Kisses for My President: Work/Family Balance in the White House and in Your House

Kisses for My President

Polly Bergen played the mother of the first female President in ABC's Commander in Chief a few seasons back with a wink to those who remembered her past. Back in 1965 Bergen also played the first female POTUS, in a movie called Kisses for My President.

While her husband (Fred MacMurray) hung about awkwardly, President Leslie McCloud handled her job ably. The first gentleman wasn't sure what his job was, however, and all the implied questions about where the dividing line between men's work and women's work lay and why were resolved when she, already the mother of two older kids, became pregnant and resigned, facing a choice between losing the job or losing the baby. Even in the sixties a working woman with kids was imaginable, but working with a baby was not.

Forty years later, Geena Davis's Mackenzie Allen might have been that child Leslie McCloud left office to raise. With three school-age kids, the baby question didn't arise for mama Mackenzie, presumably for two reasons: first, things had changed enough that the point of the story was no longer to find an ending that pushed her out of office, it was to show her managing there. Second, and equally pragmatically, because, as the female candidate for VP in the 2000 film The Contender assured those worried about the chance that she might become pregnant in office, Mackenzie and her husband could be assumed to employ reliable birth control (something still fairly new in 1965).

Nonetheless, though she had many devoted fans, Mackenzie too left office early--when the show was canceled. So, yes, she could be imagined holding the job, but then again, not so much.

Those two story lines in tandem with this year's political stories suggest both that we've come a distance, and that we're still conflicted about what kinds of work women are supposed to or are allowed to do in our world. Hillary has already lived the life of a working mother with a young child in the White House, but her status as First Lady looked enough like a familiar role and occurred against a backdrop quite different from that of today. These days advocates for revising the national work/family dynamic speak on every other corner. In between you'll hear voices raised for a return to a world in which women knew their place and stayed in it.

Part of the conflict stems from the fact that the system we operate within makes it so hard for women to succeed. The question of how to accommodate the dual needs of kids of all ages--and babies in particular--as well as a demanding job remains a huge issue in contemporary America, and Sarah Palin's candidacy brings it front and center even though she herself has not made it a talking point.

It's an issue for working women all over America, from executives to middle management to line workers, shop assistants, and clerks. And increasingly it's an issue for men, whose working wives make child care a family concern. The world is full of working people with young kids, and they need answers.

A few basic changes could make enormous differences. A national investment in an affordable, reliable system of good childcare (see the French example) would release a torrent of talent and energy into the rebuilding economy on at least three levels: the childcare workers who will earn more and get more education while providing more consistency to the children they're tending; the mothers and fathers of those kids who will be freed to participate more fully in growing the economy; and the children, who will themselves be more educated and more able to contribute down the line.

If we value families as the source of the next generation of citizens, there's plenty of room to make changes in the work culture so that people who want to spend time with their kids while building careers can do so. And framework changes in areas like the tax code so that mothers' income isn't unfairly charged as it is in the current income averaging system could reshape the way women's work adds up in the home budget. Many more changes, large and small, could emerge from a vigorous national discussion.

While this political season won't yield a woman president, it has seen a movement of women into the political forefront as never before. We're ready for a national leadership (male and female) that takes seriously the contributions on both the home front and the business front of all citizens and commits to facilitating both. So far Barack Obama is the only candidate who has demonstrated an interest in pursuing such family-friendly change. If he, as an active father to young children, can carry that banner into the White House, he can count on lots of kisses, of the metaphorical kind, from families all over the nation. And the groundwork for a return to a burgeoning national economy for good measure.

[This piece was first posted on huffingtonpost.com]

GENDER, CREATIVITY and the NEW LONGEVITY

The Women's Studies Program at the University of Houston will be presenting a symposium on GENDER, CREATIVITY and the NEW LONGEVITY, on November 13 - 15, 2008.

Speakers will explore the social and personal outcomes of the new longevity and our creative responses as a community to the changing scene.

Katha Pollitt will give the keynote on the evening of the 13th. Speakers include Margaret Gullette and Martha Holstein, among many others.

