My maternal profile

Today I lost another job to motherhood. Being visibly pregnant makes it hard to look for work, so I’ve registered with a temp agency. This morning the agency called to offer me a nice, month-long clerical job at a nonprofit that would involve some lifting of boxes up to 25 pounds. I still weightlift more than that, so it wasn’t a problem, but, stupidly thinking aloud, I reminded the recruiter that I was seven months pregnant. That did it—the client didn’t want me.

This is turning into a trend. A couple of months ago, after an excellent interview that I foolishly ended by mentioning my pregnancy (I thought it was visible, but I realize now it wasn’t to the interviewer), I never received a call-back. Two years earlier, shortly after returning from giving birth to my first child, I lost a long-term position because the progressive nonprofit I worked for decided they were no longer willing to accommodate my need for flexible or part-time work. (A nasty moral of my story you might have noticed: Don’t expect warm fuzzy nonprofits to be all warm and fuzzy toward mothers.)

Moms Rising has recently coined the term "maternal profiling," meaning discrimination in pay or hiring against women who are or might become parents (and The New York Times picked up on it, so it must be real). I’m here to tell you, those of us whose profiles are temporarily rotund know all about it. I’d love to hear your stories. Have you been maternally profiled?

In the meantime, learn from my mistakes and don’t be naïve. If you’re pregnant, wear a loose shirt to interviews and don’t mention it. Wait until they’ve offered the job before you negotiate the issue (it is illegal to discriminate against someone for pregancy). If you know what you can do while pregnant, don’t give them the opportunity to second-guess you. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

Blogs Are Like Plato

Gentle readers, I’m high on delusions of grandeur. Just when I was wondering if blogging was a ludicrous self-indulgence invented for people who have neither the skill nor the discipline to engage in more serious writing, I read that “blogs are like Plato.” (No, not Play-Doh.)

In an article on blogs in the New York Review of Books (one of my fave old-school rags), Sarah Boxer says, just like Plato, bloggers “often begin their posts mid-thought or mid-rant—in medias craze. They don't care if they leave you in the dust. They're not responsible for your education.” She uses the opening of Plato’s Republic by way of example:

‘I went down yesterday to the Peiraeus with Glaucon, the son of Ariston, to pay my devotions to the Goddess, and also because I wished to see how they would conduct the festival since this was its inauguration.’
Wait a second! Who is Ariston? What Goddess? What festival?

This set off waves of flashbacks to grad school (deep, dark secret: I studied philosophy in a past life), when we had long discussions of exactly what Plato’s theory of education might be and whether one person can “teach” another anything. But, yeah, that’s it—you’re responsible for your own learning. The trick is to awaken people’s curiosity about the contradictions and limitations in their ideas. Come to think of it, that’s not too far off from my ideas about teaching children.

So blogging isn’t just masturbatory opinionating divorced from any reality check. We bloggers are Important—we're Socratic gadflies (is this blog going to get me killed?). Anyway, check out Boxer’s article on blogging. Appropriately, although the NYRB has posted the article online, it didn’t include any links. Love it.

Juno's feminism?

I haven’t seen the movie Juno, whose star was just nominated for an Oscar, so take what I have to say here with a grain of salt. But after reading all the chatter about it, I’m depressed. This is what the New York Times calls “a feminist, girl-powered rejoinder to Knocked Up”? If this is feminism today, we are in trouble.

A movie that suggests a person can come through nine months of gestating and then surrendering her child unscathed is peddling a dangerous delusion. Before going to see this movie, I suggest reading The Girls Who Went Away: the Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Babies for Adoption in the Years Before Roe v. Wade or Meredith Hall’s recent memoir, Without a Map. Both books show just how devastating the experience of giving up a child is, one these women don’t seem ever to have recovered from. To be sure, part of the devastation was that these women largely gave up their babies unwillingly and they suffered shaming and ostracism for their pregnancies, something women today don’t face. But lest we think everything has changed, see Allison Crewes’ essay “When I Was Garbage,” in Ariel Gore and Bee Lavender’s collection Breeders. Crewes was a pregnant teenager who not so long ago nearly gave up her baby for adoption in circumstances that bear a lot of resemblance to those faced by women of generations ago; she was told she was unworthy of the baby, that it would be irresponsible to keep it, and everyone around her treated it as a given that she would give the baby up.

