One support I see as essential to responding to reproductive asymmetry (a term that's new to me and that I really like!) is paid parental leave. I tell anyone who will listen that 1) FMLA leave is available to BOTH PARENTS, not just the mother and 2) my husband is the only man I've ever met who took all 12 weeks of his FMLA leave and that was essential to our ability to navigate having premature twins. I work in a male-dominated industry and I think the most leave I've ever seen a man take following the birth of a healthy baby was two weeks and this is uncommon, most men are back after a week, with maybe a reduced schedule for a few weeks after that. FMLA leave is unpaid which means you can only stay out of the workforce as long as your savings account and vacation time can support you; most people do not have 3 months of living expenses as cash on hand, and even fewer people have vacation time which accrues to the point of being able to take 3 months off and not miss a paycheck (full disclosure that this was our situation; my husband's employer allows sick leave to roll over year-to-year and he's a generally healthy person who had been there for 14 years when our twins were born. 3 years later when we had our 3rd his sick leave balance was much smaller but he still had enough to stay home for 6 weeks). If we had paid parental leave and suddenly it became normal to see fathers leave the workplace for 2-3 months around the birth of a child, then it would not be seen as a "problem" that is only associated with female employees!
The crazy thing though is that Sweden’s birth rate has continued to decline through these generous policies. It seems odd to look toward a country whose birth rate is vastly below replacement value; we have more kids even though it’s theoretically harder for us to do so. At heart, I think the problem is that it doesn’t make financial sense to have more than 0-2 children in a society oriented around getting women to total equality in the workforce. I will use my own case as an example. If I went back to work at my old job, I would need to hire someone full time (or pay for day care). The cost of this in our old city (before we moved) would be roughly $50k for two kids until they reached kindergarten. If I had more than 2, the numbers look worse. If I went back to my old job, I would have made $150k pre tax, which would drop down to about $80-90k after tax, 30-40k after paying for daycare. I would be earning (post tax) as much as the person watching my kid except I wouldn’t be raising my own children. It didn’t make much financial sense for me to go to work - even in the top 2% of all job opportunities! Instead of paying for daycare, we pay the opportunity cost of my not returning to work. The dreadful reality is that so long as the plan was for me to do full time work, children would never make financial sense. If you can be making close to full time wages, why would you quit to take on an obligation that is only going to cost you even more money? Obviously we have our reasons and we think they are good ones, but I just don’t think any society oriented around getting women to total equality in the workforce is also capable of being a society that supports mothers adequately. Instead we have to have a society that values the unique and non-GDP-building labor that mothers do, such that women do not structure their lives in ways that are fundamentally opposed to exiting the workforce. (c.f. The two-income trap by Elizabeth Warren)
I'm all in favor of dependent care $ and something like guaranteed basic income to compensate caregivers of all sorts! I am curious though, if we actually oriented society toward equality for women in the workforce, would it cause harm? Sweden still has plenty of challenges with women getting promotions & workplace parity, and there's still more criticism of men staying home than women, and there's more to do to have workplace flexibility (hours, location) normalized. But they do have free daycare, high quality schools, etc. It seems to me Sweden is a few steps ahead of us - we have further to go. Maybe starting from equality at work isn't the worst place to start to see the changes we want to see?
I suspect that this is too optimistic about our level of resources. I believe these two ends are fundamentally at odds - having more equality at work means pushing a culture where it is expected that women return to full time work and the lifestyle associated. To give one example, it is well documented that women make 95% of what men make when you control for hours, position and so on. Yet most conversations seem to cite the decades old 77 cents on the dollar data which doesn’t control for hours worked. If mothers opted instead for the part time arrangements they would mostly prefer, this number would decrease and activists would continue to rally around this proclaimed “inequality.” Any culture that cannot replace itself is one that has fundamentally undermined a key part of our humanity: reproduction. That implies a harder role for women who play the bigger direct role in reproduction. If feminism is really about doing what is best for women, we should be skeptical of policies from countries whose birth rate is in fee fall. They have not succeeded in solving the problem of reproductive asymmetry. If they had, more women would have more children.
Equality at work could mean that neither women nor men work full time. I think the 95% equality "when you control for hours, position, and so on..." the position is a huge sticking point. Women want their vocational goals within reach, just as men do. And many men would also prefer to work fewer hours if it weren't all or nothing....Why not structure work so both men and women could work fewer hours and still achieve the vocational goals most important to them?
"Equality at work" seems like a good. My main reservation is that it seems to put everything into terms of money. Money is good too, or at least neutral. Tracy Kidder's book, "The Soul of a New Machine," tells about men who built a computer together that was so cutting edge at the time, that no single one of them could understand the whole thing -- including the project director. They worked mostly double shifts -- young single guys (I hope) -- for quite moderate pay given their educations.
One night they found a pay slip in a wastebasket, left by a janitor. They realized the janitor working an ordinary 8-hour shift was actually paid more than they were. They were stunned, dismayed. The project director pulled the team out of this by saying "Look at this way. It's like paying pinball. If we win this game, we'll get a chance to play again." This has stuck in my mine in quite a few projects of my own. "OK, I'm just playing pinball. Never mind the money." Most employees want enough to live on AND work with meaning and the chance to learn more, do more. Ideally -- yes, just my dream -- everyone has both a fair share of shit work to do, and also the chance to do work they'd gladly do for free or even pay to do, and (while I'm dreaming) the time and energy to keep learning more of whatever they want to learn.
You've set up what is potentially a false dichotomy, here. A person could want freedom to walk away at some times, and support in bearing womanly (or indeed manly) responsibilities at other times. I completely agree that the latter needs to be supported, but I suspect that dismantling the former is unlikely to be helpful, in that regard. Most of the time, when women don't have the freedom to do something for reasons involving biology, men are all too happy to say "Whoops, how did that happen? Oh, well, not our fault, guess you'll have to put up with it" and completely ignore the role of society in making childbearing and child-rearing so difficult.
This is a complex issue. Ample parental leave for both parents is certainly one part of the solution, as is an expectation (and understanding) that fathers will also take time off when a new baby arrives. My husband had nine weeks of paid leave available from his employer, and it was flexible in when it could be used, so we used other types of leave for a couple of weeks when the baby was born, and then invoked his parental leave when our baby was about eight months old, in order to help with my transition back to work. That was really helpful.