A linked exhibit called THRIVE!, curated by Mary Ross Taylor will open at DiverseWorks on November 14th, with an opening party from 6 to 8. www.diverseworks.org

Check out www.friendsofwomen.org for full details.

Ready or Not?

Here's a piece from earlier this year:

Ready or Not?

What do Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, and Michelle Obama have in common? They all began their families at relatively advanced ages. Hillary was 32 when she had Chelsea in 1980, Laura was 35 when the twins arrived in 1981, and Michelle was 34 and 37 at the births of her daughters in 1998 and 2001. All three are part of a decades-old worldwide trend among women, who, when offered the chance, often choose to start their families later (sometimes quite a bit later) than their mothers did. The CDC's recent birth data release reveals that births among first-time later moms increased again in 2006 (up 1% over 2005).

Births to older moms have been rising for years (10 times as many first births to women 35-39 in 2006 as in 1975 and 13 times as many births to 40-44 year olds), while the rates for younger moms have generally been descending. This year however the numbers of births to younger moms also rose (up 3% for teens -- the first rise since 1991, and linked to reliance on abstinence-only programs -- and up 4% for women 20-24). The average U.S. woman starts her family at 25.2, up from 21.4 in 1970. College-educated women generally put a hold on kids while they go to school and then establish at work, so their average age at first birth has been over 30 for several years. For many reasons, birth timing shapes a woman's life.

The thirty- and forty-something new moms, like Laura, Hillary and Michelle, are educated women with work histories, whether they're currently in a job or staying home. And that history, it turns out, offers many benefits -- to the individuals, their families and to society.

Most media stories on later motherhood focus on infertility, but my study of New Later Mothers (women who started their families at 35 or over, by birth or adoption), found that many women succeed in having kids later in the usual way (over 600,000 in 2006 - 1 in every 7 babies). Those who don't succeed with their own genetic material often find alternate routes to happy families via egg donation (another 6,000 or so) or adoption.

The women I interviewed were overwhelmingly glad they waited until they personally felt ready for family, because for them waiting brought many advantages. Established in their jobs and secure in their senses of self, they can focus on their kids' development rather than their own. They have fewer money worries and more clout at work (handy for negotiating family-friendly schedules). The self-confidence they've built at work transfers to their mothering. Their marriages feel sound. And, remarkably, they even live longer!

Today's later dads are also a new breed. Though in years past some dads started their families later, those guys tended to have younger wives, whereas in 2007 the older dads tend to be married to peers, which creates a different family dynamic. (Bill was 33, George was 35, and Barack was 36 and 39 when their kids were born.) Home life is more egalitarian, tasks more evenly shared, when women have cultural clout equal to their husbands'.

The new later motherhood involves an enormous cultural shift -- maybe even a form of species evolution. It's made possible by two prior changes: the broad availability of reliable birth control, and the health advances that have greatly extended the life expectancy of middle-class Americans.

These additional years mean that we can sequence our life-stages differently than ever before. For women, that means more opportunities to explore realms of life that they didn't have time for when they had to focus on raising the next generation before hitting the graveyard (at an average 47 in 1900). For men, the expanding workplace family-friendliness that women's trickle up has wrought means the chance to participate in their children's lives and to share the burden of family support. Women's education and work experience mean big additions to our pool of innovation and skill -- in the women themselves and the kids they nurture.

While many people feel ready to start their families in their twenties, readiness at any age involves choice and presumes access to reliable birth control. Beyond that, all families need expanded social support, which can be enacted through business and legislative policy. Real family friendliness builds a strong workforce for tomorrow while allowing the current workforce to focus on their jobs and perform at their best.

We are beginning to recognize the cascading ramifications of the changes the new later motherhood brings. But the diverse accomplishments of Michelle, Laura and Hillary (respectively, hospital administrator, librarian, and politician, and, similarly, wife, mother and envoy) just hint at the kinds of benefits that can flow when all women can decide for themselves when they feel ready to start their families.

[This piece was first posted in January 2008 on huffingtonpost.com]

Never Done and Under Paid

"A farmer works from sun to sun," goes the adage, "but a woman's work is never done." It's also been said that women who don't hold paying jobs "don't work." What's that difference about?

