Opting In: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself

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FOR KAREN RICHARDS

For letting me wear pants on my head as a substitute for the long hair I didn’t have, encouraging me as a teenager to travel around Europe alone, and everything else you did to ensure I could be myself

Table of Contents

Title Page

INTRODUCTION: MOMMY AND ME

CHAPTER 1 - TO WORK OR NOT TO WORK IS NOT THE QUESTION

HELP WANTED: MOTHER

EUROPE OR BUST

CHAPTER 2 - THE DRIVE TO PROCREATE: REEXAMINING THE BIOLOGICAL CLOCK

PREGNANCY IS BARBARIC

BIOLOGICAL DESTINY OR FALSE PUBLICITY

CHAPTER 3 - REAL BIRTH: DISPELLING THE MYTH OF THE RIGHT BIRTH EXPERIENCE

POWERFUL OR POWERLESS

LISTENING TO WOMEN

CHAPTER 4 - WILLIAM DOESN’T WANT A DOLL: RAISING KIDS TODAY

FREE TO BE

NATURE AND NURTURE

CHAPTER 5 - THE DIAPER DIVIDE: CAN MEN DO MORE? CAN WOMEN DO LESS?

THE SECOND SHIFT

HAVING IT ALL

CHAPTER 6 - FRIENDS FOREVER: HOW AND WHY PARENTING CHANGES OUR FRIENDSHIPS

I AM EVERY WOMAN

KIDS R US?

CHAPTER 7 - OUR MOTHERS, OURSELVES

MOMMY DEAREST

MOTHER MAY I

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

Please Note: Some of the links referenced in this eBook are no longer active.

INTRODUCTION: MOMMY AND ME

On Memorial Day 2004, my friend Mikki hosted a brunch for ladies with babies—a kind gesture toward those of us stuck in New York City on that long weekend, especially given that Mikki doesn’t have kids. On this steaming hot day, a dozen of us thirtysomething women who generally made our careers as writers, and in other makeshift ways, gathered on Mikki’s tarmac roof as our kids played in an inflated pool filled with water two degrees shy of a boil. Just seven months earlier, Lisa Belkin’s bombshell The Opt-Out Revolution, claiming that our nation’s most educated and ambitious women were opting for playdates instead of professional success, had been the cover story of The New York Times Magazine.¹ On this day, so many months later, we all still obsessed about it: How lame of those women. How could they ruin it for women who do want to work? How typical of The New York Times to run another antifeminist story … and so on.

The fact that this story dominated our conversation intrigued me, particularly since our own careers and our lives disproved Belkin’s theory. We were the living rebuttal to Belkin’s claims. Even so, we couldn’t stop talking about that article.

This particular group of sassy, hardworking, visionary women were doing both the playdates and the professions. We relished this time to talk about Hillary Clinton’s political aspirations and our latest projects, and to compare notes on cute kids’ clothes. We wanted to be respected and successful in both of our worlds. We desired the fun and perseverance that went with having kids and the stimulation and hard work of our careers. We were confident in our professional achievements and wanted to display what good parents we were. True, we didn’t necessarily gush about how much we loved mommy and me time. Perhaps we feared that if we overstated our devotion to motherhood, it would overshadow our commitment to our real work lives. More likely, we just didn’t compartmentalize between mommy time and work time. We assumed that our love of both was obvious without being verbalized. But even with our own selves as living proof, we didn’t write off the article as media hype. We still valued Belkin’s claims over what we knew to be true in our own lives.

As I walked home from brunch across the never-ending Williamsburg Bridge pushing my ten-month-old in his stroller, I tried to pinpoint what it was about this article that inspired our preoccupation. It left me wondering: If all of these feministy women couldn’t move past Belkin’s claims, what about those claims was so intractable? Why do we have a tendency to erase the reality of our own lives in the face of a media challenge? I realized that once someone’s opinions became codified in prestigious print, we felt less empowered to simply declare, That’s not true. Instead we valued the hype over the reality.

As I walked and walked, I decided that if this one article—despite its shaky anecdotal basis on the choices of a few Princeton graduates—could leave so many smart, educated, political women confused, there was a need for a lot more conversation. We needed to talk deeply and in plain language about the constant question: What is feminism’s relationship to motherhood?

