Everything Old Is New Again

Writing at Slate, Jack Shafer continues his assault on the trend stories about highly educated women eschewing careers to stay home and raise kids. The story, he points out, seems to pop up every few years in cycles—and often doesn't pan out.

It's actually older than he knows. In Stephanie Coontz's phenomenal Marriage, a History (which I wrote about yesterday) she notes that the 1920s saw a spate of articles about the "postfeminist backlash," with such headlines as "You May Have My Job, a Feminist Discovers Her Home" and "I Gave Up My Law Books for a Cook Book." There's a danger in extrapolating long-term shifts from short-term fluctuations, and journalism's "three-anecdotes-make-a-trend" rule of thumb doesn't help. (Well, it helps me, Julian Sanchez, when I need to turn out a "Whither America" thumbsucker on short notice, but not much of anyone else.)

Comments

[Russ D]

This is my favorite quote from the Shafer article:

She concedes the survey wasn't conducted with social-science rigor but calls it "a very good journalistic questionnaire."

Can't tell the journalists from the politicans anymore.

[Scarlet Kopf]

This is purely anecdotal, of course, but I am one of those women. They do exist to some extent. I not only traded in my career to stay home with them, I am their sole educator. (Homeschooling: Not just for Fundies anymore!)

[S.R.]

My first thought when I read that NYTimes article was, "yes, and...?" I have my doubts about the methodology, too, but it seems to me that if you want to have children, you should want to raise them. Today, this would probably mean one parent staying home and the other working, or perhaps both parents working part-time, but I admit that I don't understand people who go to the trouble and expense of bearing children only to pawn them off on relatives or some poor Filipino woman who's sending most of her paycheck back to her own children.

Whoever works and whoever stays home, the simple fact remains that someone has to raise the children, something about which the university women's studies gurus in the NYTimes article seem woefully ignorant. I'm surprised that, with their political convictions, they don't realize that the brand of feminism they're preaching is just shuffling the care of wealthy children down the pipeline to poor immigrants.

If you're going to have children, you're probably having them for the experience of having them. How much sense does it make to shove that experience off on other people?

[J]

Do we get a thread about Tom Delay being indicted?

[joe]

If anyone would care in throw some money in the hat, I'll be happy to quit my high powered job (You in the back, is something funny?) and stay home with my kid.

I'm not sure what this has to do with feminism.

[esme]

>If anyone would care in throw some money in the hat, I'll be happy to quit my high powered job (You in the back, is something funny?) and stay home with my kid.

Me too!

Actually I'm a woman with no high-powered job or kid. Nor a man to subsidize my living expenses.

I got some post-grad education though. And being around up close and personal to watch a human life develop and unfold sounds great to me.

[Dave Munger]

How about this. I'm a man who basically threw away his career in publishing to take care of kids, while his wife stuck with her Ivy-league career.

I was just at my 20th high school reunion, and it turned out "many" other guys had done just the same thing. We have a trend! Now where's my NYT article?

[David]

I wonder what the standard for using the word many is? Is it "any number greater than one that supports the premise"?

[joe]

David, only when the premise is one that a demographic group the source in question is courting wants to hear.

Remember the NYT's statement that they were going to try to do more to appeal to Red Americans?