“And then, like magic, as if the fairy godmother of women’s liberation waived her starry wand…”
About the “who will take care of the children” question
By now readers have probably heard of the “A Day Without Women” strike planned for International Women’s Day. Interested readers have probably also seen an assortment of articles about who gets to strike. Megan Daum at the LA Times has the typical “women of privilege” answer.
With announcements beginning on Monday that various school districts around the country would close so that teachers, mostly female, could strike, the old problem of the women’s movement reared its head. Yes, the old problem.
Who will take care of the nation’s children is not a new question. More than a decade ago, Caitlin Flanagan explained the problem well. From her 2004 essay in The Atlantic, “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement”:
Give those old libbers their due: they spent a lot of time thinking about the unpleasantness of housework and the unfairness of its age-old tendency to fall upon women. (They could hardly have imagined that in twenty years’ time Martha Stewart would build an empire on the notion that ironing and polishing silver and sweeping a kitchen floor might offer an almost sacred communion with what is most essentially and attractively feminine.) They were loath, they claimed, to foist such demeaning work on other human beings (well, not all of them were loath: Betty Friedan had a crack cleaning woman on staff when she was busy writing about the oppression of domestic work). Indeed, Shulman’s contract specifies that the “burden” of the cleaning work should not be placed on “someone hired from outside.” Members of the women’s movement believed that it was of great importance, politically and psychologically, for men to share equally in the care of households and children. Further, feminists of the period had also thought deeply about race, and about the tendency of white women to shape comfortable lives around the toil and suffering of black women. The members of a thousand consciousness-raising groups drove themselves into a thousand tizzies trying to think up a solution to this homely yet vexing problem…
And so, because of these petty, almost laughably low concerns — the unmade beds, the children with their endless questions, the crumbs and jelly on the counter, the tendency of a good fight over housework to stop the talking and the kissing and the, well, you know — one of the most profound cultural revolutions in American history came perilously close to running aground. And then, like magic, as though the fairy godmother of women’s liberation had waved a starry wand, the whole problem got solved. You must take a deus ex machina where you find one, and in the case of the crumbs and jelly on the counter tops, the deus ex machina turned out to be the forces of global capitalism. With the arrival of a cheap, easily exploited army of poor and luckless women — fleeing famine, war, the worst kind of poverty, leaving behind their children to do it, facing the possibility of rape or death on the expensive and secret journey — one of the noblest tenets of second-wave feminism collapsed like a house of cards. The new immigrants were met at the docks not by a highly organized and politically powerful group of American women intent on bettering the lot of their sex but, rather, by an equally large army of educated professional-class women with booming careers who needed their children looked after and their houses cleaned. Any supposed equivocations about the moral justness of white women’s employing dark-skinned women to do their shit work simply evaporated.
The question of what to do about the kids has been going on for 50 years. And for probably 40 of those years, women who could preferred hiring nannies they could control or fire rather than deal with men. (Whether they did this because they bought into the doofus dad troupe that became popular after the divorce boom or because they just wanted to remain in control of the household themselves is a discussion for another day.)
Tomorrow women are supposed to wear red and avoid work “paid and unpaid.” That’s fine in theory, but if you happen to be one of those women without a male partner, or one of the many for whom women’s liberation has not meant a cushy corner office and hefty salary, or one of the doctors, EMTs, and policewomen with life and death duties, or lawyers or accountants (it is mid-March after all) not planning on striking because you honor your fiduciary duties to clients — what are your options when the schools close?
Frankly, I am surprised that the feminist powers that be encouraged/let the teachers strike. Perhaps they are forcing an employment strike by making sure the kids are at home. This strike is set to be somewhat successful — unlike the original flop as trudywschuett reminded me the other day — but kids at home puts a break on the whole not engaging in “unpaid” work. Although, I suppose that even if women unable to secure male childcare have to work at home, at least they aren’t visible to the economic chaos that the organizers desire.
And make no mistake, the organizers seek maximum chaos. With the teachers striking they hope women with male partners of any sort will demand that they take a day to care for the children. Economic chaos is the goal. I argued elsewhere, yesterday, that this might backfire on them.
Plus, any protesters of means have nannies. Invisible nannies.
Women have spent decades proving that women are just as competent, just as reliable, just as serious as men. We have won the respect and the judgment that we deserve the same professions that men enjoy. (That we have bought into men’s preferences as the gold standard and that we don’t want the dangerous jobs that men endure more than enjoy — we’ll just leave those little quirks alone for the moment.) And now that we have the jobs and the respect, we are going on strike and prove to the world just how unreliable we are. And a bunch of us are going to rely on poor women (who we pay in cash because Social Security benefits are expensive) to do it.
Brilliant plan. Well done.
