{"id":1934,"date":"2019-03-12T10:29:23","date_gmt":"2019-03-12T15:29:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/?p=1934"},"modified":"2019-03-13T11:23:00","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T16:23:00","slug":"the-real-mommy-war-is-against-the-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/2019\/03\/12\/the-real-mommy-war-is-against-the-state\/","title":{"rendered":"The Real Mommy War Is Against the State"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Originally published in The New York Times<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Since 2011, I\u2019ve interviewed 135 middle-class employed mothers in Sweden, Germany, Italy and the United States to understand their work-family conflict. I spoke to mothers specifically because in wealthy nations, mothers have historically been the focus of work-family policies and they\u2019re still responsible for most housework and child care. They report greater work-family conflict and they use work-family policies more often than men. I had a personal interest: I\u2019d watched my own mother struggle to navigate her work and family obligations \u2014 a decade-long juggling act that involved occasionally toting my sister and me to boardroom meetings to nap in sleeping bags when babysitters fell ill or schools closed. Years later, it seemed as though the conflict hadn\u2019t eased for many of my peers.<\/p>\n

In the United States, almost every woman I interviewed had reached the same conclusion: It was her \u2014 or her and her partner\u2019s \u2014 responsibility to figure out child care, cobble together a leave of absence (often unpaid), get on a preschool waiting list, find a babysitter, seek advice from friends and acquaintances, and engineer any number of other highly improvised coping techniques. In the lawyer\u2019s case, this meant, among other things, joining a less-prestigious firm that demanded fewer hours and finding the right hands-free breast pump to multitask in her cubicle. The common thread in every conversation was that the parents had to solve their problem themselves, no matter how piecemeal the solutions.<\/p>\n

That all makes perfect, if outrageous, sense: The United States has the least generous benefits, the lowest public commitment to caregiving, one of the highest wage gaps between employed men and women, and among the highest maternal and child poverty rates of any\u00a0Western industrialized nation.<\/p>\n

In my interviews I discovered that American working mothers generally blame themselves for how hard their lives are. They take personal responsibility for problems that European mothers recognize as having external causes. The lesson here isn\u2019t for overwhelmed American parents to look longingly across the Atlantic; it\u2019s to emulate the Swedes, Germans and Italians by harboring the reasonable\u00a0expectation that the state will help.<\/p>\n

All the American mothers I interviewed said they felt enormous guilt and tension between their work and family commitments. So did the Italians. But Italian women tended to blame the government for their problems: \u201cSocial benefits? Zero. Less than zero. Nobody helps me,\u201d laughed one woman I met, a single mother working at a hospital in Rome. \u201cDoes the government help me? No,\u201d she said, \u201cbut they should think about helping\u00a0you\u00a0a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Sweden, working mothers I spoke with wanted full gender equality and expected to seamlessly combine paid work and child rearing. Mothers there also anticipated that the government would support them in these endeavors \u2014 and that\u2019s exactly what the Swedish state, its work-family policy, and the country\u2019s cultural ideals about work and motherhood do. When Swedish mothers feel stressed, they tend to blame the country\u2019s lofty expectations of what parenting should be. German mothers ascribed their work-family juggling act, with its emphasis on traditional home life, to outdated cultural ideals.<\/p>\n

American women who worked for companies that provided flexible schedules and paid maternity leave described themselves as \u201cbeing very lucky\u201d or \u201cfeeling privileged.\u201d This privatized approach taken by the United States government and employers exacerbates inequalities among workers. Some elite employers elect to offer helpful work-family policies, meaning only certain workers \u2014 typically highly educated, salaried\u00a0employees\u00a0\u2014 receive these supports. The employees most in need of support, however \u2014 vulnerable hourly-wage workers \u2014 are the ones least likely to enjoy any work-family benefits. The highest-income earners in the United States\u00a0are 3.5 times as likely<\/a>\u00a0to have access to paid family leave as those at the bottom of the pay scale.<\/p>\n

After three months of interviews with mothers in Sweden, I was heartened to discover that the country in many ways lives up to its image as the place where women come closest to having successful careers and fulfilling family lives. But consider the national policy focus responsible for that lifestyle: Sweden prizes gender equality, universal child care and a \u201cdual earner-carer\u201d model that features women and men sharing breadwinning and child-rearing roles.<\/p>\n

Women in Stockholm seemed confused or laughed out loud when I used the term \u201cworking mother.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t think that expression exists in Swedish,\u201d an urban planner and mother of two told me. \u201cIt\u2019s not like there\u2019s a \u2018nonworking mother,\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cI mean, what else would she do?\u201d<\/p>\n

We can\u2019t simply import social policies and hope they\u2019ll have the same effect in a different context. For instance, American parents tend to marvel at Germany\u2019s comparatively luxurious-sounding three-year parental leave, which was available to\u00a0new parents for\u00a0decades. So, I was taken aback when many working mothers in Germany told me they despised the policy because of the cultural stigma it heaped on their shoulders to not return to work until they absolutely had to. A teacher who went back to work before the end of the allowable parental leave described people telling her: \u201cYou cannot do this. You are selfish, you\u2019re a career whore.\u201d\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cBalance\u201d is a term that came up relentlessly in my conversations with women in the United States. But framing work-family conflict as a problem of imbalance is merely an individualized way to justify a nation of mothers engulfed in stress. It fails to recognize how institutions contribute to this anxiety.<\/p>\n

The stress that American parents feel is an urgent political issue, so the solution must be political as well. We have a social responsibility to solve work-family conflict. Let\u2019s start with paid parental leave and high-quality, affordable child care as national priorities.<\/p>\n

Women \u2014 again, on this side of the Atlantic \u2014 routinely assume it\u2019s their duty to stitch together time off after childbirth. Those fortunate to qualify for parental-leave benefits \u2014 even two months at full pay, or six weeks at partial pay \u2014 feel real gratitude for such\u00a0slim provisions. And in a country where most women (too often the poor and racial-ethnic minorities) receive no paid leave at all, that gratitude makes sense. But being able to work and raise the next generation of taxpayers and employees should never be deemed a matter of mere \u201cluck.\u201d<\/p>\n

Everyone should feel entitled to more.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Dr. Collins, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis,\u00a0 is the author of \u201cMaking Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally published in The New York Times Since 2011, I\u2019ve interviewed 135 middle-class employed mothers in Sweden, Germany, Italy and the United States to understand their work-family conflict. I spoke to mothers specifically because in wealthy nations, mothers have historically been the focus of work-family policies and they\u2019re still responsible for most housework and child […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2101,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1934","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\/2101"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1934"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1948,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1934\/revisions\/1948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}