Here's my take on the many aspects of Women's Work--both in the home and outside it, in honor of this year's close conjunction of Women's Equality Day (the suffrage anniversary) and Labor Day:

Never Done and Under Paid

This year Labor Day and Women's Equality Day bookend the week: a timely conjunction, since tension over what properly constitutes women's work is the crux of much of our current public discourse.

That concern feeds the babble about baby bumps that fills the celebrity magazines, lies at the root of the Supreme Court's rejection of Lilly Ledbetter's suit for fair pay restoration, of the push to pass legislation to reverse that judgment and for pay equity overall, and of the efforts by the current administration to cut access to sex ed and to birth control wherever they can find an opportunity. The Democratic primaries operated in part as a labor debate over what kinds of jobs women are allowed to hold (president or clothes presser, in one formulation). The endless stories on fertility and Mommy Wars play into the debate as well.

It's the change in definition that "women's work" has undergone in the past 50 years that generates the controversy. For ages, women's labor, apart from sex and reproduction, was largely limited to care work, whether it was done in the home for free or outside it for pay. Within the family, care work is viewed as private and personal. But this work has a very public aspect too: the nation and the business community depend on mothers to bear and raise children to be good citizens, reliable workers and avid consumers.

In effect, mothers have been underwriting the national bottom line by raising their young for no pay.

Insofar as the business world presumes their efforts, mothers have always been part of the larger economy, but their contributions have been invisibilized by the economists who segregate "production" from "reproduction" and calculate the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by omitting the work that goes on in that most domestic of spheres, the home, because it is unpaid. A more-apt acronym would be GIDP, since it's fundamentally Grossly Inaccurate.

What's more, instead of being recognized for their generosity, mothers have been further punished economically, with low pay and limited benefits when they work outside the home, and with small protection when they divorce. Motherhood is a big predictor of poverty in old age.

Jobs available to women in general have been paid less than the same or comparable jobs done by men. Women's work has been considered just worth less--not because it was but because women didn't have the status to command better treatment. Or the time to fight for it: they were too busy tending the torrent of babies, many of whom died young of ailments now treatable.

But since the advent of hormonal birth control in 1960, the social fabric woven over millennia around the assumption that women were baby machines has been undergoing quick redesign. When offered the chance, women and their partners in the US and around the world have chosen to start their families later and to keep them smaller. Most have kids, but some do not, by choice or default. Birth control has allowed large numbers of women to enter the universities and the workplace in an ever-expanding range of fields. In so doing these women have doubled our national talent pool and strengthened our skilled workforce. When mothers are well educated, the children are too, and the population lives longer in better health. The playing field has changed utterly.

In this new arena, women combine raising the next generation of workers and citizens (often in active partnership with the dads) with actively contributing as workers and citizens themselves -- an overall increase in efficiency.

The new gender realities of employment and national interest call for equal pay for equal work as well as workplace policy that allows people who wish to be parents to build both families and careers. But though women's status has been rising, we're not there yet: women still make just 78 cents for every dollar men make, and 80 cents on the dollar adjusting for occupation and rank. Oppression anyone?

Gradually, the work rules have been changing, as women trickle up into positions in business and government that either allow them to institute change themselves or cause their colleagues to make change in order to retain them. Two much ballyhooed pay-equity bills have made it through the House, and we'll soon see if they make it through the Senate and past the likely veto.

Those who blame feminists for focusing on women's workplace rights and failing to tend the family side of the struggle in the early days might consider whether it wasn't necessary for women first to establish the clout they now have in order to be heard around equity and work/life issues at all.

In the face of the ongoing redesign, there's plenty of push back by the forces of yore. This is exercised both around opposition to pay equity and work-place flexibility and in the recently very-pressurized discourse around that specifically female version of labor -- the work of child-bearing.

A network of real supports for people of both genders would promote the maximization of our potential, as workers and as parents, for personal and national benefit. It would include the usual suspects like fair pay protections, access to affordable good child care, affordable access to and information on birth control and abortion, and paid sick days, and it would expand to fund FMLA, mandate infertility coverage, and create real on and off ramps for women and men who need time off from a career to focus on family, and more.