It may be true that, in the words of Entertainment Weekly’s online review, “director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody really don't give a hoot what you think about the right to life/right to choose/right to make jokes about teen sex,” but they surely knew what would be considered unthreatening entertainment in this political moment. Giving a baby up for adoption can be funny, while abortion has to be tragedy. This line from EW’s review is telling: “Juno would have been a very different movie had the young woman named for the queen of Roman gods chosen termination and brought her admirable young female clarity to that less gentle, more divisive decision — maybe truer, certainly not so funny.” I’m not sure adoption is so gentle.

See my later posting on Juno (after seeing the movie).

What will the Republicans do for (to) us?

As promised, here’s what the top three Republican candidates have to say about the practical problems facing mothers. Bottom line: Not much. All told, what they prescribe is even more application of YOYO—You’re On Your Own—the nasty regime families are presently struggling under.

None of them mentions the word “mothers,” or even the word “woman” except in the context of protecting traditional marriage “between one man and one woman” and prohibiting abortion, as if women exist only as wives and vessels. The proposals the candidates do make would in general add to the challenges facing mothers—abortions would become illegal and therefore (even more) unavailable and unsafe, the tax code would become more regressive, which would place more of the tax burden on mothers (since mother on average earn less than men and corporations, which would get tax breaks from these candidates), and, if Huckabee had his way, divorce would become difficult or impossible. None of them offers a plan to provide universal health coverage or even universal coverage of children.

For better or worse, John McCain says nothing about families or family values. He does mention the word “mother,” as in “the fight for life will be one of courage and compassion - the courage of a pregnant mother to bring her child into the world and the compassion of civil society to meet her needs and those of her newborn baby.” That sounds great. However, nowhere do I see any proposals for how to meet those needs.

He would cut the corporate tax rate and eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax Rate. I can’t see how this would help working parents, and more likely the cut in the corporate tax rate would shift the tax burden more heavily on to average working stiffs, including mothers.

Like the rest, Romney would appoint judges to overturn Roe v. Wade and define marriage as between one man and one woman. He would also enforce obscenity laws, promote software filters to block content from children, and support “school choice,” i.e. promote charter schools and private school vouchers, i.e. further undermine the public school system. He would also offer tax credits for parents who home school. This amounts to a credit for single-earner families, deepening the tax penalties on two-earner families. He would also further deregulate the health care industry and shift health coverage away from employers and on to individuals. A terrific idea, since so far the market has done a great job of providing health care, and individuals really need less security and more risk in these soft, easy times.

I got a sense of Mike Huckabee's seductive powers from his website. There are charming surprises like “Music and the arts are not extraneous, extra-curricular, or expendable - I believe they are essential. I want to provide every child these ‘Weapons of Mass Instruction.’ ” Aww, what a sweetie. Now, on to covenant marriage. Really—under Huckabee Arkansas became the third state to adopt covenant marriage, allowing couples to opt for a marriage contract from which it is hard to get out (but people aren’t stupid—hardly anybody has gone in for it). He believes “We do need to get serious about preventive health care,” but doesn’t specify what that means. “It is time to recognize that jobs don't need health care, people do”—right on. But that sentence finishes “and move from employer-based to consumer-based health care"—i.e. move health care even further into the market and shift more risk onto individuals. (See above on Romney’s similar ideas.)

Huckabee's Big Idea is a flat tax, which indeed is a revolutionary idea. It would be a steeply regressive step that would dramatically shift the tax burden away from corporations and the wealthy and onto us poor working stiffs.

There it is. Good night and good luck. We’ll need it, if one of these guys gets elected.

What's it like to need an abortion?

In honor of yesterday’s anniversary of Roe v. Wade, check out Salon’s terrific interview with abortion doctor Susan Wicklund. What a breath of fresh air and honesty Wicklund is after all that drivel from even Democrats (Hillary Clinton, this means you) about what a “tragedy” abortion is and how it is or should be rare. Wicklund points out that there’s nothing rare about abortion—it’s the most common minor surgery in the U.S. and Wicklund says 40 percent of women have had one.

