Opting In: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself - Softcover

Richards, Amy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374226725 ISBN 13: 9780374226725

Verlag: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

For contemporary women, motherhood has become as polarizing a proposition as it is a powerful calling. For some women this tension is manifest in a debate over whether or not to have children. For others it concerns whether to stay at home with their children or stay in the workforce. Still others feel abandoned altogether by the supposedly pro-family and pro-mother social justice movement that is feminism and are at a loss when it comes to reconciling their maternal instincts with their political beliefs.

With Opting In, Amy Richards addresses the anxiety over parenting that women face today in a book that mixes memoir, interviews, historical analysis, and feminist insight. In her refreshingly direct and thoughtful approach, Richards covers everything from the truth about our biological clocks and the trends toward extending fertility, to parenting with nature and nurturing in mind, to our relationship with our own mothers, to what feminism's relationship to motherhood is and always has been. Speaking from the vantage point of someone who is both a parent and one of our leading feminist activists, Richards cuts through the cacophony of voices intent on telling women the "appropriate" way to be a mother and reveals instead how to confidently forge your own path while staying true to yourself and your ideals.

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Amy Richards

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Opting In

Having a Child Without Losing Yourself

By Amy Richards

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 2008 Amy Richards
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-374-22672-5

Contents

INTRODUCTION: MOMMY AND ME, 
CHAPTER 1 - TO WORK OR NOT TO WORK IS NOT THE QUESTION, 
CHAPTER 2 - THE DRIVE TO PROCREATE: REEXAMINING THE BIOLOGICAL CLOCK, 
CHAPTER 3 - REAL BIRTH: DISPELLING THE MYTH OF THE "RIGHT" BIRTH EXPERIENCE, 
CHAPTER 4 - WILLIAM DOESN'T WANT A DOLL: RAISING KIDS TODAY, 
CHAPTER 5 - THE DIAPER DIVIDE: CAN MEN DO MORE? CAN WOMEN DO LESS?, 
CHAPTER 6 - FRIENDS FOREVER: HOW AND WHY PARENTING CHANGES OUR FRIENDSHIPS, 
CHAPTER 7 - OUR MOTHERS, OURSELVES, 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
ALSO BY AMY RICHARDS, 
AMY RICHARDS - OPTING IN, 
PRAISE FOR AMY RICHARDS'S OPTING IN, 
AFTERTHOUGHTS: - PRACTICING OUR POLITICS, 
RESOURCE GUIDE, 
NOTES, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
INDEX, 
Copyright Page, 

CHAPTER 1

TO WORK OR NOT TO WORK IS NOT THE QUESTION

If I were the president, then ... schoolteachers would be paid more than movie stars and basketball players.

—MADONNA, as quoted in a 1995 interview in George

In the fall of 2005, The New York Times printed its perennial story on how smart women just want to be at home doing hook rugs with their kids. This time the news was based on a limited study of 138 female undergraduates at Yale. The article tried to determine once and for all what will win out: working or staying home. Not surprisingly, given its front-page placement, the majority (about 60 percent) said they would stay home. Had the findings been more positive about women's integration into the workforce, that revelation would likely have been buried in a short article in the business section. "My mother always told me you can't be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time," Cynthia Liu told the Times, explaining why she planned on being a stay-at-home mom by the time she was thirty. What made these particular findings "shocking" was that they were coming from Yale—the exact place where you should find overachieving women who knew better than to while away their days at Mommy &&&; Me classes. (Ironically, days before this article ran, this same newspaper did a roundup of the Forbes 400 list—129 of whom had never graduated from college. If success is based entirely on notions of who makes the most money, then a rural high school might be a better place to conduct interviews.)

The question in the Times article was clearly a setup, and these young women shouldn't be used as proof of an antifeminist backlash when they were simply sounding back the more socially acceptable response. In addition, these college students were predicting what might happen, not saying what had happened.

Looking at women's work lives across their life spans tells a different story. Few women actually permanently catapult their career ambitions; some have a leisurely approach to their jobs, taking time away when their kids are young, but most stay in the paid workforce for a good percentage of their adult lives. Ninety-three percent of those who leave work to parent intend to return to their careers and the average amount of time that women take away from their careers is 2.2 years. The college students I meet have their lives planned out exactly this way—career in their twenties, babies in their thirties. It's not babies in exchange for a career, but one and then the other. Sandra Day O'Connor took five years away from her prestigious law firm job in order to be home after her second son was born, and then went on to become the first woman Supreme Court justice.

If I had been asked at twenty what I thought my life would be like at thirty, I would have said that I would be a lawyer (I'm not); that I wouldn't be living in New York City (I do); that I would have one child (I have two, but I had them both after thirty); and that I would be married (I'm not). This is what I imagined for my future, but it was also what others expected of me. My more repressed desires—say, being a travel book writer or running a restaurant in some Podunk town—were to me emotionally less possible. Just like the Yale women interviewed, I had conventional ambitions. I felt that I was expected to procreate and produce the next generation of leaders. When you are middle-class, as most college students are, the question is "when" you are going to have kids, not "if." You have to explain yourself only if you choose not to reproduce. To be quoted in a prestigious paper saying that you had every intention of working fulltime, leaving your kids to be cared for by someone else, sounds irresponsible—why have kids if you are going to sign them up for full-time day care two days out of the womb? Saying you can do both career and kids sounds unrealistic.

In "Homeward Bound: The Truth About Elite Women," one of Linda Hirshman's contributions to the topic, she concluded that "feminism has largely failed in its goals." According to her findings, "There are few women in the corridors of power, and marriage is essentially unchanged." Hirshman culled her research from a very limited source, the wedding pages of The New York Times, presuming that women who want such an announcement are the best measure of feminism's success: "Who was more likely than they to be reaping feminism's promise for opportunity?" Hirshman's claims were intentionally piercing because she was a self-identified feminist.

Stories of this ilk become "newsworthy" because they're an opportunity to suggest that women are rejecting feminism. A further problem with these articles is that most take it as a premise that the workplace is the sole measure of equality. This is exacerbated informally as well. When people describe how feminism does and should prioritize motherhood, they come back dully to the workplace and its associated issues—flextime, child care, on-site day care, paid leave, and so on. Other parenting issues are overshadowed, including what fathers do or don't do, adoption, fertility, divorce, and health care. To wit: The Motherhood Manifesto: What America's Moms Want—and What to Do About It bills itself as solving "the problems faced by mothers and families," but four of the six chapters deal exclusively with work.

Focusing on this one issue misleads people about the range of feminism's accomplishments and furthers the mistaken idea that certain choices are more feminist than others. Women who take the less canonically feminist route are left feeling disenfranchised. "Why is it that so many people see this as a lazy job? Is feminism to blame?" Cheryl Smith asked me in a letter about her decision to stay home and raise her kids. Or as another woman said in response to Linda Hirshman's article: "If traditional feminism means that all 'elite' women are required to put their kids in daycare and march off to work, I want no part of it. Count me out. That's not what I signed up for, when I became a feminist."

The opt-outers are accused of casting away independence for convention, of discarding Betty Friedan's revelation that highly educated women were being undervalued, in favor of embracing the domestic goddess and party planner extraordinaire Martha Stewart. Of course, in reality Martha is a full-time working mother, and simultaneously an upscale housewife, which gets to the crux of the problem: we want whatever it is that society values, be it Rosie the Riveter one day or TV's June...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0374226725
• ISBN 13: 9780374226725
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland