Blog 8

Belkin’s article seems to ring a few chords in me, and they don’t agree with her.
I hear the argument that women now have more of a “choice” to leave their career and be stay-at-home mothers (of course how much of a “choice” this is depends on race, social class, place of residence etc.) To me, it seemed that Belkin was arguing that women nowadays are lazy about their own careers, because who wants to work if they have to? You know what, I think they are lazy and that is has always been culturally acceptable for women not to work. But you know what else; men would do the same thing.
Culture values the man who provides for his family. Culture values women who are mother figures. Mix those together and trends make sense. Things also make sense if we consider America in the 1600’s to the 1800’s, a time where women really did have designated tasks oriented around housework which were far from what your standard stay-at-home mother would complete nowadays. But I don’t think very many of those women would be considered lazy by Belkin. Belkin is trying to tie in the fact that the feminist movement has made it possible for women to move towards other types of jobs, but they simply are not fulfilling those jobs and are instead using children as an “opt out”. So while many men would do the same thing if they had the option, I still have a hard time siding with the stay-at-home mothers. The article makes its most important point right near the end:

This, I would argue, is why the workplace needs women. Not just because they are 50 percent of the talent pool, but for the very fact that they are more willing to leave than men. That, in turn, makes employers work harder to keep them. It is why the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche has more than doubled the number of employees on flexible work schedules over the past decade and more than quintupled the number of female partners and directors (to 567, from 97) in the same period. It is why I.B.M. employees can request up to 156 weeks of ob-protected family time off. It is why Hamot Medical Center in Erie, Pa., hired a husband and wife to fill one neonatology job, with a shared salary and shared health insurance, then let them decide who stays home and who comes to the hospital on any given day. It is why, everywhere you look, workers are doing their work in untraditional ways.

The other side of the argument that I hear most from Belkin has to do with “choice”. She argues that affluent, white women form Princeton had the ability to choose, while others may not have. I agree. That is why it seems such a disgrace when these women choose not to enter the work force in any way, when countless others would love to, but cannot. I’m sure that this would offend many individuals, but if someone does not express any desire to invest in themselves and realize they have an obligation to give back to society, then they are they people who hold us back from a more sensible society. I should clarify that I don’t define a job entirely by wage. There are countless organizations and causes people can assign themselves to that give some of the greatest contributions to our society.

A pretty funny response to this article can be found on the Salon News website, http://archive.salon.com/mwt/feature/2003/10/27/belkin/. The author, Walsh, attacks one of the weakest points in Belkin’s discussion: the matter of “choice”. Walsh discusses that Belkin really did refuse to discuss matters of discrimination, and she should have. She also discusses that Belkin’s work doesn’t say anything special because of the group of individuals she’s interviewing: “Because, honestly, if you take those disclaimers seriously, you'll think -- correctly -- that Belkin's piece is a real-time snapshot of a small cohort of privileged 30-something white women who are likely to think something entirely different in 10 years.” I agree with Walsh.