This week I’ve posted a guest blog on the morphing aesthetics of aging today, at the Women’s Review of Books site Women=Books, hosted by the Wellesley Centers for Women:
“Not that YOU Look Old…”: On Later Motherhood”
Please stop in, and feel free to leave a comment if you have thoughts on the matter.
Women’s Review of Books also has a Facebook page that posts the link.
Yours in transit!
eg
Motherhood seems like a basically ecological undertaking. People who spend time feeding and nurturing the young can be expected to take an interest in keeping the food pure, the parks pleasant, and the air breathable. The very act of giving birth is itself all about recycling – moving the DNA of the forebears forward into the next generation. So it makes sense that many moms embrace the green movement, cutting waste and emissions to work toward sustainable ways of living.
But for some moms, however much they might wish that it were otherwise, going deep green feels next to impossible. Because they’re busy! I’m not talking about the ones who hustle through their days cooking, cleaning and composting – though I know some ladies who do just that. Those ladies (and a few gents) have the weekly soup simmering on the back burner and the specialité du jour on the table when the family sits down. But that’s a different kind of busy.
I’m talking about the moms with the 9 to 5, and the kids in the backseat at 6 wailing for a meal NOW! Those are the moms who bring home the Styrofoam so much more often than they (aka I) want to. And the plastic, and the metallic peel-off tops. Whose children’s bodies incorporate too many French Fries and hormone-heavy hamburgers. How many working parents’ families are sustained by the unsustainable? And is there a way out (besides quitting the job and living on roots and berries in the countryside)?
You know there is! And it’s not rocket science. It’s easy in concept – though it may be harder in actuality to break the bond with convenience (which is, after all, a kind of addiction).
In the packaging realm, the answer is simple: bring your own bin. If you can reuse a paper shopping bag, or carry your own cup to Starbucks, you can bring your own Tupperware to the burger shop. Yes it’s plastic, but you already have it. This behavior does require some planning – you have to have the bin clean and ready in the car when you get there, and you can’t go to the drive through—you have to park, walk in and hand your container to them when you order. So try it. If they won’t take your bin, you have to walk out. Find another shop where they’re not so hidebound. Given enough bin-waving customers, they’ll all adjust. In the meantime, it might help to think of it as an adventure on behalf of the planet. And your children’s sense of the importance of life’s details.
The harder part is relying less on the fast food to begin with, which either means buying more high-end take out (not an option for many, especially in recessionary times) or cooking it yourself. Which of course involves more than chopping and stewing – the shopping and the planning can double the time investment. Getting us all to the place where we make time to do this, and where we think it’s worthwhile, will involve a big cultural shift–to a Frenchified world where both employers and workers see food and family time as important. Of course this shift is well underway in the world of local farmers’ markets, cooking show fanaticism, and the slow food revolution.
This is not yet the world of the working moms I know however–and quite a few of the part-time or stay-home moms chose that route precisely because they wanted somebody to have time to do the cooking. This makes home cooking a luxury for the well off, and it means that for many the two sides of the “women’s work” spectrum — home arts and climbing the ladder in the paid work world, to a point where business policy might be reshaped — are directly opposed. Because time is limited.
But do they have to be opposed? I remember my own working mom poring over piles of cookbooks every Saturday planning the weekly menu and shop. Some weeks we’d get lots of spaghetti — but we also got a good variety of basic healthy vegetables and simple meat dishes, lots of casseroles in winter, and the occasional soufflé (not hard, once you’ve tried it a few times). Part of making it work is prioritizing cooking. And when there’s really no time for that, the other part is the bin in the car.
Working mom shopping co-ops could help — or websites with one week’s recipes with prefab shopping lists beside them (okay, I’m fantasizing here, and they’d all be good recipes with ingredients everyone in my family likes). Next step, getting the kids involved in the cooking –or in just making sure the bin is washed and ready to go in the morning. And there’s always the Crock Pot . . .
Related story: How Green Is Your Takeaway Container?
Here are two stories from Forbes: one tells us that, surprise, looks matter for women in terms of promotions (thinner, taller, confident, dressed-up women make more on average). The story does not address the way looks affect the promotions of men — except in the case of height. Does that mean there is no link for men on weight and appearance?