In addition, I would like to see a society in which we don't feel we have to hide the realities of childbearing. There's real pressure to say that, no, being pregnant doesn't affect your ability to work at all (even though morning sickness hits hard, for some people, and you can get pretty exhausted, towards the end, too). We also need to acknowledge that being a birthing parent is a different experience to being a non-birthing parent -- the lesson of how "stopping the tenure clock" around the birth of a child mostly just leads to a huge boost in the careers of fathers is an important one, here. Fathers can and should be taking time to help with a new baby, but there's no way to make the experience of giving birth "equal" to the experience of having your partner give birth.
I find myself disturbed by the ways in which society is willing to take advantage of the manifold vulnerabilities associated with pregnancy and childbirth. There are the ways in which the medical system holds the health of mothers and babies hostage to an overly-restrictive regime in which doctors are assumed to have authority over details as small as whether a birthing mother can stand or lie down. We need better mental health support for new mothers who may be experiencing post-natal depression. We need to recognise the ways in which a pregnant woman (or a new mother) is particularly vulnerable to abuse; we need to not be ashamed of the ways in which the psychology of childbearing plays into this, telling us that if someone (perhaps literally) poops on us then we should take care of that person rather than protesting.
We need to support the compatibility of care and of ambition -- two powerful sources of meaning that neither men nor women deserve to be cut off from. If women lose out on career opportunities because they want to take care of their preschool children (in a full time or even just part time capacity), the assumption is that this is their "choice" and that nothing has gone wrong, here, even if taking that time means they lose out on important life dreams, or find themselves relegated to less prestigious, more "feminine" job positions, because those are the types of jobs that will consider accommodating them.
This also influences when women choose to bear children. There's this fear that if we have children too early (by which I mean, in our twenties), we won't be "established" in our careers, and will find ourselves forever cut off from certain opportunities. We take it as given that entering the workforce as a mother will be hard, that we will need previous experience we can point to in order to prove to employers that we are worth hiring, and that if we don't have that experience then it's a foregone conclusion that we will miss out.
Childbearing takes a lot of time and energy, there's no doubt about that. But the tradeoffs aren't fixed. When society is willing to come together around new parents and help them out, that makes a huge difference. When that societal support is paired with a respect for mothers as full human beings, rather than a view of mothers as saintly madonnas who can and should martyr themselves unnecessarily ... well, I don't even know what that would look like. I want to find out.
"When that societal support is paired with a respect for mothers as full human beings, rather than a view of mothers as saintly madonnas who can and should martyr themselves unnecessarily ... well, I don't even know what that would look like. I want to find out." Love this so so much. Me too!
> "This also influences when women choose to bear children. There's this fear that if we have children too early (by which I mean, in our twenties), we won't be "established" in our careers, and will find ourselves forever cut off from certain opportunities."
Aww, yeah. A large percentage of friends I went to college with had their first kid in their 30's. (Sigh, so much anxiety surrounding the wish to "be successful" and "do it all.")
A friend occasionally points out that our society is feeding women/people/my_generation a falsehood... the implication that our fertility/health is going to be just the same as we go through our 30's as in our 20's, or that the differences are "not a big deal." (I mean, I feel like I unthinkingly picked up this impression!)
I had my kiddo at 29, and I think if I had him in my early twenties odds are I wouldn't be doing work that I love and be able to provide the opportunities I can now for him. I think if we had stronger communities to support parents, free or low cost high quality childcare and invested heavily in equity in our public schools having a kiddo younger would be awesome. Given the world we have, I'm very glad I had him when I did!
Completely agree though that we don't talk about fertility issues nearly enough and we should be making it a better & easier to have kids younger.
The first support I think of is getting rid of the idea that delaying childbearing is an appropriate way to fix reproductive asymmetry. Whether it's pushing free IUDs on poorer women, holding up a "success sequence" of delaying childbearing until age 25 or 30, writing onerous restrictions into paid family leave laws to push women back into the labor force (cf. Isabel Sawhill's critiques of DC Paid Family Leave), or abortion, a society that looks at children as an obstacle to women's equality isn't going to effectively respond to the dependence of having and raising children.
I've read this article several times, and am not through thinking about it, but finally something out of the swirl of "what's wrong and what can be done about it" gets clear. Two things are needed at the same time, for both women and men. For one thing -- to decrease an illusory, fantasy idea of freedom -- for if you know you've conceived a child, you're never truly free of that, no matter what either father or mother does. And the other thing -- not second, in fact perhaps even more basic -- to increase the sense of true belonging. (This reminds me of your book, Leah, which I've not yet read -- about how to create a community of belonging.) Both of these things are needed -- desperately, for many people in our society, and to some extent I think, for most.
Think about how almost all advertising and article illustrations build on our human fear of not belonging -- which our society also makes a realistic fear in many other ways. (Even for people who seem secure in every way -- if the security has been constructed from fear, it's an illusion.)
At the same time, ads and illustrations keep showing us that we're foolish to be content and rooted, because there are other places and situations that look so much better. Think of Instagram and Facebook too. So and so just got back from this fantastic vacation...and look at this new house! In some ways social media is even more seductive, because it's such an easy way to keep in touch with extended family and friends...or at least, it gives the illusion of really "keeping in touch."
Material poverty makes all this so much worse. That said, I don't discount the spiritual and emotional poverty that may be much worse. If I had to choose, I'd choose the material poverty and the social handicaps that come with it.
I've never forgotten how a study showed that young black men in a big city ghetto -- New York? Boston? -- expected to live no longer than 20 years, if that. And we wonder why many don't plunge from total lack of belonging -- except perhaps to a gang -- into "responsible family life?" I'd start right there -- real belonging for all boys and men. And yes of course, girls and women. And yes, I'm a feminist.
I just checked the link and yes, it looks so good! Just reading the description, I felt a surprise flush of shame at remembering how I rejoiced in my superiority to the boys in grade school. All we girls were so far ahead, and the teachers (all women) seemed to prefer us better too. No wonder the boys rejoiced in later grades when they got dominance.
