When I was a General Studies student contemplating
graduate school in 1958, I remember a famous
historian at Columbia, Richard Hofstadter, saying, “why would a lovely young woman
like you want to get into this business when you could stay home and raise a family?” Though I was hurt by that comment, it made sense
to me, too. I knew that after graduation, my
middle class parents would expect me to get married (and to have children soon after), and
so did all my friends. From their
perspectives, that was what a young woman was supposed to do. And that is exactly what I did – the week
after commencement.
I kept secret diaries when I was a young
mother in New York in the early sixties. They
were filled with yearnings. Not until the
birth of my fourth child did I read Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. Many of the sentiments in that book, however, had
been clearly expressed in my own diaries. “Am
I a freak?” I wrote. “Why am I
feeling guilty about everything? Maybe I
should be an artist? Or a lawyer? Maybe I should have an affair? Is this all?”
I recall loving the role of caregiver, loving to caress, nurture, and admire my
beautiful babies. But I also remember feeling
restless, resentful, and dissatisfied. Why, I
found myself asking, is all the caregiving left to me?
Much about the assignment of caregiving
has changed in the past forty years. I can
measure this because of the research on mothering I have undertaken during my twenty years
teaching nontraditional undergraduate and graduate students at Binghamton University, and
considering my experiences as a mother of six children, grandmother of seven, and care
provider for my ninety-three year old father. I
feel a genuine but qualified optimism about the future of shared caregiving
responsibilities which will most probably take the form of shared parenting.
There are many reasons why assigning
caregiving to women alone is being
reexamined. Of course, such reasons are
primarily economic. Most families now need
the incomes of both husband and wife, and single mothers have no choice but to work. Beyond these primary realities, there are two
other explanations particularly relevant to the lives of many General Studies student and
alumni. The first relates to a popular,
deeply held perception about women’s nature and the impact of the women’s
movement, and the second, to assumptions about the ways in which children grow and
develop.
First, with respect to women’s
nature, mothers have generally been considered to be the kinder, gentler sex, innately
able to provide unconditional love as the very definition of woman. But for what has been
called stage one of the contemporary feminist movement, the focus shifted from the caring
nature of women and their work as mothers. Building
on seminal work by Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan, feminists began to see the
age-old glorification of caregiving as an instrument of women’s oppression.
By the mid-seventies, however, a number of
feminist scholars began to argue that this first wave of feminist theorizing invalidated
ways of knowing that seemed characteristically womanly.
Thus, a second wave of feminist theorizing took a posture that sought to discover
and validate women’s lives in the concrete labors of their daily experiences. This
standpoint (often labeled “essentialist”) assumes a separate female world, one
in which women are essentially different from men: that is, specifically, more caring,
more giving.
We should note that while this long-term
debate still rages, this assumption that women and men have essential natures has itself
been challenged by many feminist theorists writing in the late eighties and nineties. These theorists are extremely skeptical of any
universalist ideas that downplay the consequences of thinking about distinctions and
differences among people. They believe that
claims of difference can easily be read as a biologically essentialist claim compatible
with conservative discourse about the proper roles for women and men.
The second reason to question this
caregiving assignment to women alone is that it is predicated on certain accepted but
questionable assumptions about the ways in which children grow and develop, assumptions
which inevitably reflect the dominant cultural and psychological thought of any given
historical period. In post-Freudian Western
societies, the presuppositions for healthy childhood development include an appreciation
of the primacy of infancy, the need for early bonding with the mother, unconditional
mother love, and the prolongation of infancy to adolescence and frequently far beyond. As Philippe Aries reminds us, however, assumptions
about childhood change over time. Mothers’
roles in the lives of their children were not always as we now know them.
A number of contemporary feminists of
color also remind white, middle class women in the United States that experiences of
childhood are not always as the dominant culture portrays them. And, beyond the scope of this discussion,but
important for all of us to consider, a number of leading developmental psychologists have
recently rallied around a new hypothesis from grandmother Judith Rich Harris. She argues in her recently published book The
Nurture Assumption that what is important is not what children learn from their parents
but what they learn outside the home. Put
bluntly, peers matter more than parents.
In the past five years I have had many
occasions to visit the Columbia University campus where my son and daughter- in-law are
graduate students. As I stroll with my young
grandson,I see young fathers pushing prams, I see daycare centers filled with happy,
creative toddlers, and I see couples juggling school, work, and parenting in a difficult
but egalitarian manner. Clearly, women’s
search for a balance between selfhood and caring in school, the work place, and home is
contributing to the shattering of the myth of woman as sole caregiver. This deconstruction of traditional assumptions is
not easy or inevitable, however. It requires
a sense of humility, a sense of humor, and a willingness to open our hearts and our
pocketbooks to embrace a community considerably larger than the nuclear family by which
most of us who are mothers and fathers have defined our responsibilities.
Linda
Rennie Forcey is Professor Emerita of Human Development and Women’s Studies at
Binghamton University, and is a contributing editor.
