Miriam Peskowitz and Sharon Hays both focus upon the balancing act of motherhood and work in thought provoking books. Each author is concerned with how our society treats women seeking to maintain—voluntarily or due to economic pressures—some sort of equilibrium between raising children and working for wages. I found it fascinating to [End Page 124] consider these books side-by-side; sifting through their many stories offered lots of fodder for ruminations about women's contributions to domestic and workplace spheres, both in reality and ideally.
Originally intending to write a memoir, Peskowitz included others' voices at the urging of Seal Press editors. She sought to chronicle "the playground revolution" (her initial working title), as she experienced it personally after the birth of her daughter in 1998, and as she experienced it more broadly. Her book ends up bridging a journalistic approach with a personal one: part memoir, part accumulation of stories and ideas from women much like her and from those with very different lives. The result is an interesting journey through the playgrounds and other places on many mothers' (and stay at home fathers') circuits. Perhaps because this isn't a strictly scholarly book, she elicits a friendly intimacy from many of those she interviews. The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars is a personal survey of how several families divvy up work and child raising, with reflective musings about what these configurations might mean.
Sharon Hays spent three years researching in the field, beginning in 1996 at the onset of welfare reform (officially, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996), splitting her research time between two welfare offices in different types of cities. Her original research provides an in-depth view of how welfare reform affects real lives, rather than getting caught up—as politicians are apt to do—in the theoretical merits or pitfalls to these sweeping reforms. Hays' thorough and scholarly work takes a critical look at the welfare system, but the subject matter is so real that the reader experiences the mind and soul numbing monotony and despair of the welfare experience. The book succeeds in keeping real the human cost of a systemic government policy, a very difficult task.
In promoting her book Peskowitz uses the current "mom media" circuit well, from an interview on Literary Mama (literarymama. com) to Mothers Movement Online (mothersmovement.org). Her blog (playgroundrevolution.com) chronicles her work-and-life trajectory. Between book and promotion of the book it's possible to feel that you kind of know Peskowitz and could in fact run into her on a playground near you.
Hays' book, published by Oxford University Press, has some scholarly reviews and was named one of the "Outstanding books for the general reader" in 2003 by the American Library Association. An excerpt from the book appears on Mothers Movement Online, and an interview with her appears in The Sun magazine. While it can be slow going to plow through, this book truly deserves a wide readership. In the acknowledgements Hays mentions her personal tie to the subject: her mother-in-law, now deceased, raised her husband and his sisters as a single mother on welfare. Writes Hays of her mother-in-law, "The man she brought up, the one I love, could not be a greater testimony to her strength of character, and her commitment to serving the larger good."
The way Hays acknowledges her mother- in-law touches upon one of those notions plaguing mothers—particularly in (or even after) this third-wave era of feminism—the "good mother." Just the notion of good enough mother can set many women, regardless of economic status, into crisis.
Although Peskowitz does reach out to learn about mothers with situations different from hers, including some advocates for women on welfare, the bulk of her attentions (until the last part of the book) go to women with relatively greater economic and educational privilege. [End Page 125] Peskowitz points out that the idea of whether to work isn't entirely a matter of free will. The American workplace has not accommodated a spirit of family friendliness, even as men and women try to embrace a shifting set of roles that would mean both males and females share parental duties more equitably.
Her pursuit of hard data about women absent from the workplace is wonderfully illuminating, highlighting how stepping outside the paid workforce renders any societal sense of women's contribution immediately invisible. She calls the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, and the National Center of Health Statistics in her search to ferret out real numbers to tell the story about what mothers do in terms of work and family. By doing so, she realizes how much is missing from the data being collected. For example, Peskowitz writes:
Scanning the data fields on my screen, I was reminded that mothers are unemployed too. Is an unemployed mom counted as a stay- at-home mother? My cousin Ally was laid off from her dot-com job several years back. She went back to work months later. It's tempting to count her as a stay-at-home mom, but she wasn't. She counted as an unemployed mom—that is, if she had even applied for unemployment insurance. If she hadn't then she couldn't be counted.
Through the Institute for Women's Policy Research, Peskowitz finds a way to interpret data that gets at the issues she's investigating: "the nuanced story about mothers' work lives I'd been searching for." The numbers she finds suggest that part-time work is an option many mothers employ during their children's infancy and preschool years (44 percent during infancy, 37 percent during the preschool years). Even with school-age children, 37 percent continue to work part-time.