I want to add that one factor in the inequality has been the emphasis in the U.S. on military service. When the draft was in force, poor people understood that they were raising "cannon fodder" to serve the rich people who could afford to send their kids to college to escape being drafted. More recently, it offers impoverished young people steady employment -- and talk about rootlessness and relentless training in "what it means to be a 'real man.'" (In GynEcolory, Mary Daly has a chapter on the extremes of military training of men in aggression and dominance and the utter disdain for anything "feminine" in another person or in themselves.) We hope this is changing....
One concern that I have is that I don’t actually think Family Leave is adequate. A baby doesn’t suddenly become easier after 12 weeks or 4 months. (If anything, it was easier to work during the potato-like first 4 months than the curious exploratory 6-12 months.) I’m not sure if the problem is that our daughter was higher needs than most, or that we are both basically only children and don’t know what to do with babies. We have only been able to keep our heads afloat with having one parent stay home and having extra babysitting support. We moved to be closer to relatives in part to get that babysitting for free / from our parents. I honestly wonder if a straight up cash tax credit would be better than FMLA because it could encourage arrangements that are long-term more sustainable. FMLA is very boom or bust - 40 hours a week off and then 40 back on. Something that would give a bit more time/space/resources to be moms without such dramatic shifts would be more useful.
The thought of having missed my kids' pre-school years is a horror to me! I did do college at the same time, but for the earliest years it was half time or less. Best of both worlds.
If medical insurance could be separated from employment, then employers might be more willing to allow both men and women to work half time or thereabouts. That would make it easier to arrange cooperative child care among a small group of parents, at no extra cost and much benefit to all.
At one time a lot of women were pushing for job-sharing employment -- each mother working half time at a shared job, taking mutual responsibility for communication and organizing the work. Of course many companies did shift from full time workers to part time, but it was to avoid paying benefits. If our society provided the benefits, sharing jobs could still work well.
I agree that the linking of health insurance benefits to employment is suboptimal. It also hurts families where both parents work full time, because they are loosing out on a significant chunk of their compensation since they only can use one company’s insurance.
I am reminded of a comment I once heard from one of my all-time favorite “other feminists,” the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who pointed back beyond abortion to the emergence of the Pill: “In one fell swoop, widespread availability of oral contraceptives undid what Western Civilization had been trying to do for 2000 years, that is, hold men responsible for the children they engender and the women who bear them.”
Well...except that at the time the Pill emerged, all any man who wanted to leave could just leave the state...and often just the same town...and never pay child support. (Another factor at that same time is that if a man lost his job, he often had to move out and at least seem to disappear, so the woman and kids could get food and shelter via the welfare system. Zero help was provided if the father stayed with his family. So both pressures increased abandonment.
What supports do you see as most essential to respond to reproductive asymmetry?
I think the tragedy of reproductive asymmetry is that the "my body, my choice" message underpinning birth control and abortion meant that it became a woman's problem only, and not something a man never need be concerned about.
The only way I see it changing is that it would require a major change in how women navigate and manage their relationships with their partners so that they know it isn't about women's bodies only, but men as well. Make sure men have a stake in it.
I imagine there are plenty of women who are doing that already in committed relationships. That is where it needs to begin, on the personal level.
I think a truer analysis of how our current society started failing men and women in the 60s/70s would emphasize the destruction of labor unions and the legitimizing of mass firing rather than Roe v Wade and the second wave feminism that let women publicly wear pants, work in more industries, and apply for credit.
And any critique of “unwanted sex and the hierarchies of power that generate it” shouldn't ignore the role of the Church in idealizing women's purity and chastity while insisting men can't control their urges.
Reproductive asymmetry and our response to it is a vital and interesting discussion that I'm so glad you're hosting. People across all parts of our political spectrum can agree that our society fails families and fails both men and women as parents and people. Fixing this failing is vital, and can go into all sorts of interesting policy nooks and crannies (like guaranteed basic income, healthcare for all, child credits, baby boxes, so so many directions). But the idea that a response to reproductive asymmetry should include forcing women into unsafe illegal abortions (which are increasing in our country anyway due to limited abortion access and healthcare costs) and/or increasing surveillance of pregnant bodies boggles me.
Maybe I’ve had an unusually fortunate environment, but ever since I’ve been raising adolescents (beginning around 2002), the Church and faith-based resources my kids and I have been hearing have equally emphasized chastity (understood as use of the sexual faculties according to right reason) for men and women alike. Though I do recall the 80s as having that “men can’t help themselves, so it’s all on you, girls” vibe. This may be an area of demonstrable progress.
There's progress, but it's not evenly distributed. To an extent, discussion of NFP in Catholicism carries with it a discussion of chastity within marriage—rather than it being a virtue you're done with once you marry.
I agree with you regarding the discussion of women's purity versus...I don't even know for men? But is it not what I should be. I think there should be better conversations for men (and women). I don't know how to say what I mean here. I guess "modernize" —i.e., women are humans, they are your equals, act accordingly.
About the problem of "idealizing women's purity and chastity while insisting men can't control their urges" - ugh, good point!
I think that men and women should be BOTH called to a high standard of sexual purity AND understood to be broken human beings who may fall short anyway. (and will be surrounded with gentle, warm-hearted believers who keep their cool if/when things fall apart and help them piece life back together.) How do we do that?
Martha and Catherine- have either of you known people (individually, or together in community) who did both those things well? (Or some version that better fits what you're wishing to see!!)
I find sexual purity to be a complicated concept - it's so enmeshed in a history of women (and children) being responsible for men's actions and sullied by them. And too frequently in a loving community where it's understood people fall short it's the perpetrator who gets the love & support (there's a horrific series on rape within the Pennsylvania Dutch communities that talks about the way a culture of forgiveness allows rapists to persist while silencing victims).
I don't love this virtue being framed through "purity." You can strive for chastity after making mistakes, just like you can work on your temper even after giving way to wrath. Chastity isn't a virtue you lose access to once you've struggled with it.
I once went to a church where they banned basketball games being shirts vs skins if women were anywhere nearby. The idea being the men needed to guard/protect the women who might be tempted by seeing them shirtless. It was great to see the equality there.