The months and years rolled on from Belkin’s initial claim, as I had a second child and simultaneously consumed the deluge of articles prompted by what seemed to be an increased obsession with motherhood.² For instance, Emily Nussbaum concluded in a New York magazine article that nothing has changed since 1963—new labels pasted on top of the old pathologies. Linda Hirshman wrote that upper-class women who stay home were leading lesser lives.³ While I recognized that many of these stories came to fruition simply because controversy sells, I also noticed that feminism seemed to sell. The fact that so many articles were taking the time to bash this political movement actually confirmed for me that it had power. In the articles and also the many books on the topic (Mommy Wars, The Mommy Myth, To Hell with All That, and so on), feminism wasn’t necessarily the main selling point, but all either blamed motherhood for undermining women’s full potential or harped on feminism for falsely telling women they could be more than mothers. Was it feminism or motherhood that was to blame for women’s insecurities and for the fact that women hadn’t achieved more equality? What I discovered is that motherhood’s relationship to feminism has been reduced to right and wrong answers. Did you have a home birth, are you a member of La Leche League, and do you let your daughter play with Barbie? The polar extremes receive the most attention—home births or hospitals; PTA mom or latchkey kid—but most parents I encountered found themselves in the gray area of doing some of each, contemplating how to thoughtfully respect what society says is best (for instance, two-parent households) balanced with what our own instincts might tell us (love matters more than who gives it). Most people strive to be mothers without giving up their unique selves, but the question before us is, How?

When I am asked, Can you be a feminist and a mother? I answer yes, but not if that means escaping the realities of your own life. Being exclusively a mother can be an easy way out, seeing yourself in relationship to others rather than figuring out what you uniquely want or who you uniquely are. In fact, the initial tension between feminism and motherhood developed because the former advocates the pursuit of independence, while the latter is based on dependence. In its most basic definition, feminism is about self-worth and dignity, which mothers need in order to parent effectively—even if they don’t think they need it for themselves, they should be giving that example to their children. I know that the stronger sense of self that I get from my non-familial responsibilities has made me a better parent. I also know that I always wanted kids and I would have felt cheated had I sacrificed that.

In attempting to maintain a healthy balance between preserving ourselves and raising children, the workplace is often used as a scapegoat for why women can’t do both. However, reporting solely on the work issue trivializes the way that parenting affects our entire lives. Mothers certainly grapple with how to define work and the extent to which we should work inside or outside the home, but I observed that we equally want to dissect how much our partners are (or aren’t) doing and to analyze our relationship with our own mothers. Women worry about whether we will actually be able to get pregnant or if we will ever want to have sex again. We are concerned that there is one appropriate way to parent our children, and if we have someone helping us with our child rearing, we worry that we will cease to be primary in our children’s lives. We might be insecure about hiring help or challenged by how our realities conflict with how we thought we would behave as parents. This level of detail is left out of most public conversations on motherhood.

Paying attention to these more public conversations brought me back to all the times I had been asked personally about motherhood and feminism. The people I talked to—through my online advice column Ask Amy, at lectures on college campuses, in radio and television interviews, and even at intimate dinner parties with my closest friends—expressed confusion about the extent to which this very political movement could support this very personal decision. People seemed genuinely interested in how to reconcile this historically fractured relationship. This book has become a synthesis of those conversations—a pastiche of years of talking and thinking, augmented with more targeted interviews and research.

Because motherhood is so frequently used as a stand-in for femininity—the supreme expression of being a real woman, in fact—there is confusion as to how it can be compatible with feminism. People are confused because feminism, according to the history books, is about freeing women from feminine expressions and expectations. To actually enjoy motherhood or to embrace it challenges most people’s assumptions about how to be a feminist. No matter how much defensive maneuvering feminism does, campaigning for women to be in the workplace or to not have children if they don’t want them is interpreted primarily as urging women to forsake their biology. In truth, arguing for inclusion isn’t the same as arguing for absolutes—asking for women to have a seat in the boardroom doesn’t mean that all women have to pursue that route.

Judith Warner’s much publicized book on mothering today, Perfect Madness, underscored this chasm. The motherhood mystique was the term Warner used to distill today’s frenzied approach to parenting and contrast it to the feminine mystique of her mother’s generation, Betty Friedan’s term for educated women who were bored to tears at home raising their kids. Friedan’s peers felt alone, isolated, and bitter that their lives were only extensions of their children’s and spouses’ lives. They struggled with how the feminine role dictated women’s lives and perceptions of themselves, while the next generation let motherhood overshadow their every ambition. The Feminine Mystique became a bestseller because women read it as their own biography, confirmed in their rage and invisibility, and also with a sense that they were capable of more. Warner updated these concerns for a new generation that had been raised to believe that they could have it all and do it all perfectly.

