The World Split Open (69 page)

True, some businesses had adopted some family friendly policies. Every year,
Working Mother
magazine published the 100 most “family friendly” companies. In 2000, the magazine reported that companies that were making “significant improvements in ‘quality of life' benefits such as telecommuting, on-site child care, career training, and flex-time,” were, as a result, “saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in recruitment in the long run.”
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Although some progressive universities, law firms, and hospitals had made career adjustments for working mothers, the basic clockwork of the male career had remained largely unchanged. Career demands almost always collided with women's most intensive childrearing years. Many women quite reasonably couldn't or wouldn't handle such a burden. And, sadly, without the support of a vibrant women's movement, too many working mothers felt they had failed,
rather than realizing that the organization of work made it nearly impossible to earn a living, advance in a career, and still enjoy a family life.
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The truth is, the feminist agenda remained woefully unfinished. Women had entered the paid labor force on men's terms, not their own. It was not until 2006, for example, that the nation's largest public institution of higher education, The University of California, adopted a serious family friendly initiative for parents. Although women now made up at least half of all college, law, and medical students, and appeared on television as lawyers, surgeons, police officials, and even briefly as the Commander in Chief, most American employers and men had not done all that much to alter the conventional structure of the workplace or family life.

Since most people viewed the care crisis as an individual problem, books, magazines, and newspapers offered American women an endless stream of advice about how to become better organized and more efficient, or how to meditate, exercise, and pamper themselves. Many of these articles were useful and even empathic, but only addressed the individual woman. Missing in all this advice was the very pragmatic proposal that American society still needed to rethink and reorganize both the workplace and the family for the twenty-first century.

But conventional wisdom reinforced the widespread myth that American women had gained equality, solved all problems, entered a post-feminist era, and that it was time for disgruntled feminists “to move on.” Such advice was hardly new. Ever since 1970, the mainstream media had been pronouncing the death of feminism and reporting how career women had returned home to care for their children. In 2000, Ellen Galinksy, president of the Families and Work Institute in New York, wearily responded, “I still meet people all the time who believe that the trend has turned, that more women are staying home with their kids, that there are going to be fewer dual-income families, but it's just not true.”
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The early twenty-first century version of this journalistic narrative now described how feminism had duped women, forcing them to choose between family and career. With a certain celebratory tone, such stories described how elite, wealthy, and predominantly white women were “choosing” to ditch their educational credentials and “opting out” in favor of home and children.

Some of these highly educated women who did leave their careers channeled all their energetic perfectionism into producing perfect babies, a pattern Judith Warner described in a book appropriately titled
Perfect Madness.
A growing industry offered affluent and anxious mothers an array of expensive toys designed to create a “Baby Einstein.”

When some of these mothers began to experience isolation and loneliness, they joined a growing number of virtual or actual mothers' support groups. Three so-called “opt out” moms even started a new magazine,
Total 180!
, which targeted stay-at-home moms with the slogan “From briefcase to diaper bag.” One feminist reporter described the world she found inside the magazine to be “a dark, dark place.” She was particularly appalled by an editor's description of “pizza joints where groups of stay-at-home moms ‘let out' by their husbands huddle ‘for a once-weekly session of lamenting, venting, laughing, and girding for the next week of chaos.'”
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Stories that celebrated what some called “choice feminism”—the belief that any choice is as good as any another—conveniently obscured the fact that an absence of quality, affordable, and accessible child care and flexible working hours, among other family friendly policies, greatly contributed to a woman's so-called “choice” to stay at home. Such articles, moreover, hardly represented the lives of most working women. The seemingly endless parade of articles about “opt out” career women relied on sloppy outdated social science research that focused largely on wealthy women who had married even wealthier men. More recent surveys had in fact showed that highly educated women intended to pursue careers, and that most women, in any event, had to work, regardless of their preference.
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Anecdotal evidence, in short, substituted for a statistical or analytic assessment of the limited choices women faced. In 2005, for example, the media began describing “the daughter track,” or the exit of women (mostly the leading-edge of baby boomers) from well-established careers in order to be full-time caregivers for an elderly parent. Such stories grabbed the public's attention, described women as “opting out,” but failed to describe the incredible anguish, lack of part-time alternatives, and inadequate social services that forced women to give up careers to take care of their parents.
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In short, the media mostly ignored the growing care crisis. Instead, they published sensational stories that pitted stay-at-home mothers against “working women” in what they coyly called the “Mommy Wars.” When the
New York Times
ran a story about why some feminists rejected the concept of “choice feminism,” one woman wrote the
New York Times
editor:

The word “choice has been used in the context of women working at home versus working outside the home, as a euphemism for unpaid labor, with no job security, no health or vacation benefits and no retirement plans. No wonder men are not clamoring for this “choice.” Many jobs in the workplace also involve drudgery, but do not leave one financially dependent on another person.
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Despite such protests, the Mommy Wars raged on. In 2006, writer Caitlin Flanghan published
To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife
and gained considerable celebrity and professional attention by urging other women to honor “their inner housewife.” Flanaghan had just joined a long and dishonorable American tradition in which women made careers out of telling other women to stay home with their families.
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The Mommy Wars, however,
did
reflect the fact that many women felt they had to choose between work and children. Scholars have long noted that in Scandinavian countries, where laws provide for generous parental leave and subsidized child care, women participate in the labor force at far greater rates than in this country.
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Many American women who left their jobs, moreover, were lulled by the widely held belief that they could easily reenter the labor force. In many European countries, such reentry was even mandated. Not so in the United States.