Right before I read Leah's piece, I read an article about how Dave Ramsey's company just fired a woman for getting pregnant because it goes against the company's Christian 'values'. It's a great example of reproductive asymmetry! Technically they fired her for having premarital sex, and have fired 12 others for the same (potentially all pregnant women, unclear). If she had had an abortion, she would have kept her job (and healthcare). Instead she's lost her job and healthcare while pregnant. Horrific. Here's the article: https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/williamson/2021/03/29/can-you-fired-over-sex-life-dave-ramsey-thinks-so/6980891002/
Leah, can you or Ms. Bachiochi give more clarity and context around the "walk away" wording and what she means by that. I am not sure if I agree with it, given the following sentence: a man "blithely return[s] to the course of his life." I don't think that's an accurate portrayal of the issues surrounding why women get abortions whatsoever. Often, women who do get abortions do have supportive partners, are married, and together make a truly tough and challenging decision. It is not based on not sexual autonomy or freedom. Instead, it is based on factors such as lack of health care, poverty, the immense strain of a 9-month long pregnancy on a woman, etc. Or, yes, a woman has an unsupportive partner who is abusive, who treats her terribly, or perhaps even raped her, and is now pregnant with her assailant's child.
I'm afraid I have to disagree with the assertion that reproductive freedom is a way of playing catch up. I see the reasoning and even see where it occurs in society, but I don't think that's not the case. I have personally thought a lot about this type of stuff over the past year. I have "undo" many of the things I was told and accepted in Catholic schools and circles. (I'm still proudly Catholic, though.) have found that most of the (politically conservative-based, usually) rhetoric on women's issues Empirical evidence states that birth control is not harmful to women — it doesn't cause cancer; it doesn't forever alter women's bodies, etc. Yes, there are outliers, but primarily the data states otherwise. And I do think it is time we talk about these issues more openly and honestly.
Hi Catherine, happy to offer a bit more clarity here. When I say that "men can just walk away," I don't mean that the reason women have abortions is because men walk away (though certainly that is true). I mean far more basically that men -- by the very design of their bodies -- have the capacity to detach themselves from a pregnancy in a way that a pregnant woman simply cannot.
As Aristotle first observed, the most fundamental difference between men and women is an asymmetrical one: women reproduce inside themselves; men, outside themselves. So, quite literally, when a woman is pregnant, she is "with [the] child." Yet the man who impregnated her (father to and so equally parent to the child) can physically walk away from her and the child (perhaps just into another room, but still, he can do so while she cannot).
This reproductive asymmetry is basic to what it means to be human, as male and female. The far more difficult questions then follow from it: in light of reproductive asymmetry, what are the obligations (and rights) of each of the parties involved and what are the obligations of the broader community and the state, etc etc. The full (12 min) talk from which Leah quotes gets into these latter questions a bit more...
I agree that the idea of "blithely returns to the course of his life" is only a tiny bit of the picture. It may seem huge at the time...but I've learned that in the long run, no one gets away with anything. Not really. The father of my kids walked away...ran, really...and it was decades later when he said he'd realized what he'd missed, and what was lost forever.
And a woman who has an abortion might feel huge relief at the time -- problem solved -- and only a decade or more later realize she still has an emotional and spiritual relationship with that unborn child, to deal with. I met a few such women, and it's really, really tough to deal with.
> What supports do you see as most essential to respond to reproductive asymmetry?
First thing I think of is people who will take the role of a gracious listener... someone to listen to a newly-pregnant woman who thinks her world is going to fall apart... and keep listening as she tries to figure out if she can see a vision for how to "do life" with a kiddo way earlier in her life than she imagined.
I imagine this listener and the would-be counselee having potential for misunderstanding! (You are dealing with something so raw, and affecting every part of your life!) Some families have money problems that are inexplicable to others. Not just the immediate nuclear family lacking sufficient means, but walls and barriers like, "I can't ask members of my extended family for financial help." "Why not?" And the answer is something like, "Because of a culture where members of my family have been incredibly unreliable with money/informal-loans in the past, it will give me pariah status." ("Pariah"! That's the word. That's one of the huge asymmetries that's been retained.)
Meanwhile, a woman deemed privileged will have her own struggle, as she wrestles with her vision for moving forward with education/career at the pace all her peers do. (people have mentioned this already!) Or she fears she won't be able to provide her child with the status symbols that are considered "essentials" for kids by her upper-middle-class peers, and, well, in a culture where "good moms" will "obviously" provide those things, she's looking ahead at shame.
I wonder if - throughout already-existing-structures in America - there is enough... for any woman or family to be supported through the raising of an unlooked-for child. If such a mother or father would be able to accept help. Without shame.
A support team of one close friend/counselor who is an excellent listener and gives hours a week (or a community of people who know how to really listen!) should be able to see a woman [who's apprehensive about having a child at an early stage of life] through a process of changing her narrative, changing her vision, and re-orienting her existing relationships. (esp. with family members, and with the child's father)
Yes, at LEAST one close friend/counselor. And the same for the father. There are some fathering mentor programs going. In my small rural town in NE Georgia, there's a court diversin program for men who could go to jail for not paying child support. Instead, they can enter this program and get real help in getting a job and training, plus mentoring in how to be a father -- the kind of father they never had, not the absent one or the one who yelled and beat them.
To leave a more serious comment than my last one, I think the area in which both women and men need more support is family leave and work hours that respect family needs. If we could shift society from its current work-takes-all mentality to one that genuinely valued children and family life, that would go a long way towards erasing the effects of what you've termed reproductive asymmetry, and it would benefit men as well as women.
What if men could be charged with assault and battery for every unintended pregnancy, even if the sex itself was consensual? (I don't really think that's a very good answer--as the mother of a son, I'm appalled by the idea--and yet I've thought for some time now that it's an argument that might be worth making, just to point out the imbalance in the consequences of pregnancy for men and women. Pregnancy and childbirth are physically grueling ordeals--there should be some form of redress when a woman is forced to endure them when she doesn't want to.)
One support I see as essential to responding to reproductive asymmetry (a term that's new to me and that I really like!) is paid parental leave. I tell anyone who will listen that 1) FMLA leave is available to BOTH PARENTS, not just the mother and 2) my husband is the only man I've ever met who took all 12 weeks of his FMLA leave and that was essential to our ability to navigate having premature twins. I work in a male-dominated industry and I think the most leave I've ever seen a man take following the birth of a healthy baby was two weeks and this is uncommon, most men are back after a week, with maybe a reduced schedule for a few weeks after that. FMLA leave is unpaid which means you can only stay out of the workforce as long as your savings account and vacation time can support you; most people do not have 3 months of living expenses as cash on hand, and even fewer people have vacation time which accrues to the point of being able to take 3 months off and not miss a paycheck (full disclosure that this was our situation; my husband's employer allows sick leave to roll over year-to-year and he's a generally healthy person who had been there for 14 years when our twins were born. 3 years later when we had our 3rd his sick leave balance was much smaller but he still had enough to stay home for 6 weeks). If we had paid parental leave and suddenly it became normal to see fathers leave the workplace for 2-3 months around the birth of a child, then it would not be seen as a "problem" that is only associated with female employees!
