Full Frontal Feminism_ A Young Women's Guide to Why Feminism Matters - Jessica Valenti [39]
As horrible a tagline as that was, boy, did it cause a stir. That one frigging article from 2003 has been reborn a million times over in the media. And it’s wrong every time. Belkin’s original piece argued that all these highly educated women were dropping out of the workforce to take care of their kids and be housewives because they found it more enjoyable. The problem? Belkin’s theory was based on the idea that all the women in America are like the Harvard MBA-holding, rich-ass white women she interviewed. Yeah, not so much. Most women don’t have the financial ability to just decide not to work. Not to mention that just because a handful of elite women are doing something doesn’t make it a social trend. But since the Belkin piece ran, countless similar articles have followed, citing the same “opt out” nonsense. While a couple of articles may not seem like a big deal, the fact is, they put out the false notion of a “trend.” And duh, trends are trendy. Telling young women that the cool new shit is to stay at home (and this, of course, entails having a rich hubby) is not exactly the best message in the world.
The truth? Women aren’t opting out. We can’t! Even those who do have the financial options aren’t dropping out of the workforce. The Center for Economic Policy and Research put out a paper this year titled “Are Women Opting Out?”14 The answer was a resounding “hells no.” The paper noted that “the early 2000s recession led to sustained job losses for all women—those with and without children at home,” and “between 2000 and 2004, thirtysomething mothers with advanced degrees saw no statistically significant change in the effect of children on their labor force participation rates.”15 In fact, the women who did leave the workforce because of childcare responsibilities often did so because of the Mommy Wage Gap!
This isn’t to say that women aren’t ever making the decision to stay home and raise families—they are. But given the economy and a host of other factors, it’s just not as common as some people would like you to think. And when women do stay home, they have a whole new set of worries.
The Unloved/Unpaid Labor
Unfortunately, but not exactly shockingly, women do the majority of the work in the household. You know, all the fun stuff like cleaning toilets and doing laundry. And this isn’t just women who don’t have jobs outside the home—it’s all married women. A recent Department of Labor study showed that women spend twice as much time as men on household chores and taking care of kids. That’s in addition to their paying jobs. Fun, huh? In fact, in July 2006 The New York Times reported that unemployed men do less work around the house than women who have full-time jobs.16 Yeah, that sounds fair.
When it comes to moms who don’t work outside the home, their work (shockingly) is ridiculously underappreciated. A recent study by Salary.com actually showed that if a full-time stay-at-home mom was paid for all of the work she does, she’d be getting $134,121 a year.17 Now that’s some money.
The stay-at-home-mom stuff is talked about a lot in feminist circles—especially since all this “opt out” nonsense started. Some women say that the whole idea behind feminism is that we exercise our choices—and that if some women want to stay at home rather than work, we should respect that. Others, like author Linda Hirshman, say that not working is just a bad idea all around. Hirshman makes the case in her book Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World that women are selling themselves short if they “opt out,” and that being engaged in the world at large—rather than just the one at home—is necessary.18 She especially hates the old saying that moms are “doing the most important job” in the world by raising kids:
❂ If, in fact, it were the most important thing a human being could do, then why are no men doing it? They’d rather make war, make foreign policy, invent nuclear weapons, decode DNA,