"Having it all sucks" (taught, trouble, better, house)
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OMFG You Do NOT get it if that's what you think the issue is. You've shown your true colors here. Yes, most regulars do know what's up and they've called you out for it. You were quoted directly. No twisting needed.
Unlike some people, I don't think that my OPINION is the law of the land or the absolute way it is or should be. Maybe that is the error in our communication
It's a shame that good topics like this so often seem to devolve into personal insults, quotes taken out of context, twisted meanings, and other predictable nonsense.
As a regular, I see this all too often.
Last edited by KathrynAragon; 02-18-2016 at 08:29 PM..
Unlike some people, I don't think that my OPINION is the law of the land or the absolute way it is or should be. Maybe that is the error in our communication
Who said their opinion should be the law of the land? Did anyone try to force you to go to work, or tell you that you made the wrong choice?
Sweden has one of the highest 'quality of life' indices in the world. Almost 75% of mothers with children younger than age 6 are in the workforce. Children aged 1-6 spend an average of 33 hours a week in child care. So clearly children aren't harmed by having working parents.
And my problem with Warren's conclusions (although I haven't read he source, just the references to it her) is that dual income families have always been around. Middle class white women may have fought to get into the workforce but lower income women and racial/ethnic minorities have always worked after marriage. In the 1950s 1 in 3 women was in the workforce; today it is 3 out of 5.
I repped you with this comment and would like to add to my thoughts. As I mentioned to you privately, Liz is a great Senator in my eyes (and a true champion of working people in a country where support for this group has been scanty since the 70s). But if a statistic or premise is wrong, it is important to correct it. And this particular assumption, which is that women historically stayed inside the home, doing entirely uncompensated work, is false, as you said. It was the case for the upper-middle class and some of the middle class during a brief period of time in the mid-20th century, which was, not coincidentally, a period of unprecedented prosperity for Americans, and also the era of the nation's largest-ever working class per capita. When people pine for the 'good old days' when women stayed home, they seldom mention that the couple decades following WW II were a statistical anomaly, and the prosperity for average Americans was unique to that time period. Instead, they tend to blame working adults, especially working women with children, for being greedy or harboring out-of-control "keep up with the Jonses" compulsions.
But, prior to that period, and from the late 20th century on, the vast majority of women with children have worked outside the home for pay, and women's workforce participation hit an all-time high during Clinton's final year in office. Workforce participation has since plunged dramatically for male and female adults alike, and in most cases, not by choice, but because there are far fewer jobs available than people who want to work. In my family and my wife's, the elder generations of women consistently worked, save for one individual, my mother, who was profoundly mentally ill for much of her working prime. We grew up in the 70s and 80s assuming stay at home mothers were the stuff of well-off families and TV sitcoms, and neither of us suffered for it. Many caregiving arrangements are far more tragic and damaging than a biological mother who works outside the home, and those that involve child abuse top the list. Doubly so when the abuser is the child's mother, since the prevailing attitude is women are fundamentally incapable of despising or harming their children. It's the major reason adult survivors of such abuse find good help hard to come by too, especially if their abuser was female. The flipside of the stereotype that "fathers aren't able to care for young children the way mothers are" coin is the false but popular notion that most child abuse is perpetuated by men. Child abuse is a tragedy and a shame on our nation, regardless of which caregiver inflicts it on a helpless little person.
The biggest barriers to working while raising a family are structural and attitude-based. Most professional jobs today demand the worker take on the load for 2-3 people while making the salary of one full-time person (IF they are lucky...many make LESS). Despite hundreds of new technologies that enable us to work from anywhere and conduct meetings between teams that are double-digit time zones apart, many companies conduct business as they did in the 20th century. Managers, too, are harried and overscheduled; as a result, many resort to evaluating an employee's performance by the number of hours s/he's spent sitting at a desk instead of looking at individual results and productivity. Speaking of productivity, in America, it's at an all-time high, but workdays are growing longer and the boundaries between work and home are blurring more and more. Most workers aren't being compensated for their efforts either, as both inflation-adjusted salaries and benefits continue to shrink and employee contributions to many "perks" increase each year.
Finally, when an office is overworked and severely understaffed, taking time off is a feat on par with juggling oranges as you ride a unicycle. Can we blame someone new to the workforce for cutting her maternity leave short, if she's losing money each week she's out? Or, if her office is like most I've seen, she fears being made redundant if her manager so much as catches a whiff that her priorities lie anywhere other than the company at all times? I realize that some are of the opinion that new mothers have no business working outside the home. Typically, those against the idea either claim women are greedy and addicted to stuff, or that feminism "forced" this arrangement (it's said, by denigrating childrearing and applauding careers, but it's a myth on par with the one about the great bra-burning that never was -- the biggest outcome of 70s feminism was how it made many wives aware of the need to have some fallback skills and a potential source of income in case the other breadwinner leaves, gets fired, falls ill, etc.) The truth of working mothers is not so political...it's really just down to math. Basic costs of living are rising exponentially every year, while the real value of most workers' take-home pay has continued its downward plummet. And it isn't because upper-middle class women entered the workforce in larger numbers from the 70s onward. It's because the economy is now a global one, and executives are focused on cutting costs and making their quarterly numbers. There is a reason the term "human resources" sounds so clinical and impersonal: rather than viewing new hires as valuable talent poised to add innovation and profit, a decent percentage of hiring managers view those workers as burdensome costs.