YES! I particularly love how Sweden tackled this problem - here's a fun write up: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/american-dad-sweden-now-has-plenty-family-time-n851866
The crazy thing though is that Sweden’s birth rate has continued to decline through these generous policies. It seems odd to look toward a country whose birth rate is vastly below replacement value; we have more kids even though it’s theoretically harder for us to do so. At heart, I think the problem is that it doesn’t make financial sense to have more than 0-2 children in a society oriented around getting women to total equality in the workforce. I will use my own case as an example. If I went back to work at my old job, I would need to hire someone full time (or pay for day care). The cost of this in our old city (before we moved) would be roughly $50k for two kids until they reached kindergarten. If I had more than 2, the numbers look worse. If I went back to my old job, I would have made $150k pre tax, which would drop down to about $80-90k after tax, 30-40k after paying for daycare. I would be earning (post tax) as much as the person watching my kid except I wouldn’t be raising my own children. It didn’t make much financial sense for me to go to work - even in the top 2% of all job opportunities! Instead of paying for daycare, we pay the opportunity cost of my not returning to work. The dreadful reality is that so long as the plan was for me to do full time work, children would never make financial sense. If you can be making close to full time wages, why would you quit to take on an obligation that is only going to cost you even more money? Obviously we have our reasons and we think they are good ones, but I just don’t think any society oriented around getting women to total equality in the workforce is also capable of being a society that supports mothers adequately. Instead we have to have a society that values the unique and non-GDP-building labor that mothers do, such that women do not structure their lives in ways that are fundamentally opposed to exiting the workforce. (c.f. The two-income trap by Elizabeth Warren)
I'm all in favor of dependent care $ and something like guaranteed basic income to compensate caregivers of all sorts! I am curious though, if we actually oriented society toward equality for women in the workforce, would it cause harm? Sweden still has plenty of challenges with women getting promotions & workplace parity, and there's still more criticism of men staying home than women, and there's more to do to have workplace flexibility (hours, location) normalized. But they do have free daycare, high quality schools, etc. It seems to me Sweden is a few steps ahead of us - we have further to go. Maybe starting from equality at work isn't the worst place to start to see the changes we want to see?
I suspect that this is too optimistic about our level of resources. I believe these two ends are fundamentally at odds - having more equality at work means pushing a culture where it is expected that women return to full time work and the lifestyle associated. To give one example, it is well documented that women make 95% of what men make when you control for hours, position and so on. Yet most conversations seem to cite the decades old 77 cents on the dollar data which doesn’t control for hours worked. If mothers opted instead for the part time arrangements they would mostly prefer, this number would decrease and activists would continue to rally around this proclaimed “inequality.” Any culture that cannot replace itself is one that has fundamentally undermined a key part of our humanity: reproduction. That implies a harder role for women who play the bigger direct role in reproduction. If feminism is really about doing what is best for women, we should be skeptical of policies from countries whose birth rate is in fee fall. They have not succeeded in solving the problem of reproductive asymmetry. If they had, more women would have more children.
Equality at work could mean that neither women nor men work full time. I think the 95% equality "when you control for hours, position, and so on..." the position is a huge sticking point. Women want their vocational goals within reach, just as men do. And many men would also prefer to work fewer hours if it weren't all or nothing....Why not structure work so both men and women could work fewer hours and still achieve the vocational goals most important to them?
"Equality at work" seems like a good. My main reservation is that it seems to put everything into terms of money. Money is good too, or at least neutral. Tracy Kidder's book, "The Soul of a New Machine," tells about men who built a computer together that was so cutting edge at the time, that no single one of them could understand the whole thing -- including the project director. They worked mostly double shifts -- young single guys (I hope) -- for quite moderate pay given their educations.
One night they found a pay slip in a wastebasket, left by a janitor. They realized the janitor working an ordinary 8-hour shift was actually paid more than they were. They were stunned, dismayed. The project director pulled the team out of this by saying "Look at this way. It's like paying pinball. If we win this game, we'll get a chance to play again." This has stuck in my mine in quite a few projects of my own. "OK, I'm just playing pinball. Never mind the money." Most employees want enough to live on AND work with meaning and the chance to learn more, do more. Ideally -- yes, just my dream -- everyone has both a fair share of shit work to do, and also the chance to do work they'd gladly do for free or even pay to do, and (while I'm dreaming) the time and energy to keep learning more of whatever they want to learn.
Wow, thank you for that link! What a wonderful way to support parents -- and full life.
You've set up what is potentially a false dichotomy, here. A person could want freedom to walk away at some times, and support in bearing womanly (or indeed manly) responsibilities at other times. I completely agree that the latter needs to be supported, but I suspect that dismantling the former is unlikely to be helpful, in that regard. Most of the time, when women don't have the freedom to do something for reasons involving biology, men are all too happy to say "Whoops, how did that happen? Oh, well, not our fault, guess you'll have to put up with it" and completely ignore the role of society in making childbearing and child-rearing so difficult.
This is a complex issue. Ample parental leave for both parents is certainly one part of the solution, as is an expectation (and understanding) that fathers will also take time off when a new baby arrives. My husband had nine weeks of paid leave available from his employer, and it was flexible in when it could be used, so we used other types of leave for a couple of weeks when the baby was born, and then invoked his parental leave when our baby was about eight months old, in order to help with my transition back to work. That was really helpful.
In addition, I would like to see a society in which we don't feel we have to hide the realities of childbearing. There's real pressure to say that, no, being pregnant doesn't affect your ability to work at all (even though morning sickness hits hard, for some people, and you can get pretty exhausted, towards the end, too). We also need to acknowledge that being a birthing parent is a different experience to being a non-birthing parent -- the lesson of how "stopping the tenure clock" around the birth of a child mostly just leads to a huge boost in the careers of fathers is an important one, here. Fathers can and should be taking time to help with a new baby, but there's no way to make the experience of giving birth "equal" to the experience of having your partner give birth.
