sally draper, come over here this minute...

(sorry for the hyper-link-looking text here. no idea how to fix this! blah.)
the reading i've been doing lately brings up a lot of interesting ideas about the historical changes to childhood. my favorite show-and-tell example of how what's good for children has changed is der struwwelpeter ("shock-headed peter," or mark twain's translation from the german, "slovenly peter"), a collection of short morality tales for children published in 1845. my sister-and-law brought back a copy for my husband from the struwwelpeter museum in frankfurt.

"slovenly peter," our anti-hero, refuses to have his nails or hair cut and becomes the creepy kid we see here on the cover:
in another story, a little boy won't stop sucking his thumb, and while out one day, a tailor comes along with gigantic shears and chops off the offending appendages (see image below). there's also the girl who plays with matches and burns to death and the boy who refuses to eat his supper and grows so skinny that he dies, too. fun stuff!
the idea of using scare tactics like these to teach children lessons is very much out of place in today's world of parenting where good moms and dads do their best to protect their children from the harshness of the adult world and home is a safe haven from danger.

viviana zelizer's pricing the priceless child (1994) describes the moral transformation that childhood underwent in the US during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which accompanied industrialization. when the home stopped being the center of economic activity, the role of children changed, too. no longer valued workers on farms and in factories during their young years, children came to embody future potential and emotional pricelessness. child labor laws, compulsory school attendance, and increased attention to child safety marked and reinforced these changes. the bedtime stories parents told their children surely changed, too.

the argument could be made that ever since these changes were set in motion, parents (and especially mothers) have continually needed to step up their game to ensure that their children would be well taken care of--emotionally, developmentally, physically and materially (see previous post on how we define kids' needs). we internalize these standards. this reminds me of my own reaction to one of my favorite scenes ever from "mad men" (aka the very best show ever). here's the clip (embedding disabled--sorry!).

i love how this whole scene is set up. betty and francine smoking at the kitchen table and francine standing up to reveal her pregnant belly. betty calling sally over for a talking-to, but not the sort that a 2009 mom would give (not a toy! warn children of risks of suffocation!). betty's final command for sally, which calls our attention to an unseen toddler.

i don't know how much of betty's mothering we can consider typical of the early 60s and how much is played up for effect (i'd love for a historian of motherhood to write about this!). what i am fairly certain of is that we are meant to be a little shocked and horrified. i was, and i was also a bit comforted--"at least i'm a better mom than betty draper." then again, if our ideas about what it takes to raise optimally well-adjusted, smart and successful children keep ramping up, which of our well-meaning mothering practices will future TV (or whatever eventually, god forbid, replaces TV!) viewers ridicule?

no role models

so, this morning i gave a little presentation on my research to my colleagues at university x (my alma mater) where i currently have an office for the duration of my leave from teaching, which opened up into a conversation about family/work balance. here's some of what i said:

Few employed mothers can maintain ideal worker status (unfettered by family responsibilities, able to work a more-than-full-time week) and few, understandably, want to do so when this means seeing their kindergartner for just one waking hour per work day. As much as the ideal worker norm further punishes mothers by pushing them into low-paying, part-time pink-collar jobs and leaves 40% of them and their children in poverty if they divorce their ideal worker husbands who get to take their ideal worker wage with them, this norm isn’t great for men, either. Okay, it is great for men who want to work 80 hours a week while their spouses raise the kids and manage all of the household work, but there are penalties for men who want to play an active role at home or share the second shift equally with their partners. Like women, men who take time off after the birth of a child or negotiate for a more flexible work schedule to meet family obligations may be branded as “not serious” about their job, overlooked for promotions and relegated to less desirable assignments upon their return to work.

Of course, the ideal worker norm makes any kind of care-giving a challenge, not just parenting. Taking care of an aging parent or an ill partner doesn’t fit into this model, either. Farther down on the ladder of selfless care (or perhaps on another ladder entirely), is the nevertheless crucially important issue or caring for ourselves. Can we make adequate time to be and do something more than our work? Or, as in my somewhat flip question for academics—Can we live a life of the mind and still make room for twice-a-week Pilates? Or maintain meaningful friendships? Or be active in spiritual, neighborhood or service communities? Or paint, run, square dance, or read for leisure? We all know you can knit at meetings, so I’ve left that one off the list.

My new project on mothering and work is, not surprisingly, hugely influenced by my own experiences as a tenure-track junior faculty member and the mother of a delightful two-year old daughter. Anthropologists make their careers by listening to other peoples’ stories, and this is where I’d like to open up the conversation to all of you and invite you to talk about your experiences of trying to find balance between academic work and care work—for others or yourself. A few questions: What have your challenges been? Have you had any role models in this capacity? What, if anything, should institutions like the University X do about this?

