Outlook: Are Stay-at-Home Moms Making a Mistake?

When Linda Hirshman set out to look at the first generation of women to grow up with feminism and how they managed their marriages and work, she thought she'd find a bunch of lawyers, doctors, academics and other professionals. Instead, she found. . .a generation of stay-at-home moms. All around, educated women were quitting work to stay home with their children. And that, Hirshman declared in an article published last December in The American Prospect, was a big mistake. But instead of getting kudos for standing up for feminism, Hirshman got blasted -- on the Internet, in letters, in newspaper columns, on television. It turned out, as one article put it, that "Everybody Hates Linda."

Hirshman, a retired professor of philosophy and women's studies at Brandeis University and the author of the just-published " Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World ," was online Monday, June 19, at 1 p.m. ET to discuss her Sunday Outlook article, " Unleashing the Wrath of Stay-at-Home Moms , ( Post, June 18, 2006 )," and the realities of the "opt-out" phenomenon.

The transcript follows.

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Linda Hirshman: This is Linda Hirshman. I just entered the chat room and I want to thank you all for the many submissions you have already written. Give me a minute to see if there are any large themes emerging, and I will try to participate as best I can.

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Linda Hirshman: Several themes seem to run through most of the questions.

One is that it's not nice to argue about women. Let me answer that first, because if you can't argue about women, what's the difference what I have to say?

I think this argument that we should all just support one another is a very good example of the "soft bigotry of low expectations." Women are people; their decisions matter, to themselves and to the society. Let's call such behavior "political." There is no reason in the world that women's behavior should be so unimportant that we cannot have a political argument about it.

For a lot of history, women were considered to live only personal lives. Feminism suggested "the personal is the political." After forty years of feminism, I say, the female is the human. The human is the political. No more confining our decisions to the invisible realm of the household and hiding them behind some nonsense about "all get along." I don't hear Democrats saying that to Republicans or Moslems to Christians, flat taxers to progressives. Women are important enough to argue about.

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Fairfax, Va.: What interests me so much about this debate is that there seems to be no choice that doesn't get a segment of the population up in arms. Working full time? You are putting your own needs ahead of your children and paying others to raise them. Staying home full time? You are subverting your intelligence and wasting your life changing diapers and washing dishes. Juggling the part time work/home combo? You trying to do two full time jobs in half the time and failing at both.

Maybe if we all stopped shooting each other down for making the wrong choice and started to really try and figure out a way to create fundamental balance between work and family, we could all calm down and get on with the business of living.

Linda Hirshman: See overall answer I just posted.

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Springfield, Va.: Linda, I am very much looking forward to reading your book. I "mommy-tracked" at my job for a decade, as did many of the women I worked with. Many other women left the workforce. I wish they had not, it's lonely here as the token female. All of the men that I work with have built-in backup for our constant travel and long hours. I am torn between keeping my struggles quiet so as not to look like a whiner, or putting it out in the open and trying to effect change. If there were more of us, I would have some support instead of being a lone voice.

Linda Hirshman: I received a lot of email since my article appeared online Saturday and in print on Sunday (about 500 and still coming). Several of the emails that I did have a chance to read sounded this theme of being alone or a token female.

I was glad to know it, although I am sorry to hear it, because it makes the point very well that the individual's decision to quit affects the other women in the workplace. It's not just her individual choice, and it's not personal. It's political, and questions like this one show why.

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Silver Spring, Md.: I was chastised by my (ex) boss recently when I had to leave a nonessential meeting that dragged on past my usual quitting time. My boss, also a woman, said that I should have stayed, even if it meant picking up my kids from daycare late (which becomes a logistical nightmare), and then pointed out that other parents in the office were able to handle the juggle better than I was. I thought was an odd thing to say to me given that the other parents in the office have stay-at-home wives.

I've thought a lot about the criticism, wondering if it was warranted. I've concluded that (a) the meeting really was unessential (a wrap-up for an event that happened while I was on maternity leave and that I wouldn't have been a strategic part of, anyway), and that (b) my major offense was in giving the appearance that my kids came before my job, or maybe even just any acknowledgement that I had kids.

I've since left that job for another one, but I know that if I had stayed, I would have felt pressured to choose between my job and my kids. As it was, I was left with the sense that I wasn't doing right by them, myself, or my job. I'm lucky that I was able to find something better so quickly.

All this is to say that, as a self-respecting feminist with a messy house and a truly equal marriage to a supportive partner, I can understand women wanting to just call it a day and stay home.

