an unexamined life...
The news article about the "hordes" of "smart and attractive" women who are running from the boardroom are pretty constant in the last two years. I try not to give them credence or too much hype, since that's what a lot of it is. But this quote, from the end of the article, stuck out at me:
This acknowledgement, that there remains a fundamental misunderstanding of how gender roles operate or how they affect various parts of your life, drives me bonkers. All these 19 & 20 year old girls declaring how they want to work for ten years and then give it all up. First of all, the class privilege inherent in these conversations is ridiculous. The whole article is written like "well, it's me at home or a nanny and I just don't trust the lower class to rear good rich kids." More than elite college grads, these are upper class rich kids who seem to have no worries about repaying student debt or needing to earn money for their families. Already that takes us into the top tiny tier of the U.S. -- not one that is a measuring stick for general trends.
There is an argument to be made that "motherhood" is often the golden ticket out of a working life that is not as rewarding or meaningful in the U.S. as it could be. The amount of time and exhaustion required to "make it" in an 80-hour-work-week environment is not one that anyone, in the long run, really wants. So some women are using toddlers as a way to get out of it, the way that in five years their boring gender robot husbands will use an affair or a trip around the world. There is something valuable, instructive even, about doing something other than work. At the same time, for this girl to be like -- don't want to look at the world, don't want to know how it affects me, don't see why things should ever change -- is just painful.
"Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood" - from the nyt
"Ms. Ku added that she did not think it was a problem that women usually do most
of the work raising kids.'I accept things how they are,' she said. 'I don't mind the status quo. I don't see why I have to go against it.'"
This acknowledgement, that there remains a fundamental misunderstanding of how gender roles operate or how they affect various parts of your life, drives me bonkers. All these 19 & 20 year old girls declaring how they want to work for ten years and then give it all up. First of all, the class privilege inherent in these conversations is ridiculous. The whole article is written like "well, it's me at home or a nanny and I just don't trust the lower class to rear good rich kids." More than elite college grads, these are upper class rich kids who seem to have no worries about repaying student debt or needing to earn money for their families. Already that takes us into the top tiny tier of the U.S. -- not one that is a measuring stick for general trends.
There is an argument to be made that "motherhood" is often the golden ticket out of a working life that is not as rewarding or meaningful in the U.S. as it could be. The amount of time and exhaustion required to "make it" in an 80-hour-work-week environment is not one that anyone, in the long run, really wants. So some women are using toddlers as a way to get out of it, the way that in five years their boring gender robot husbands will use an affair or a trip around the world. There is something valuable, instructive even, about doing something other than work. At the same time, for this girl to be like -- don't want to look at the world, don't want to know how it affects me, don't see why things should ever change -- is just painful.
"Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood" - from the nyt
posted by good golly at 12:03 PM
5 Comments:
Of course it's class privilege to be able to say, well I'm going to leave my high-earning career to stay home with my kids. And the NYT should not imply that it's a universal trend by any means.
But does that make the phenomenon less interesting? I'm not speaking to a general trend of reporting on this issue - just a specific response to this article. I agree that this article does not/should not try to answer the question: Are young women choosing to stay home with the kids, despite their elite educations; but rather: Of those young women who have stated this as their goal, and are so able, why?
What fascinates me is that for each young woman is a young man with the same choice. This article virtually ignores young men and whether they have considered abandoning a career to take care of kids, by default suggesting that they don't exist. Well, why not? And, class privilege or not, isn't that worth exploring?
I guess it's because the status quo is just fine the way it is. Willful blindness, woohoo!
i bristle at the class implications because the nyt (and new york magazine, glamour, and every other magazine that's pushed this story hard) keeps using these extremely rich people to generalize about womanhood and "what women really want" -- which I think is ridiculous. It's a small selective group not representative of women at all and not actually representative of female graduates of elite institutions either. That's where the qualm comes in.
I think the questions unasked of these people (esp of men and of women about the men they are so carefully planning out their lives with -- presumably before they've met) is the crux of my interest. I think it's fascinating that someone would go through the labor and the stress of an ivy league school and law school to "give it up". . . solely because they are wives and mothers. The assumption that their partners wouldn't want equal influence is insane to me.
But I do think that using this subset of people is what drives these stories. First, because these aren't women that are staying home to do laundry and cook meals - there's an assumption inherent that they won't have to do those menial chores. So there's also a question of what "staying home" means when your kids are in school and you have people hired to do the basics. Does that really mean "not working" or does that mean other contributions -- charitable work, serving on the school board, volunteering. . . ?
The thing I hate the most is how mnay of these stories run based on nothing. There are no hard numbers here, nothing to prove its much of a "new trend" so much as the same stasis that a unequal work environment and unequal burden of child rearing and home labor have always caused.
Yes, agreed with all of that. Feministing also has good (similar) comments on this article.
There are many creepy elements of the article. Nuff said. (for now)
This is like all the other articles about the same thing. Ain't a woman grand who can "have it all," and even better if she gives it up for kids. She's a damn hero. When was the last time you read an article about a man who has it all? It's assumed. Don Trump never gets asked (and does he have kids? i dunno) if he feels like he's given something up to not have kids, or if he's sacrificed a home life for his success. But every successful business woman story asks the same question -- how does she manage to have it all (if she also has kids) or how could she have sacrificed that choice? These articles also never get to another issue, like, the lack of fulfilling jobs for women. Could it be that women as a group consciously (or otherwise) think the capitalist gain of selling patterned toilet paper to the largest number of people for the biggest cost and least expense is not meaningful because they understand the importance of interrelations in the world, ie, it's not all about money? Who knows?
donald trump has three children. including donald trump jr.
or at least that's what i remember from an old snl skit.
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