Women Who Opt Out: The Debate over Working Mothers and Work-Family Balance

Introduction: Women, Work, and Motherhood in American History

| 3 Introduction Women, Work, and Motherhood in American History Bernie D. Jones When Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963, she pulled a veil off the “merry homemaker” image ascribed to American women of the postwar era (Tyler May, 1988; Coontz, 2011). It was the problem that had “no name,” women who asked whether being a mother and housewife was all there was to life. These were college-educated women who were told that they should not use their education and training in the workplace. The consensus was that well-educated wives were assets to their husbands as long as they remained in the home, because housewifery meant “true feminine fulfillment .” Her book became a best-seller and rallying cry for women eager to escape the “gilded cage” of domesticity. She later became one of the founding members of the National Organization for Women. This new women’s rights movement was developing a visible presence and institutions dedicated to the political and legal aspects of the struggle for equality. Friedan described the nascent movement: “For those of us who started the modern women’s movement . . . [t]he new paradigm was simply the ethos of American democracy—equality of opportunity . . . but applied to women in terms of concrete daily life as the theory and practice of democracy may never have been applied before. And how truly empowering it was, those first actions we took as an organized women’s movement, getting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act enforced against sex discrimination” (Friedan, 1997, 5). This was about women tackling the next step after suffrage had been won in the earlier part of the century: women’s economic citizenship (Kessler-Harris, 2001). 4 | Women, Work, and Motherhood in American History American society had long been conflicted over the very issue of women’s economic citizenship, and the women’s rights movement of the twentieth century brought these conflicts to the fore. Although the Industrial Revolution changed American society in that more men and women went into the workforce, “female workers’ economic prospects” did not change (VanBurkleo, 2001, 136). Their work was seen as less meaningful and significant than men’s work: “[W]omen could work and hold property, but not too seriously, not as a rule, and not for ‘family’ wages” (VanBurkleo, 2001, 137). Women worked for less pay than men and their failure to earn wages on par with male workers meant that their salaries were secondary, thus pushing women toward seeing their labor in the workplace as less important than domesticity. This trend persisted into the twentieth century, as the tensions over women’s work took different manifestations. Forty years after Friedan, Lisa Belkin addressed these tensions in her October 2003 article. Now that women have formal equality, what does it mean? Must formal equality equal substantive equality as the equal treatment feminists envisioned? Is all inequality the result of sexism? Can women who believe in equality and who call themselves feminists make choices that result in inequality for women in the workplace? The subtext to the article indicates a view among women of a younger generation of feminists that it is equal treatment ideology that is truly limiting by asserting that “choices” can only have one meaning, namely, that women must be absolutely equal to men. These younger women argue that feminism is meaningless without respect for women’s individual needs as being separate and apart from equal treatment outside of ideology. Those who wish to eschew work outside the home should not be criticized. The foundation for these contemporary debates lay in the late-eighteenthcentury ideology of “Republican Motherhood,” the notion that women’s efforts in the new nation should emphasize the domestic sphere of marrying and raising children to become civic-minded citizens (Kerber, 1980). By the nineteenth century, the rhetoric became one of “separate spheres,” that men belonged to the world of the public sphere—politics, commerce, and labor—while women belonged to the world of the private sphere. Women’s protection from the public sphere meant that their domesticity would enable men’s efforts in the public sphere. Continuing the duties ascribed to their foremothers of the Early Republic, they were to raise upstanding citizens (VanBurkleo, 2001). Women, Work, and Motherhood in American History | 5 Working women of the nineteenth century posed a challenge, though, to the idealism of domesticity and “separate spheres.” Not all women could stay at home as...