I find myself disturbed by the ways in which society is willing to take advantage of the manifold vulnerabilities associated with pregnancy and childbirth. There are the ways in which the medical system holds the health of mothers and babies hostage to an overly-restrictive regime in which doctors are assumed to have authority over details as small as whether a birthing mother can stand or lie down. We need better mental health support for new mothers who may be experiencing post-natal depression. We need to recognise the ways in which a pregnant woman (or a new mother) is particularly vulnerable to abuse; we need to not be ashamed of the ways in which the psychology of childbearing plays into this, telling us that if someone (perhaps literally) poops on us then we should take care of that person rather than protesting.
We need to support the compatibility of care and of ambition -- two powerful sources of meaning that neither men nor women deserve to be cut off from. If women lose out on career opportunities because they want to take care of their preschool children (in a full time or even just part time capacity), the assumption is that this is their "choice" and that nothing has gone wrong, here, even if taking that time means they lose out on important life dreams, or find themselves relegated to less prestigious, more "feminine" job positions, because those are the types of jobs that will consider accommodating them.
This also influences when women choose to bear children. There's this fear that if we have children too early (by which I mean, in our twenties), we won't be "established" in our careers, and will find ourselves forever cut off from certain opportunities. We take it as given that entering the workforce as a mother will be hard, that we will need previous experience we can point to in order to prove to employers that we are worth hiring, and that if we don't have that experience then it's a foregone conclusion that we will miss out.
Childbearing takes a lot of time and energy, there's no doubt about that. But the tradeoffs aren't fixed. When society is willing to come together around new parents and help them out, that makes a huge difference. When that societal support is paired with a respect for mothers as full human beings, rather than a view of mothers as saintly madonnas who can and should martyr themselves unnecessarily ... well, I don't even know what that would look like. I want to find out.
"When that societal support is paired with a respect for mothers as full human beings, rather than a view of mothers as saintly madonnas who can and should martyr themselves unnecessarily ... well, I don't even know what that would look like. I want to find out." Love this so so much. Me too!
> "This also influences when women choose to bear children. There's this fear that if we have children too early (by which I mean, in our twenties), we won't be "established" in our careers, and will find ourselves forever cut off from certain opportunities."
Aww, yeah. A large percentage of friends I went to college with had their first kid in their 30's. (Sigh, so much anxiety surrounding the wish to "be successful" and "do it all.")
A friend occasionally points out that our society is feeding women/people/my_generation a falsehood... the implication that our fertility/health is going to be just the same as we go through our 30's as in our 20's, or that the differences are "not a big deal." (I mean, I feel like I unthinkingly picked up this impression!)
I had my kiddo at 29, and I think if I had him in my early twenties odds are I wouldn't be doing work that I love and be able to provide the opportunities I can now for him. I think if we had stronger communities to support parents, free or low cost high quality childcare and invested heavily in equity in our public schools having a kiddo younger would be awesome. Given the world we have, I'm very glad I had him when I did!
Completely agree though that we don't talk about fertility issues nearly enough and we should be making it a better & easier to have kids younger.
The first support I think of is getting rid of the idea that delaying childbearing is an appropriate way to fix reproductive asymmetry. Whether it's pushing free IUDs on poorer women, holding up a "success sequence" of delaying childbearing until age 25 or 30, writing onerous restrictions into paid family leave laws to push women back into the labor force (cf. Isabel Sawhill's critiques of DC Paid Family Leave), or abortion, a society that looks at children as an obstacle to women's equality isn't going to effectively respond to the dependence of having and raising children.
I've read this article several times, and am not through thinking about it, but finally something out of the swirl of "what's wrong and what can be done about it" gets clear. Two things are needed at the same time, for both women and men. For one thing -- to decrease an illusory, fantasy idea of freedom -- for if you know you've conceived a child, you're never truly free of that, no matter what either father or mother does. And the other thing -- not second, in fact perhaps even more basic -- to increase the sense of true belonging. (This reminds me of your book, Leah, which I've not yet read -- about how to create a community of belonging.) Both of these things are needed -- desperately, for many people in our society, and to some extent I think, for most.
Think about how almost all advertising and article illustrations build on our human fear of not belonging -- which our society also makes a realistic fear in many other ways. (Even for people who seem secure in every way -- if the security has been constructed from fear, it's an illusion.)
At the same time, ads and illustrations keep showing us that we're foolish to be content and rooted, because there are other places and situations that look so much better. Think of Instagram and Facebook too. So and so just got back from this fantastic vacation...and look at this new house! In some ways social media is even more seductive, because it's such an easy way to keep in touch with extended family and friends...or at least, it gives the illusion of really "keeping in touch."
Material poverty makes all this so much worse. That said, I don't discount the spiritual and emotional poverty that may be much worse. If I had to choose, I'd choose the material poverty and the social handicaps that come with it.
I've never forgotten how a study showed that young black men in a big city ghetto -- New York? Boston? -- expected to live no longer than 20 years, if that. And we wonder why many don't plunge from total lack of belonging -- except perhaps to a gang -- into "responsible family life?" I'd start right there -- real belonging for all boys and men. And yes of course, girls and women. And yes, I'm a feminist.
I have To Raise a Boy by Emma Brown sitting on my shelf, I bet you'd like it! https://bookshop.org/books/to-raise-a-boy-classrooms-locker-rooms-bedrooms-and-the-hidden-struggles-of-american-boyhood/9781982128081
I just checked the link and yes, it looks so good! Just reading the description, I felt a surprise flush of shame at remembering how I rejoiced in my superiority to the boys in grade school. All we girls were so far ahead, and the teachers (all women) seemed to prefer us better too. No wonder the boys rejoiced in later grades when they got dominance.
I want to add that one factor in the inequality has been the emphasis in the U.S. on military service. When the draft was in force, poor people understood that they were raising "cannon fodder" to serve the rich people who could afford to send their kids to college to escape being drafted. More recently, it offers impoverished young people steady employment -- and talk about rootlessness and relentless training in "what it means to be a 'real man.'" (In GynEcolory, Mary Daly has a chapter on the extremes of military training of men in aggression and dominance and the utter disdain for anything "feminine" in another person or in themselves.) We hope this is changing....