---

i followed-up on the question people weren't addressing--do you have any role models for a good integration of work with family and other involvements?

dead silence.

one junior faculty member weighed in to say that he has departmental colleagues with young children who do more than a minimum of work, but certainly aren't working 70 hour weeks (as he admitted to doing himself). these colleagues are labeled "dead wood" by others in the department. he said that he admired their commitment to their families and implied that they were probably happier and more well-adjusted than the workaholic professors he knows, but he also made it clear that others saw them as free-riders and less-than-committed to their work. in the hierarchy of academic insults, those jabs are pretty high on the list.

no one else had anything to say. the best we could do in a room of 12 or so faculty members was a cautionary tale.

i was pretty, okay totally, disheartened by this. at the small college where i teach, i have colleagues who pull all-nighters to grade and are uber-accessible to their students (note that the bulk of work i'm talking about here comes from teaching demands, not scholarship) but i also have colleagues who put reasonable restrictions on hours worked per week, even during the most labor-intensive weeks of teaching, and have involved family and non-campus community lives. last year, three female faculty colleagues (2 pre-tenure, 1 tenured) at my college each gave birth to their third child. this may not seem particularly out of place, but a recent chronicle of higher education article talks about the "more-than-two" taboo for female faculty (i think you need a subscription to view it--it's from the june 30, 2009 issue). if enough female professors continue to have babies and expect workplace policies and procedures to adjust to this norm, i think we will see change. i feel lucky to have friends and colleagues who are role models in this capacity. i hope that they see me in this way, too.

how i became an anthropologist

one of my departmental colleagues is teaching a class for new sociology and anthropology majors and minors this term and has invited everyone in our combined department to write a narrative about how we came to our field of study. even though i'm on leave this term, i did it. it was fun to write, but i probably took way too much time to do it (4 pages, single spaced!). i'll chalk it up as my writing exercise for the past two days. here are a few excerpts:

Though I’ll briefly mention that, when asked to write a report in fourth grade on what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said “archaeologist (it’s possible that I’d just seen “Raiders of the Lost Ark” for the first time, and I know for certain that the photos of archaeological finds in my grade school’s library books depicted glittery gold and jewel-encrusted things that are, I now know, totally unrepresentative of what archaeologists actually do tend to find), I feel like the most logical place to start this reflection on just how I became an anthropologist is to tell you that I spent my undergraduate career at a college a lot like College X [where i teach] (and not too far away from it, either), College Y, just an hour’s drive away. My college search was kind of all over the place—I applied to big state schools and little liberal arts colleges, not really knowing what I wanted or where I’d find a second home, which is (beyond academic concerns) what I really wanted. I visited College Y a few times and had a gut feeling that this was the place for me. When I started my first year, I remember picking classes based on what I thought would be interesting to learn about—Philosophy, Psychology, Women’s Studies and yes, Anthropology. I had the good fortune of having parents who trusted my instincts and didn’t push me in one way or another when it came to choosing an course of study. My mom would say that if I loved what I was pursuing (and also got a solid and well-rounded education), that a career or job path would follow. Maybe this isn’t the most practical advice, but I’m grateful every day for the faith they put in my abilities and decisions, and I like to think that they took a good risk that paid off!

p.s. this is a great reminder for me as a mom.

I applied to a handful of Anthropology Ph.D. programs during the winter of my senior year at College Y. I got a few rejection letters and a few acceptances. The only campus I visited during the application process was University X, where I set up meetings with some faculty members whose research interests overlapped with mine. I convinced my then-boyfriend to take the day off to drive me there and back. Compared to College Y's town, University X's town seemed like Mecca to me—bookstores, coffee shops, two Indian restaurants! A few months later I was accepted at University X, though without financial support in the form of an assistantship from the Anthropology department. A few weeks after that, I was offered a research assistantship (from one of those faculty members I met face-to-face on campus who also had an appointment in Women’s Studies, the department that granted my assistantship. Take-away message: face-to-face meetings can yield unexpected and invaluable results), which made the whole grad school endeavor economically feasible. I cried some very happy tears after that phone conversation.