The second story offers more on the French gender quota proposal covered below — this one with a few more details on who gets onto boards of directors in the US, and why.
Putting the two stories together lets us wonder–would looks matter any less for women if there were more women in positions of power? Sure, looks do affect our perceptions of everybody, maybe especially in leadership roles, so people –male or female — who don’t attend at all to appearance would tend to be passed over for those jobs. But looks on their own do not a leader make, as our national undying loyalty to Oprah signals, whatever her shape of the moment. In fact it’s Oprah’s ongoing struggles with a body with its own opinion on what looks good that draws us to her and creates a dynamic of mutual empathy — and understanding that while standardized looks may entice us, they aren’t what finally matters.
Paying attention to grooming while projecting a confident attitude (the way to fulfill one version of attractiveness) is not the same as spending enormous amounts of time at the gym, refusing all sweets, or signing up for surgery. While looks count more for ladies in a world of male power, if power were equalized, women might feel less pushed to focus so much on appearance (and self-criticism) and have more time for developing their good ideas. Looks-wise, we’d likely get a range of leaders as a result — some svelte, some not so svelte; but they’d all have something interesting to say. And maybe the rest of us could relax a little as well.
The Guardian reports:
“In a bill submitted to the French parliament this week, all companies listed on the Paris stock exchange would have to ensure female employees made up 50% of their board members by 2015. If passed, a gradual implementation of the law would see businesses obliged to have women in 20% of board seats within 18 months, and 40% within four years.”
In a related move, in 2000 France changed its constitution to promote gender equity in politics,* but currently, the Guardian reports, “only 18% of MPs in the lower house [of the French Parliament are] women.” This parallels the 17% of Congressional seats held by women in the US.
In the U.S., though women hold more than 50% of managerial positions, only 15.2% of directors seats on corporate boards are filled by femmes. Only 3% of US corporations have female CEOs (Ursula Burns, above, is one). Though boards presumably seek the most able appointees, the old-boy network still has strong hold and able, qualified women are being overlooked. Without a strong incentive, established boards of directors have not actively sought to bring in points of view that might challenge established business practice.
But after the recent business collapse in the US and beyond, it’s clear that old ways of doing business are not serving us well — and that new viewpoints are badly needed.
If the French proposal passes, observers doubt whether the board quotas will be met on schedule, since the political quotas have not been. But no change is possible if no attempt is made. Is it time for the US to start thinking along similar lines?
*”The French Constitution was reformed in 1999 to state that “the law favors the equal access of women and men to electoral mandates and elective functions.” In 2000, French law was changed so that political parties must present equal numbers of men and women (within two percent) for most elections. In 2007, socialist Ségolène Royal (see above) stood for the Presidency, but lost with 47% of the vote to conservative Nicolas Sarkozy.” (International Women’s Democracy Center)
Thanksgiving Day is Mother’s Day – in reverse! It’s the day when the Mother (or the nourisher/s, of whatever age or gender) works hard and long to fulfill the family’s core fantasies of care and good eating. Primal stuff. This works even if it’s you by the stove, channeling the nourishers of your past. Or if the cook at your feast is no relation.
*Thanks to Cathy Boswell for this phrase
Because the recession has laid off more men than women (75% of jobs lost were men’s jobs, in arenas largely staffed by men like manufacturing and construction…), women by default are about to become 50% of the paid workforce for the first time. Not exactly an advance, since we’ve made the gain while standing still. Time Magazine and Ms, following the lead of Maria Shriver’s A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything report, have both taken this as an occasion to examine gender and workplace issues–always a good thing if it can move us along further in our discussion of how to make the workplace fairer.
Here’s a link to a discussion of some of these issues I was part of on Houston PBS earlier this week.
In reality, women have always been 50% of the workforce. So far hitting 50% of the paid workforce has only been the occasion to remind us that we’re the underpaid 50% — where before we were just the unpaid 50%. Will that evidence be enough to get change moving?
“A Domestic Proposal: No More Babies”
Senator Jon Kyl made headlines recently by proposing that maternity care shouldn’t be covered by health insurance because he didn’t need it. When Senator Debbie Stabenow noted that his mother probably did, Senator Kyl replied that “That was more than 60 years ago.”