Comments? Thanks so much for writing about these difficult topics!

Linda Hirshman: Here is another example of how the individual decisions affect everyone. Political philosophers call this the "regime effect." When men can count on stay at home wives, they have a huge advantage at the office. I picked this up in interviewing one of the 1996 grooms, who crowed about how he didn't have to get the dry cleaning, like the men with working wives he competed with had to do. Imagine how hard it is for a working mother to compete. If you read my book, hint hint, you will find the numbers about the college professors in the University of California system. It is staggering how much harder those women academics are working at home than the men are.

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Linda Hirshman: Here's a second important theme (first one was the regime effect).

Someone has to be there at least in the time before and after school to mind the children. Some people solve this, as we solve most things in a market economy, by hiring someone to do it for them. These child care employees are not strangers, as the SAHMs called them on GMA when I was on. They are very familiar, or the parents aren't doing enough research first.

My preferred solution would be for the mothers and fathers to share equally in the child care. The children would benefit by having the most committed people caring for them more of the time. Having two people of equal authority would expose the children to different points of view. And the men would be pressed to refuse to participate in what has been described as soul destroying law firm work, although the lawyers I interviewed among the New York Times grooms for my original article, did not assert that they had lost their souls.

Anyway, as the economists say, "I never met a man who washed a rented car" before he returned it to the lot, so unless women refuse to cut their careers off and bear it all themselves, the guys show little willingness to take it on.

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washingtonpost.com: AUDIO:  Hirshman, Steiner on Motherhood , ( June 19, 2006 )

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Washington, D.C.: I think working moms would have it easier if men would take on their fair share of the housework. But how does a woman get that to happen without having to be the delegator all the time? It seems like women notice sooner what needs to be done, so they end up doing it themselves. My husband doesn't think about grocery shopping till he's hungry. I have to give him a list, and sometimes I wish he'd think of these things himself. After all, we both work!

Linda Hirshman: I'll share a personal story, even though I told Leslie Morgan Steiner this morning that it's sexist and bigoted to require a female thinker/writer to be "vulnerable" and cuddly and talk about their personal lives, whereas male writers can recommend anything without sharing a word about their sex lives. But it is directly responsive to your question, and it just happened, so here goes.

When I started working on the ms for Get to Work, I had a very tight deadline. (It's short, but very carefully laid out. I WANT to force people to struggle to disagree with me. That's what we are trained to do.)

At the end of the first day of work, I heard heavy breathing in my home office and turned around to find my husband standing behind me.

"Are we having dinner?" he asked. This is the male equivalent of "what did you plan for dinner?"

I drew a breath.

"Honey," I said, "if it meant I could finish this book -- which is the culmination of my life's work -- I would live on canned tunafish for every meal for the next three months."

Shortly thereafter, my husband, who, like all humans, does get hungry, and is not a jerk (see Hirshman Rule 3, never marry a jerk), began to shop. He went to the store every day, since he seemed never to be able to anticipate what he would want more than 24 hours from the current shopping trip. Sometimes he went two or three times a day, one trip for each meal.

GUESS WHAT?

It does not matter. We ate. The food got purchased. Nobody starved. Sometimes the meals were better, because there was cool stuff in the store just then and sometimes they were worse, because it takes a little advance planning to make a brisket. After a few weeks, I got used to the new routine and stopped fragging him about making a list.

It was sort of exciting, actually, like the Iron Chef thing, trying to make meals out of the unexpected arrivals (we both like to cook, and by dinner time I was too tired to write any more).

So, TMI probably, but it's a real story

with a happy ending

and a moral: just leave him alone til he's hungry.

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Washington, D.C.: Dear Dr. Hirshman, first, thank you so much for raising these very important issues at a critical time for feminism and for our country. I enjoyed your article and rushed out to buy your book. I was a little surprised, however, by your response just now on the child-care issue. Don't you think male and female parents who instead of outsourcing work-day childcare do the bulk of it themselves, either on their own if single parents or sharing it if they are together, they will be disadvantaged at the workplace compared to nonparents or parents who have outsourced--and are therefore available to get to the meetings, take the business trips, and so forth. Moreover, I'd make a strong argument for the outsourcing as being good for the kids--daycare makes for better socialization, etc. In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm a professional and a non-parent who grew up the daughter of two working parents (and who was very happy as a latch-key kid)

Linda Hirshman: This is a very interesting and intelligent question.

