Feminists, rejoice! We can stop what we’re doing, for Ross Douthat has decided that the time has come to “officially consolidate [our] gains” from the women’s movement of the 1970s. After all, look at the success of Sarah Palin! Not to mention last Tuesday’s primaries, where “all the major female candidates won” – never mind that they were conservatives. In fact, the fact that they are conservatives is even more proof that our work is done. Conservative women’s “rise is a testament to the overall triumph of the women’s movement,” because “America is now a country where social conservatives are as comfortable as liberals with the idea of women in high office.”
But there are a couple of problems here. The first is that Douthat’s victory lap is celebrating the achievement of simply putting more women in higher office. As Ariel Levy noted (and as I also noted), sticking more women into higher positions isn’t really feminism. It’s what Levy calls the “politics of identity,” instead of a “politics of liberation” – women become interchangeable cogs, and the game is simply to overtake more of the machine. It ignores the values that they may hold. It also ignores whether or not this does anything to make the lives of the rest of us more equal or free. (And equal pay and family planning don’t appear on Sarah Palin’s agenda.)
Because the truth is, American women are not more equal. Only three percent of Fortune 500 companies have a woman as CEO. Women account for 17 of 100 Senators and 75 of 435 Representatives. Why don’t women have access to all the jobs men do? The answer comes down to parental leave and childcare.
Women enjoy far more equality in Sweden--and experience far less misogyny, it would seem. Sweden made itself a test case for increased parental leave, subsidized preschools, and better care for the elderly. Before the incentives of “daddy leave” were introduced in 1995, the country already had the preschools and elderly care in place, as well as a full year’s salary for a parent who took leave, a guaranteed job when he or she got back, and the ability to work six-hour days until the kids were in school. As the New York Times notes, “Female employment rates and birth rates had surged to be among the highest in the developed world.” Then came daddy leave, which meant that a family lost one month of subsidies if the father didn’t take some time off, as well as the addition of a second nontransferable father month. Now 85 percent of fathers take leave. But more importantly than that, a mother’s future earnings increase 7 percent on average for every month the father takes off. As the Times notes, “Companies have come to expect employees to take leave irrespective of gender, and not to penalize fathers at promotion time. Women’s paychecks are benefiting and the shift in fathers’ roles is perceived as playing a part in lower divorce rates and increasing joint custody of children.” On top of all of that, “a new definition of masculinity is emerging” – one in which a manly man takes time off to be with his newborn child.
This is what the game is about: making more choices available for women at every level, as well as equal pay and promotions for the choices they make. This can’t be achieved without highly subsidized childcare and parental leave. Otherwise women are forced to choose between being a mother and being successful at her job. Just take the story of Alexandria Wallace, recently profiled in the Times, who ended up reverting to welfare checks because the childcare for her daughter was no longer funded by the state. As Womenstake notes, Congress needs to invest in childcare subsidies to prevent more stories like Alexandria’s, and to “avoid further economic decline.” It is literally what stands between many women and their desired job. But it is also what holds down pay and promotions, when women take time off for pregnancy.
A feminist victory is not about gaining a few placeholders in office. It’s not about making conservatives comfortable with that idea, either. Rather, it’s about constructing a society where women have the most possible choices. Women in the U.S., sadly, don’t. -Bryce Covert
Bryce Covert is a journalist and blogger who writes on feminism, politics and the energy industry. She has a B.A. in literature from Brown University and you can find her at www.brycecovert.com and www.twitter.com/brycecovert.
Monday, June 14, 2010
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5 comments:
This is an extremely important issue that has been raised time and time again. It's sad that it seems like no one is listening - we could so easily improve society in so many ways, but the push toward some kind of policy on this seems extremely weak.
I discovered this blog quite by accident, and am *quite* concerned about its direction, given the financial crises that many states are experiencing.
Where will the money come from for yet *more* subsidies, if fewer people are working, and those working are making less, whether male or female. There's a limit to how many taxes can be raised...
gdgm+,
Thanks for reading. Firstly, my point is that while Douthat is trying to say that women have achieved equality, we in fact have not. But in terms of the financials of child care, employment is the best economic policy this country can have. Who benefits when a young mother like Alexandria, ready and willing to work, has to turn to welfare programs instead because she has no one to care for her child? The more women (and men) at work, the more money they have to spend, the more taxes they pay, the better the gears of our economy grind. There are also plenty of places where we spending too much money--take the defense budget, which this year is a whopping $708 billion. Who says we can't take a small fraction of that to help women with quality child care? And even if taxes did have to be temporarily raised for this, putting people to work more than pays for itself.
And it's not like this is an untested idea. As you can see in my piece, Sweden is already doing it, and you don't see anyone worrying that Sweden is about to go bankrupt. In fact, most European countries have far better maternal care and benefits than in the US. It's not about whether or not we can afford it; it's about where our priorities lie.
Bryce Covert,
Thank you for your reply. I understand the concept, but as the saying goes, 'the devil is in the details'. You ask, "who says we can't take a small fraction of that to help women with quality child care?" The response is: how to articulate that to our political system, and translate it into legislation that the public will vote on and agree to. How will that happen?
I was also quite surprised at your claims about "nobody is worrying about whether Sweden will go bankrupt." With their declining population rate and economic challenges, Sweden DOES have those worries. See http://www.ekonomifakta.se/en/. And not to mention Sweden's varied differences from the US.
So indeed, 'the devil is in the details'. To finish with a quote attributed to Margaret Thatcher, "...Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They [socialists] always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them."
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