Some heard this exchange as evidence of Kyl’s lack of empathy, but if the ladies of the nation are listening carefully, we may hear a different message.
Maybe babies just aren’t needed anymore. Sixty years ago yes, but not any more.
Maybe that’s what the powers that be have been trying, gently, to tell us by not insuring births, not supplying health care for kids or good affordable childcare that would allow moms to go to work to support those kids knowing that they’re both safe and well cared for.
Maybe that’s why we’ve read a few stories blaming moms for their many, and sometimes opposite, failures. Like staying home and working. Both of these behaviors, we’ve learned, are mistakes. But maybe not, as it’s sometimes seemed, because “they’re” trying to turn women against one another in order to distract us from the project of demanding fair treatment for families. Maybe the real point is that motherhood of all kinds just is a mistake these days, because nobody needs kids anymore.
They haven’t said it outright because they know we find raising kids so personally fulfilling that they didn’t want to just forbid us having them. But maybe it’s time to heed the example of our sisters in Italy and Japan, whose birthrates fell way below replacement level years ago, and move on. Especially now that deaths are way down–people like Senator Kyl are living longer than ever before, and planning, doubtless, to stay fit and in office for ages. So maybe we don’t need a new generation of workers, or of caregivers for the old folks like him–they won’t be declining. No help required from the unborn children of other people to fund Social Security down the line either, if you’re never going to draw it.
Time to kick back ladies and explore some new kinds of fun. The kind that doesn’t include worrying about infertility or the uninsured cost of treatment. No need to labor away actually bearing babies, or to bother raising them–inculcating them with those good manners that make pleasant neighbors or with that work ethic that employers made so much use of historically, but apparently can do without these days.
Instead we can move off the mommy tracks and start really competing on the earning tracks. No more long-term cuts to your wage packet because you flexed or took a few years out of the full-time work stream to accommodate your kids’ development–the same kids that you thought might be a boon to the nation in years to come. Before you realized they were superfluous.
Once we’re making the high dollars, we’ll have no trouble paying for our health care out of our own pockets, no matter how high it goes. A lot of that cost was for those pestilential kids anyway.
If a few people do die off (accidents, irresponsible eating habits maybe) and their jobs need filling, there are always immigrants, who arrive here fully formed, saving us the trouble and cost of bearing and educating them.
Stopping with the babies already will go a ways toward fixing global warming too (fewer diapers in the landfill, no additional mouths to hog resources), especially if we can get the third world on board with a similar plan–though there would remain a few kinks to work out re the immigrant labor stream (see above).
If the nation needed more kids, you know our leaders would view the family not as a site of personal pleasure only, but also as a site of production, in which some social investment would be appropriate (like health care, like paid sick days…). If the nation wanted to encourage women to both raise and educate kids at the same time that they hold down the jobs that allow them to feed those kids and to contribute their skills and talents to the national labor pool, they would make it easier, not harder, to do both. QED. No babies wanted.
How could we have missed all those hints? The implied proposal to end procreation as we’ve known jumps out so clearly, when you look at the actions rather than the words.
It will take us a little time to figure out what to do with ourselves once we don’t have to plan our activities around kids–Christmas will not be the same. But we’ll have plenty of time for that reading we’ve been meaning to get to, and for those home improvement projects that were interrupted by all the games those kids kept insisting on, the camping trips, the homework sessions, the loads of laundry. And we can finally really put to the test whether the sex drive has some subliminal link to procreation. Or is it entirely separate?
Of course it’s not just the new longevity that allows us this new life pattern. Sixty years ago, when Kyl’s mother brought him into the world, there was no hormonal birth control and women were stuck having kids willy nilly. Not so today. As part of their program to end procreation, Senator Kyl and friends should be introducing birth control into the national water supply shortly.
So the world has been run by stealth environmentalists and radical family planning advocates all along! I can see now that they have no other motive than the good of our country in proposing the end of procreation, and that the next move toward resolving the nation’s problems lies in the laps of the ladies (or, in this case, does not lie there). I myself will not be able to participate in the new childfree regime, my youngest being now four years old, but I am at least past child-bearing and will not be contributing further to the excess population.