We've just had a fine example of what a business model focused on short-term profits does for us. A better model would focus on long-term growth and honor all the work that women have done and will do in the home and outside it.

For millennia women's work has been underwriting the bottom line for business and the nation. It's time for some return on that investment.

[This piece was first posted on huffingtonpost.com]

Reviews & Interviews

Here's a recent review by Jo Keroes at the Mommy Track'd site.

Earlier reviews include the Washington Post (see Learned Ladies Living Large post below), the Houston Chronicle , the Austin American Statesman , and the Feminist Review.

Other discussions of the book appeared in the New York Times, the Daily Telegraph, Time Out NY Kids, among others...

Radio interviews include Conceive, on Air, The Current on the CBC, Conversations with Joy/WPR, and
Northeast Public Radio.

Births Up--No, Down!

Here's my take on the differences between the CDC and Census reports on 2006 fertility, and the context of fertility anxiety the reports operate within:

"Births Up--No, Down!: Stats and the Politics of Fertility Anxiety"

"More Women Than Ever Are Childless, Census Finds" read last week's NY Times headline. Both the claim and the rather alarmist phrasing ("more than ever!") may have confused readers who recalled the December 2007 headline for the story on the annual CDC birth data (gathered from birth certificates), which told us that "Teenage Birth Rate Rises for First Time Since '91." That article then went on to report that rates were up for women in all age categories between 15 and 45. Both reports were based on data from 2006.

So how can births be up and down in the same year? Easily, if you're comparing to different years past.

Where the CDC report compares to 2005 data, the Census report looks back thirty years and finds that in 1976 women 40 to 44 had a total average 3.1 kids, whereas now they have 1.9--one child fewer overall. Since some women do still have three or more, part of that average is a rise in the number of women who end their "childbearing years" without bearing children - up from 10% in 1976 to 20% in 2006, the lowest level documented to date.

Easily too, if your data come from different stages in women's fertility stories: where the CDC documents actual births in the given year, the Census takes a retrospective look at how many children women report having by the time they're 40 to 44, an age group assumed to have largely finished having kids.

It's no surprise that more women are childless now than were in 1976. Work and family expectations have changed substantially. For most, birth control means the chance to decide how many kids you want, and when. But for some it means the chance to say "None" and still have a romantic life.

The 2006 CDC data tell us that births to teens 15 to 19 were up 3% after a steady 14-year decline, and that, less problematically but interestingly, births to women 20-24 were up 4%, women 25-29 were up 1%, 30-39 up 2%, and 40 to 44 up 3%.

In addition the CDC report calculates that the total fertility rate [TFR] for women went up to 2.1 in 2006. The TFR projects the total number of children that a hypothetical woman currently of childbearing age might be expected to have at current rates. Given that the TFR in 1983-1986 (when the women who were 40-44 in 2006 were just starting to have babies) was between 1.799 and 1.837, the recent Census report of 1.9 could just as well have been headlined: "Women Having Slightly More Children Than Predicted."

But that would have required cross-referencing the CDC and Census data. Doing that might also have raised other questions. For instance, since the birth rate to women 40-44 was up 3% in 2006, and up consistently for more than 20 years prior, and with egg donation offering the possibility of expanded numbers of births to women 45 and over, there is basis for questioning whether the set of women 40 to 44 actually does offer us a good portrait of "completed fertility." Something to talk about.

Background Anxiety

Though both reports don't purport to do more than give some "facts," statistics are always read in context. There's a lot of complexity to the back-story on recent birth patterns, having to do with education, economics, changing social rules, HR policy, and the relative lack of affordable childcare, but the takeaway from the Census article for many readers was one more drop in the bucket of fertility anxiety.

Though the Times article began with a statement about women choosing not to have kids, the alarmist cast of the headline plays into an ongoing story we've been hearing constantly over the past five years about rising problems with infertility, in spite of the fact that that story is highly unspecific.

Lots of women have kids in their late 30s and early 40s, some in the usual way and some with the help of IVF, though sometimes it takes them longer to become pregnant than it would have earlier. Some try without success. After 43, increasing numbers of women employ egg donation, and many women adopt. Some decide to stay childfree.

