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Debunking myths of working motherhood
Lis Riba, August 2001
The notion that children are better off when mothers stay-at-home
(working part-time, but remaining somehow present for their kids) is not
borne out by historical evidence.
Two books you might want to read, both by Stephanie Coontz:
"The Way We Never Were" and "The Way We Really Are"
[I don't have access to the books right now, so I'm quoting from reviews,
news articles, and interviews]
Coontz writes: "Whenever people propose that we go back to the traditional
family, I always suggest that they pick a ballpark date for the family
they have in mind. Once pinned down, they are invariably unwilling to
accept the package deal that comes with their chosen model."
Looking SOLELY at America, and not Europe or the rest of the world,
I'd like to make three main points, which I will document heavily below.
1) A study last year from University of Maryland showed that today's
mothers spent MORE time with their kids than mothers 40 years ago. (link)
Looking SOLELY at America, and not Europe or the rest of the world,
2) Aside from the upper classes, most mothers have ALWAYS done work
outside of childrearing and housework.
2a) Even when mothers were at home, they generally DIDN'T spend all their
time in childrearing. (link)
2b) The 1950s were a historical fluke, a combination of good economic times
and a lot of government assistance. (link)
3) Given those historical facts, what should/can we do for modern parents?
3a) Face up to the fact that times have changed (link)
3b) Define the problems (link)
3c) Stop the blame game (link)
3d) Start finding solutions (link)
1) A study last year from University of Maryland showed that today's
mothers spent MORE time with their kids than mothers 40 years ago.
Study Sees No Change in Mothering Time
Though More Have Jobs, Women Spend as Many Hours With Children as in '60s
By Jacqueline L. Salmon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 26, 2000; Page C08
Some good news for 21st-century moms: They may think they spend less
time with their children than moms did in the days of Wally and the Beav,
but it ain't necessarily so. A University of Maryland study released
yesterday has found that today's mothers spend just as much time with
their children as mothers did in 1965.
Although earlier studies found that parents these days spend as much
one-on-one time with their children as their own parents' generation did,
Bianchi's analysis went further, finding that today's moms spend the same
amount of "indirect" time--doing things while accompanied by their
children--as moms did in 1965.
Another reason the amount of time mothers spend with their children
hasn't changed much is that, contrary to our gauzy childhood
recollections, it was never that high to begin with, said Bianchi.
Years ago, at-home moms were loaded down with chores, and they often
relied on their older children to take care of the little ones. "Quality
time" wasn't a priority. As technology lessened the time women spent
cleaning house and doing other chores, many women occupied themselves
with volunteering in addition to child-rearing.
Anna Behrensmeyer, 53, a paleontologist and mother of two who lives in
Arlington, says her own mother was unable to spend large amounts of time
with her and her two brothers. "She was home, but she was really busy
keeping the house together," Behrensmeyer recalled.
On the other hand, she said, "when I go home, I'm with the kids from 5
p.m. until 9, and during that time--except when I have to be at the
stove--we're totally together, and I'm not distracted by anything."
[For more information, see http://www.bsos.umd.edu/src/timeuse.html]
2) Aside from the upper classes, most mothers have ALWAYS done work
outside of childrearing and housework.
2a) Even when mothers were at home, they generally DIDN'T spend all their
time in childrearing.
Until this century, most people worked at home, as farmers or craftsmen or
in some form of family business. According to Sturbridge Village (a
historical recreation town in Massachusetts), most women took work into
the home, whether it be spinning or broommaking in the 1830s to sewing or
ironing in the first half of the century.
Doris Kulman wrote:
Historically, wives not only baked the family bread but helped earn it,
too. In colonial times, they worked alongside their husbands on the farm
and in small family businesses. In the early part of this century, when
married women were legally barred from the workplace, many worked at
home, sociologist Demie Kurz, co-director of Women's Studies at the
University of Pennsylvania, points out, "taking in boarders, laundry,
other women's children." It just wasn't called work.
While raising 10 children, my grandmother, in her spare time, did
something called "helping papa in the shop." She didn't think of herself
as a working mother, nor did anyone ever describe her as one.
Take a look at this description of a woman who lived in what is now the
Lower East Side Tenement Museum. http://www.thirteen.org/tenement/gumpap.html
As an AP article notes:
In one apartment of what is now the Lower East Side Tenement Museum,
Nathalie Gumpertz, a single mother, worked as a seamstress. In other
dim, dusty apartments, tenants made brooms and cigars. It was 1900,
and 25,000 New Yorkers took in "home work," finishing the manual work
started elsewhere. It was an essential way to supplement family income.
Women ideally stayed home, although in reality growing numbers went to
work before marriage. Homes evolved from work and social centers
bustling with business partners, boarders and neighbors, to private
family fiefdoms, notes historian Tamara Hareven.
"Separating work and home was something most people aspired to," says
social historian Stephanie Coontz, author of "The Way We Never Were."
Coontz discusses the Victorian image of the mother who devotes herself
entirely to her children, creating an inviolable nest of love and
devotion for her young. In fact, families who could afford that sort of
life built it on the backs of a terribly exploited workforce.
