What Married Woman Give Up During The Recession
Women shouldn't have to give up their babysitters and other luxuries.
Those who read this column know that I’ve been writing very personally about how the downturn has affected my relationship. In all honesty, I'm starting to fear that by focusing on what’s happening inside relationships, we may be losing sight of larger contexts—what could and should be happening in the structures that govern our lives.Read: Is The Recession Changing Men's Values?
Whoever invented the notion that a wife who earns less than her husband has a career that is, by definition, "expendable"? The ubiquity of this sentence—"she has an expendable career"—was brought home to me once again when I read Diane Clehane’s "Recession Marriage Wars" in yesterday's Daily Beast. Clehane poignantly shares her frustration that for her, and for many working mothers she knows, "The recession means wives are under pressure from their husbands who tell them a sitter is now a luxury they can't afford.”
These are working mothers, mind you—women who have defined themselves by their careers for most of their lives and who know that being a good mom and having a great career are not mutually exclusive. As someone with big hopes of starting a family, and as a feminist, I'm thinking government-funded or employer-subsidized childcare is sounding like a pretty darn good idea right about now.Read: Career and Family Can We Really Have Both?
But instead of going there, so much of the writing about how recession is affecting relationships tends to focus on marital fallout alone. Says Clehane, whose contracts have been halved but who refuses to give up the work she loves, "No matter how many times we have the conversation, my husband doesn’t understand why I’ve chosen to drive myself crazy staying up half the night to write for half of what I was making a year ago."Read: 2 Ways Recessions Can Strengonships
Written by Deborah Siegel for Recessionwire.com.
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Discussion
I think we should have government sponsored child care, first off.
But nannies and the more expensive babysitters are sometimes profoundly necessary, especially if the child has special needs, or if the parent's career has unique demands.
Demands like those on my cousin. She is a cardiologist, divorced with custody of their two sons. When she is on call, she has to have another adult in residence who can seamlessly take over the child care aspects of her life at a moment's notice. She does not have time to take the kids "to" a sitter or grandma's, and has chosen to live as near the hospital as she can. I'm sure that people who have emergency heart catheterizations and stent placement are glad that she makes very sure that when she needs to be Doctor that she can leave being a mom outside the hospital.
I'm not against nannies. If you're making money, you can have one. The women in these stories were working without actually making money. Why should someone pay for them to have child care? Or would you support paying me to stay home with my kids?
This is probably going to irritate everyone, but I have very little sympathy for the women in these articles. They are not making money at their jobs, they are losing it. They are upset because they can't have nannies anymore.
If they really don't want to stay home and be child-care providers, they can look for other work that makes more money. They could also join the world of most working mothers and find cheaper child care.
It they don't want to give up the job that doesn't make money, they can try working part-time around naps and preschool and their husband's work schedule. They can swap child care with friends.
I have absolutely no desire to subsidize a wealthy woman who wants to go on working without making money. Government supported child care should be for families with low incomes who really need it.