There is no typical patient situation. It isn't all students who want to stay in school, it isn't all career women who want to continue with their careers and not have children right now. It isn't all single women who aren't married and not ready to have a child on their own. And it isn't all married women who had kids but now feel financially strapped. It's all of those women.

To think about this issue honestly we have to think what it would be like to be unwillingly pregnant.

People say they would never have an abortion because of their religion or for whatever other reason. Then they're sitting on that table, we're ready to start doing the abortion, and they want to tell me about how, when they were 17, they made a promise to be abstinent, and here they are at 21, not married and with an unwanted pregnancy. They just want to talk about it and say, I didn't realize -- I didn't understand what it would be like when it was me.

Here’s a note passed on to me by an abortion fund after I donated a small amount of money:

I am a 31-year-old single mother of three. I am currently unemployed and I don’t receive support for my three children. After I found out I was pregnant my partner was killed. My children and I are having a very rough time financially and I didn’t feel it was fair to any of us to bring another child into our situation. So I made a decision that was best for all of us.
Due to our financial situation I could not come up with the full amount to terminate the pregnancy. The counselor here at the Center for Women’s Health understood my situation and feelings. She worked to help me very hard. I hope that I am able to help someone else one day in my life.

What will the presidental candidates do for mothers?

You aren’t hearing much this campaign season about issues particularly facing women and parents, and you sure aren’t hearing the candidates offering practical solutions to the stresses facing working mothers. So I trundled my (virtual) self off to the candidates’ web sites to see if I could dig up the candidates’ positions on these issues.

First, the Democrats, at least the leading three candidates. Bottom line first, and then the details: Edwards is the only candidate, Republican or Democrat, who demonstrates that he has thought about the practical and economic difficulties specifically faced by women. The man gets it. Read this list of his proposals addressed to women and weep, as I about did, since it’s a longshot this man will be president:

Require businesses to offer paid sick days. Expand the child care tax credit and move toward universal preschool. Expand home health care and offer respite care for those caring for elders. Compensate women who pay less into Social Security, and therefore under current provision receive less benefits, because they are caring for children or other family members instead of working for pay. End poverty (disproportionately faced by mothers and children) and raise the minimum wage (two-thirds of minimum wage earners are women). Pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, which seeks to end wage discrimination against those who work in female-dominated or minority-dominated jobs by establishing equal pay for equivalent work. Remove some of the tax penalties exacted on low-income, two-earner married couples by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit.

And that’s just the stuff on his page on women. The proposals on his “working families” page are great for mothers too. The only major thing I see missing is paid family leave.

Obama’s offerings are nearly as good, the differences between him and Edwards on this score being largely a matter of presentation. Where Edwards speaks specifically to and about the difficulties facing women, Obama mentions only families and fathers. But, alone among the candidates, Obama mentions paid family leave (his plan is to encourage states to offer it). He, like Edwards, supports requiring employers to offer paid sick leave.

He would not only expand the child care tax credit, but make it refundable, so that low-income families could benefit from it. Obama, too, has a plan to move toward universal preschool and expanded child care funding. He would quadruple Early Head Start and increase Head Start funding. He would also expand funding for after-school programs (which always sounded frivolous to me, until I became a parent and began to wonder what you do with your kid between the end of the school day and the end of the work day).

About his plan to “promote responsible fatherhood,” I’m not too sure. (It sounds awfully like the Moynihan report, and is this where we want policy attention focused? How about rewarding responsible motherhood, or at least removing the penalties on mothers, which in the end amount to penalties on responsible fathers, too?) Elsewhere, he mentions that he would provide a special supplement to the Earned Income Tax Credit to workers who “are responsibly supporting their children on child support,” i.e. fathers. As best I can tell, his “Making Work Pay” tax credit would do little to erase the penalties on two-earner families.

Clinton’s families planks sound nice, in a vague sort of way. “Attracting and supporting more outstanding teachers and principals, and paying them like the professionals they are” is good, but precisely how? Reforming No Child Left Behind, also good, but how? “Giving new parents support and training to promote healthy development for their children” sounds all right, but not like bread and butter to me. Increasing access to early childhood education is great, but she gives no promise to move to universal preschool. She does mention expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and the child care tax credit, without offering details. She mentions family leave, but says nothing about paid leave. And she, like Edwards, supports legislation to provide those taking care of elders with respite care.