Peskowitz argues that while the generation following the '50s housewife (the '70s feminists) won certain access into the workplace, whatever "have it all" mindset the women following the '70s (Peskowitz' current generation of young mothers) hoped for, hasn't materialized in the new millennium. Peskowitz tows a line we've heard before: women of that initial out-at-work-like-men generation didn't fight for the chance to fully parent and fully work, instead accepting work over parenting. The entitlement of the next generation (hers) assumed women could work and raise families in relatively equal measures, the next logical step for those women who blazed their way into new professions (and had families as well). It turned out, to Peskowitz' considerable shock, that this path had not been set before her at all. Of her own experience Peskowitz writes:
Quitting my full-time job contradicted everything I always knew was right and true in the world. My own mother had worked when my brother and I were young, and I always admired her tenacity and feminist commitments. My life, too, had been committed to the public sphere. I taught, I wrote, I spoke. I had come into adulthood as a daughter of feminism and the daughter of a feminist mom. I felt, well, entitled to any life or job or career I wanted. To leave my job for motherhood went against everything I thought life should be.
Peskowitz couldn't fathom diving back into the intensive (and for her, commuting) world of academia (she was a recently tenured professor) soon after giving birth. She wanted—surprising though it was to her— more time with her daughter, and the chance to focus more of her energies upon her. And so she walked away from tenure and a stable career, trading them in for the unfamiliar [End Page 126] landscapes of playgrounds and adjunct professorships.
For the women Hays encounters in her exploration of welfare reform, balance between work and parenting isn't so readily a matter of the free will that women in more privileged positions experience; overwhelmingly for mothers on welfare this balance includes sole responsibility for their children. Since 1996, for low-income mothers seeking government assistance, placing parenting above work means a loss of already finite resources. Under the Clinton era welfare reform, certain values were placed high on the pedestal: work above parenting, controlling fertility, and the refuge (however false it may be for some) of marriage. Hays points out how stringent the rules have become while the actual work options— low-paying jobs without benefits or even steady hours—cannot accommodate a family economically or otherwise.
The rules—a "job search" that includes 40 job contacts with places that are currently hiring within 30 days, attendance at job training workshops and taking any job she may land—are unyielding. If a woman (and overwhelmingly those on welfare supporting young children are women) does not adhere to the rules, she is sanctioned. To be sanctioned stops benefits for a time and at the same time reduces one's possible lifetime benefits, which in most cases are two to five years, total. The ticking clock in a welfare office isn't biological; it's one's lifetime allotment of various sorts of aid. A woman has no recourse to refuse any work, not on the basis of impossible hours, nor childcare crises nor family illness, nor a poor work situation.
Most of the Personal Responsibility and Work Act addresses work requirements; there is, however, one provision of the Act that addresses the most personal of issues in an immediate and forceful way. This provision, which directly impacts the life in the welfare office, is the "family cap"—barring from welfare receipt all children born to mothers who are already on welfare:
The reality of this policy is faced by women like Joanne, a 29-year-old mother I met at a follow-up interview in the Arbordale welfare office. Joanne received welfare benefits for herself and her five-year-old daughter, Amanda. Her six-month-old son Tony, however, was conceived while she was on welfare—he was therefore a capped child. Joanne was physically abused by Amanda's father, so she left him when her daughter was a toddler (and when she began to realize that the abuse was affecting her baby girl as well as herself). Less than a month after Tony was born his father left them, apparently unable to face the responsibility of supporting the whole family. Joanne and the two kids had since moved back in with her parents, sleeping in their living room.First, as Gwendolyn Mink points out, this policy is arguably unconstitutional in that it systematically operates to penalize women for exercising their right to reproductive choice.
Additionally, marriage is encouraged even if the reality of marriage doesn't guarantee one's financial stability. The jobs women are forced to take adhere to the government's "work first" policy. Hays writes about how this policy emphasizes "expedient entry into the labor market rather than long-term, career-oriented training. Even though many of the caseworkers I met recognized that low- wage jobs were inadequate to cover the costs of raising children, state policymakers deemed the work first model the most realistic strategy given the time limits and federal work participation demands." In other words, Hays describes a two-tiered democracy, one in which [End Page 127] even modest economic independence allows one to make choices; another—the welfare tier—dictates choices taken for granted by everyone else.
In The Truth Behind The Mommy Wars many of the mothers Peskowitz meets (and Peskowitz herself) envision feminist ideals to include room for women choosing to take time from the paid workforce in order to raise families. This is not necessarily their mothers' feminism at work or that of their older colleagues, many of whom sacrificed time with their children in order to advance their careers. But to definitively say that the free will to focus upon family isn't a feminist choice ruffles some feathers. Who exactly gets to decide what "counts" as feminist? Peskowitz lets us hear from many who would argue that to consciously choose family over career is a feminist choice due to its deliberate sensibility. She writes, "The story told by new mother activists is that many of us reject classic feminism's rejection of home and family, much as we benefited from feminist inspiration, not to mention the expanded opportunities we received. Second-wave feminism, though, was energized by housewives, by women who were able to look at domestic life and motherhood with a critical edge. Perhaps this can happen again."