Irish and German immigrant girls often went into domestic service at
age 11 or 12. Slave labor provided the material for the textile mills
that freed women from making cloth.
Coontz draws an eerie parallel to today's political debate with her
discussion of the "Gilded Age" of the mid-1870s to 1880s. After a
divisive war (the Civil War, instead of Vietnam), America experienced an
"orgy of wealth-seeking among the rich, an intensification of economic
distress among the poor and a retreat of the middle class from previous
involvement in social reform," Coontz writes.
2a) Even when mothers were at home, they generally DIDN'T spend all their
time in childrearing.
It used to be acceptable for kids to be left unattended without it being
considered neglect. Kids hung out with other kids, often without adult
supervision. [Think of the difference between improvised pick-up games
and Little League.]
Mid-1970s, when I was in elementary school, I lived in a suburb of Madison,
Wisconsin. Afternoons, summers and weekends, my friends and I would hang
out together with no adult supervision. I knew not to leave the
subdivision and had a time to return home, but otherwise we'd hang out in
somebody's backyard or go to the local playground or go on expeditions
through the nearby fields... As long as I was back home on time, nobody
was checking up on us.
The radio show "This American Life" aired a segment titled
"The Geography of Children" Quoting from the website's summary:
In the early 1970's, a geographer named Roger Hart did a study of
exactly where it is that children go during the daytime. For two years,
he followed 86 children -- all the children in a small town in Vermont,
during the hours when parents were away at work. In this rural setting,
nearly every child had a secret hiding place somewhere. He explains what
the places were, and why nearly every child in town had the compulsion
to make a secret place. He published his findings in a book called
Children's Experience of Place, which is now out of print.
On "This American Life"s website, they provide links to several maps:
Again, quoting from the website:
Roger Hart published his findings in Children's Experience of
Place. He's planning on returning to the same town in Vermont to do a
sequel to his original study. The children from his study are the adults
in town now. He suspects that children today, even in a small town, are
much more restricted in where they're allowed to go. He also expects
that parents will be less willing to have him -- a stranger visiting
town -- simply traipse off with their kids."
You can listen to the story at http://www.thislife.org/ra/157.ram.
It's about 25 minutes into the piece.
For a more extreme example, there's a Yiddish poem, "My Sister Khaye,"
which recounts matter-of-factly how mother worked all day and the narrator
was raised by his ten year old sister:
http://www.fh-fulda.de/hilsenrath/texte.htm
2b) The 1950s were a historical fluke, a combination of good economic times
and a lot of government assistance.
"The apparently stable families of the 1950s were the result of an
economic boom -- the gross national product grew by nearly 250% and per
capita income by 35%."
"[W]hen you look back in history, the 1950s period of the mother-at-home
is really such a historical aberration, that colonial mothers child care
to servants and younger siblings, that throughout, right up until the
1920s, of course, child labor was the norm in America. So when you look
back in history, there are very few times when you have that concentrated
maternal attention that you got in the 1950s. It's kind of ironic that
those kids turned out to be the 1960s rebels, too." (Incidentally, the
highest rate of teen-age childbearing in 20th-Century America was in
1957.)
By whatever name, the Cleaver family of the '50s, sociologist Stephanie
Coontz tells us in her challenging book, "The Way We Never Were," was
both "a new invention" and "a historical fluke." That fluke, she says,
was made possible by the post-war prosperity and generous government
benefits for education, job training, housing loans and road and sewer
construction, which made it possible for young middle- and working-class
couples to marry, move to the suburbs, and start their families.
"Economics tends to shape the look of families," says Farris. "In
post-World War II America, working families enjoyed new entitlements like
the GI Bill for higher education, FHA loans for housing and Social
Security benefits for retirement. That's why marriage and fertility rates
increased.
"Strong labor union contracts also eliminated the need for two
wage-earners. Stay-at-home wives and mothers became commonplace, and
children, who no longer had to help support the family, could receive
high school diplomas and, in many cases, college educations."
3) Given those historical facts, what should/can we do for modern parents?
3a) Face up to the fact that times have changed
Doris Kulman writes, "Whether because she needs to, or because she wants
to, or for some mixture of the two, the work-for-pay mother is here to
stay. Our economy would collapse without her."
Coontz: "The first thing we have to do is we have to get rid of the
notion that somewhere in the past is a workable model of family life and
family arrangement that is going to solve our problems and if only we
could get back to it, we wouldn't have poverty, we wouldn't have social
alienation. Now, I'm not saying that we don't have serious problems in
families today, including values problems. But most of the values
problems are problems in our social values, not just our family values.
No, kids should not be neglected no, they should not go hungry. Most of
the time it's not parents' values that make them go hungry, it's our
social values that do so. So we have to stop blaming individual families
for things that are often out of their control and even when they're not
but of their control are a lot more complicated than the right-wing
demagogues would like us to think."
