Author Carrie L. Lukas, vice president of policy at the Independent Women’s Forum,presents plenty of standard—and correct—answers to the various conceits of women studies’ departments in the opening chapters of her book. She swiftly disposes, for example, of the complaint that women typically receive a fraction of men’s pay for the same work. The usual statistics are all here: If you account for the facts that women spend a half an hour less in the office than men every day, and 10 years less in the workforce over the course of a lifetime, the wage disparity effectively disappears. But these statistics deserve repeating, if only because the rallying cry “75 cents on the dollar!” seems to retain its great rhetorical power. (John Kerry used it in a debate back in 2004.) She also refutes the oft-cited statistic that one in four women is a victim of sexual assault, and concludes that marriage, far from the “hitting license” of women’s studies textbooks, is actually rather safe. Married women are less likely than divorced, separated, or cohabiting women to be victims of domestic abuse.
But by chapter 11, “Work in the Real World,”the clucking has begun in earnest. In a section entitled “The feminist working girl fantasy,” Lukas, by way of Friends and a host of other pop culture references,points out that the lives of Rachel Green, fashion designer, and Average Johanna, career girl, are very different. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Johanna has a roughly 6 percent chance of becoming a secretary. Lawyering and doctoring “don’t make the list” of the 20 most common professions for women, a fact that causes Lukas to sniff that “this list of occupations stands in stark contrast to the depiction of working women commonly found on television and in women’s magazines” and remind us once again that Young People Can’t Tell the Difference Between Television and Reality.
It’s an appalling condescension, worthy of the paid-work-as-exploitation crowd. It fails to acknowledge, for one thing, that men’s top jobs aren’t any more conventionally glamorous. (The top profession is truck driving.)The thought that women might find satisfaction in work that Lukas considers beneath consideration is just as unlikely to occur to her as it is to occur to Caitlin Flanagan. Lukas cites an Independent Women’s Forum/Pew poll to the effect that only 15 percent of women would work full-time, if they had their druthers,and an additional third would opt for part-time. Which all sounds fine—until you realize that the question was prefaced by the important qualifier, “if you had enough money to live as comfortably as you would like.” A third of truck drivers—and lawyers and surgeons—would also doubtless prefer part-time work to full-time work, and no work at all to part-time work, if financial conditions created a new Eden.
It’s then that Lukas begins to sound like The Simpsons’ Helen Lovejoy, prone to shouting, “What about the children? Won’t someone please think of the children?” Did you know that some children return to empty houses? Or that those who attend day care programs get nits and scabies? (Forget first grade, in that case.) After this hand wringing, Lukas admits, “No researcher I’m familiar with says that daycare will cause serious problems for most children.” The ambiguous wording proceeds from the ambiguity of the consensus. Within the single outfit that has studied the question in the greatest detail (the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development), researchers believe that children in day care have better verbal skills at 54 months but that their mothers have less of that biologically useful maternal attachment. The differences in health between day care kids and children at home were statistically insignificant by age 3. Lukas strips away the nuance, covers her tracks with a few grudging caveats, and still manages to create the impression that those feminists have been hiding something all along.
And that’s how you create a conservative narrative these days. Take a set of assertions,call it a majority opinion,and proceed to show how only establishment types could possibly believe it in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Because of this formulaic approach to intellectual engagement, the format of an Idiot’s Guide works well for the Politically Incorrect Guide series. Creative typography summarizes the content of each chapter in three quick “Guess what?” facts challenging the accepted wisdom.
The “Fertility Facts” chapter is a good example of how such disconnected observations obscure the complexity of the questions they purport to answer. Lukas correctly argues that “many women have been led to believe that they can postpone childbearing without consequence” but seems oblivious to the possibility that there might be good reasons for women to accept the risk of decreased fertility. One is better technology that can bring forth babies from what a generation or two ago would have been barren ground. Others are increased wealth and, yes, that much-maligned opportunity to pursue paid work. Although sorting cause from effect is tricky when it comes to poverty and motherhood, a 2004 Kennedy School of Government analysis of Britain’s Millennium Cohort data suggests early motherhood may compound the already poor prospects of low-income women who give birth at an early age—which is by no means proof that such woman should have made different choices.
Although they start at different points, the Flanagans and Lukases, leftist and rightist critics of women’s choices, arrive at the same place for the same reason: a refusal to see women as autonomous beings, capable of weighing alternatives and arriving at conclusions based on information about individual circumstances that the commanders of the Mommy Wars simply can’t possess, no matter how many polls they conduct. Whether the particular narrative about motherhood has women conscripted into service by capitalism or feminism, what’s missing is a cool-headed free market analysis, which would regard women as actors in an arena of choices, without the conceit of top-down management.
Horwitz’s aforementioned Cambridge Journal of Economics paper goes a long way toward providing this analysis. Recognizing that children and work are competing values, and that sociological evidence suggests one can outsource everything but parental love, he concludes, “The decision as to which person(s) will work in the market and which will (or will not) work at home can be understood, again, in terms of preferences and opportunity costs.” This description lacks that old comfortable strain of oppressor and oppressed. But as moral prescriptions go, “mind your own business” is as cogent as any.
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