Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [65]
Nowhere does this double bind cinch more tightly than in the work-family conflict. Women are insistently asked to cover their status as potential or actual mothers. At its extreme, work can press women to forgo having children altogether. As writer Sylvia Ann Hewlett has recently argued, “cloning the male competitive model” leads many high-achieving women to experience childlessness as a “creeping non-choice,” given that the years between twenty-five and thirty-five are key to both career building and childbearing. For her, “one pair of figures from corporate America says it all: 49 percent of women executives earning $100,000 or more a year are childless, while only 19 percent of 40-year-old male executives in an equivalent earnings bracket do not have children.”
Women who do have children run up against what law professor Joan Williams calls the “Maternal Wall.” Williams adduces the testimony of Barbara Billauer, president of the Women’s Trial Board, that “every single woman [lawyer] that I have spoken to without exception, partner or associate, has experienced rampant hostility and prejudice upon her return [from maternity leave]. There is a sentiment that pregnancy and motherhood [have] softened her, that she is not going to work as hard.” Williams also quotes a Boston lawyer who puts it more pungently: “Since I came back from maternity leave, I get the work of a paralegal. I want to say, look, I had a baby, not a lobotomy.”
Many women respond to this hostility by muting their status as mothers. Sue Shellenbarger, author of the Wall Street Journal’s “Work and Family” column, regularly features working mothers who cover—the woman who limits her maternity leave to six weeks to make her pregnancy “invisible,” the woman who plans “her children’s birthday parties on her office telephone while talking in hushed, serious tones,” or the woman who jams her preschoolers’ naked Barbies out of sight before picking up a client in her car. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild similarly describes how women cover by downplaying their child-care responsibilities, by building up stores of goodwill before having a child, or by not displaying photographs of their children at work.
A critic might fairly observe that most workers, male or female, must surrender their children when they enter the workplace. Yet the degree to which they must do so is not sex-neutral. Hochschild’s study of a major corporation describes how top male executives routinely displayed photographs of their children behind their desk. Women managers did not, favoring diplomas and awards instead. As one female manager put it: “Women on a career track make a conscious effort to tell the men they work with, ‘I am not a mother and a wife. I’m a colleague.’ ”
Working mothers also face the reverse-covering demand. Sociologist Cynthia Epstein describes law firms where working mothers are made to feel guilty for covering too well: “Comments made by various lawyers often reflected the belief that a woman’s first priority should be her children.” Hochschild discusses how men pinned a “mother identity” on professional women by constantly asking women but not men about their children, or by making more pointed comments: “It takes a lot more than paying the mortgage to make a house a home.”
These cross-cutting demands lead to a classic double bind. In her study of women lawyers, Rhode points out that “working mothers … are often criticized for being insufficiently committed, either as parents or as professionals. Those who seem willing to sacrifice family needs to workplace demands appear lacking as mothers. Those who want extended leaves or reduced schedules appear lacking as lawyers.” Rhode concludes that “these mixed messages leave many women with the uncomfortable sense that whatever they