What Marriage Equality Can Teach the “Collective Caregiving” Movement
The biggest social revolution of the past decade contains three important lessons for parents — and all caregivers
Abby Huntsman is a sharp, ambitious twenty-something with a great job. Her husband, coincidentally, works at the firm that announced it would fly nannies on business trips to help new parents return to work, prompting my recent New York Times op-ed, “The Workplace Culture that Flying Nannies Won’t Fix.” Talking with Abby about the op-ed on the Sirius XM radio show she co-hosts, it was clear that she herself is struggling to reconcile her thoroughly modern life with some very traditional views of gender roles at home. Even though she and her husband want kids, she can’t imagine him taking their baby and a nanny on business trips.
Millennials have surpassed the Baby Boomers to become the largest generation in the U.S. workforce, but this generation, touted for its commitment to gender equity, appears just as trapped as the rest of us in traditional family archetypes. Maybe that’s why Marc Zuckerberg basically got a pass when he announced he is an expectant dad (where were the #WillZuckerbergTakeLeave tweets?), while Marissa Mayer got creamed for announcing she will take only two weeks when her twins are born.
It would be easy to blame men for not doing their share, but that would be wrong. According to sociologists David Pedulla and Sarah Thebaud, the disconnect between what young people say they want and how they act can be largely explained by our country’s underwhelming support for working families — constraints like the lack of paid parental leave and universal, affordable child care; and corporate cultural norms that reward constant availability. These limitations are basically forcing young men and women to abandon their ideals of egalitarian relationships. And, as Anne-Marie Slaughter chronicles in her new book, young people are not the only ones suffering.
To be sure, there will always be an element of personal choice in how we construct our work and family lives. Anne-Marie and I graduated in the same class at Harvard Law School, but I was four months pregnant, so I made choices constrained by being a working mother right off the bat.
But the reality is that we all make choices about work and family within a certain cultural context: one which sees having children, and caregiving more broadly, as a personal, private matter — rather than something that is both a collective good and a collective responsibility. I have been told that “having a baby was my choice,” so why should anyone else pay for it… and I would bet thousands, if not millions, of women have heard something to that effect in their lives. Deanna Fei has been collecting these stories since AOL’s CEO blamed her emergency C-section and delivery of a premature baby for cutbacks to the company’s 401(k) plan (he quickly rescinded the cutbacks once Deanna came forward).
What we need is a movement that takes work-life fit out of the personal realm, and makes it a social issue. What we need is a collective caregiving movement.
Luckily, Millennials (and the rest of us) have a model of a successful culture-change movement right in front of us: marriage equality. In the past decade, Americans have drastically changed their attitudes about gay marriage in “the most significant, fastest shift in public opinion that we’ve seen in modern American politics,” according to Alex Lundry, a Republican political consultant who worked on Romney’s campaign.
Marriage equality offers a great model in two ways. For starters, same-sex couples are more likely than opposite-sex couples to share both routine child care and emergency care, according to Families and Work Institute’s most recent report, Modern Families. Because same-sex couples can’t default to gender norms, they are more likely to divide household and caregiving duties based on factors like preference and talent.
But more broadly, the marriage equality movement can teach those of us who want to start a collective caregiving movement three important lessons:
Lesson #1:
Reframe the debate
Marriage equality: Given that discrimination against gays and lesbians was rampant in all areas of American life, why focus on the issue of marriage equality? Because, as Jo Becker writes in Forcing the Spring, “It steered the conversation towards principles of love and commitment, rather than rights and demands, and it showed that gay and lesbian couples wanted the same things in life as their straight counterparts.” Marriage equality is a universal message — one that all people can relate to on an emotional level.
Collective caregiving: Even though the facts dictate otherwise, most people still think of caregiving as a “woman’s issue” and they think of work-life balance as a personal goal. Reframing the goal as collective caregiving removes the gender connotation and makes caregiving a societal goal, something that everyone has a stake in and benefits from. This movement can’t be just about the new mom who needs better parental leave policies. It has to be about the senior executive who needs help caring for his aging parents; and about the neighbor who needs help from his community to recover from cancer. In other words, we need to see that we all have been cared for at some point in our lives — and that whoever provided us care was cared for at some point as well.
Lesson #2:
Address core beliefs
Marriage equality: One of the root causes of opposition to the gay rights movement, and indeed the basis for legally-sanctioned discrimination against gay people, was a belief that sexual orientation is a “lifestyle” choice, not an inherent trait. The marriage equality movement refuted this core belief, highlighting research by well-respected academics and telling stories showcasing people who had been forced into “conversion” therapy and become suicidal, for example. Once the original core belief started to erode, the movement could appeal to the fundamental American value of fairness.
Collective caregiving: What are the core beliefs that are holding back a collective caregiving movement? In my view, they are that most Americans still believe that women are naturally better caregivers, and that mothers are always the preferred caregiver. That’s why 51% of Americans believe that children are better off if the mother stays home, but only 8% say children are better off if the father stays home, according to the Pew Research Center. So, any collective caregiving movement needs to refute that caregiving is naturally a mother’s domain and that children are better off with their mothers as caregivers. The Men Care campaign, and research like Kathleen McGuinn’s, at Harvard Business School, on the positive effects on children of having working mothers, are good places to start.
Lesson #3:
Pick unlikely messengers
Marriage equality: Any message is most powerful when delivered by unlikely messengers. Ted Olson, a leading conservative who represented President Bush in Gore v. Bush, was one such messenger. As Forcing the Spring concludes, having Olson represent the plaintiffs in the Prop 8 litigation was a “game-changer.” Other unlikely messengers supporting the marriage equality movement have been straight couples, parents of gay children, and young people, like the Obamas’ daughters.
Collective caregiving: Who will be the unlikely messengers for the collective caregiving movement? I am sure there are many, but here are a few suggestions: senior men who are caring for elderly parents; and male veterans and professional athletes, some of whom, like Daniel Murphy, have already become messengers of sorts. Other potential messengers include childless people, as well as new grandparents.
Millennials may be the biggest segment of the workforce, but we cannot expect them, on their own, to make the kind of systemic change we need in this country so that they — and all of us — can follow our dreams. After all, the fact that women make up half the workforce hasn’t changed these systemic issues either. I thought it would, when I wrote, over twenty years ago in a book for working mothers, “we all participate in weaving the social fabric; we should therefore all participate in patching the fabric when it develops mismatches between old expectations and current realities.”
Our social fabric is ripping because working families don’t have the supports they need. A collective caregiving movement can change that.
Medium is convening a conversation about work, parenthood, and how the two mesh — or don’t — in our lives. To get involved, please follow the Working Parents publication and the tag, and help us expand the dialogue by writing a post or a response.