I think that there will always be competition, certainly in a market economy. It seems fairer to me to have the competition based on shall we say a "taste" for childrearing than on a gender ideology that lays the burden on women and frees up the men. And I have received so many communications from men who "wish" they could spend more time with their children that I think you could SHIFT the workplace somewhat if women didn't volunteer to do it all.

As the economists say, ALL CHANGE IS AT THE MARGINS. If women stop buying into the assumption that the domestic labor belongs to them, a lot of behavior will change. Maybe it will even reach a "tipping point" and change the regime.

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Linda Hirshman: Okay we have a lot of input about sequencing, part time work and the like.

There is a lot of data that women who leave the workplace for more than a couple of years never come back to where they left. At the highest end, they miss out on the high trajectory that puts you in the Senate, the CEO's office, the producer's office, the editor-in-chief's office. The society, which is hierarchical as all society's are, is then run by men with stay at home wives. Maybe that's why there never have been meaningful public or market policies enabling families to work and care for home as they would like to do.

Even short of the highest end, they miss out on accumulating enough pension to be independent at the end, they often are dependent on their husbands' social security rather than their own. At the middle level, they can go back and be the assistant to the admissions director but they'll never be the dean or the principal.

The other thing I noticed in my interviews is that many of the home mothers had no desire at all to go back to work. They could not get on in a bureaucratic environment, they articulated, to me and on the mommy blogs, a real aversion to being bossed, which is, unfortunately, part of any human enterprise, and an aversion to being judged for their performances, which I found quite alarming actually. But then, as many people have noticed, I have an unnatural taste for judgment.

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Washington, D.C.: I am an attorney who left to stay at-home 8 years ago, and I almost regret not keeping at least a part-time schedule to keep a foot in the door. What have you found is the best way to transition back in? Are moms/women who stayed in resentful of us who try to reenter or are they mostly willing to help us return? Comments or suggestions for us who want to go back?

Linda Hirshman: I have a feature on my Web site: Get to Work Manifesto, called "Ask Linda." I am going to start trying to answer some of these discrete questions there soon. Please send your questions to Ask Linda and we'll try to get some wisdom from each other as well as from me. This has been wonderful fun and I thank you all for taking the time and for your civil tone and good questions.

Write to Ask Linda and let's continue to think things through.

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Arlington, Va.: I am 30 years old, married, and have a Masters degree. I find this dialogue extremely interesting, especially as I consider the impacts of my decision to have children in the future. The last year, I have stayed in a job that I find only somewhat interesting because it offers good benefits and would be supportive of shorter hours. While I would prefer to have a job which challenges me more, I worry about not being able to take the time off to raise a child. It is interesting that my husband and I pool our incomes to share expenses and also split housekeeping duties, but I would surprised if we invested equal time into rearing a child. While I am willing to not go as far in my career as I would like when I have a child, it saddens me that my choice would affect other career minded women somewhat - as you noted in your article. I hadn't considered that side effect of my choice, and I wonder if I am doing what is right by not living up to my career potential.

Linda Hirshman: Don't have babies if he won't do half the childrearing. Does he know where babies come from? He's there, right?

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Stafford, Va.: As a working mother of many moons ago, who was at the beginning of this 30 odd years ago. I feel that to be a mother is not a mindless and brainless task, it takes great skill, patience,and time. It is actually the most important job that we as mothers and women can do. Not running a corporation, not being on a management team, or much less anything else. I worked as a nurse for many years, a rewarding but thankless job, I had my mother as my child care provider, my husband and I both had to do shift work, manage a household and child care. Now looking back, your child's primary years are the most important and the big house isn't, this area is so out a site unfortunately that to live here it takes two paychecks and that is the sad commentary of the American way of life and the children and relationship are suffering as a result. Just read the headlines in the post in the past month or so, teen years are just as important and the phone is not substitute for being there.

This is just my take, as a grandmother, mother of some 30 odd years, hindsight is always 20/20

Linda Hirshman: Saying that being a mother is the most important thing a mother can do is a tough one to answer, right? because you have assumed your conclusion.

Try again. what's the question?

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Linda Hirshman: I have to say goodbye now.

The whole argument is much more interesting than these snippets. Try reading "Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World" (Viking) on the shelves at bookstores everywhere or online. I have information about how the feminist movement wound up in this predicament, what we can learn from Nobel prize winning economic analysis of family life and from the moral arguments now coming from lesbians and gays, and how the tax code keeps women down.

Buy the book. With mom, that will make two sold!

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