---

My life has changed a lot in some pretty fantastic ways over the past few years, but these changes, especially motherhood, have made a continued commitment to West Africa as a fieldsite increasingly unfeasible. Fortunately, Anthropology is a flexible discipline that allows us to ask questions about what people think and do in any and all cultural settings. This term, I’m on my pre-tenure leave from teaching and have started working on a new project that returns again to my interest in women’s reproductive health in the US and carries over ideas about the relationships between reproductive and productive work from my dissertation research. In this new work I want to examine the transition to employed motherhood for women returning to paid work after the birth of their first child (where do you think that idea came from?)....Next summer I will start the fieldwork for this project in University X's town (where I still live), which will be comprised of interviews conducted with a cohort of women during their second or third trimester of pregnancy, and again after their return to work within their baby's first year....I am also really interested in how child care decisions made with a first child in early infancy affect long-term patterns of care within the family (especially how mothers and fathers share, or don’t share, child care responsibilities), but those answers are a long way down the road!

state-subsidize me!

$680--that's the amount we wrote a check for this morning to guarantee E a spot at a local montessori pre-school for next year. we're happy and confident that we found a good fit for all of us--in our neighborhood, small class size (six 3-4 year olds), kind, energetic and talented teacher, great space (indoor and outdoor), good drop-off time, and affordable. E met her future teacher this morning and, i think, charmed her socks off.

we've been mentally preparing ourselves for the added expense of tuition for next year, but needing to put up almost $700 right now (first and last month's fees) to secure her a place for a year from now made me feel panicky. we could swing it, but just barely. what if we were a one-income family? what if we made substantially less and had very limited savings? i know that many, if not most, families are in that boat.

i'm relieved that we're not in waiting list limbo now, as many pre-pre-school parents are. when E was born, two years ago, we were advised to get her on school and after-school waiting lists as soon as possible. all of the advice was like a persistent ringing in my ears. always there, but never very clear. who do we talk to? where? what are the best programs? do public schools have programs? how long are the waiting lists? it often felt like more than enough just to concern myself with whatever stage or phase baby E was going through, much less think years ahead to when she'd be a walking, talking, play-purse-carrying pre-schooler.

the census bureau reports that, after housing and groceries, the greatest expense for young families is child care. i know that for probably all of you reading this, that's not at all a surprise. what's especially discouraging is how few states provide anything close to universal access to early education for pre-schoolers. the national institute for early education research (NIEER) reports that, as of 2008:

-there are still 12 states that offer absolutely no state subsidized pre-school--no special education, no head start, nothing*.

-the state that does the best job of providing near-universal access to early education is oklahoma, where a full 88% of 4-year olds are enrolled in state pre-k, special ed, or head start programs (the next best are florida at 74% and georgia at 61% ).

-illinois and arkansas are the best states for subsidized pre-school for 3-year olds, with 32% enrolled in state pre-k, special ed or head start at that age.

-if the expansion of state-sponsored pre-k programs follows past growth rates, it will take 20 years to gain universal pre-k access for 4-year olds and 150 years for 3-year olds.

the US pioneered universal public school access for 6-year olds at the beginning of the last century, but we've clearly fallen behind. michael moore fans and freedom fry haters might already know that 99% of french 3-5 year olds are enrolled in pre-schools that are either free or at a small cost to families (ann crittenden, the price of motherhood, pp. 263-264).

we can afford a high-quality pre-school, but many families can't, and it's kids whose families have limited resources that need early education the most. i'm reminded of this classic bumper sticker/t-shirt image:


http://www.pureparents.org/data/files/Bake%20Sale%20T-Shirt%20%281066%29.jpg

*those states are alaska, hawaii, idaho, indiana, mississippi, montana, new hampshire, north dakota, rhode island, south dakota, utah and wyoming.

cutting corners

"In the race against time, parents often inadvertently cut back on children's needs as well. For one thing, they cut corners in physical care. One working mother commented: "Do kids have to take a bath every night? We bathe Jeremy every other night and then otherwise wash his face and hands. Sort of sponge him off. He's surviving." Another mother questioned a child's need to change clothes every day: "Why can't kids wear the same pants three or four days in a row? When I was a girl, I had to change into fresh clothes every day, and my favorite clothes went by so quickly."

--Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Second Shift (Penguin, 2003), p. 206

i re-read this passage this morning and something about it really sticks in my craw. my pencil-written margin question is "who defines needs?" i can see her making this point to emphasize that parents see their own busy work/home schedules as interfering with an important aspect of child care, but my read is that the moms she's quoting here don't seem to think that every-other-day baths and re-wearing the same (presumably un-filthy) clothes are sacrifices of their child's "needs." neither do i. we do the same things in our house. maybe that's why this stood out to me ("hey hochschild, don't judge me for letting my daughter wear the same jeans three days in a row!")

it's a small point, but in hochschild's astute account of how american working families negotiate gender ideologies and divide up domestic responsibilities, i was a bit taken aback by the idea of some kind of universal, static parenting standard creeping into her analysis. an imagined sharon hays debates arlie hochschild in my mind--"this is intensive mothering she's talking about here! moms can never do enough or get it just right, can we?"

i think the core of my complaint and unease is the use of the word "needs" here. when it comes to child rearing, it's easy to say that children have needs, but when you get down to it, they're difficult to define or operationalize. they've certainly changed a lot over time (see, especially, rima apple's work). i think everyone agrees that kids need love, but we could talk for days about what that means, right? granted, love is a complex concept to pin down. but what about those more pedestrian aspects of parenting that reflect loving care? is a daily bath a need? what about 5 servings of (organic?) fruits and vegetables? being read to? primary care from a parent? 30 minutes of vigorous physical activity? in various arenas, i've seen/heard all of these labeled as "what children need."

can we give all of these things every day?
if we accept all of these as "needs" do we set ourselves up to be failures as mothers in our own minds?

amazon research

though the title of this post may not seem surprising coming from an anthropologist, it's probably not what you think. the research of which i write has nothing to do with the yanomamo or any other folks who live in amazonia, but instead, amazon.com.

i've been typing up notes from arlie russell hochschild's the second shift (2003 [1989]) and thinking about how women, men and families strategize (both practically and ideologically, as hochschild discusses) to get paid work and house/family work done. i was reminded of all of the amazon entries i'd paged through online when E was a baby, i was going back to work and needed advice about nursing/pumping. when hochschild was writing in 1989, she noted that there was a multitude of advice books for employed moms, but none for employed dads (27). i wondered if this was still true.

to do a quick survey of the field of books written specifically for employed mothers and working fathers as either 1) how to "do it all" advice manuals or, 2) memoirs of the authors' own mis/adventures in parenthood and paid work, i did separate amazon searches--"working father", "working mother" and "working family."

here's what i found, looking at the first 10 pages (120 entries) of each search's results:

"working family"--2 titles
"working father"--3 titles
"working mother"--51 titles (plus 2 more that came up in the "working family" search)

i expected a discrepancy, but was still a little surprised at the huge gap between "mother" and "father" books. clearly, employed motherhood is still the "marked category" that draws attention from both writers and readers and is understood to require a level of balancing/juggling/managing not attached to employed fatherhood. a few titles demonstrate this:

42 Rules for Working Moms: Practical, Funny Advice for Achieving Work-Life Balance by Laura Lowell (2008)

Mothers on the Fast Track: How a New Generation Can Balance Family and Careers by Mary Ann Mason and Eve Mason Ekman (2007)

The Stuporwoman Files: Observations of an Overworked, Overhwelmed, Overjoyed Working Mother

by Monica L Lewis (2005)

Help Me Before I Go Crazy: Adventures from a Working Mother's Life by Marjorie Nightingale (2004)

Flex Time: A Working Mother's Guide to Balancing Career and Family by Jacqueline Foley and Sally Armstrong (2003)

i think the second shift has a lot to say about this. hochschild made calculations based on major time-use studies from the 60s and 70s and found that women worked 15 hours longer per week than men--a full month of 24-hour days more per year when paid work, housework and child care were combined (2003: 4). i wonder how much has changed since then*? if the books (or lack thereof) give us a clue, probably not much. the most recent of the three "working father" books was published in 2002, whereas three of the 51 "working mother" books were published just this year.

*i'm looking for more recent studies that document hours spent in employed work and house/family work--if you know of any, let me know!

the return of lady professor

as most of you who are reading this probably already know, i'm on a term-long leave from teaching and have started a new research project. my blurb for the faculty newsletter went something like this:

Carrie is working on a new research project that will examine the transition to employed motherhood for women returning to paid work after the birth of their first child. US Census data indicates that over half of employed women who become first-time mothers return to work by the time their infant is three months old. The "fourth trimester" is a time of great change and adjustment for women and their families, and for many new moms this also includes the physical, emotional, social, financial and organizational challenges of integrating mothering and paid work. This interview-based ethnographic research will redress the lack of in depth, qualitative investigation into this transition and seeks to understand how employed women make child care decisions (writ large) pre-natally and whether/how they implement those decisions post-partum, as well as the meanings new moms attach to their strategies to integrate their lives as mothers and workers.

