turner (02/15/83)
#N:ucbesvax:10300003:000:1816
ucbesvax!turner Feb 14 20:13:00 1983
Hello Gil, Voice of Reason! I, too, have been thinking about
how people are always framing the children/career controversy with
the tacit assumption that work-roles are immutable. The "one-parent-at-
home" adherents ("mommy-at-home", usually) obviously suffer from this
assumption, but so do those who would like to see child-rearing made
more equitable.
Employers have a great deal invested in "fear of sacrifice",
whether it is a mother's fear of not sacrificing her children's well-
being on the altar of a career, or a father's fear of sacrificing his
career on the altar of a family. More work can be gotten out of Daddy,
and when Mommy finally does go looking for work, her market value is
significantly lower.
Notably, no mere swapping of roles will alleviate the problem.
People sense this, but blame themselves rather than employers. These
employers are often glossed by the more defeatist among us as "society".
Heaven help us if we have regressed so far in out vision of democracy
that we imagine such a small minority to be so powerful!
The idea of "re-extending" the family is a difficult one for
those who are used to thinking of the family as the "basic unit of society",
without questioning how this unit came to be conceptually packaged in
its present form. But any study of the history of the American family
will leave a strong impression of its CURRENT artificiality.
An interesting defense of the idea of equalization of child-rearing
can be found in Dorothy Dinnerstein's "The Mermaid and the Minotaur".
She does not look too much at the (admittedly far-reaching) social
changes that this would require. Perhaps something interesting can be
worked out in these "pages".
Michael Turner