There you have it, folks. Next, on to the Republicans.

Dust and Divorce

I want to talk about dust. Yes, dust. Not one but two whole books have been published about it lately, and I think there’s something weirdly profound about dust. Start talking about dust and pretty soon you’re talking about the whole of gender roles. Dust leads to crap which leads to the timeless question, Who cleans the toilet? Right there you’ve got the basis for a thousand divorces, and you even begin to get at the relationship between gender and class. Remember, it was the Untouchables who cleaned toilets in India, and Gandhi and his wife almost got divorced when he insisted they clean their own toilets, that is, that she clean them. Whoa, that was fast.

I’m not kidding. Cary Tennis over at Salon just responded to a question from a woman whose husband threatens to divorce her if the house isn’t cleaned up. Tennis gave a cute, perky answer to the question that completely avoided the dust elephant under the carpet: gender. It’s one of the clues that makes me suspect that Cary is a man. No woman would think that this problem had a simple, buck-up-and-clean, practical answer.

A while back, I went to a Moms Rising house party and came away totally depressed because what everyone talked about was cleaning and how their husbands never do their share. One woman said she once left a basket of clean laundry sitting for 10 days, waiting to see if her husband would notice and fold and put away the clothes. Ever since then that’s become a joke with my partner. “Are you testing me?” we ask if laundry or dishes or filth sits around for a while. In fact, he does most of the laundry, although I generally clean the toilets and occasionally I find the symbolism of that intolerable and make a snide, passive-aggressive comment that could lead to divorce if I didn’t pull back from the brink fast. Luckily, we both deal with dust.

I came away from that Moms Rising meeting thinking, My god, have we come nowhere since the fifties? Did I just step through a time warp into The Feminine Mystique? I wanted to say to these women, Can’t we talk about more important things than dust? I found myself admiring and identifying with the three single women in the group because they seemed so much more empowered and positive. Even the recently divorced woman who described how hard and lonely it is was talking about real problems and not dust. I felt ashamed to be among the smug marrieds.

I felt like saying to the rest of the group, Just let the house be dirty and be done with it. But I realized I would sound like Linda Hirshman. In a much ballyhooed American Prospect article and then a book called Get to Work, Hirshman says women are making the bad choice to opt out of the workforce in droves and need to buck up and make better choices. Among Hirshman’s short list of antidotes to becoming a housewife: ignorance and dust. That is, never know whether there’s butter in the fridge or where it is, and leave the house dirty. There’s something appealing to me about remarks like this—“sinus-clearing,” in David Brooks’ words—and I think it’s useful to keep in mind. There’s a cost to sliding into these gendered divisions of labor and so you should resist it, as best you can.

But fighting passive-aggressive, one-on-one battles in your home over cleaning is a losing proposition that will get you angry, beaten down, divorced, or all three. Here’s the thing: Dust isn’t a personal problem. Women have been snarking at men to do their share of house cleaning for decades and studies show there’s been little to no improvement in women’s “second shift.” (The worst part is the disparity gets even worse after a child is born.) The answer why isn’t because men are jerks (or if they are, telling them so won’t improve things). In fact, the tax code made him do it. Among other things. (More on that later.) Getting yourself more power outside the house—with a well-paid job, for starters—and therefore too busy to do much cleaning, is a far better strategy. But there are barriers to that, as all you mothers out there can attest and I myself know too well, having spent chunks of time un- and underemployed since my daughter was born. On that subject Linda Hirshman offers nothing.

Tough as it is, we have to keep our heads above the dust and notice its connection to bigger issues. Because dust doesn’t matter. Although it does.

Pay me to get knocked up?

The New York Times’ Freakonomics has just renewed my faith in readers. So smart they are in response to the uncritical article by Melissa Lafsky on a study showing that financial incentives can increase birthrates. The study looked at Israel’s child subsidies and found that they increased the birth rate across cultural groups. The article dismisses other issues that influence fertility (such as the high costs of having children, which fall disproportionately on women, or of policies that could ease those costs, such as childcare funding, antidiscrimination laws, family leave, etc). This leaves one with the impression that child payments are the only effective way to raise fertility.