these past few weeks, i've been doing a ton of reading that has been, in equal parts, fascinating and exciting and frustrating. social science research on motherhood and mothering emphasizes the personal, relational and emotional triumphs and joys of being a mom while embedding all of these experiences in harsh political-economic realities--mothering is widely acknowledged to be the most important job in the world, but is still the least valued (to paraphrase ann crittenden). i love that this new project resonates with (and frankly, completely grew out of) my own experiences of being a mom and working for pay.*

i was recently reminded of advice from my friend sarah via another friend, lexi. sarah advises those of us who should be writing to start the day by writing something. anything. this feels like the perfect venue to share some of what i'm learning, as well as my own reactions and reflections. again, as when i started this blog, i can't promise myself that this will be a daily practice, but i know it will be a valuable one to help me process some of the stuff i've been thinking about. so here's my morning writing exercise:

yesterday i read about divorce. it was not fun. i grew up having very few friends whose parents were divorced. i always chalked it up to living in a predominately catholic neighborhood and attending parochial school through 12th grade, but now i see something i had been unable or unwilling to acknowledge.

divorce makes women and children poor.

divorce certainly can be emotionally devastating, but it's the financial part that can be the real killer. in my middle-class childhood neighborhood, most moms were at home full-time or worked part-time jobs. in many american families, it is women who are cutting back on hours or leaving work altogether because they want to provide a greater level parental care to their young children (why it is women who are overwhelmingly doing this is another massive can of worms, and i'm sure you can guess many of the reasons why). lots of the moms i knew were college-educated (that's where they met their husbands) but left their teaching or office jobs or stopped working full-time when they started having kids. a few sobering facts (paraphrased from crittenden's the price of motherhood):

-part-time workers (65% of whom are women) in the US are not entitled by law to earn as much per hour or receive proportional benefits as full-time employees, and on average earn about 40% less per hour than full-timers (p. 97).

-a survey by catalyst found that employees who reduced hours to part-time (most of whom were mothers) reported no change in their workload. 10% reported that their workload had increased (p. 97).

take home message: part-time employed moms make far less per hour of work than full-time employed dads and are expected to do just as much work, or more, in a shorter amount of time.
and as we know, neither non-employed moms nor employed moms get any compensation for the family work they do at home that allows children to be nurtured and thrive and allows husbands/dads to function as the ideal workers the marketplace demands--those who are unencumbered by domestic/family responsibilities, can work long hours, don't need to take time off to care for sick kids, etc.

but what about divorce? if the marriage ends, how are women compensated for functioning as non-ideal workers outside the home (and dramatically cutting their own earning potential in the process) in order to work more at home as primary care-giver for the child/ren and manage family responsibilities in a way that (presumably) both women and their partners think best? some more facts:

-neither a married spouse nor children have any legal claim to the other spouse's income aside from basic provisions of shelter, clothing and food for the kids (p. 111).

-no state court requires an equal standard of living for all members of a household after divorce (p. 151).

-though a survey of women indicated that 80% thought they would be able to get alimony if they divorced, only 8% are actually awarded any (p. 156).

-a 1992 survey conducted by the department of education found that only 6% of custodial (post-divorce) parents (mostly moms) expected any support from exes in paying for their children's college tuition (p. 126).

-when ann crittenden interviewed california state legislator bill morrow (R) about his opposition to that state's 1988 legislation to increase child support payments (where even high-earning dads were paying no more than $300 per month in support despite CA's high cost of living), he said, "my parents were children of the depression...they didn't have anything, and they got ahead. you don't have to be middle class to succeed. we can't guarantee that every child can be middle-class or upper-class even if dad is. that's not necessary or even desirable" (p. 174, emphasis added).

-approximately 40% of divorced moms end up living in poverty (joan williams, unbending gender, p. 115)

moms love their kids. sometimes women make decisions that greatly reduce their economic power (really, the only sort of power that matters much) both in and out of marriage to do what they think is right for their families, and especially their children.

women are smart. the moms in my neighborhood were smart. even if they didn't know that their chances of receiving any alimony or adequate child support were slim if they divorced, or that despite their college degrees that they'd likely end up poor, i am sure they sensed that their lives, at work and at home, would be radically changed if they divorced. to what extent did these women put up with ungrateful, unloving, cheating or even abusive spouses because they knew that they couldn't leave the marriage and know for certain that they, and their kids, would be able to make ends meet? i never thought to ask that question. now i do.


*it's sometimes tough to find the right words to describe women who are conventionally known as "working mothers." i was raised by a working mom who wasn't employed and was never remunerated for any of the countless hours of family work she did to care for me and support my dad. i am also a working mom, but one who does get a paycheck for her (non-caregiving) work.