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While we are quoting ourselves today: In December I wrote a profile of Elizabeth Edwards for the New Republic (which for some reason is not showing up online). My main point was that Elizabeth has an overshare problem. In her book, on the campaign trail, to her friends, she spills everything—everything—freely: about her son who died, her cancer, her marriage, her other kids. Now the tell-all strategy which has served her so well in the past has come back to bite her. So she—the real victim of this story—would be hard pressed to unleash her fury at the press.
But I will do it for her. There is no reason on earth I can think of to have run this story, much less stalked the guy at a hotel. Public figure? Who isn't a public figure? Unless the guy is having Nazi orgies in a brothel, this seems a pretty weak excuse. Vice -presidential candidate? Also weak. That was hardly likely, and you can kill that with rumors. Jack Shafer's hypocrisy argument I find totally unconvincing. The kind of hypocrisy that counts is when someone's public position is at odds with their private behavior. If Larry Craig votes against all gay rights legislation but solicits gay sex, then the gay community is allowed to out him. Ditto Pastor Ted Haggard, who preached weekly on the evils of gayness. But when a man says he's not having an affair when he is—that's just lying, same as most men would do in that circumstance. There are honorable reasons to lie in such a situation—namely, protecting your wife and children. We are still in the private realm here. This is just one of those cases where the press gets into a froth merely because the guy lied about something they thought they had him on, and then late one night they all made a bet to screw him. No honor there, no larger purpose served.
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OK, Rachael, so how about the selfish reason most of us wouldn't want to be that particular messenger? Unless I trip over a presidential candidate in the Bois de Boulogne some night - unlikely, as I live in Maryland - I am just not that eager to write up whose-what-is-going-where; that sort of thing might give readers a little wahoo, she said haughtily, but they will not respect you in the morning. Or on any subsequent morning. This is an especially tragic admission, I know, coming from your adultery, I mean, marriage correspondent. (While I'm confessing, I also got thrown out of Arthur Ashe's apartment building on purpose the day the world found out he had AIDS, so as to avoid having to ask him, "So, sir, plan on dying soon?' And doesn't every reporter have at least one story like that, about hiding behind the potted plant when they were supposed to be harrassing people?) Nobody who could also make a living doing data entry wants to be the one to break a story like this. I mean really, I try to put myself in the gum-shoes of the guy who says he chased John Edwards into a bathroom stall, and is there any chance in heaven he is thinking ah, now this is the reason I got into the biz; why can't every day be like this? No, he is going home, drinking himself to sleep as it's getting light outside, and dreaming about the various ways God will pay him back. Bad juju, I tell you.
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Sorry, Melinda, I have to disagree, though I do share your sympathy for the Edwards family. I was just reading Elizabeth's touching farewell to Tony Snow yesterday. She told the tale of a gentleman who approached her at a parade and gave her good wishes for her health and added "although we don't agree on much of anything." That's how I feel about Elizabeth, too. It's hard not to admire a woman who overcame the loss of a child, who had a second round of children in her 40s, and who bravely and selflessly told her husband to soldier on with his campaign after her cancer reappeared. So I think the National Enquirer story—if true—is devastating for her and her children. But the tabloid—however scuzzy—can't take the rap here. This isn't chasing an ambulance carrying a mentally ill Britney Spears to the hospital. John Edwards is still a prominent public figure, of sound mind and body, and at least until recently he was being touted as a possible vice presidential candidate. (And on that note, isn't it better for Obama that this comes out now?) He's fair game, and if his family gets hurt, the "bad juju" belongs all to him.
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Emily, I do understand what you and Linda are saying: It's demeaning to dismiss what women say about their lives as lying or mere rationalization. But I'm not suggesting that. I do know that both women and men say that they want to spend more time with their families (and not just when they are politicians who've been caught with their hands in the cookie jar). But for women, that explanation for leaving a job is socially acceptable, while for men it's appalling (except for the aforementioned politicians). Women are pushed in that direction by social structures, including stereotypes that have been peddled and internalized over a lifetime—for instance, by New York Times articles that say that say women leave their jobs to stay home with the kids, reinscribing that cultural narrative.
To Linda's point: I'm not proposing, as you say, that "the findings about working-class women apply to elite women." My post said nothing about your work, because I wasn't concerned with your work; my concern is with the New York Times' long history of treating women's economic lives as personal rather than public. You are writing about what elite women should and shouldn't do. I care about the pundits and policymakers who are influenced by articles about the elite women—and who make policy based on those anecdotal stories that then is applied to all women.