But smart readers pointed out that just because payments to families for having children raised fertility in one (unique) country doesn’t mean that’s the only thing that could affect fertility. “It’s like saying its been proven that your head aches when you hit a wall, but that DOES NOT MEAN that everytime you get a headache that you have hit a wall,” one reader put it.

I think a lot of women feel like they’ve hit walls against having more kids. That could be why they, ahem, are getting headaches. As if to suggest Western European countries with social policies that ease the burden on working mothers are trying the wrong tack, Lafsky writes, “Th[e study’s] conclusion could be big news for countries like France, Germany, and Sweden, which, in the face of lagging birthrates (a problem the U.S. doesn’t seem to be having), have adopted “explicitly pro-natalist policies” to reduce the costs of bearing children.”

Here things get odd. If you click on the link about lagging birthrates, you find no mention of France, Germany, or Sweden, and instead learn that the sharpest birthrate declines have been in the former Communist countries. Eastern European women in the article speak longingly of the days when Communist governments provided subsidized day care centers, not to mention other social supports, such as free apartments.

The women notably weren’t saying they wanted to stop working (for pay) to stay home with children but couldn’t afford it. They were saying it was hard to have more than one child without social support. So payments for having children don’t address their problems. Child payments wouldn’t provide the structures of support that the women longed for, and they wouldn’t reduce the costs to women of trying to combine work and parenthood.

By leaving all the costs of working in place, while subsidizing childbearing, child payments push women out of the workforce. But evidence suggests women don’t want to go. The countries whose birthrates have fallen sharpest are the industrialized countries with the least social support for working mothers: Eastern Europe, including Russia, and Japan, Greece, Spain, and Italy. Faced with barriers to working while having children, women aren’t dropping out of the workforce. They’re having fewer kids. Meanwhile, France, Germany, and Sweden have more social supports and higher birthrates.

As the article mentions, falling birthrates are an economic threat, “straining pension plans and depleting the workforce across the continent.” Europe “faces a shortfall of 20 million workers by 2030.” So, um, why not help keep mothers in the workforce? This could be a two-fer, likely producing a higher birthrate as well.

Keep all this in mind if Republicans again promote child credits instead of social support to working mothers (a la the Contract with America, in which child credits were the most expensive plank). It’s a bum deal—economically and morally.

Parents Raise Children Better than Government Does?

I seem to be thinking a lot about right-wing rhetoric lately. I can’t get a recent sound bite from Mike Huckabee out of my head. Heading out of his Iowa caucus win, Huckabee said, “Parents do a much better job of raising children than the government does.”

Huckabee’s one-liner raises the specter of bony-fingered Uncle Sam breaking into houses all over America to steal children. Although as far as I know there is no such government program, part of the brilliance of this rhetoric is that it, one, speaks to parents’ real fears and stresses about raising children, and, two, identifies a cause for those stresses: Big Gubmint. In fact, of course, the tremendous difficulties American parents are facing—long work hours, too little money, unavailable or unreliable or way too expensive childcare—are caused not by too much government but by too little of it. That is, too little of the right kind of government policies.

It isn’t only the far-right that is seduced by this anti-government rhetoric. For example, most Americans seem comfortable with government-supported daycare only if it’s for the disadvantaged. The various social policies Europeans enjoy, from extensive paid family leave to highly subsidized daycare attended by all strata of society, haven’t made it to this country not only because we still have not accepted an egalitarian view of women’s roles, but also because we don’t see children as the entire society’s responsibility. (That, I think, has a lot to do with race.) Instead, the philosophy of You’re On Your Own rules, which leaves parents struggling terribly, while clinging to the only supportive institutions they find at hand, namely family, marriage, and churches. Meanwhile, right-wing purveyors of the You’re On Your Own philosophy mask its nastiness with misty-eyed odes to family values and pin parents’ troubles on the very institution that could provide practical solutions. Brilliant.

What has Dobson done for you lately?

I’ve begun doing a little research into James Dobson. First of all, I chatted with the one religious conservative parent I know here in town. This is a fascinating experience. This woman, who happened into my life when I went looking for fellow writers in the neighborhood, is bright, thoughtful, and well-educated, not to mention glamorously beautiful. None of which, I am sorry to admit, conforms to my stereotypes about religious conservatives.