I repped you with this comment and would like to add to my thoughts. As I mentioned to you privately, Liz is a great Senator in my eyes (and a true champion of working people in a country where support for this group has been scanty since the 70s). But if a statistic or premise is wrong, it is important to correct it. And this particular assumption, which is that women historically stayed inside the home, doing entirely uncompensated work, is false, as you said. It was the case for the upper-middle class and some of the middle class during a brief period of time in the mid-20th century, which was, not coincidentally, a period of unprecedented prosperity for Americans, and also the era of the nation's largest-ever working class per capita. When people pine for the 'good old days' when women stayed home, they seldom mention that the couple decades following WW II were a statistical anomaly, and the prosperity for average Americans was unique to that time period. Instead, they tend to blame working adults, especially working women with children, for being greedy or harboring out-of-control "keep up with the Jonses" compulsions.
But, prior to that period, and from the late 20th century on, the vast majority of women with children have worked outside the home for pay, and women's workforce participation hit an all-time high during Clinton's final year in office. Workforce participation has since plunged dramatically for male and female adults alike, and in most cases, not by choice, but because there are far fewer jobs available than people who want to work. In my family and my wife's, the elder generations of women consistently worked, save for one individual, my mother, who was profoundly mentally ill for much of her working prime. We grew up in the 70s and 80s assuming stay at home mothers were the stuff of well-off families and TV sitcoms, and neither of us suffered for it. Many caregiving arrangements are far more tragic and damaging than a biological mother who works outside the home, and those that involve child abuse top the list. Doubly so when the abuser is the child's mother, since the prevailing attitude is women are fundamentally incapable of despising or harming their children. It's the major reason adult survivors of such abuse find good help hard to come by too, especially if their abuser was female. The flipside of the stereotype that "fathers aren't able to care for young children the way mothers are" coin is the false but popular notion that most child abuse is perpetuated by men.
The biggest barriers to working while raising a family are structural and attitude-based. Most professional jobs today demand the worker take on the load for 2-3 people while making the salary of one full-time person (IF they are lucky...many make LESS). Despite hundreds of new technologies that enable us to work from anywhere and conduct meetings between teams that are double-digit time zones apart, many companies conduct business as they did in the 20th century. Managers, too, are harried and overscheduled; as a result, many resort to evaluating an employee's performance by the number of hours s/he's spent sitting at a desk instead of looking at individual results and productivity. Speaking of productivity, in America, it's at an all-time high, but workdays are growing longer and the boundaries between work and home are blurring more and more. Most workers aren't being compensated for their efforts either, as both inflation-adjusted salaries and benefits continue to shrink and employee contributions to many "perks" increase each year.
Finally, when an office is overworked and severely understaffed, taking time off is a feat on par with juggling oranges as you ride a unicycle. Can we blame someone new to the workforce for cutting her maternity leave short, if she's losing money each day she isn't there, and, if her office is like most I've seen, she fears being made redundant if her manager so much as catches a whiff that her priorities lie anywhere other than the company at all times? I realize that some are of the opinion that new mothers have no business working outside the home. Popular condemnations include: the women are greedy and addicted to stuff, or it's the fault of feminism for making many wives aware that it's wise to have fallback skills and a source of income in case the primary breadwinner leaves, gets fired, falls ill, etc. The truth is not so political...it's really just basic math. Basic costs of living are rising exponentially every year, while the real value of most workers' take-home pay has continued its downward plummet. And it isn't because upper-middle class women entered the workforce in larger numbers from the 70s onward. It's because the economy is now a global one, and executives are focused on cutting costs and making their quarterly numbers. There is a reason the term "human resources" sounds so clinical and impersonal: rather than viewing new hires as valuable talent poised to add innovation and profit, a decent percentage of hiring managers view those workers as burdensome costs.
Kudos for an actual intellectual addition to a spiraling thread. I enjoyed your post. Very informative.
If you didn't assume I thought my opinion was law, then you would leave me to my opinion with out assaulting my character or taking it so personally.
It doesn't matter if you think it is law. Your opinion is that it is "laughable" to put extras over having a SAHP. That is what I do, in a way, so it was insulting. Every time you said it was fine by you that so and so is a working mom, it was prefaced with something negative about it. I'm not the only one who pointed that out. I don't know why you don't see it, or if you are just pretending.
It would be like me expressing my opinion that SAHM's don't set a good example for their daughters, or that it's laughable to say that being a SAHM is as much of a job as working outside the home. Or saying that your kids will grow up to be dependent on you because they don't get the chance to do anything on their own.
I never said any of that. All I did was take issue with you calling my "idea," which also happens to be my reality, "laughable."
I'm proud that I'm able to give my kids extras and proud that I work hard in order to do it.
It doesn't matter if you think it is law. Your opinion is that it is "laughable" to put extras over having a SAHP. That is what I do, in a way, so it was insulting. Every time you said it was fine by you that so and so is a working mom, it was prefaced with something negative about it. I'm not the only one who pointed that out. I don't know why you don't see it, or if you are just pretending.
It would be like me expressing my opinion that SAHM's don't set a good example for their daughters, or that it's laughable to say that being a SAHM is as much of a job as working outside the home. Or saying that your kids will grow up to be dependent on you because they don't get the chance to do anything on their own.
I never said any of that. All I did was take issue with you calling my "idea," which also happens to be my reality, "laughable."
I'm proud that I'm able to give my kids extras and proud that I work hard in order to do it.
I'm glad for you. I really am. I am happy that you are happy about your choices.
I say something genuine...you say something loaded and sarcastic. Really, I am happy for anyone who makes a major parenting decision and feels confident and happy about that decision. Parenting is so hard. I second guess 97% of the decisions I make. I am very happy for people who feel content and confident about their parenting decisions. Not loaded, not sarcastic.
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