's a good option for women who really enjoy looking after children, but don't care to work in an institution. But in-home nannies just seem to cause so many problems - the wages are never enough to provide a decent living to the nanny, and I think it can't be good for children to have someone at their beck and call. Maybe these are just my class prejudices showing, but servanthood worked back when class division was taken for granted, and servants were called by their last name with no polite honorifics. But today is different: I would not like to be a servant in someone else's home (I tried it, lasted 3 days, left out of mutual distaste), so why should I inflict it on someone else? *She was an early childhood education major, but dropped out when she realised she knew more about how to raise children than her professors - and I know I'm biased but I think she did a really good job considering the raw material.
• Bush welfare agenda - married to a myth
• Flanagan raises some good points, but I was frustrated by this article. She lambasts professional women for making career gains "on the backs of poor women" when she admits that did exactly that herself, without any discussion of what she could have/would have done differently if she could do it over again. Furthermore, I think that she is pointing to a symptom of an illness and labeling it a serious illness in and of itself; there are many thousands, if not millions, of women working illegally in the United States, and many of them have left children behind in their native countries to do so. Rather than address the grinding poverty and utter lack of opportunity in many developing countries that send so much of their labor force to the US, she chastizes "whiny" upper middle class women for exploiting women of color. I couldn't help but think that she wrote the article mostly to assuage her own feelings of guilt for having been a participant. There are so many factors that come into play with this issue- most families are unable to make ends meet on one paycheck; employers are often not family-friendly; six weeks of maternity leave is miserly, particularly considering how wealthy the US is as a whole; small children absolutely require the full-time attention of an adult; coupled with an influx of cheap labor (I know more than one nanny who is credentialed as a schoolteacher in her native country, yet makes significantly more working as a nanny here.) I'm not sure that it's fair to place the blame on any one group of people. It's not an ideal situation, that's certain. But when the subject is the exploitation of immigrant women, I'll get my dander up first about women and children who are held in this country (and elsewhere) as sexual slaves. *That* really pisses me off.
• I think she is less concerned about the practice of hiring nannies per se, than about educated feminists who write about how they personally balance work and motherhood, without thinking about the very priviledged place they are in. (I liked her comment about phone calls to the factory floor). It is these feminists who often dominate mainstream discourse about gender and work. She does hire a nanny, and realises that puts her in one position, but her point is not "don't hire a nanny" but "pay the nanny decently and legally - don't skip on the social security payments."
• being one of those women, back then, who fought for the right to simultaneously work/study/reproduce, there was no presight of how it would filter down into the current situation. the dream, at that time, was for an enlightened workplace that would accomodate children, somehow, as part and parcel of their wonderful and essential employed mothers. i was fortunate enough to be able to work within my home for the first five years of my daughter's life and see her in school before full-time employment elsewhere and i wish all children and their mother's could have the same benefits. to me, the current shuffling of children off to nannies, care centres or even neglect, is a regretful and deplorable exploitation, of a freedom that many women could gain from, into a loss for children in such circumstances. a wonderful article, thanks, jb
• Thank you all for a fascinating article and an interesting discussion. I continually ask myself this question: if money were no option, would I choose to be a stay at home mother, or would I choose to work? Admittedly, there are days in which spending the day at work seems easier than dealing with the daily work of raising a toddler. Currently, I've been working my ass off trying to advance my career so I can have more flexibility to stay home with my son more often and spend more time with him. The problem is that doing this currently requires a slew of evenings and weekends and the fact of the matter is, at the end of the day, the best of me is gone. I am very happy with our child-care situation (a wonderful in-home day care), and I thank the heavens every day that I am not one of those minimum wage mothers having to struggle to afford good day care and don't have the flexibility to take off work to deal with a sick child. I also have a fantastic spouse who shares the burden. But I am angry at a society that pays so much lip service to family values, yet refuses to do anything about the ridiculously low wages we pay our child care workers, our teachers, and lack of decent maternity leave for stay at home mothers. As my own mom pointed out the other day when I was lamenting the path of burnout I am on, these early years go by quickly and I'll never get those back.
