| Here
we go, again
At the risk of boring
those as weary of deconstructing the opt-out story as I am, I'll
mention some of the more salient points others have made: that media
coverage of work/life family issues are framed as lifestyle stories
targeted at a particular demographic, and that reporters reinforce
this story with their choice of interviewees and the questions they
ask (Joan Williams); that stories about opting out make better copy
than the ordinary lives of most working parents (Rosalind Barnett
and Caryl Rivers); that media gender bias may play a role (Kristin
Rowe-Finkbeiner); that the history of the "opt-out" stretches
back to the 1980s, when a spate of media stories proclaimed, incorrectly,
that women were "bailing out" of the workforce (Susan
Faludi); that alternative work/life stories are fighting to be heard
amongst the "din" of our information-saturated age (Linda
Basch, Ilene Lang, and Deborah Merrill-Sands). To these media analyses
we could add Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels's argument in The
Mommy Myth that a greater conservative cultural backlash
against changing gender roles has affected the way many individuals
and institutions view and portray motherhood. Perhaps the popularity
of the opt-out story suggests that our country still prefers to
think about family and motherhood in terms of personal values and
choices and not in socioeconomic or political terms; and that to
do so, many believe, would require us to adopt very un-American,
European-style social policies interfering with our competitive
capitalist edge. (This runs contrary to much work/life research,
such as studies done by the Families
and Work Institute and Catalyst,
which suggest that workplace flexibility enhances productivity.)
All of this threatens to make opting out into what Judith Warner
in Perfect
Madness calls a "master narrative," a story that
"we tell now about women's progress and the problems of motherhood"
for all women.
On an individual level,
for women whose work patterns are far more complicated than the
public narrative of the "opt out revolution" implies,
the ready phrase "opting out" may provide an easier explanation
-- to the women themselves, or to others -- than calling out the
complex array of cultural, structural, economic and personal pressures
that influence mothers' behavior. As Peskowitz points out, it's
a lot easier to use a rhetoric of personal choice (so popular in
this country, and so dominant at this particular moment) than to
acknowledge the greater forces that often compel us to make certain
choices. The latter runs the risk of inviting questions and of being
construed as "complaining" in a culture where "we're
supposed to be agents of our own freedom, not trod-upon workers
who complain." Thus, the rationale of "opting out"
may be more comforting and socially acceptable than the assertion
that mothers' employment options are often circumscribed by factors
that can't be overcome by ingenuity or will. From another point
of view, resorting to the "opt out" explanation hints
of self-deception and prevents women from seeing their own situations
as part of a greater, societal problem.
Ultimately, of course,
what's at stake is how we frame our understanding of the issues
-- whether we see our own struggles in connection with the struggles
of other mothers, in the context of greater socioeconomic forces,
or whether we view our own lives as individual stories. For this
reason, many have been working to situate the popular debate in
a larger frame. Numerous researchers and research institutions,
policy analysts, journalists, and feminists have called for a change
in the existing rhetoric. Again and again, they have argued for
a more accurate, complex, and diverse accounting of motherhood (and
fatherhood) in the U.S. As Families and Work Institute Vice President
Lois Backon argued at an "Opting Different" panel sponsored
by the National Council for Research on Women in June 2005: "We
need to reframe the work/life discussion for the entire workforce,
women and men."
The list of those working
to recast the dialogue is a long and familiar one to those who follow
the work/life field. Some of these researchers have also tried to
influence public rhetoric more directly, by suggesting specific
stories the media could pursue. A recent AlterNet
article by scholars associated with the National Association
for Research on Women, Catalyst and the Center for Gender in Organizations
at Simmons College ("What Women Want: A Rebuttal to the Times,"
by Linda Basch, Ilene Lang, and Deborah Merrill-Sands, 3 Oct 05),
provides one of the best overviews of the facts and research disputing
the opt-out story to date and suggests alternative stories the media
could be covering, with headlines such as "Gen X Men Crave
Work/Life Balance Too" and "Stay-at-Home Moms By Default,
not Design." Similarly, Joan
Williams, Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the
Center for WorkLife Law at University of California Hastings College
of Law, has made detailed
recommendations regarding how to change the media coverage of
work and family, proposing stories about the persistence of a "maternal
wall," employers' unexamined gender stereotyping of mothers,
and recent courtroom successes in legal challenges to various workplaces.
Ongoing research points to other potentially significant stories,
including Cornell sociologists Shelley
Correll and Stephen Benard's preliminary findings pointing to
the existence of a motherhood wage penalty.
There are, as well, plenty
of journalists and writers who have suggested alternative narratives
to the opt-out story. Ann Crittenden, Judith Warner, Miriam Peskowitz,
and Judith Stadtman Tucker, among others, have put forth alternative
narratives to describe various dimensions of early twenty-first
century motherhood in the U.S. -- Crittenden's "mommy tax,"
Warner's "mommy mystique," Peskowitz's "playground
revolution," Tucker's "mothers' movement" -- all
of which shift the lens away from its current setting on personal
choice and the implications of choice for identity (am I a working
mom? a stay-at-home mom? a work-from-home mom?) in order to focus
on broader questions of policy and politics. Their work, which is
smart, informed, and accessible, has certainly transformed my own
understanding of the issues. To what extent it will help move the
national dialogue forward still remains to be seen. |