As it turned out, returning to work was not that simple. One woman who had left her six figure position as a CEO to stay at home offered this advice to other women: “Don't quit your job. Definitely don't stop. You will not be able to pull yourself back.”
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According to one study, those who held advanced degrees in law, medicine, or education, often faced a “frosty reception” and found themselves shut out of their careers.
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In her 2005 book
Bait and Switch
, social critic Barbara Ehrenreich described how difficult it was to find employment as a mid-level manager, despite waving an excellent résumé at potential employers. Summing up the plight of the back-to-work mom, Ehrenreich issued this caveat: “The prohibition on résumé gaps is pretty great. . . . You have to be getting an education or making money for somebody all along, every minute.”
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For poor women, for whom there never was much “choice,” the care crisis was even more acute. But poverty, like the care crisis, remained invisible to mainstream America and largely outside the national political discourse. During a 2004 vice presidential debate, Gwen Ifill, an African American anchor on PBS, asked both Senator John Edwards and Vice President Dick Cheney how they would address the needs of HIV-infected African American women, the most rapidly growing infected part of the American population. Both men looked stunned and ignored the specific question. Cheney blathered about AIDS in Africa. John Edwards filled his time by discussing the need for greater health care coverage in the United States. It was a shameful moment in American politics.

When Hurricane Katrina tore into New Orleans in 2005, the American public—including many veteran mainstream journalists—seemed genuinely shocked that poor people lived from hand to mouth, owned no cars, and were unable to escape the torrential flooding that destroyed their homes and communities.

During the presidential tenure of George W. Bush, Americans fought cultural wars over sex education, stem-cell research, same-sex marriage, abortion, university curriculum, and intelligent design, but they avoided the plight of the poor. Meanwhile, poverty soared and the middle class shrank. In 2004, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that poverty rates in United States had increased for the fourth straight year and had jumped from 31.6 million people in 2000 to 37 million, including 13 million children.
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Federal data revealed that 14.3 million women lived below the poverty line, which underscored the feminization of poverty. Blue-collar men also suffered a catastrophic downward mobility as their union jobs were outsourced and they moved to the low-wage sector of the economy. Full-time working women experienced a “wage gap,” earning 76.5 percent of men's salaries.
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As working mothers, moreover, they also suffered from a “mother gap” that cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost income, lower pensions, and less social security over their lifetimes.
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Upper-class tax cuts also widened the gap between the wealthy and the poor. In 2004, the editors of
The Economist
, one of the world's most pro-capitalist publications, described the damage that growing income disparities was causing the United States. Thirty years earlier, they noted, the average annual compensation of the top 100 chief executives
was thirty times the pay of the average worker. By 2000, it had jumped to 1,000 times the pay of the average employee. They also described the American educational system as “increasingly stratified by social class,” because poor children “attend schools with fewer resources than those of their richer contemporaries.” America's celebrated universities, they noted, were increasingly “reinforcing rather than reducing” these educational inequalities, largely because of rising tuition. They also blamed American corporations for failing to be agents of upward mobility.
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Another cause for rising poverty was linked to the fallout from the 1996 Welfare Reform Act (The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act), which had eliminated guaranteed welfare and replaced it with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). Administered by the states, TANF's actual goal was to reduce the number of mothers on welfare rolls, not to reduce poverty. TANF also created a five-year lifetime limit for single poor mothers receiving assistance.

Ironically, TANF was supposed to provide self-sufficiency to poor women. But most states forced them into unskilled low-wage work, where they joined the working poor. In her best-selling book,
Nickel and Dimed
, Barbara Ehrenreich wittily exposed how subsistence wages with unaffordable health care benefits made it impossible for low-waged women to support themselves, not to mention their children. By 2002, one of ten former welfare recipients in seven Midwestern states had joined the homeless, despite the fact they were working.
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TANF also disallowed higher education as a work-related activity, which robbed many poor women of an opportunity for upward mobility. “Our demands are quite simple,” said one welfare mother. “Give us a real chance towards self-sufficiency.” TANF also emphasized abstinence and marriage formation, to which one welfare mother responded, “We want caps and gowns, not wedding gowns.” Some children also suffered from welfare reform. Instead of utilizing a highly respected public program like Head Start, TANF issued vouchers that mostly resulted in inadequate child care. Many women who didn't receive child care assistance reluctantly left their children with irresponsible relatives or babysitters they had good reasons not to trust.
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Although the media celebrated the highly educated career woman who quit her job to become a stay-at-home mom, the federal government required TANF single mothers to leave their children somewhere, anywhere, so that they could fulfill their requirement to work and get off welfare. Repeated attempts by a group of Senators to allocate more child care to recipients of welfare fell on deaf ears.

TANF, however, was merely a symptom of this country's failure to address poverty. All American welfare efforts have tried to modify or regulate the behavior of individual poor women, rather than address the education, health care, child care, mass transit, affordable housing, and progressive tax structure that could eliminate the catastrophic poverty that has persisted in such a wealthy nation.