{"id":1676,"date":"2018-07-31T08:46:48","date_gmt":"2018-07-31T13:46:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/?p=1676"},"modified":"2018-08-06T16:02:12","modified_gmt":"2018-08-06T21:02:12","slug":"babies-in-the-senate-and-city-hall-are-todays-mothers-making-different-demands-from-the-generation-before-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/2018\/07\/31\/babies-in-the-senate-and-city-hall-are-todays-mothers-making-different-demands-from-the-generation-before-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Babies in the Senate and City Hall: Are today’s mothers making different demands from the generation before them?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reposted from\u00a0Psychology Today<\/a>.\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Tammy Duckworth is the first senator to give birth while in office.\u00a0And she did so with great fanfare and a demand that her breastfeeding infant be able to accompany her to the Senate floor.<\/a>\u00a0The mayor of DC adopted a baby, and almost immediately began juggling motherhood and\u00a0politics<\/a>, with barely any time away from the public eye.\u00a0Millennial mothers are running for office and\u00a0 advertising their breastfeeding babies in campaign photos<\/a>. Women are demanding that their status as mothers, with babies, be accommodated.\u00a0It\u2019s about time.<\/p>\n

And yet, why now?\u00a0 Professional women have been in careers for over 50 years.\u00a0What is new now?\u00a0 A\u00a0sociological concept of \u201cthe economy of\u00a0gratitude<\/a>\u201d helps explain these newly vocal demands by today\u2019s mothers.\u00a0The demands of employed mothers have definitely changed since the 20th Century. Women like me, middle class white baby boomers who fought to join the ranks of the professionally employed,\u00a0were happy that we had broken into the boys club.\u00a0We were grateful to be there.\u00a0As Gloria Steinem so aptly explained, we\u00a0wanted to\u00a0be the men we were supposed to marry.\u00a0We wanted was to\u00a0influence the world, to make our own way, to be independent.\u00a0In my generation, we wanted to be someone in our own right, not\u00a0somebody\u2019s wife, but to be that somebody.\u00a0To do that, we put up with sexual harassment, lower wages, and the mommy wars.\u00a0We were breaking new ground for married middle class\u00a0women,\u00a0who had been raised to be wives.\u00a0My\u00a0parents<\/a>\u00a0wanted me to train to be a nurse or a teacher just, as they would say, \u201cin case your husband ever leaves you.\u201d\u00a0With that kind of parental ambition, I was\u00a0grateful\u00a0to have fought to carve out a life that included my work and my family.\u00a0I felt lucky to have escaped the domestic life my mother and her friends lived.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s young mothers, Millennial women, are not grateful for being allowed to be in their jobs, to be somebody.\u00a0They take that for granted, thanks to their grandmothers and mothers who fought those battles. In my new book,\u00a0Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure (Oxford, 2018)<\/a>, I interviewed 116 Millennials and nearly all of them, including very conservative “true believers” in\u00a0gender<\/a>\u00a0differences, expected women to spend their adult lives in the labor force, whether or not they were mothers. There is simply\u00a0no endorsement for the\u00a0idea that in heterosexual\u00a0marriage<\/a>\u00a0husbands are breadwinners and women wives.\u00a0And the quantitative data agree<\/a>.\u00a0There is almost no one left that doesn\u2019t believe women should have equal rights in the public world of politics and work.<\/p>\n

So today\u2019s young mother doesn\u2019t feel any gratitude, as we did, for being allowed into the\u00a0workplace<\/a>.\u00a0And the daughters of working class women and women of color have always had role models who were both mothers and workers.\u00a0So nearly all American women today\u00a0take it for granted that paid work is the responsibility of women and men, mothers and fathers. Women just presume they have a right to be at work.\u00a0Thank goodness for that!\u00a0Today\u2019s new mother has usually been in the workplace for several years, and is used to competing with men as equals, knowing, of course, that she\u2019s more than equal since women\u00a0are held to higher standards and presumed incompetent until we prove otherwise.<\/a>\u00a0Motherhood\u00a0now comes with a shock to many successful women.\u00a0For the first time, perhaps in their post-feminist era lives,\u00a0the rules are so clearly, so obviously, stacked against them.<\/p>\n

We have no male\/female job listings but we still have schools that dismiss small children at 3:00 pm, and workplaces that presume workers are available full-time\u00a0during the day and 24\/7 online, with just a few weeks off per year. Such school hours clearly presume children have one parent (read mother) at home.\u00a0And workplaces that reward workers who have no competing care-taking\u00a0 demands are affirmative action programs for (usually) white men with wives.\u00a0The next step in feminism is to create a world where men, as well as women, have\u00a0moral<\/a>\u00a0and practical responsibilities for caring for other people.\u00a0Perhaps then\u00a0our society will begin to root out the patriarchy upon which it has\u00a0been built, and workplaces will begin to realize that all workers also have someone to take care of, if only themselves.<\/p>\n

But for now, let\u2019s hear this generation of Millennial women roar. Let\u2019s applaud\u00a0as they demand our workplaces accommodate women\u2019s role in reproduction, so that infants can breastfeed while their mothers rule the world.\u00a0But this too\u00a0is only one\u00a0more step forward.\u00a0Let\u2019s hope in the near future\u00a0their husbands\u00a0\u2014 maybe that’s daydreaming,\u00a0perhaps instead it will be their sons\u00a0\u2014\u00a0will lead the charge for paid parental leave for all Americans,\u00a0to allow fathers and mothers more time at home with infants, so no one has to bring their baby\u00a0to the office.\u00a0Such radical change may just take generations but no one ever promised that the feminist revolution would be easy.<\/p>\n

Barbara J. Risman is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.\u00a0 She is also a Senior Scholar at the Council of Contemporary Families.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reposted from\u00a0Psychology Today.\u00a0 Tammy Duckworth is the first senator to give birth while in office.\u00a0And she did so with great fanfare and a demand that her breastfeeding infant be able to accompany her to the Senate floor.\u00a0The mayor of DC adopted a baby, and almost immediately began juggling motherhood and\u00a0politics, with barely any time away […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2095,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[102,30296,35,8959,55,3849,11306,38872,3093,96968,19487,38871,104879,76,38899,13177,14936],"class_list":["post-1676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-breastfeeding","tag-child-care","tag-children","tag-families","tag-gender","tag-gender-equality","tag-gender-inequality","tag-maternity-leave","tag-millennials","tag-paid-family-leave","tag-paid-leave","tag-paternity-leave","tag-professional-women","tag-work","tag-work-family","tag-work-family-balance","tag-work-life-balance"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2095"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1676"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1711,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1676\/revisions\/1711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}