But news media coverage only about that side of things ignores important other factors at work, like subtle and overt discrimination, that women may be less willing to acknowledge to themselves. A story: A friend of mine got a promotion after her partner, the biomom, gave birth to their child. The co-mom concluded that her boss was a little mind-boggled about exactly how to treat her—and ended up treating her as a "dad," someone who needed a promotion and a raise to support her wife and new baby. That would be consistent with how researchers have found women and men are treated after a child is born: There's a "mommy penalty" and a "daddy bonus." For instance, in experimental reviews of comparable résumés, women with children are less likely to be hired,pare paid less, are more likely to be fired, and are allowed fewer absences or late arrivals than women without children or than men with or without children ... while men with children are treated better than men without.
The social scientists I interviewed all agreed that Lisa Belkin's "research" method—asking people after the fact why they did what they did—was invalid and would never pass peer review. (This would be true as well of Linda's questioning of NYT Styles section brides, although Linda, your goal is different than Belkin's, which is why I am not writing about your work: Your goal is to warn and counsel young elite women about navigating the hazards ahead, and you succeed admirably.) But basic social science and the new neurobiology have consistently shown that post-facto explanations for behavior are unreliable: Healthy people settle on the most livable and socially comfortable story. To find out why people actually do what they do requires prospective, not retrospective, research into what they are thinking as they are making their decisions, not after the decision has been made—as well as into studies of comparable populations' behavior with variables changed. This isn't saying that people lie; it's saying that the human psyche is complicated and resilient and that our internal story is shaped by many factors.
But here's my bigger beef with the news media on this story: Women's economic lives are covered as personal issues ... while men's economic lives are covered as public issues. Moms out of work = style section; dads out of work = business section. That's just appalling. There is no going back to June and Ward Cleaver; the American economy desperately needs to adapt to reality. Flip the issue, and consider the fact that 80 percent of American children are living in households in which all adults are in the work force. That leads to an entirely different set of public policy discussions than does the "moms just wanna go home" storyline.
I will now indulge myself and quote my CJR article here:
... yes, maybe some women "chose'"to go home. But they didn’t choose the restrictions and constrictions that made their work lives impossible. They didn’t choose the cultural expectation that mothers, not fathers, are responsible for their children’s doctor visits, birthday parties, piano lessons, and summer schedules. And they didn’t choose the bias or earnings loss that they face if they work part-time or when they go back full-time.
By offering a steady diet of common myths and ignoring the relevant facts, newspapers have helped maintain the cultural temperature for what [researcher Joan Williams] calls “the most family-hostile public policy in the Western world.” On a variety of basic policies—including parental leave, family sick leave, early childhood education, national childcare standards, afterschool programs, and health care that’s not tied to a single all-consuming job—the U.S. lags behind almost every developed nation. ... And any parent could tell you that it makes no sense to keep running schools on nineteenth century agricultural schedules, taking kids in at 7 a.m. and letting them out at 3 p.m. to milk the cows, when their parents now work until 5 or 6 p.m. Why can’t twenty-first century school schedules match the twenty-first century workday?
The moms-go-home story’s personal focus makes as much sense, according to [Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers], as saying, "Okay, let’s build a superhighway; everybody bring one paving stone. That’s how we approach family policy. We don’t look at systems, just at individuals. And that’s ridiculous."
Hurray again to Uchitelle and the NYT for doing it right this time.
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E.J. and Linda, I'm glad you're reprising your debate, because I'm titillated by this new data about women dropping out of the workforce, paired with Heather Boushey's explanation: "When we saw women starting to drop out in the early part of this decade, we thought it was the motherhood movement. ... We did not think it was the economy, but when we looked into it, we realized that it was.” I'm struck, as I am whenever this comes up, by how deeply some of us are invested in one explanation over the other. Lisa Belkin's 2003 thesis, that highly educated women were quitting work because, well, they just wanted to, was anathema to a lot of feminists. They (to a degree me included) just wanted her to be wrong. But of course she's not wrong entirely—in upper-middle-class circles, there are women who say their choices are driven by disaffection with the work they had and affection for taking care of husand and kids. E.J. has an interesting explanation for why they should frame their decisions in this way, and amen to her point that it's a mistake to let this small cohort of women stand for the whole. Linda responds, here in the Fray, that she doesn't see a link between the problems the economic downturn has created for lower-income women, and the conclusion that bad times are also the reason that well-off women drop out, since "the low wages and layoffs did not affect elite workplaces, where wages and demand continued to rise."
I'm eager to hear Boushey's response to this—I have a call in to her—and E.J., yours too. In the meatime, aren't all the explanations correct, to one degree or another, and isn't the argument really about how much various groups of women's choices are affected more by one (hooray for staying home) over another (I'd work if I had better childcare, more flexible hours)? I see why the numbers matter: If all women were staying home for one clear reason—or if lower-income women tended to have one reason, and higher-income women tended to have a different one—that would tell us a lot about where we're at, culturally speaking, and perhaps about the policy prescriptions we'd advocate for. But will it ever sort out neatly? So often, it seems to me, these intimate and difficult decisions are made for a tangle of reasons that shift over time.