• Personal experience here, feel free to ignore. I continually ask myself this question: if money were no option, would I choose to be a stay at home mother, or would I choose to work? I am lucky enough to have the choice (and I count my blessings, honestly). I chose to be a full-time mother because I didn't want to miss out on anything my child did/does, but also because I intended to go back to school part-time or via correspondence. Now I am ready to go back to work part-time not because we need the money (although a little pocket money is nice) but because I feel like I'm missing out on adult interaction and my brain is stagnating (anyone spot the reason for MoFi's existence?). I have a casual daycare centre that I've used when I've had a daytime appointment, and my 13-month-old son loves going because he gets cuddles, new kids and toys to play with, and plenty of social time with non-family members. Kids need change as much as grownups. It's also nice that he can make all the mess he wants there and someone else will clean it up. The teachers set boundaries and those boundaries are enforced, so the kids aren't running wild. The daycare also keeps a notebook for each child, writing in it words your child said (if they're learning to talk), games they played, bruises they got, and so on. Parents who put their children in daycare fulltime aren't missing out as much as they could be, because the teachers keep them fully informed on the smallest details. As far as I know, the teachers at his daycare are reasonably paid, given that they've spent one year at a Teachers' College to qualify to look after preschoolers. One of the teachers there leaves on Friday for one year of unpaid maternity leave -- her only reassurance is knowing that in a year's time her job will be waiting for her. As an aside, I was delighted in California that my husband was granted three days of "family leave", to take time off when I or any children that we didn't have at the time were sick. I wish that was more universal. Lastly, I could never hire a nanny, nor even a housekeeper, because I wouldn't want a stranger having full access to my home. I realise that they wouldn't be a stranger eventually, but I think I spent too long in the US and my home is a sacred place. ;) I'd hate the idea of being personally responsible for someone's source of income. I'd rather work at night so my husband would be home with my son than to have him in someone else's care full-time. Longest and most incoherent post EVER.
• I am not a mother, but I've seen women who had a very full life before getting pregnant decide to let one role take over their lives - motherhood. Later, they wonder why they feel bored or that they're missing out on something. Hmm.
• Caitlin Flanagan is now working at the New Yorker, largely on the strength of her Atlantic reviews and controversial, attention-getting articles. I think of the of the interesting things about her, and her work, is her adamant anti-feminist position, both direct and implicit (via comments like "[my husband] is the head of the household and I treat him as such." This is paired with defiant, ringing declarations that in 14 years of marriage, she has never once changed a sheet or ironed her husband's clothes. A follow-up opinion piece in the New York Observer tries to get her to pin down a bit more of why she is so stridently anti-feminist, and unfortunately largely fails (I think). I guess...I think she has interesting points, is dead on about paying your nanny (hell, any personal employee, actually) what the law requires you to do but she at times seems to be abrasive and troublingly controversial without a great deal of understanding or merit. And therefore makes it more difficult for women who do not have the advantages she has, struggling to do the best for themselves, their children and their families in an already hostile climate. My opinion, of course.
• One of the things I like most about MoFi is the way that seemingly dead threads suddenly spring into life .. I read the nanny article back in February, but didn't follow the subsequent debate and didn't realise (though I suppose I might have guessed) what violent reactions it had aroused. Thanks for the link, ilyadeux. For what it's worth, I don't see Flanagan's article as "adamantly" or "stridently" anti-feminist, not in the least. She freely acknowledges that feminism has benefited many women, herself included; and she is suitably grateful for that. But she argues that the benefits of feminism have failed to extend all the way down the social scale -- in short, that feminism has benefited the educated upper-middle-class elite, but not their social inferiors. (As already pointed out by jb and others, upthread.) Indeed, one could almost read the article in Marxist terms, as saying that social inequality is the primary issue, gender inequality merely secondary. Certainly if I'd been asked to 'place' the author of this article on a political spectrum, I would have put her quite far to the left -- so I'm astonished, really astonished, to find that she's widely regarded as an anti-feminist and an opponent of working women. Obviously I will have to reread the article and think again, more carefully. Anyway, whatever the merits or implications of her arguments, there's no doubt that she writes extremely well, and I can't wait to read her work in the New Yorker -- that is, on the rare occasions that I see the New Yorker, as very few copies of the magazine seem to find their way over here to Britain, more's the pity.