Naomi Wolf: Why women still can’t ask the right questions

[stevenleser]

I love Naomi Wolf. She is one of a couple of feminists who really helped me form my views on feminism.

http://view.koreaherald.com/kh/view.php?ud=20120703001196&cpv=0



NEW YORK ― We are just recovering, in the United States, from the entirely predictable kerfuffle over a plaint published by Anne-Marie Slaughter, former director of policy planning at the State Department and a professor at Princeton University, called “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.” The response was predictable because Slaughter’s article is one that is published in the U.S. by a revolving cast of powerful (most often white) women every three years or so. (SLeser addition, here is a link to the article to which Wolf is referring --> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-can-8217-t-have-it-all/9020/ )

The article, whoever has written it, always bemoans the “myth” of a work-life balance for women who work outside the home, presents the glass ceiling and work-family exhaustion as a personal revelation, and blames “feminism” for holding out this elusive “having-it-all ideal.” And it always manages to evade the major policy elephants in the room ― which is especially ironic in this case, as Slaughter was worn out by crafting policy.

The problems with such arguments are many. For starters, the work-family balance is no longer a women’s issue. All over the developed world, millions of working men with small children also regret the hours that they spend away from them, and go home to bear the brunt of shared domestic tasks. This was a “women’s issue” 15 years ago, perhaps, but now it is an ambient tension of modern life for a generation of women and men who are committed to gender equality.

Such arguments also ignore the fact that affluent working women and their partners overwhelmingly offload the work-family imbalance onto lower-income women ― overwhelmingly women of color. One can address how to be an ethical, sustainable employer of such caregivers; nannies in New York and other cities are now organizing to secure a system of market-pegged wages, vacation time, and sick days. Or, as so often happens in a racist society, one can paint the women who care for the elite’s children out of the picture altogether.
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(More at above link)

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	I agree with Naomi Wolf on this subject, it's more of an intersectional issue where many of the solutions are readily available for us to see in other countries like the Netherlands and Canada but those solutions are blocked by corporate interests like the US Chamber of Commerce
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	I agree with Anne-Marie Slaughter on this subject, the issue is that the top jobs are not attainable by women if they also want to have a family. The necessary supports are not there for women. Women who have the capability of being a CEO or other top position have a choice to have that position or a family but not both.
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	I disagree with both of them
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[patrice]

1. I would love to answer your question, but I think you need to formulate it a little more specificall

y.

e.g. I agree with ______________________________ (insert paraphrase of the position)
I disagree with __________________________ (ditto).

Otherwise you're going to get agreement or disagreement with what your respondents THINK the position is, rather than whatever you are actually asking.

[stevenleser]

2. Interesting point. Let me see if I can formulate better questions/answers. Its hard to digest

either woman's article into a concise statement.

[stevenleser]

4. Let me know what you think of my updated questions. nt

[JustAnotherGen]

3. Another person

Who was heavily influence by Naomi Wolf. If you've read the Beauty Myth and Backlash (Faludi - her contemporary) they told us these truths years ago.

She also is touching on (in that article) what our DU Member Catherina has placed out there for thought on many occasions - the intersection of feminism with other groups' issues.


And on this - I couldn't agree more.

Most importantly, Americans have a remarkable tendency to reduce problems that others addressed through public policy to a matter of private “choice” and even personal psychology. But the real question is not whether “women can have it all.” Rather, it is how a sophisticated foreign-policy professional can write as if countries like Canada and the Netherlands simply did not exist.

There is much more at play in terms of (International Chamber of Commerce) influence on Public Policy than a woman's personal choices. The policies (at least in the US) do not support that balance. At the same time - the corporate policies don't support the single without kids either.

And I'm bringing that last group up because it's a way for a few people at the top to create divisions instead of every 'worker' saying: doesn't matter if I'm married or not. Single or not. Have children. Have a 'selected' familiy since I'm 1000 miles away from my primary/biological/adoptive family. If I'm a man and my spouse is a man. If I adopt or give birth. . .WE all HAVE lives. But work asks us to put it on the back burner and brush off the increasing demands on our time, for less money.

And in the middle of this - or rather lost in it - are the home health care workers (my experience while my father was dying last year) and child care workers - who step up to the plate for the female business owner, CEO, physician, administrative assistant, police woman, etc. etc.

[yardwork]

5. I know women who are highly successful professionals at the top of their fields who have families.

It is certainly not an either/or. I've observed and talked with some of these women about how they balance all these responsibilities, and they note that it is not easy. One must be very organized, willing to hire people to help with some of the childcare/household responsibilities, and willing to tolerate lack of perfection. In many cases the women's husbands have less demanding careers, taking on more of the role of the house husband.

[LadyHawkAZ]

6. I think you have hit on the keyword to the whole issue

"perfection". The ideal as sold by the media is to be the perfect career woman with the perfect job, yet still spend the perfect amount of time with the perfect kids who get perfect grades, have a perfect husband and a perfect sex life in your perfectly kept house, all while maintaining that perfect skin and perfect size 3 figure...

This obviously isn't going to happen, but it's the image that gets sold to us. I suspect too many of those now-exhausted women who Slaughter is trying to convince were betrayed by feminism somehow bought into that perfection ideal, but it wasn't (at least to my knowledge) feminism that was responsible for that image. Feminism's idea was that you shouldn't have to be just a wife and mommy, or just a career woman, or just anything. The idea that either job, or any job, had to be done to a certain ideal was a media product, and a heavily photoshopped one at that.

That being said, there are still a lot of obstacles thrown in the way of working women with kids by the current corporate culture- one of the points Slaughter made in her article was that of making school schedules match work schedules, really resonated with me. I remember the difficulties of finding decent child care for swing and grave shifts, and also the difficulties of working all night and then having a child up all day that needs supervision. Simple things like that, so easily fixed if our culture would ever give a little.

[yardwork]

7. I agree. "Feminism" is being blamed for the ills of corporatism and capitalism.

So it always is. I was reading my local news site this morning and somebody posted that "socialism" is to blame for the CEOs getting $40MM severance packages.