Women’s Work?
Alison Wolf makes an interesting argument: career equality between the sexes has negative repercussions for society. In this article, (link via Arts and Letters Daily) she claims there are three results:
-the death of sisterhood, or an end to the millennia during which women of all classes shared the same major life experiences to a far greater degree than did their men.
-the erosion of “female altruism,” the service ethos that has been profoundly important to modern industrial societies, particularly in the education of their young and the care of their old and sick.
-the impact of employment change on childbearing. We are familiar with the prospect of demographic decline, yet we ignore – sometimes wilfully – the extent to which educated women face disincentives to bear children.
I’m not sure where to begin on how messed up this article is, but I’ll try. (Also, the last sentences of three of the four final paragraphs are strange in tone and seem like mistakes.)
First, her assumption of some prior “sisterhood” in which women shared experiences re-visits one of the key mistakes of early, 70’s era feminism, where “women” really meant “rich, white women” and did not accurately or fairly represent the multiplicity of women’s lives.
Second, she decries the decline in volunteer social services, but only implies a conclusion, and one that’s disturbing at that: that educated women should leave the workforce to resume the unpaid social services of the past.
The final concerning implication in Wolf’s article is that the financial disincentives for career women to have children mean that more poorer, less-educated women are having children. I took Wolf’s concern to mean she thought the “wrong” women were having children.
At base, Wolf’s point is a good one. Society does suffer because women are penalized rather than supported in having children. But penalties exist for all women, not just wealthy, highly educated ones. Wolf doesn’t put the onus where I think it should be–on public policy. By implication, then, (so much of what’s troubling about the article is what’s implied, because hard data and solutions aren’t supplied) the onus falls where it usually does–on women themselves. What Wolf has done is blame the victim.