We find surprising points of agreement—including being disturbed by the epidemic of diagnosis of ADHD among little boys and the treatment of it with psychoactive drugs—and then subjects on which we lack a common language and stop short. (Such as the moment when she suggested I read Francis Fukuyama, “a liberal writer.” Say whaa? Or when she said that Dobson starts from the “scientific fact” that boys and girls have very different brain chemistry, “which is undeniable.” Except I do deny it. That is, whenever I hear a specific claim about gender brain differences and the behavior traits that supposedly flow from them, I seem to find that there’s shoddy logic or bad research behind it.)

So here’s what she said about how Dobson helped her in her parenting: She’s the mother of a very physical and active little boy and had been worried about the contrast between her son and the well-behaved, quiet little girls he played with. Dobson, she said, emphasizes how different boys are from girls and claims that boys are typically highly physical. This, she said, was very comforting.

Though she didn’t quite connect this to her own story, she said Dobson starts from what his readers already believe—in rigid gender roles, particularly—and fleshes it out and extends it. Isn’t that what most of us look for in self-help books? Not to have our ideas challenged, nor to have to work too hard with new ideas. And isn’t someone who talks in familiar tones comforting? Surely that’s a big part of why I listen to NPR and not Fox—those NPR people sound sort of the way my people talk (never mind that much of what they actually say is drivel. And Daniel Schorr is a blowhard).

I also went to Dobson’s site. Much of the information there is unobjectionable. The main article currently on their parenting section starts with the comforting words, “All moms experience moments when they feel unequal to the responsibility of motherhood and think: I just can’t do this! I don’t have the strength and wisdom for raising this child.” Ain’t it the truth? The bulleted advice I generally agree with too, from “pass on a love of learning” to “listen to your child.” Amen! The only item I can’t go for is “teach your child to pray” and talk regularly to God. There’s nothing horrible in praying, and the reasons I don’t believe in it are deep and complex (start with the fact I don’t believe there’s a deity out there to make requests to or discuss daily life with). With a little stretching maybe I can translate this to “teach your child to discover a source of values deeper than what people around her happen to think.” Okay, so it’s quite a stretch.

What I’m getting at is that we should try to separate out the cultural differences from the real political differences and in public political conversations be careful of railing against other people’s culture.

"James Dobson has really helped my family"

Check out the great post over at Mothertalkers about James Dobson and a run-in with a fundie friend. The friend (maybe too strong a word) kept repeating that Dobson "has really helped her family.” So what I would like to ask her is how? Exactly how. I’m not being snide. I really want to know. What does Dobson offer people that makes him such a force in America? He makes me want to vomit (on him), but millions love him, and I refuse to accept because they’re whackos as an answer. That kind of attitude is what gives liberals a bad name.

I think every progressive candidate and political activist should be asking this question. If we knew the answer we’d be on our way to being able to make common cause with folks who are now voting for people like Mike Huckabee, who said just the other day, “Families do a much better job of raising children than the government.” Only here’s the beauty part: Candidates who don’t have an ideological hatred of government could actually offer solutions to the real practical problems parents face. And then we could say buh-bye to James Dobson. And Grover Norquist and Pat Robertson and Phyllis Schlafly and Ralph Reed (hey, yippee, we already did get rid of him. Or he got rid of himself) and … name your favorites.

So, gentle readers, what’s the answer? I know exactly one religious conservative in the neighborhood, so I havcn’t the foggiest. Anybody out there know a Dobson fan to ask?

The Business of Being Born

Ricki Lake has a new documentary film out about childbirth that asks the question, “Should most births be viewed as a natural life process, or should every delivery be treated as a potentially catastrophic medical emergency?” The latter is how the current U.S. system treats birth, but Lake’s film suggests the other choice is better. The Business of Being Born makes the case for having a baby anywhere but in a hospital. Plenty of others have made this point in print (see especially Born in the USA and Birth as an American Rite of Passage), but a film by a celebrity could bring a much broader audience.

If you live in New York, LA, San Francisco, or Seattle, you can see the movie on the big screen in the next few months. Small screenings are scheduled at libraries and universities in other cities, and Lake and her director Abby Epstein encourage people to host their own screenings.

