New York Times Letters to the Editor - March 4, 2006
(I blogged on this same article on March 2nd, see "Stepping Into the Fray." This is definitely a topic that everybody has an opinion about. -sg)

Women on the Early (and Late) Shift (6 Letters)

To the Editor:

Re "Stretched to Limit, Women Stall March to Work" (front page, March 2):

I wonder whether the balancing act required specifically of working mothers wouldn't be better studied, measured and reported using a broader concept like family management rather than household chores.

Rote and routine chores like laundry, garbage, vacuuming and carpooling steal time away from both parents. But I would venture that the most challenging and harder to quantify family responsibilities borne by women are the planning, organizing, scheduling, coordinating, monitoring and adjusting that make the smooth flow of children's lives possible, particularly when their every minute must be accounted for to allow both parents to work.

These are the "thinking" chores that you can't easily ask or pay others to do and that women, more than men, seem saddled with performing all hours of the day and night — hours that I suspect aren't accurately reflected in the research statistics.
-Molly Fraker - Berkeley, Calif., March 2, 2006

To the Editor:

The closing comment from Cathie Watson-Short — "We really didn't get equality at home" — points to the essential problem: family life is not woman's work; it is everyone's work.
Just as professional responsibilities are now shared between the sexes, so must domestic duties become universal efforts.

As an editor in her mid-20's who lives in Manhattan with three roommates, all men, I've seen this concept of domestic cooperation put into action daily.

We share grocery shopping and cleaning chores and do our own laundry. Nothing more is expected of me than of anyone else.

If a group of college classmates can do this, shouldn't a couple who choose to take on the responsibility of parenting be able to demand of each other the same level of equality that is now part of the workplace?
-Kathleen Brennan - New York, March 2, 2006

To the Editor:

Enough already with how hard it is to be a mother in this day and age! You're depressing all of us who are just managing to pull it off. (Every time I read one of these articles, I wonder, "Is there something wrong with me that I'm not more miserable sending my child to day care as I tromp off to work every day?")

You quote Cathie Watson-Short saying: "Most of us thought we would work and have kids, at least that was what we were brought up thinking we would do — no problem. But really we were kind of duped. None of us realized how hard it is."

But when upper-middle-class women choose to have three children, they should consider how that might affect their careers.

Part of adult life is facing hard choices and living with sacrifices and compromises. If you believe that you can "have it all" without any pain, you've been watching too much TV.
-Debbie Berne - San Francisco, March 2, 2006

To the Editor:

As a working mother of four sons, I agree with Cathie Watson-Short about feeling "duped" about working motherhood.

The messages we now give to girls make it seem as if the only barrier to women's success is convincing girls that subjects like math and science are interesting.

But if these girls get their science or engineering degrees, they have this to look forward to: getting up at 5 a.m. to make lunches and start getting kids ready for school; going to work at 6:40 a.m., returning home at 6 p.m. to help make dinner, spend time with everyone and help with homework, put kids to bed, then work from 9 to 11 on stuff that didn't get done at work during the day and that you couldn't stay late to do, as your male colleagues did.

Can anyone come up with something better? I don't know, but I do know that I am still in it for the long haul. And in case you are wondering, this is the only article I had time to read on the train because I was working the rest of the time.
-Maria Race - Elmhurst, Ill., March 2, 2006

To the Editor:

Two changes must occur for mothers to enjoy an equal chance at a fulfilling work life outside the home: men have to take equal responsibility for child care, and the workplace has to offer more help, in flex time and on-site child care.

Until that happens, women will continue to bear a greater proportion of a family's domestic burden.
-Elisabeth Israels Perry - St. Louis, March 3, 2006

To the Editor:

We will never reconcile the tug between being a working mother and a stay-at-home mom until both sexes understand that a woman who chooses to stay home and raise the next generation of mothers and career blazers often works harder and longer hours than her office counterpart. In other words, she is a "working mother" as well.

Raising two boys and having also worked in an office, I speak from experience when I say "The Apprentice" looks like child's play.

Have Donald Trump send his upstarts over to my neck of the woods on Monday morning. Starting at 6 a.m. until 9 p.m. every day for the next 10 years or so. Bring lots of Kleenex, driver's license, Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, aspirin, imagination and infinite patience.

Oh, and did I mention that there's no starting salary?
-Susanna Salk - Roxbury, Conn., March 2, 2006

Technical Issues

About a year ago I gave my 15-year-old son my old notebook computer, a circa 2001 Sony Vaio. It had served me well, but it was so heavy (funny how quickly our perceptions change). I just couldn’t bear it any longer.

As a safety precaution and in order to be sure there was no electronic-flotsam adhering to the hard disk, I wiped it clean by reinstalling the operating system. When I had done this before the time consuming nature of a full reinstall was never the most daunting part – the problems always seemed to come up when I had to make decisions about the security programming. Windows XP doesn’t like it when it has to fight with other programs for operational superiority. This is not an accusation, just a pragmatically accepted fact. A few years ago I had started using Norton’s Internet Security program which bundles a number of control features with anti-virus protection. I generally liked the program and felt it protected me well, but was regularly frustrated by conflicts between automatic updates and Windows XP. I became a serial “System Restorer.” I had to back out of updates so often that I started to worry that my virus protection was fatally incomplete.