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And guess what? I still don't want to know. If this story about John Edwards is true—and yes, I still say if—I might have to snatch him bald-headed myself. But you know what would be worse? Chasing a man who is out of politics up and down the back stairs of a hotel in the middle of the night for the purpose of ... what? Making his family suffer more than they already have? Bad juju, people.
Click here to read more from XX Factor on the John Edwards scandal.
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Oh Linda, are we going to go round on this again? You and I have had this discussion in person and in print. Those Sunday Styles women with children who told you they were "opting out" weren't lying to you; they were fully engaged in the very healthy psychological strategy of wanting what they had. Given the constraints facing them—hostile and inflexible workplaces, internal and social expectations that they (and not their husbands) were responsible for their children's well-being and daily schedules, sudden triggering off the "moms can't work" stereotype in the behavior of those around them (and probably a silent withdrawal of good assignments, promotion opportunities, and the like)—these women "chose" to stay home with their kids. Of course they fell in love with the children—but that wasn't the only force at work. Take any psych class and you will learn about this phenomenon: It's often called "sour grapes," but it's really very healthy. What, they're going to say: I hate spending my life stuck with snot-nosed screaming kids all day, I miss having adult conversations, but I was too angry at my condescending colleagues to accept the cut-rate hours and mommy-penalized pay and insane stress of making everyone happy—just for a few early years? (Most, of course, had a false idea of how easy it would be to get back into a good job—in part because of those rosy "opt-out" articles, as Joan Williams has documented in such detail.) Nope, they "chose" to stay home, as expected.
But what if those elite women (and men!!) had had some better choices—early childhood education and school schedules that match 21st-century workdays, less demanding hours, and the like? Then many of them, male and female, would "choose" reasonable, high-paying, well-respected, career-track work that also gave them some flexibility to care for their families. I had a long list of women tell me this when I interviewed them: If they were single mothers, they bit the bullet and took all the insulting treatment to keep feeding their kids. But if they were married to men with high-paying jobs, those who could sometimes bailed out.
As a point of fact, however, high-education women are more likely to be working once they have kids (presumably because they can afford better child-care options) than are the women for whom earnings are more marginal. If you press me on this I can find the correct BLS table; don't have it at hand (and I have another deadline just now!).
Most important, however, is that the Times has stopped peddling the suggestion that Lisa Belkin's Princeton-grad friends stand in for a wide swath of American working women. Uchitelle's coverage (and the front-page placement!!) is much more promising for the kind of working-family-friendly policies needed for this country's economic growth. I want the newspapers of record to talk about most people, rather than the few, when they're guiding our pundits' and policymakers' thinking.
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A guest post from Linda Hirshman, author of Get to Work:
XX Factor is full of talk of how the Times just corrected its 2003 opt-out story about why women quit their jobs (it's the economy, stupid). Short version: Female factory workers' wages decline and they won't work for less. Then they cover their decision with talk of falling in love with their babies.
I don't know about Lisa Belkin, who wrote the most famous version, but I feel compelled to remind Slate's readers that her opt-out story was about high class dames, many her Princeton classmates, workers at the Maytag plant not so much. The women who announced their weddings in the New York Times and inspired me to tell them to Get (back) to Work, similarly tony bunch. Unclear to me why these stories are rebutted by a study of the working class, not to diss the working class, but during the recent economic bad stuff, Princeton grads didn't actually experience wage cuts. Here's the estimable Wikipedia on what happened to the classes, rather than the masses:
Considering how education significantly enhances the earnings potential of individuals, it should come as no surprise that individuals with graduate degrees have an average per capita income exceeding the median household income of married couple families among the general population ($63,813).[21][22] . . . While educational attainment did not help reduce the income inequality between men and women, it did increase the earnings potential of individuals of both sexes, greatly enabling many households with (a) graduate degree householder(s) to enter the top household income quintile.[21]
Household income also increased significantly with the educational attainment of the householder. The US Census Bureau publishes educational attainment and income data for all households with a householder who was aged twenty-five or older. The biggest income difference was between those with some college education and those who had a Bachelor's degree, with the latter making $23,874 more. Income also increased substantially with increased post-secondary education. While the median household income for a household with a household holding an Associates degree was $51,970, the median household income for those with a Bachelor's degree or higher was $73,446. Those with doctorates had the second highest median household with a median of $96,830; $18,289 more higher than that for those at the Master's degree level, but $3,170 lower than the median for households with a professionals degree holding householder.[18]
Congressional economists say that babies don't predict dropouts, even among the top earners, but they are bailing for some reason, and it sure ain't plant closings at Debevoise. I tend not to think that women are lying to me when I interview them. Maybe the laid-off washer-makers tell sociologists they love their babies when they actually just hate their paychecks, but I don't think the Times brides were having me on.