The most critical inference I drew from Warner’s book was that the anxiety or the conflict that she identified was a direct result of the women’s movement. Friedan’s peers were challenged by society’s assumptions about what women desired. Warner’s peers were challenged by feminism telling them they didn’t have to (or shouldn’t) be consumed by motherhood. The implied protagonist in Perfect Madness was a mythical feminist mother: the one who doesn’t care about baking perfect cookies and isn’t competitive about school admissions. The women Warner interviewed for her book were smart, often professional women who were troubled by the marketing of motherhood, but they also didn’t want to be left out, which made them more dependent on society’s version of motherhood than they wanted to be.

The reaction to Friedan’s book helped to start a movement; the response to Warner’s book was fierce rhetoric. Many mothers told me she was too neurotic. (Or was she just more honest about her neuroses?) What had happened in those forty years to spark such a different reaction?

We got equality at work. We really didn’t get equality at home, one young woman said about her generation.⁴ Feminism’s crusade remains unfinished because examining the personal is far more threatening than condemning the political. It’s easy to judge others; for instance, to make fun of women who are profiled in articles about their eight-hundred-dollar strollers. It’s harder to examine the minutia of our own lives and challenge ourselves on how we are contributing to the headlines and the consumption.

For my mother’s generation, being a feminist parent was easier to define. She raised me on her own, put herself through college, had a women’s group, and blared Free to Be … You and Me in the Volkswagen Bug she purchased with her own line of credit. Even if she hadn’t used the language of feminism, others would have projected that onto her. Today, women are parenting solo in record numbers, and working moms are the norm. However, even with those lifestyle changes, many of today’s parents struggle with how to live in a way that does not clash with their progressive values. They really want confirmation that they can be personally conflicted without appearing to be politically compromised. One can love motherhood and all of its associated trappings and still be a smart, serious person with ambitions. Or, in my own life, I can believe that normative gender roles are unnecessarily confining and still gently redirect my son to a red bathing cap over the fuchsia one he prefers.

Given my fifteen-year career as a feminist writer, lecturer, and activist, I am aware of how much feminism has improved the world for mothers. The changes wrought by feminism were often subtle and so integrated into our daily lives that younger people have no reason to know that the women’s movement paved the way. We have baby seats in grocery carts, diaperchanging stations in men’s and women’s restrooms, schools that don’t segregate boys and girls for sports, tax deductions for child care expenses, the Family and Medical Leave Act, on-site child care in the workplace, flextime, job-sharing opportunities … feminism’s investment in parenting is undeniable.

In fact, the history of feminism is one of supporting and inspiring mothers to action. The suffragist Ida B. Wells-Barnett was among those who started the first federal infant nutrition programs. Other women agitating to get the vote did so because they were mothers. During the Great Depression, mothers mobilized in the streets to protect their families from rising food prices and the cost of rent. In the 1920s, feminists fought for a Mothers’ Pension, a precursor to welfare and thus eventually deemed by its foes as a charity since they didn’t see motherhood as work. Feminists changed the language around parenting to give it power. Popularizing home economics meant that mothers’ sphere had serious clout; homemaker was a job title rather than invisible work. But that revolution was fought mostly outside of the home, even if it was about the home. For instance, drafting legislation so girls could play Little League right alongside the boys or gathering in Houston, Texas, for the 1977 National Women’s Conference to highlight the dearth of child care and the plight of homemakers.⁵

The main accomplishments of feminism thus far can be boiled down to four goals. First, it wrestled pregnancy and birth away from the medical establishment and put them back into the hands of women. In 1900, 50 percent of babies were being delivered by midwives; by 1975 pregnancy had become professionalized and only 1 percent were.⁶ Feminism responded by empowering women to better understand and participate in their own pregnancies through supporting not only midwives but also birthing centers and more partner participation. Second, feminists helped make it thinkable for parents to work and parent simultaneously. Advocacy groups and legislation lobbied work places and rewarded them for being more family-friendly. To help working parents, child care centers were created, especially those that were affordable and had some quality control. Third, feminism promoted antisexist child rearing—and put the emphasis on parenting rather than marking these responsibilities as solely women’s domain. The feminist assumption was that children were brainwashed into being masculine or feminine and little kids needed examples that challenged gender stereotypes—dads could vacuum and moms could dole out allowances. Fourth, and perhaps most important, though it remains the least accomplished, was the proclamation that parenting be valued socially and economically.