But earlier this year…

I upgraded to Norton Internet Security 2006 (I swear to you, this is not a compensated commercial message). OMG, someone over at Norton evidently felt my pain. This program has been running perfectly, updating perfectly, and intercepting malicious invaders perfectly for me for two whole months. The key seems to be that it “learns” how to handle access to and from your computer. Somehow this has ended the “fight” between my security program and Windows.

I am thankful for this feature today because I had to wipe my now 16-year-old son’s computer again this morning. He had lost the ability to access the internet months ago, but hadn’t been able to fix the problem. I tried all of my own best tricks, but had not luck either. I thought about how well the updated security software had performed for me on my laptop, and decided to upgrade his security program as well.

Now the old Vaio runs like a champ. Hey, it runs so well that I am thinking I should get it out of my son’s bedroom and move it to the kitchen so I can blog while I eat my breakfast every morning. Hmmmmm.

My favorite things:

I'm all about balance, so I thought I should quickly post a happy/carefree riff so that I don't get a reputation as a ranter...or worse yet, a whiner.

The photo below was taken on a perfect day:

1. The first day of a getaway weekend celebrating my husband's 40th birthday
2. Driving up the rugged Northern California coast
3. In a convertible
4. Top down (of course)
5. Enroute to Anderson Valley
6. To experience the Boonville Beer Festival,
7. Roederer Estate, Navarro, and Husch Vineyards
8. Before passing through a mystical grove of coastal redwoods
9. One the way to the remarkably beautiful, fun, funky town of Mendocino.
10. This may have taken more than one day...I lost track after the Beer Festival (I'm kidding).

I left out a bunch of other stuff, but you get the idea. The memory of this kind of day gets me through "that kind of day."

Driving up the coast in Mendocino County. 

Stepping into the fray...

Well. Better late than never, I suppose.

This morning there was an article in the New York Times that just made me want to start writing a blog. Eduardo Porter writes about the slowing entry of women into the workforce. He concludes that this change is because women are realizing the limitations of combining work and family. Mr. Porter implies that this trend is related to a kind of "equality reality check" for women. First a couple of brief quotes from the two non-academic-researcher real women that were apparently interviewed for this front page article:

• Cathie Watson-Short "...has not figured out how to mesh work with caring for her three daughters." "...(W)e were kind of duped," she continues, "None of us realized how hard it is" (to balance work and family).
• "(Her) stay-at-home-mom friends, like her, felt blindsided by the demands of motherhood."
• Catherine Stallings, 34, found it difficult and stressful to deal with her job and her 5-month-old daughter. "Usually, (my husband and I) are so tired we pass out around 10 or so." [Editor's note: Have you ever known anyone with an infant that wasn't pretty exhausted by 10:00pm?]

Let's look at the big picture here (there's a reason why economists disagree with Mr. Porter's POV). These kinds of statements reflect major societal changes in expectations and perception, not a physical or mental limitation on the capacity of mothers. The current trends are indicative of a period of transition more than "hitting the wall."

In fact a stabilization trend is shown when one combines U.S. Census Report data with the findings of Suzanne Bianchi, a University of Maryland sociologist cited in the article. Census data shows that the period of rapid workforce growth from the 60's-90's resulted in an increase in paid working time among mothers; growing from an average of 9 hours to an average of 26 hours per week. During that same period Bianchi's study shows the average time spent by mothers on weekly housework dropped from 32 to 19 hours a week. Conversely, from 1995-2003 mothers worked outside of the home about 4 fewer hours per week, but spent about the same time on weekly household chores. So, Prof. Bianchi's work indicates that women are reallocating their time. Anyone with middle-class female friends could have told her that! Having a housekeeper seems to have become de rigeur, even among the not-too-privileged-classes. Another academic quoted in the article, Cornell University Economist Francine Blau, opines, "one can question how much further increases in women's participation can be had without more reallocation of household work." No kidding.

Is it just me, or is this not being able to see the forest for the trees? Were these guys asleep when all of the "80's Superwoman" backlash started coming out? Woman are just getting further down the cultural/societal evolutionary road as each year passes. They are redefining their roles to match their expectations. It's economic utility, baby, not hitting the wall. Women that can afford to focus on motherhood over their careers are choosing that focus...for fun and personal satisfaction. It makes them happy. Coincidentally, Mr. Porter's article notes one "big exception to the trend," that the percentage of single working mothers in the workforce has continued to grow, increasing by 19% since 2000. Perhaps single mothers get more fun and personal satisfaction out of feeding, clothing and sheltering their kids? I'm just guessing here.

I'm not alone in feeling frustrated by the onslaught in media bias regarding this topic. Check out this post referring to another NYTimes article (which rubbed me the wrong way too) discussing the Ivy League educated stay at home moms, and this one which questions current perceptions of women's working/mothering choices.

I respect the New York Times. I'm sure Mr. Porter thinks he's reporting responsibly...but isn't this just the same old 50's-style societal expectations crap all over again? It took a really long time for women to be able to make these kinds of decisions for themselves, without the threat of cultural damnation for lack of conformance. Besides the fact that media repetition of this "documented trend" risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy, these reports hurt the mothers who do work.