GynEcolory is interesting, but inaccurate. It's "GynEcology" -- Daly's first of several shocking books meant to awaken women to living as ourselves.
One concern that I have is that I don’t actually think Family Leave is adequate. A baby doesn’t suddenly become easier after 12 weeks or 4 months. (If anything, it was easier to work during the potato-like first 4 months than the curious exploratory 6-12 months.) I’m not sure if the problem is that our daughter was higher needs than most, or that we are both basically only children and don’t know what to do with babies. We have only been able to keep our heads afloat with having one parent stay home and having extra babysitting support. We moved to be closer to relatives in part to get that babysitting for free / from our parents. I honestly wonder if a straight up cash tax credit would be better than FMLA because it could encourage arrangements that are long-term more sustainable. FMLA is very boom or bust - 40 hours a week off and then 40 back on. Something that would give a bit more time/space/resources to be moms without such dramatic shifts would be more useful.
“If anything, it was easier to work during the potato-like first 4 months than the curious exploratory 6-12 months.”
Boy was this true for us!
The thought of having missed my kids' pre-school years is a horror to me! I did do college at the same time, but for the earliest years it was half time or less. Best of both worlds.
If medical insurance could be separated from employment, then employers might be more willing to allow both men and women to work half time or thereabouts. That would make it easier to arrange cooperative child care among a small group of parents, at no extra cost and much benefit to all.
At one time a lot of women were pushing for job-sharing employment -- each mother working half time at a shared job, taking mutual responsibility for communication and organizing the work. Of course many companies did shift from full time workers to part time, but it was to avoid paying benefits. If our society provided the benefits, sharing jobs could still work well.
I agree that the linking of health insurance benefits to employment is suboptimal. It also hurts families where both parents work full time, because they are loosing out on a significant chunk of their compensation since they only can use one company’s insurance.
Oh, what a great point! Also, I'm pretty sure most employers don't give many choices among insurance policies and networks.
I am reminded of a comment I once heard from one of my all-time favorite “other feminists,” the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who pointed back beyond abortion to the emergence of the Pill: “In one fell swoop, widespread availability of oral contraceptives undid what Western Civilization had been trying to do for 2000 years, that is, hold men responsible for the children they engender and the women who bear them.”
Well...except that at the time the Pill emerged, all any man who wanted to leave could just leave the state...and often just the same town...and never pay child support. (Another factor at that same time is that if a man lost his job, he often had to move out and at least seem to disappear, so the woman and kids could get food and shelter via the welfare system. Zero help was provided if the father stayed with his family. So both pressures increased abandonment.
What supports do you see as most essential to respond to reproductive asymmetry?
I think the tragedy of reproductive asymmetry is that the "my body, my choice" message underpinning birth control and abortion meant that it became a woman's problem only, and not something a man never need be concerned about.
The only way I see it changing is that it would require a major change in how women navigate and manage their relationships with their partners so that they know it isn't about women's bodies only, but men as well. Make sure men have a stake in it.
I imagine there are plenty of women who are doing that already in committed relationships. That is where it needs to begin, on the personal level.
I think a truer analysis of how our current society started failing men and women in the 60s/70s would emphasize the destruction of labor unions and the legitimizing of mass firing rather than Roe v Wade and the second wave feminism that let women publicly wear pants, work in more industries, and apply for credit.
And any critique of “unwanted sex and the hierarchies of power that generate it” shouldn't ignore the role of the Church in idealizing women's purity and chastity while insisting men can't control their urges.
Reproductive asymmetry and our response to it is a vital and interesting discussion that I'm so glad you're hosting. People across all parts of our political spectrum can agree that our society fails families and fails both men and women as parents and people. Fixing this failing is vital, and can go into all sorts of interesting policy nooks and crannies (like guaranteed basic income, healthcare for all, child credits, baby boxes, so so many directions). But the idea that a response to reproductive asymmetry should include forcing women into unsafe illegal abortions (which are increasing in our country anyway due to limited abortion access and healthcare costs) and/or increasing surveillance of pregnant bodies boggles me.
Maybe I’ve had an unusually fortunate environment, but ever since I’ve been raising adolescents (beginning around 2002), the Church and faith-based resources my kids and I have been hearing have equally emphasized chastity (understood as use of the sexual faculties according to right reason) for men and women alike. Though I do recall the 80s as having that “men can’t help themselves, so it’s all on you, girls” vibe. This may be an area of demonstrable progress.
There's progress, but it's not evenly distributed. To an extent, discussion of NFP in Catholicism carries with it a discussion of chastity within marriage—rather than it being a virtue you're done with once you marry.
So many good discussion with boys and young men were also triggered by the Kavaugh hearings.That was something great that emerged from that turmoil.
I agree with you regarding the discussion of women's purity versus...I don't even know for men? But is it not what I should be. I think there should be better conversations for men (and women). I don't know how to say what I mean here. I guess "modernize" —i.e., women are humans, they are your equals, act accordingly.
About the problem of "idealizing women's purity and chastity while insisting men can't control their urges" - ugh, good point!
I think that men and women should be BOTH called to a high standard of sexual purity AND understood to be broken human beings who may fall short anyway. (and will be surrounded with gentle, warm-hearted believers who keep their cool if/when things fall apart and help them piece life back together.) How do we do that?
Martha and Catherine- have either of you known people (individually, or together in community) who did both those things well? (Or some version that better fits what you're wishing to see!!)
I find sexual purity to be a complicated concept - it's so enmeshed in a history of women (and children) being responsible for men's actions and sullied by them. And too frequently in a loving community where it's understood people fall short it's the perpetrator who gets the love & support (there's a horrific series on rape within the Pennsylvania Dutch communities that talks about the way a culture of forgiveness allows rapists to persist while silencing victims).
I don't love this virtue being framed through "purity." You can strive for chastity after making mistakes, just like you can work on your temper even after giving way to wrath. Chastity isn't a virtue you lose access to once you've struggled with it.
I once went to a church where they banned basketball games being shirts vs skins if women were anywhere nearby. The idea being the men needed to guard/protect the women who might be tempted by seeing them shirtless. It was great to see the equality there.
