Judith Warner: Families to Care About
Interesting piece in the New York Times published March 19. Warner notes that a lot of the news coverage (or at least, perhaps, NYT coverage?) of the recession has focused on what in reality is a very small part of the economic downturn-- job loss and economic hardship for the fairly to very well-to-do. After discussing the fact that this is a "classic blue-collar recession," she writes:
The kind of marital tensions that we’re seeing in the downwardly
mobile lifestyles of the rich and wretched, the family historian
Stephanie Coontz told me this week, aren’t necessarily typical of
couples further down the income scale, either. Wealthy families, she
said, have tended, with their work-around-the-clock husbands and
at-home wives, to have adopted a rather old-fashioned model of
marriage, with fixed sex roles. They’ve set the tone, but the rest of
the population hasn’t necessarily followed.
Increasing numbers of working class women now — in a downturn where
82 percent of the job losses have been among men – have become their
family’s sole wage-earners, it’s true. But their husbands, very often,
are holding their own at home just fine. For while the stereotype has
long been that working class men won’t do “women’s work,” Coontz said,
the truth is that in recent years they’ve had a better track record
than the most high-income men in sharing domestic duties. Twenty
percent of these men, in fact, actually do more housework and child
care now than their wives. “These people have been doing it for some
time and they’re much more ideologically committed to doing it,” she
said. “I think your worst offenders” (dirty coffee mug-wise), “are in
that top 5 percent.”
I would recommend reading the whole column. I was heartened by Warner's call to action for broader changes in the workplace:
There’s a deeper reason, too: paying attention only to the – real or
perceived – “choices” and travails of the top 5 percent hides the
experiences of all the rest. And this means that the needs of all the
rest never quite rise to the surface of our national debate or emerge
at the top of our political priorities.
This happened very obviously in the 1990s, when the New
Traditionalist story line hid the fact that many mothers at home were
actually either poor (and unable to “afford to work” if they had kids,
as Coontz puts it), or had had their nonworking “choice” made for them
by an inflexible workplace or a high-earning husband’s nearly 24/7 work
schedule. Years of public prosperity passed without any real action on
creating family-friendly workplaces.
While I think that Warner does a bit of a disservice in this piece to women who may be in the "top 5%" (of what? I'd like to know) but who face or faced the same challenges as the rest of all women, with inflexible workplaces or spouses or partners who (also?) have a very time-consuming profession, that may just be part of a larger disagreement with her views on opting out, or maybe a generational shift, or my own blissful naivete. She makes good points though, about the need for broader legislation-- paid leave, flexible workplaces. Take a look!