I want parents today to highlight and build on these accomplishments, but more so, I want parents to be inspired to own motherhood and parenting in their own unique way without valuing someone else’s experience over their own. I want to celebrate the links between motherhood and feminism, rather than bemoan which is a better or more admirable choice. Perhaps parents today are better positioned to take on parenting issues because they don’t see embracing motherhood as a threat to women’s success outside of the home.

For me, feminism is a sense of fairness, and it’s so integrated into my life that I rarely identify it as my motivation: for instance, when I am angry that the teachers at my son’s school don’t have health insurance, or when I pay attention to how few male teachers there are and how all teachers are poorly paid. Days before I learned that the teachers at my son’s school didn’t get health insurance, I had been complaining about the high cost of tuition, but then I thought, Could I pay twenty-five dollars more a month, to be combined with twenty-five dollars from every other parent, to remedy this? Yes. The observations aren’t exclusively feminist, but the desire to change what has otherwise been presented as inevitable—be it access to day care, more representative reading material in libraries, or more security in our neighborhoods—is a result of feminism. Feminism is a process, not a conclusion: raising awareness, creating resources, and challenging why this is the way things have to be. Or in my personal example, paying babysitters a living wage instead of a minimum wage (something closer to $15 an hour versus $7.15 in New York).

Feminism asks that one filter what seem to be one’s personal desires through a more thoughtful process of political inquiry. Do I really want children, or am I just doing what is expected of me? If I make the decision not to breastfeed, what message does that send to others? How have I changed since I became a parent? What if I can make the choice to work or not to work, but others can’t? We must feel secure with our choices and in who we are. As is, we don’t always believe that we are capable of the change we imagine. Politically we mandate it, but emotionally we haven’t made huge progress. For instance, many women still assume that asking for paid parental leave is asking for too much; we’re lucky enough to get unpaid leave and still have jobs when we come back.

I want to minimize the disconnect between what one believes and how one lives. I often have to check myself—am I being the type of citizen that I want others to be? For instance, as I write this, I am in the midst of demystifying admission into New York City’s public schools—no easy feat, especially when competing for some of the more prized public schools. As I tour the schools, nine months ahead of when my child would be attending, I realize that most people at the tours are other middle-class families, though my neighborhood is statistically scaled toward a lower income, because of the large public housing units in the area, and the particular schools I am looking at have an express commitment to diversity. When I compared notes with the waitresses in my neighborhood, who have kids the same age as mine, they told me they didn’t know that you had to look and apply this early. There are barriers that make it harder for some parents to maneuver in this system—buying books, making phone calls, accessing contacts, and being able to show up for a two-hour tour at 9:00 a.m. in the middle of the workweek. A school’s commitment to diversity can’t survive on those who are able to reach out. In my sharing the information I have, I am trying to ensure that others get the same access as I. Passive feminism is easier—having opinions without having to substantiate them with our own actions—but that leaves us only questioning the landscape, never changing it.

Individuals need to start acknowledging their role in why things haven’t evolved more. We are the vital part of the equation, because in every area where we are, we have control over making change. Also, focusing on the individual has larger repercussions, because improving women’s lives tends to benefit the entire community. We can (and should) lobby governments, organizations, and advocacy groups. But people imitate what they see. We have more effect when we change our own behavior and also lobby our own partners to do more, our own workplaces to offer more, and our own communities to step up to the plate and create cooperative child care, neighborhood watch programs, or whatever is deemed a priority for that particular community. Be it the father who takes paternity leave; the parent who makes more money, but pulls equal weight in the house, proving that division of labor isn’t solely about economics; or the woman in your neighborhood who takes initiative and starts a babysitting collective, offering free spots to some parents who don’t otherwise allow themselves free time and can’t afford to donate their time; or the mother who breastfeeds in all the situations when she takes her baby into the outside world.

The problems might be ubiquitous—not enough government support, an unhelpful partner, failing schools—but the solutions must be both personal and varied. All those years ago, Betty Friedan’s generation was motivated to change society by the discovery that an identity awaited them; what should motivate this generation is not anger-inducing articles such as Belkin’s, but the news that you can be a mother and hold on to the person you have become.

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.¹ 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.² 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 full-time, 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.³ 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