The Nickel Mines, PA shooting in 2006 comes to mind: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14900930
Right before I read Leah's piece, I read an article about how Dave Ramsey's company just fired a woman for getting pregnant because it goes against the company's Christian 'values'. It's a great example of reproductive asymmetry! Technically they fired her for having premarital sex, and have fired 12 others for the same (potentially all pregnant women, unclear). If she had had an abortion, she would have kept her job (and healthcare). Instead she's lost her job and healthcare while pregnant. Horrific. Here's the article: https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/williamson/2021/03/29/can-you-fired-over-sex-life-dave-ramsey-thinks-so/6980891002/
Leah, can you or Ms. Bachiochi give more clarity and context around the "walk away" wording and what she means by that. I am not sure if I agree with it, given the following sentence: a man "blithely return[s] to the course of his life." I don't think that's an accurate portrayal of the issues surrounding why women get abortions whatsoever. Often, women who do get abortions do have supportive partners, are married, and together make a truly tough and challenging decision. It is not based on not sexual autonomy or freedom. Instead, it is based on factors such as lack of health care, poverty, the immense strain of a 9-month long pregnancy on a woman, etc. Or, yes, a woman has an unsupportive partner who is abusive, who treats her terribly, or perhaps even raped her, and is now pregnant with her assailant's child.
I'm afraid I have to disagree with the assertion that reproductive freedom is a way of playing catch up. I see the reasoning and even see where it occurs in society, but I don't think that's not the case. I have personally thought a lot about this type of stuff over the past year. I have "undo" many of the things I was told and accepted in Catholic schools and circles. (I'm still proudly Catholic, though.) have found that most of the (politically conservative-based, usually) rhetoric on women's issues Empirical evidence states that birth control is not harmful to women — it doesn't cause cancer; it doesn't forever alter women's bodies, etc. Yes, there are outliers, but primarily the data states otherwise. And I do think it is time we talk about these issues more openly and honestly.
Hi Catherine, happy to offer a bit more clarity here. When I say that "men can just walk away," I don't mean that the reason women have abortions is because men walk away (though certainly that is true). I mean far more basically that men -- by the very design of their bodies -- have the capacity to detach themselves from a pregnancy in a way that a pregnant woman simply cannot.
As Aristotle first observed, the most fundamental difference between men and women is an asymmetrical one: women reproduce inside themselves; men, outside themselves. So, quite literally, when a woman is pregnant, she is "with [the] child." Yet the man who impregnated her (father to and so equally parent to the child) can physically walk away from her and the child (perhaps just into another room, but still, he can do so while she cannot).
This reproductive asymmetry is basic to what it means to be human, as male and female. The far more difficult questions then follow from it: in light of reproductive asymmetry, what are the obligations (and rights) of each of the parties involved and what are the obligations of the broader community and the state, etc etc. The full (12 min) talk from which Leah quotes gets into these latter questions a bit more...
And this short essay of mine in the Atlantic may get at all this better (and certainly I hope my forthcoming book does): https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/equality-autonomy-abortion/605356/
That's a great explanation, thank you! Your definition of asymmetric autonomy has also given me more to chew on! :)
I agree that the idea of "blithely returns to the course of his life" is only a tiny bit of the picture. It may seem huge at the time...but I've learned that in the long run, no one gets away with anything. Not really. The father of my kids walked away...ran, really...and it was decades later when he said he'd realized what he'd missed, and what was lost forever.
And a woman who has an abortion might feel huge relief at the time -- problem solved -- and only a decade or more later realize she still has an emotional and spiritual relationship with that unborn child, to deal with. I met a few such women, and it's really, really tough to deal with.
> What supports do you see as most essential to respond to reproductive asymmetry?
First thing I think of is people who will take the role of a gracious listener... someone to listen to a newly-pregnant woman who thinks her world is going to fall apart... and keep listening as she tries to figure out if she can see a vision for how to "do life" with a kiddo way earlier in her life than she imagined.
I imagine this listener and the would-be counselee having potential for misunderstanding! (You are dealing with something so raw, and affecting every part of your life!) Some families have money problems that are inexplicable to others. Not just the immediate nuclear family lacking sufficient means, but walls and barriers like, "I can't ask members of my extended family for financial help." "Why not?" And the answer is something like, "Because of a culture where members of my family have been incredibly unreliable with money/informal-loans in the past, it will give me pariah status." ("Pariah"! That's the word. That's one of the huge asymmetries that's been retained.)
Meanwhile, a woman deemed privileged will have her own struggle, as she wrestles with her vision for moving forward with education/career at the pace all her peers do. (people have mentioned this already!) Or she fears she won't be able to provide her child with the status symbols that are considered "essentials" for kids by her upper-middle-class peers, and, well, in a culture where "good moms" will "obviously" provide those things, she's looking ahead at shame.
I wonder if - throughout already-existing-structures in America - there is enough... for any woman or family to be supported through the raising of an unlooked-for child. If such a mother or father would be able to accept help. Without shame.
A support team of one close friend/counselor who is an excellent listener and gives hours a week (or a community of people who know how to really listen!) should be able to see a woman [who's apprehensive about having a child at an early stage of life] through a process of changing her narrative, changing her vision, and re-orienting her existing relationships. (esp. with family members, and with the child's father)
Yes, at LEAST one close friend/counselor. And the same for the father. There are some fathering mentor programs going. In my small rural town in NE Georgia, there's a court diversin program for men who could go to jail for not paying child support. Instead, they can enter this program and get real help in getting a job and training, plus mentoring in how to be a father -- the kind of father they never had, not the absent one or the one who yelled and beat them.
To leave a more serious comment than my last one, I think the area in which both women and men need more support is family leave and work hours that respect family needs. If we could shift society from its current work-takes-all mentality to one that genuinely valued children and family life, that would go a long way towards erasing the effects of what you've termed reproductive asymmetry, and it would benefit men as well as women.
What if men could be charged with assault and battery for every unintended pregnancy, even if the sex itself was consensual? (I don't really think that's a very good answer--as the mother of a son, I'm appalled by the idea--and yet I've thought for some time now that it's an argument that might be worth making, just to point out the imbalance in the consequences of pregnancy for men and women. Pregnancy and childbirth are physically grueling ordeals--there should be some form of redress when a woman is forced to endure them when she doesn't want to.)