Check out their press room for reviews and articles about the film, including a cover story in Mothering magazine and an article in Salon.

Kudos to Chris Dodd

Here’s a reason to be sorry Chris Dodd has bowed out of the presidential race: Dodd is the original author of the Family and Medical Leave Act, which for the first time in U.S. history required employers to grant family leave. Okay, so it’s a minimal little law—the leave is unpaid, only large employers are covered, and you have to have worked in the job at least a year. But still. It was a good start.

Dodd also has sponsored a bill that would finally require employers to give paid family leave, His Family Leave Insurance Act would provide eight weeks of paid leave. The bill has gone nowhere. But let’s give the man credit for working on it.

Still, not too much credit. As a savvy politico friend of mine noted, unlike John Edwards, who has used his candidacy to bring issues of inequality into the national conversation, Dodd didn’t use his candidacy to draw attention to the issues of family leave and work–family life balance. I’m still waiting for a candidate to do that. I’ll keep you posted on the proposals of other Democratic candidates on these issues.

Meanwhile, as Joanne Bamberger has noted at the Huffington Post, the Republican candidates to a man are silent on the practical difficulties mothers (and fathers) face and how to solve them.

Gender roles and Sweden's daddy leave

The question about gender roles being a function of biology seems to hang a lot of people up when you start talking feminism and parenting. I think a lot of people think feminism means insisting on androgyny, and I think if you dig a little deeper many think that means rejecting the virtues and activities that have been traditionally associated with mothers—which isn’t my idea of feminism. I also think that many women resign themselves to their frustration over their partner’s failure to take an equal parenting role and make sense of how they themselves suddenly became hausfraus by attributing it to biology. I don’t know or care much what’s “natural,” but I’m for freedom from the penalties and rewards that enforce gender roles. We’ll certainly never know what’s natural until we erase those constraints.

These roles are deeply rooted and the mechanisms that enforce them complex. Case in point: The government of Sweden noticed that despite their generous family policies, which include a FULL YEAR of paid parental leave (go clean up your drool now), which could be allocated between parents as they choose, few fathers were taking advantage of it. In 1994, mothers were taking about 89 percent of the leave, and although Sweden has one of the world's highest rates of female participation in the labor force and smallest gender pay gaps, the gap persists and a glass ceiling is evident. So in 1995, Sweden set aside a month of paid leave that could be used only by fathers and in 2002 instituted a second month of “daddy leave.”

It’s too soon to tell what effect this will have (although fathers’ share of family leave has been going up since the 1995 change), and I don’t see how such an explicitly gendered policy could ever be instituted under the U.S. legal system. But let me leave you with the words of the Swedish parliament when the daddy leave was passed. Read ‘em and weep for our own benighted government.

"It is important that fathers use their opportunity of taking parental leave. Research shows that an early established and close relation between father and child is beneficial for both the father and the child and provides a good founding for the relation later in life. ...
An increased use of parental leave by fathers should contribute to a change in attitudes among managers so that they will view parental leave as something natural to consider when planning and organizing the work. Such change in attitudes is necessary for both men and women to dare to take parental leave without a feeling of jeopardizing their career or opportunities of development at work. Another reason for increasing fathers' use of parental leave is that women's prospects of achieving equal opportunities with men in the labor market are limited as long as women are responsible for the practical housework and children. A shared responsibility for practical care of children would mean a more even distribution of interruptions in work between women and men, and women would thereby gain better opportunities of development and making a career in their profession."

Dad happier too when mom earns a wage

Update on that study that found mothers who work for pay are happier than those without a salary: Rebeldad Brian Reid, guest blogging at the Washington Post’s On Balance, took a look at the study and noticed that there are interesting results in it about dads. Fathers are happier too when their partners have wage-earning jobs. “This conclusion does a great job of cutting down the dangerous and misogynistic idea that men really, really want traditional marriages and a clear-cut division of responsibilities in the household.” Here’s to that.

And here’s to Rebeldad, who gives lots of reason for hope. “This conforms to my longstanding bias: I think that equality in marriage makes for happier kids and a more stable union. The even better news is that the data for the study was gathered between 1996 and 2003, meaning that the study authors were looking at an older set of fathers than are walking around my neighborhood. I'm optimistic that the next generation will be even more equality-minded.”