Sometimes you hear people say something like, "How could anyone not be a feminist?  Isn't feminism simply believing in equality for women?"  Is that what feminism is?  And if so, just what is equality for women?

Is it the elimination of all statistical disparities between men and women, on the assumption that all such disparities must be the result of prejudice?  How about the statistical imbalance between men and women's rates of incarceration?  That doesn't seem to draw the outrage that statistical imbalances between whites and blacks' rates of incarceration arouses.  

I think even feminists acknowledge that men and women are, in manifold ways, different.  The difficulty lies in the details... sorting out when those details are biological effects, or cultural prejudices, or personal choices, or theological imperatives, or whatever.  

In an April 28, 2017, New York Times op-ed column, Jill Filipovic (a feminist writer) argues that women are still laboring under mid-century prejudices which require them to find satisfaction in domesticity rather than work outside the home.  Her essay is an unsatisfying combination of personal anecdote, over-generalization and sweeping, unattributed statistics.  For example, she begins her argument by claiming that: 

Historically, women weren’t supposed to need their individual identity to be formed through work, because women weren’t supposed to have individual identities at all: They melded into their husband’s identity when they married. Women’s identities have long been relational — daughter, wife, mother — rather than individual.

Filipovic provides no support for her claim that women of the past had no individual identities.  Is she referring to legal regimes which treated married couples as a single property-owning unit?  Or does she think accepting your husband's name is the same as surrendering all individual identity?  And is she deliberately conflating the category of 'woman' with the category of 'wife'?  Filipovic provides no support for these statements, but then claims that post-war norms linger today:

While the majority of Americans today — nearly 80 percent — do not think women should return to traditional wife-and-homemaker roles, something shifts when you replace “woman” with “mother”: Just over half of Americans believe children are better off with a mother who is at home full time and does not hold a job. Only 8 percent say the same thing about fathers.

Filipovic thinks this attitude towards working mothers is a relic of post-war America, a time when "The prevailing sensibility was that life as a suburban housewife was supposed to bring ultimate happiness."  ("Ultimate happiness"? Really?)  And again she slips between references to mothers and to women generally, making it difficult to understand what distinctions between them (if any) she believes are appropriate.  In any event, she then asserts that women's domesticity in the post-war era

was less about what actually made women happy and more about money — and men being able to make it without competing with women. Men’s wages rose steadily through the 1950s and ’60s, while women’s stagnated. Although women had earned more than 63 percent of what men did in the early 1950s, by the mid-1960s they made less than 58 percent.

Why does Filipovic believe that a five percent increase in men's wages relative to women's, proves her claim that economic interests were at the root of domestic norms?  Again she provides no further argument to clarify.

The climax of Filipovic's imperfect advocacy comes when she complains that feminists describe the question of working-outside-the-home in terms of personal choice.  She believes this 'choice' language whitewashes the burdens of economic demands, historical norms, and other factors that limit women's choices.  So feminists should stop arguing that women should have choices and instead make "a vigorous moral argument in favor of women working outside the home."  Women simply ought to work outside the home, and feminists need to argue that they should.

She supports this incredible claim by arguing that women working outside the home is better for everyone: for mothers, for children, for society, etc.  Supposedly working mothers have better mental and physical health and are happier than stay-at-home mothers; supposedly daughters of working mothers are "higher achievers" and "make more money;" supposedly sons of working mothers "do more household work;" supposedly husbands of working mothers are less likely to "view [female co-workers] unfavorably."

Filipovic provides no citations for any of these astounding generalizations — but do you notice how many of them are essentially circular?  Working mothers are better because they result in more working mothers (coded as daughters that earn more, husbands that are more domestic, etc.).  That clearly begs the question: Is it better, in general, for mothers to focus on mothering or something else productive?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Filipovic ignores the most important issue in the debate: What happens to the child that is being left behind in favor of work?  When we focus the debate on the "happiness" of the working parent, we assume that being a parent is primarily a question of personal happiness and self-satisfaction.  But isn't it, first and foremost, a question of personal obligation and duty to the life those parents created?

The primary question for parents is: Who should raise your child on a daily basis?  Just how much do you, or does society, value that function?  Should mothers and fathers find strangers — minimum wage workers with modest emotional investment — to raise their children?  Does it matter if your daughter is raised by someone who loves her or by someone who loves the paycheck?  Or in a less mercenary key, is childcare a job worthy of your greatest creativity, hardest effort, and deepest investment... or should it be farmed out to a third-party sub-contractor?

Filipovic lays out her arguments against the backstories of her grandmother and mother, both of whom worked outside the home and both of whom she clearly loves and admires.  At one point she quotes her mother as anguishing over the decision to leave her children to work: "there are not descriptive emotional words to explain the thought of being away from your babies." 

It is precisely the impulse betrayed by her mother's words that is so telling but which Filipovic fails to grapple with.  Filipovic quotes her mother as a way of tipping her cap to the maternal instinct, but she gives it no further discussion.  How can she pretend to speak intelligently on how mothers should act, when she has nothing to say about being a mother?  Why is there a maternal instinct?  What is the significance of it?  What truths, what demands, underlie its resonance?  Filipovic's argument is full of unwarranted assumptions, logical leaps and straw men, but in the end, it is this cavernous lacuna — overlooking that only a child can make a mother — that most undermines her argument.  Only a child can make a mother – so you must start with the child to discuss the mother.

Any discussion of child-rearing which starts from the place of the parents' happiness and self-fulfillment is bound to end up in the wrong place, because being a parent is not a question of personal fulfillment.  By the time you have become a parent, you have committed yourself to a different goal: other-personal fulfillment.  You should be setting the long-term needs, desires and interests of another human — one whose very existence you are responsible for  — above your own.  That is a burden for fathers and mothers alike.

If you wish to discuss this post with me, I'd welcome receiving an email from you.  Please email me at language.on.holiday@gmail.com.