Hays does not explicitly bring feminism into her discussion of low income women's lack of agency. The women Hays encounters are so clearly penalized by the combination of familial responsibilities, lack of substantive financial potential, and a system that undervalues women's worth both to their families and the larger economy, that the reader yearns to have these injustices named and put into a directed feminist analysis.
For example, Hays describes the underground daycare options for women on welfare. Often, former welfare recipients create informal home daycare situations (mainly caring for the children of women receiving welfare). Some of these childcare providers left welfare specifically because they wanted to care for their own children; others do this after the clock runs out on their benefits. These daycare situations are often overcrowded, unregulated, low paying and unstable. And they are a tacit nod to the fact that the government cares more about reducing the number of women receiving welfare than that their children receive quality childcare, by far the largest expense (to workers or to the government) if provided by a licensed facility. An overview that questions more than economics or governmental social policy is necessary to examine these priorities. The Personal Responsibility Act contradicts many real-life personal responsibilities, that much is clear.
Feminism, whatever it is or however we define it, must enter into any meaningful discussion about women, work and mothering. For many pondering these issues a logical next step is for some sort of mothers' movement to rise up from the smoldering ashes of all of this confusion and unfairness. Couldn't women unite to demand that the non-paying caretaker role be better valued and that women (and men) transform the American workscape so that part-time labor is adequately compensated, thus allowing more flexibility between the paid workforce and family? Groups like Mothers and More point out that women (largely) also put in a great deal of labor caring for other family members, such as the elderly or chronically ill, again without compensation or societal acknowledgement. In current society "women's work" remains just that, with all its less than glorious connotations. [End Page 128]
Reading these books back-to-back has made me think about how parenthood is at once the great equalizer—we all change diapers, we all feel proud when our babies shed those diapers—and not such a great equalizer at all. In a democracy, there is some unspoken untruth to the notion that everyone's participation is somehow matched. Even though Peskowitz faces unfair workplace discrimination as an adjunct professor, and even though she does more than her husband in the domestic realm, she did enjoy (and acknowledges) the flexibility to make a choice about how she balances work and family. She makes a fair point that even wealthy women setting aside powerful careers make economic sacrifices if they make family their priority. Yet, for a woman on welfare to make a similar choice— family over work—plunges her from poverty to extreme poverty. It would be stretching the truth to deem their sacrifices parallel, especially if a woman on welfare had to balance her options as the sole parent and additionally the sole provider. Class, economic and educational opportunity, the cushion of family with means, the ability to live where schools are good and safety is assured, these things cannot be ignored. Without a very truthful assessment of these issues, a meaningful and broad- based mothers' movement—a revolution of mothers—cannot succeed.
As I read Peskowitz' book, I felt as if I were reading about my friends, only in two other cities. Her arguments reminded me how much I think women with privilege struggle to acknowledge their advantage. Last year, at a dinner with three other friends (mothers all) I brought up The Mommy Myth (by Susan Douglas & Meredith Michaels), a book I'd just finished reading. One other person at the table had read it. She could not cede that all of us at the table—none worked full-time for money—are privileged to be in that position. She felt burdened by parental responsibilities and by how she has more of those responsibilities because her husband earns the money. She saw their imbalance within the marriage as inherently unfair. Not that my friend's set- up is easy or even fair, but to be a two-parent, one-income family in a country where that is not an option for many, remains a privilege. Until more privileged women can come clean—our reality, even if imperfect and burdened in myriad ways, isn't on a par with those struggling to survive—we can't make the revolution that is needed, for ourselves and for all mothers.
Both of these books are dense with compelling stories detailing women's struggles to find ways to raise families and support those families, to figure out how to be adults in a larger world and good parents within the intimate sphere of family. It's a lot of stories, and at times the stories begin to blur. This is the point. Peskowitz and Hays are writing about real lives. They want us to invest less in abstracts than in the reality of people's experiences. The stories shared are different; Peskowitz by and large creates a set of narratives that are much more interior (and, if you're anything like me, at times eerily familiar) than Hays' accounts. Hays' accounts are mainly about women's literal survival and how they pull that off, or disappear further to society's margins. She doesn't have to tell you how heartbreaking it is to peer into these women's lives briefly, but she does tell you how heartbreaking it is, and this underscores how criminal the so-called welfare reforms are. From what is complicated and personal we are pressed to think larger and more theoretically, even idealistically, about what is needed for real families to thrive. Although Peskowitz calls for revolution from the playground, Hays' stories are the ones that caused me to want to rise up and push for change.