Presumably the rise in the number of childless 40-to-44 year olds is due to a combination of some women and their partners choosing against kids altogether, others hoping for kids but out-waiting their fertility, and still others planning to start soon. Exactly what proportions are unknown. But infertility was the inference made by the reporter who called me asking if the story wasn't evidence that working women were waiting "too late" to start their families.

The hyped-up infertility consciousness (repeated by the media ad infinitum) and the big emphasis on babies and on women's "secret desire" to stay at home with kids long term, in spite of plenty of evidence to the contrary, is a sign of another, underlying anxiety among some of us over how many women really don't want to just stay home.

That anxiety helps shape the environment that's putting pressure on women of all ages to have babies NOW, at whatever age--along with the recent highly politicized decreases in access to birth control, especially for younger women. Will it block the exits from the ways of yore? For many, sadly, it may.

If women are forced to step out of school at whatever level in order to raise kids they would rather have had later, our nation and our economy will suffer, especially if we offer them no real way to step back in. At a time when a strong future depends on our rigorously educating all our people, it's not the time to throw away the real contributions that educated women make to our common wealth, both as moms educating young workers and citizens and as workers and citizens themselves.

At the same time, we have a group interest in supporting the family ambitions of our population. It's time to move toward a really family-friendly national policy, that combines real work/family balance options in business, mandating insurance coverage for existing fertility treatments and expanding fertility research, and honoring the decisions of those who choose to live childfree.

[This piece was first posted at huffingtonpost.com]

Fertility "Facts"

Have you seen this table


or the chart it's derived from it?



At several points in life and on the web I've encountered them, cited as evidence that the rate of age-based infertility in the US has risen over the past 100 years. Sometimes an attribution is given, to an legitimate article by researcher George Maroulis, and in fact that is the chart's source. But context means a lot, and this presentation leaves out key information. The table, which also cites Maroulis, seems to draw on the chart, but does so very selectively and inaccurately (among other faults, it conflates and misstates the pre-20th century lines [there is no 18th or 19th-century data in the chart], omits the Iranian and Hutterite lines and misrepresents "modern USA" in several ways).

In the essay this chart is taken from, it's clear that what's being compared here are pre-birth-control ("natural") populations and data from the US in which birth control of various kinds is employed--non-hormonal (1955 and 1981) as well as hormonal (1981). It's the effect of the use of birth control that this chart documents--not a decline in ability to bear. The latest data in the chart comes from very early in the new later motherhood trend (1981), so the representations of births to women in their forties in the chart tell us little about dynamics today.

As I note in Ready, while the table includes a footnoted comment that the "older data is likely to include substantial inaccuracies," no note appears on the huge inaccuracy created by the presentation of the modern data.

This kind of erroneously presented material amounts to a form of statistical fakery, and contributes to the high level of contemporary fertility anxiety.

Here's Maroulis's discussion of the charts:
"Data from the United States do not reflect natural fertility rates since the populations are, as mentioned earlier, practicing birth control. However, they are of interest since they are the product of a combination of biological and social inferences. . . . the fertility rates observed in natural cycles of historical populations may have a bias in that older women who have already conceived previously may not be as anxious to get pregnant. So it may be more appropriate to review data from populations in whom women purposely delay childbearing and try to get pregnant at older ages. . . . A considerable amount of data from such natural populations that delay childbearing and did not practice contraception existed from the late 1700s and early 1800s in Belgium, England, France, Germany and Scandinavia, where the mean age of marriage was over 27 and even close to 30. . . . Results [show] that women over 40 years are not, as often portrayed, hopelessly infertile but indeed can, in up to 48% of cases, achieve a pregnancy." (George B. Maroulis, "Effect of Aging on Fertility and Pregnancy," Seminars in Reproductive Endocrinology, 9, no. 3 [August 1991]: 168.)

Note that the "over 40" category he invokes at the end of the quote is not defined in terms of upper age limit, and so could involve a number of women over 43, who skew the information on women 40-42, who current data indicates are substantially more likely to be fertile than women 43 and over.