Getting paid for not sharing
Excerpted from What mothers need for Mother's Day by Joan Williams and Ann Crittenden, Boston Globe, May 13, 2001
- What mothers really need is...compensation.
In the 1960s, feminists said women ought to have equal access to work and play, and the opportunities that men have. In exchange, men would have equal access to hearth and home, the opportunities for love and family, and care giving.
Equalitarian men by the millions embraced the message and welcomed women into the "man's world." But a funny thing happened - as author Warren Farrell noted, while women were willing to avail themselves of the new opportunities access to the "man's world" afforded them, few reciprocated. Most were unwilling to give men access to the "woman's world."
From men's perspective, "having it all" was about women keeping what they had while also getting what men had. It was women saying, "What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine."
Now, they want us to pay women for not sharing.
Nor does a mother's unpaid work entitle her to any ownership of the primary breadwinner's income...after a divorce. So-called family income belongs to the person who earns it, not to all family members. This helps explain why more than one-third of all divorced mothers end up on welfare.
True for a few. But many divorced mothers end up on welfare because pop feminist policies have encouraged them to use welfare as an easy way to cop out of the "for worse" part of their wedding vows. Otherwise, pop feminists would not fight so hard to oppose father custody of children after divorce - they know that mother custody is key to subjugating men to the pop feminist agenda.
If a mother wants any economic security, she has to...find a paying job outside the home.
Neither entirely nor always true. She can opt for becoming a full-time stay-at-home mom who honors her wedding vows and stays married to her husband. But, again, this is something pop feminists have raged against, calling marriage oppressive to women.
Or, she can choose to embrace the equalitarian ideal of a partnership relationship, and share both the work and the child rearing with her husband. But, again, this is something pop feminists have strongly opposed, first in divorce court, demanding the courts treat mothers as the default custodial parent, then in the home by branding all men as suspect sexual predators.
We define the ideal worker as someone who works full-time for 40 years straight, taking no time off for child-bearing or child-rearing.
Not true. Survival is a full-time job. It is a condition of life. We do not define it, it defines us.
Defining work in this way effectively excludes the great majority of mothers from the best jobs...from auto worker to corporate lawyer...
Most Americans no longer have such "best jobs" thanks to globalization and other, more traditional barriers to entry, such as education, aptitude and geographic location. This brings us closer to the essential nature of their demand - a socialist state in which men have to pay women for the rights and opportunities women won't share with men.
It is no accident that this country has the highest rate of maternal and child poverty in the developed world.
Indeed, no other nation in the world - developed or otherwise - has so many pop feminists making policy. With a lot less pop feminist ideology and a little more common sense, the number of American mothers and children in poverty would shrink dramatically. But then, so would the demand for pop feminist books, and then the pop feminist authors might actually have to work for a living.
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