A Mother in the Trenches

Steve Brickles

One of the reasons I'm so freaked out about the idea of having a baby is that many of my friends found it so hard to work full-time after giving birth that

They left.

Yes. Although they wanted to stay at their jobs, they weren't able to come up with situation that accommodated them and their families.

Yep. And it's like, "but that's their choice." But it's not exactly a choice, is it? The word I often use is "nudged out." When inflexible workplace policies basically allow you no choice except to work way more than anybody would want to or to leave, then it's not a choice.

ELLE editor Miranda Purves has used the phrase " choices that feel like traps."

I totally agree. And it often feels like the only way you're allowed to participate in the good jobs is to pretend you're not a parent. In the book, I talk about women who go back to work and talk about putting their "game face" on and pretending they never had kids, and never talking about them.

The idea that women feel like they need to play down the fact that they've got kids at home in order to succeed at work kind of pushes us back into that old, '80s style of feminism, in which working women were trying so hard to prove that they were just as tough as the guys that they didn't ask for special treatment—treatment that they needed to succeed as working moms.

To be fair, I do think that's partly why we are where we are—the idea that women can't be seen as gentle, or as nurturers in any way. I think the reasons for that come from the fact that women were facing such intense discrimination that there was little choice in the beginning but to focus on overturning those things at any cost. But in the process, there were some cases in which women were the ones who were going against things like laws that required paid leave. It was because they didn't want to be accused of exceptionalism. I feel like there was a certain necessity back then to take the approach, but you can see now why that worked against us.

Why haven't we established a new feminism that involves fighting for these things that so clearly benefit all parents? Why is it so hard to get women to feel like they should be fighting for policies like paid leave, childcare and flexible working schedules?

Part of the reason is that new moms are so overwhelmed with just getting by that there's not a lot of energy left. And the other thing is that their energy has been misdirected: You have the ridiculous "mommy wars" thing, the idea that every mother's enemy is some other camp of mothers. It's a complete distraction from the fact that all of us are actually facing same problem—which is basically a shortage of options that don't suck. In terms of political rhetoric, this "pull yourselves up by your bootstraps" thing has been very successful. The Reagan-era idea that to be pro-family is to not support families has lingered on long after he did.

So what's the way out?

People need to realize that this needs to be addressed not on the personal level—we don't need things like more caffeine, or better personal organizers. We need to change things on the policy level.

What groups are working this and what are they doing?

In terms of advocacy, there's MomsRising.org and The National Partnership for Women and Families. The center for WorkLife Law at UC-Hastings is amazing. The lawyers there basically spearheaded the legal effort to prosecute companies like Novartis.

The drug company Novartis was recently sued by female employees for discrimination and was ordered to pay $250 million in punitive damages. The great irony was that Novartis had been recently recognized as one of the best and most accommodating companies for working mothers.

Yes. The idea that we can solve these problems by relying on voluntary measures from private companies is absurd. You can just point to the fact that so many companies cut benefits at random. The fact that most women don't get to stay home [after giving birth] for 12 weeks or more makes it very clear that the system doesn't work. Back to your question about how we are going to deal with it: I think part of it is telling the stories—which is what I'm trying to do in the book—in a way that features the inhumanity both to women and to children. When you are tearing newborns away from their parents, there isn't a soul who can argue that that is an example of good family values. So I think there's a lot of potential for bipartisan support—at least of things like paid family leave.

Has there been any progress on these issues?

President Obama put some money in the budget—it hasn't passed yet—which is seed money that states can use to set up paid family-leave programs. Ultimately, we need a national one, but this is a start. Obama has also called for childcare funding increases. I think that in those areas, we don't have enough money or momentum, but we have some. The area I'm less optimistic about is part-time work regulations. There have been efforts to pass something called a "soft touch" law, which would grant employees the right to simply request part-time schedules, and even that has gotten a lot of push-back from employers and hasn't gone anywhere. Part of the problem is that we haven't yet figured out in this country how to provide benefits.

How do you respond to the popular "socialism" argument?

The countries with family-friendlier benefits have a range of political and economic systems. Since most other countries provide paid family leave, for instance, this group includes many countries that have decidedly capitalist systems. It is true that doing things like subsidizing childcare and granting paid time off for everyone after the birth or adoption of a child will cost money—and that that money would come from tax dollars. But simply beefing up our support for families doesn't make us socialist.

Well, how are we going to pay for these types of benefits, especially in this economy?

Tax dollars! People freak out about that, but it's public money. We just had Defense Secretary Robert Gates talking about the huge amounts of waste in our military budget. If you ask almost anyone if we should be spending half a billion dollars for a mobile airport for planes we don't use versus helping working families stay afloat, it seems like a no-brainer. People may say that the economic downturn means that we now don't have the money to spend on these things. But the argument that not doing these things—not putting money towards family-friendly policies—has made our economy stronger, and that the U.S. is so strong because we don't take care of families in this way...well, our economy apparently isn't so strong. So that's not really working. Also, a new Rockefeller study shows that there are really high levels of support for paid leave among different groups, including Evangelical Christians. In the study, 64 percent of conservatives, 74 percent of evangelical Christians, 81 percent of moderates, and 89 percent of liberals support paid leave and believe that businesses should be required to provide paid family leave and medical leave for every worker who needs it.

Where should women like me, without kids, direct our energy? I feel like this is our fight, too.

As much as these issues primarily affect mothers, if we are going to solve this, we really need to get men on and non-parents on board. Laws such paid family leave would include all caregivers. Everyone needs it, as there are all these people caring for parents and other sick relatives. You can get involved with groups like MomsRising, which would be happy to have you, kids or not. You can write directly to your legislature and tell them you want them to support these proposals in the budget. We also need to get a fire under the part-time work issues. I don't know how else to do it besides to call attention to the fact that other countries do it so much better, and it makes life better for all different kinds of families. Actually, forget the family part—it makes life more livable for everyone.

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