Long before I identified as an Asian American, I identified as a feminist. Lately I have been reading about the new surge in “The Mommy War” debates, spawned by Linda Hirschman’s American Prospect article Homeward Bound on how the stay at home mom phenomenon is “the failure of choice feminism.”
I spent years dropping in and out of college, working in retail, free-lance or low-rung human service settings with low pay and laughable benefits. I continued to work in these jobs even after having my daughter. For the past nine years, I have been a stay at home mom (although the three years spent earning my degrees might as well have made me a working mom). And now, at age 37, I am embarking on my first-ever professional job search.
One of the things that most bothers me about the Mommy Wars is its focus on the “choices” of educated, middle- to upper- class, 30-40 year-old (and my guess, mostly white) woman. Hirschman herself admits that in her research, she interviews and tracks several women whose weddings were featured in the “Sunday Style” section of New York Times. Hirschman writes,
What better sample, I thought, than the brilliantly educated and accomplished brides of the “Sunday Styles,” circa 1996? At marriage, they included a vice president of client communication, a gastroenterologist, a lawyer, an editor, and a marketing executive.
Hirschman found that almost all (90%) of these women went on to have children, and 85% had quit working full time. Half of the women had quit working all together. Hirschman continues, “liberal feminists abandoned the judgmental starting point of the movement in favor of offering women ‘choices’ . . . A woman could work, stay home, have 10 children or one, marry or stay single. It all counted as ‘feminist’ as long as she chose it.”
Most of the working moms I knew before I became a SAHM were not working for the career opportunities, but to put food on the table. When I was working as a tailor for a major department store, there were several of us working moms. About half of us were Vietnamese women (I was the lone Korean) and several of the others were first generation immigrant women. We all worked because we had to. If we had guilt over the hours we worked (and we were working retail hours – those evenings and weekends are hard on a family), it was never discussed.
When I had my son, however, I felt equally compelled to become a SAHM for the same reason I worked – because financially, it made more sense. Two children in daycare equaled my monthly income, and that wasn’t including transportation and all those other hidden costs associated with working. I managed to find myself a free-lance job that would provide us with a small amount of income and cushion the blow to our yearly GNP. The SAHMs in my circle were not pushing our Baby Bjorn strollers through Saks or hiring nannies; we were meeting at public parks for play dates and combing through the thrift store racks for “gently used” clothes for our kids.
I’ve known my share of women who are SAHMs for distinctly non-feminist reasons; but I felt no contradiction in calling myself a feminist who stays home with her kids. If anything, my feminism has become stronger because I’ve been so invested in teaching my kids what feminism means.
In “Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families,” Leslie Morgan Steiner, a Washington Post ad exec, brings together women from both sides of the proverbial backyard fence. Of the 28 contributors, three are African American and one is Arab American but I was unable to find any who identified as Asian American.
It's not that I disagree with Hirschman about all her critiques, especially the one about how men aren't made to "choose" but then again, that's an old point.
What do you think about the Mommy Wars? Why are API families not included in these discussions? Hirschman claims that for women, there is not just a glass ceiling in the workplace, but in the home as well. Do you agree? What has been your experience?
--Jae Ran