Pam, I loved your quote from your mother... " ...what I soon learned was
that
I was going to be tied to baby anyway, because your father certainly wasn't
the one doing the work!"

I've been reading Naomi Wolf's book "Misconceptions," and one chapter is all
about the effect that becoming parents had on her marriage and the marriages
of her friends.  These are middle-class couples where both partners
considered themselves feminists, and where before kids there was an
agreement, often a spoken agreement, that the work of the family (domestic
work and work in careers) would be shared equitably.  But she reports that,
after the first kid, in ALL of the marriages the balance changed.  The added
work of caring for the child, and especially the work of taking
responsibility for the child, somehow always ended up in the wife's share.
The chapter is entitled "Calling it fair," because in every case, the mother
eventually decided to capitulate, but the general pattern was that the women
felt the marriage had lost some of its strength and much of its appeal.

She describes a conversation with her own brother, a feminist who believes
in
equality, after his family (with kids) had made a cross-country move to
accommodate his career despite his wife's reluctance.  He told his sister
that, among the fathers he knows, not one would sacrifice a career-building
opportunity, because they know that underneath their wives' desire for
equality, the wives will not leave their husbands.  The men can insist on
getting their own way: " 'A. Because they love us. B. Because of the kids.'
"
 So women's capacity for loving is what allows the men to benefit from a new
inequality in their formerly egalitarian relationships.

Obviously this kind of thing went on in our mother's generation too---and in
fact right back to Eve!  It's just that before the mid 20th century, we
didn't have the notion that things were supposed to be equal or could be
equal.

I think this question---to whom does the work of child-rearing
belong?---lies
at the heart of our struggle to enable women to breastfeed.  As long as
having kids is viewed by the culture as some kind of "hobby" that women can
manage in their spare time, apart from the "real work" of their careers, we
women will have a problem demanding the kind of support we really need.  As
long as women are struggling for equal treatment in the workplace, they have
to prove that they can act like men in the workplace.  One practical effect
of this is that we tend to minimize the fact that women who become parents
actually do  require a reasonable accommodation at their jobs (and in the
family and the community) because of of pregnancy, childbirth, and
lactation.
 Acknowledging women's 'special' needs would put women in a difficult
position for negotiating equal opportunity, equal pay, equal advancement,
and
equal power in the workplace.  Yet, hey! women ARE different from men,
especially when it comes to how much 'blood, toil, tears, [milk] and sweat'
we invest in producing the next generation.  If we don't keep this fact at
the forefront of the discussion, we lose out...and the children lose
out...and ultimately everybody loses out.

Loving it here on the soapbox,
Chris Mulford
Swarthmore  PA  (eastern USA)

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