3b) Define the problems
Coontz: "The problem has not been the lack of programs that work but
this pervasive big lie spread in America that government can't help and
that community can't help and that it all has to be a question of
individual willpower and parental commitment. The fact is that when
people talk about the collapse of the family dream, most of the time what
they're really talking about is not the collapse of the family but the
collapse of older economic, political, and social structures that allowed
middle-class values to exist and reinforce them."
"The result is that we experience it as a family crisis, as a
generational crisis, but, in fact, it's a major reorganization of our
economy, our political system, our age structure, our demography, and
we're not going to solve that in the family. But too many politicians
feed upon the anxieties of middle-class families, about what they can
pass on to their children, and say that if only families would stay
together, if only families would be more traditional, then all of your
traditional expectations that were formed in those very atypical
post-war years can continue to be met."
3c) Stop the blame game
Coontz: "I think the biggest single barrier is myths. You know, we go
around beating women up, for example, for not being able to live like
1950s sitcoms, instead of saying--that period, first of all, was not have
so idyllic as it--as we remember it--and secondly, even if it was, we're
not going to return to it."
Americans have engaged in an orgy of self-blame for trends driven by
economics, and the fires of guilt are stoked by "politicians who find it
easier to lecture us on how to live than to come up with real programs,"
Coontz says.
Coontz laments that "I sometimes feel that half the people I talk to are
torturing themselves trying to figure out what they did wrong in their
families. . . and the other half are torturing themselves trying to
figure out what their parents did wrong. . . "
Breaking the cycle of blame, Coontz writes, "frees valuable time and
energy for figuring out what they can actually do to help solve the problem."
3d) Start finding solutions
Coontz says it's unrealistic to expect the nuclear family to compensate
for American society's reluctance to take care of its own. It's time for
society to go to work to support the family, both through individual
volunteerism and renewed government support.
Doris Kulman writes, during World War II, "Millions of women, the vast
majority of them mothers of young children, answered that call and
swarmed into defense industries. What did they do with their children?
Left them in the hastily established, government-financed child care
centers, that's what."
Coontz: "So let's look at our school schedules, our work policies, our
day-care facilities and see if maybe we can bring them into line with the
21st century instead of telling families that they just--if they would go
back to some golden age in the past, we wouldn't have any problems."
"[T]here's absolutely no reason we can't do it. Every other major
industrial nation in the world has gone far beyond these timid policies
for unpaid child care and unpaid parental leaves and has decent systems
of regulating child care, paid parental leaves, the family assistance
programs. So there's no reason we can't do it. What we have to do is get
beyond the kind of posturizing, the myths, the scapegoating of 'other
people' families, like black families you see so often and just deal with
the here and now, with the present."
"Children do best," Coontz concludes, "in societies where child-rearing
is considered too important to be left entirely to parents."
Coontz writes: "Whenever people propose that we go back to the traditional
family, I always suggest that they pick a ballpark date for the family
they have in mind. Once pinned down, they are invariably unwilling to
accept the package deal that comes with their chosen model."
Quoting http://eclipse.barnard.columbia.edu/~rg322/women.html
... the nuclear family was not traditional but in fact a phenomena
of the fifties. The nuclear family of the 1950s arose due to particular
circumstances involving both America future.
The 1950s nuclear family differed from previous conceptions of the
family in America. Of course, circumscribed gender roles were not new;
they had always been around and were particularly reinforced during
Victorian times. But the definition of the nuclear family in the 1950s
went beyond the concept of the breadwinner husband and homemaker wife.
For the first time in history, Americans were expected to find all their
satisfaction and pleasure in the home:
<snip>
"For the first time, men as well as women were encouraged to root their
identity and self-image in familial and parental roles" (Coontz p 27).
Women especially needed to devote attention to both husband and child:
"The hybrid idea that a woman can be fully absorbed with her youngsters
while simultaneously maintaining passionate sexual excitement with her
husband was a 1950s invention" which did not coexist in previously in
American history (Coontz p 9). The emphasis on the family as the source
of all satisfaction in life made the 1950s nuclear family a new
invention in America's history.
In the fifties people were aware that the nuclear definition of the
family was new. After the hardships of the Great Depression and World
War II, Americans were eager to embrace a new type of family life.
During these difficult times, families were forced more than ever to
rely on extended kin. Extended families had always been prevalent in
America, yet "The Great Depression and Second World War...reinforced
extended family ties, but in ways that were experienced by most people
as stultifying and oppressive" (Coontz, p 26). These frugal times
understandably led to tension between extended families living together
under the same roof. In Postwar America, therefore, the nuclear family
was hailed as modern. Returning war veterans were encouraged to marry.
Society now advocated women to leave their war time factory jobs for
domesticity. The government subsidized housing to make up for the
housing-crunch caused by the disruptions of the depression and war.
People married at a younger age as prosperity and government aid allowed
them to establish themselves more easily. "By the early 1950s, newlyweds
not only were establishing single-family homes at an earlier age and a
more rapid rate than ever before but increasingly moving to the suburbs,
away from the close scrutiny of the older generations" (Coontz, p 26).
American Postwar prosperity was expressed through the family in the suburbs.
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