Feminist hysteria about the “Mommy Track” has been an entertaining diversion during a spring in which the media alternate between depressing reports about the Alaskan oil spill and tiresome complaints about how President Bush isn’t doing what they think he ought to be doing. The newsmagazines, newspapers, TV news and talk shows, and even the cover of Business Week, climbed aboard the publicity train to discuss the Mommy Track and what people think about it.
Poor Felice Schwartz, whose article in the Harvard Management Review start the controversy. She didn’t even use the term that has been hung on her idea. She must wonder why all the fuss.
All she did was to state the obvious, namely, that most mothers like to spend some time raising their children rather than putting in the 60-70 hours a week it takes to ride the fast track to success in the corporate and professional world. The reason for the furor is that what she said is feminist heresy.
It is feminist dogma that men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, are fungibles, interchangeables. Feminists are offended by any term indicating that there may be a different role for men and women; they think that “role” is a dirty four-letter word.
They think women are oppressed when society expects mothers to take care of their own children. They think women must be relieved of this burden, or at least share it equally with men.
Again and again, college women ask me why the child care burden can’t be “shared.” Implicit in their demand is the notion that child care is somehow degrading, menial, and a second-dclass status, and that is a pity because it is false.
In fairness to Ms. Schwartz, she didn’t say that business should decide which track to put women on. The woman employee should select her own track, whether the “career-primary” fast track or thee “career-and-family” slower track.
There is no reason why women should be expected to stay on the same track all their lives, and Ms. Schwartz didn’t imply that they should. Children grow up and women’s family responsibilities change from year to year.
What wounded the feminists most were Ms. Schwartz’s statements that “Maternity is biological rather than cultural” and that maternity is not simply childbirth but a continuous that continues from pregnancy through bonding and child rearing. The feminists simply cannot accept this because it violates their stereotype of “equality.”
Nor did the feminists want to hear the facts of business life that a successful corporate or professional career means so many extra hours and personal sacrifices for women that it “requires that they remain single or at least childless or, if they do have children, that they be satisfied to have others raise them.”
In a recent Washington conference, George Gilder aptly pointed out how feminism has persuaded women to focus on their careers in their twenties and early thirties, competing intensely with men for advancement in their jobs, and then if perhaps they decide they want to “have it all,” at about age 40 they can think about marriage. At that point, they discover that it is much harder for a woman to get married, or at least to marry the man she wants to marry.
Thousands, perhaps millions of American women make this tragic mistake. But having made it, they feel a compelling emotional need to defend it and to justify it.
George Gilder explained that the real hear of the daycare controversy “is essentially about ratifying the feminist mistake – an attempt to give public ratification to the appalling error which millions of American women made in the 1970s and 1980s.”
Feminism taught young women that marriage was a cage, that divorce was liberation, that childcare was a burden, that abortion was women’s right, and that devoting themselves to careers in their twenties and thirites would bring fulfillment.
Feminism was dealt a body blow when that famous cover story in Newsweek a couple of years ago showed how career women’s chances of marriage had passed them by. A recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times poignantly described another result of feminists teaching young women to give their career priority in their lives.
“I am a walking cliché of my generation,” this feminist sadly wrote, “a woman of 40 who put work ahead of motherhood and now longs for the latter.” The problem is that she now belongs to what she calls “the sisterhood fo the infertile.”
After rejecting motherhood during her prime childbearing years, she is now spending thousands of dollars, traipsing around from one fertility clinic to another, trying to find a medical miracle that can help her to conceive and carry a baby.
The real defect in feminism is that it attempts to change or even repeal huma nature. There is no evidence that they will be successful in the foreseeable future.
