Motherhood by Mary Cassatt - 1902 |
The Price of Motherhood: Why the
Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued
by Ann Crittenden 2001, Henry Holt & Co. LLC
In the United States, motherhood is as American as apple pie. No
institution is more sacrosanct; no figure is praised more fulsomely…
When I was on a radio talk show in 1998, several listeners called in to
say that child-rearing is the most important job in the world. A few weeks
later, at a party, Lawrence H. Summers, a distinguished economist who
subsequently became the secretary of the treasury, used exactly the same
phrase, “Raising children,” Summers told me in all seriousness, “is the most
important job in the world.” As Summers well knows, in the modern economy,
two-thirds of all wealth is created by human skills, creativity and enterprise –
what is known as “human capital.” And that means parents who are
conscientiously and effectively rearing children are literally, in the words of
economist Shirley Burggraf, “the major wealth producers in our economy.”
But this very material contribution is still considered immaterial. All
of the lip service to motherhood still floats in the air, as insubstantial as
clouds of angel dust. On the ground, where mothers live, the lack of respect
and tangible recognition is still part of every mother’s experience. Most
people, like infants in a crib, take female caregiving utterly for granted.
The job of making a home for a child and developing his or her
capabilities is often equated with “doing nothing.” Thus the disdainful
question frequently asked about mothers at home: “What do they do all day?” I’ll never forget a dinner
at the end of a day in which I had gotten my son dressed and fed and off to
nursery school, dealt with a plumber about a leaky shower, paid the bills,
finished an op-ed piece, picked up and escorted my son to a reading group at the
library, run several miscellaneous errands, and put in an hour on a future book
project. Over drinks that evening, a childless female friend commented that “of
all the couples we know, you’re the only wife who doesn’t work.”
In my childless youth I shared these attitudes. In the early 1970s I
wrote an article for the very first issue of Ms. magazine on the economic value of a housewife. I added up all
the domestic chores, attached dollar values to each, and concluded that the job
was seriously underpaid and ought to be included in the Gross National Product.
I thought I was being sympathetic, but I realize now that my deeper attitude
was one of compassionate contempt, or perhaps contemptuous compassion. Deep
down, I had no doubt that I was superior, in my midtown office overlooking
Madison Avenue, to those unpaid housewives pushing brooms. “Why aren’t they
making something of themselves?” I wondered. “What’s wrong with them? They’re
letting our side down.”
I imagined that domestic drudgery was going to be swept into the
dustbin of history as men and women linked arms and marched off to run the
world in a new egalitarian alliance. It never occurred to me that women might
be at home because there were children there; that housewives might become
extinct, but mothers and fathers never would…
The devaluation of mothers’ work permeates virtually every major
institution. Not only is caregiving not rewarded, it is penalized. […] the
United States is a society at war with itself. The policies of American
business, government, and the law do not reflect Americans’ stated values.
Across the board, individuals who assume the role of nurturer are punished and
discouraged from performing the very tasks that everyone agrees are essential.
We talk endlessly about the importance of family, yet the work it takes to make
a family is utterly disregarded. This contradiction can be found in every
corner of our society.
[…] motherhood is the single biggest risk factor for poverty in old age.
American mothers have smaller pensions than either men or childless women, and
American women over sixty-five are more than twice as likely to be poor as men
of the same age.
It may well be that mothers and others who care for children and sick
and elderly family members will go on giving, whatever the costs or
consequences for themselves. Maternal love, after all, is one of the world’s
renewable resources. But even if this is so, there is still a powerful argument
for putting an end to free riding on women’s labor. It’s called fairness. […] Such recognition would end
the glaring contradiction between what we tell young women – go out, get an
education, become independent – and what happens to those aspirations once they
have a child. It would demolish the anachronism that bedevils most mothers’
lives: that although they work as hard as or harder than anyone else in the
economy, they are still economic dependents,
like children or incapacitated adults.
The standard rationale for the status quo is that women choose to have
children, and in so doing, choose to accept the trade-offs, that have always
ensued. As an African safari guide once said of a troop of monkeys, “The
mothers with the little babies have a hard time keeping up.” But human beings,
unlike apes, have the ability to ensure that those who carry the babies – and therefore
our future – aren’t forever trailing behind.
Ann Crittenden is an award-winning journalist, author, and lecturer.
Her latest book, If You've Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything, received
critical praise and was featured in People magazine. Her previous book, The
Price of Motherhood, garnered widespread media attention and was named one of
the New York Times Notable Books of the Year in 2001. The book is already being
called a classic. A women's magazine editor wrote recently, "If The
Feminine Mystique was the book that laid the seeds for the women's movement of
the 1960's, The Price of Motherhood may someday be regarded as the one that did
the same for the mothers' movement."
Crittenden was a reporter for The New York Times for eight years,
writing on a broad range of economic topics. She initiated numerous
investigative reports and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has also
been a financial writer and foreign correspondent for Newsweek, a reporter for Fortune
magazine, a visiting lecturer for MIT and Yale, an economics commentator for
CBS News, and executive director of the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Her previous books include Sanctuary: A Story of American Conscience
and the Law in Collision, one of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year
in 1988, and Killing the Sacred Cows: Bold Ideas for a New Economy (1993). Her
articles have appeared in every national newspaper and numerous magazines,
including Foreign Affairs, The Nation, Barron's, and Working Woman.
Crittenden, a native of Dallas, Texas, is a graduate of Southern
Methodist University and the Columbia University School of International
Affairs. She completed all of the work except for the dissertation for a PhD in
modern European history from Columbia. She is a member of the Council on
Foreign Relations and has served on the board of the International Center for
Research on Women. She is married, has one son, and lives in Washington, D.C.
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