LawCulture

So THAT'S why I haven't found time to blog in months. . .

From today's NY TImes:

While married mothers and married fathers were approaching “gender equality,” measured by total hours of work, the researchers found stark differences among women. These disparities suggest why working mothers often feel hurried and harried.

Over all, the researchers said, employed mothers have less free time and “far greater total workloads than stay-at-home mothers.” The workweek for an employed mother averages 71 hours, almost equally divided between paid and unpaid work, compared with a workweek averaging 52 hours for mothers who are not employed outside the home.

On average, the researchers said, employed mothers get somewhat less sleep and watch less television than mothers who are not employed, and they also spend less time with their husbands.

The article describes a new book, Changing Rhythms of Family Life, which sounds well worth reading.  In all that free time. . . .  yeah, right.

Mommy wars -- a false battle

Los Angeles Times
Rosa Brooks
March 31, 2006

Mommy wars -- a false battle

IN HER MUCH-DISCUSSED new book, "Mommy Wars," Leslie Morgan Steiner likens the tensions between working mothers and stay-at-home mothers to "a catfight." Personally, I think it's more like dueling roosters: a cockfight.
more here.

Signs of a (Diaper) Changing Time

The Sunday New York Times had this article on the trend of providing diaper changing stations in both male and female restrooms.  The story follows a man named Greg Allen who is "compiling a list of public men's rooms in New York equipped with changing tables and using Google maps to pinpoint their locations on his blog, daddytypes.com."  It also mentions a lawsuit brought in 1994 on behalf of a diaper-clad child who was shopping with his father in a Lord & Taylor in Manhattan whose men's bathrooms did not have a diaper changing station (the women's bathroom did have one). The failure to provide equal facilities for men and women was alleged to be a form of sex discrimination.  (Lord & Taylor settled the suit by providing changing stations in both the men's and women's bathrooms so that the issue of sex discrimination was never decided.)

A student of mine brought this article to my attention yesterday after our constitutional law class. (We are in the middle of our unit on sex discrimination, having just discussed Frontiero v. Richardson and United States v. Virginia.) To him, I gather, this article was evidence of change in our culture and, specifically, in society's expectations for men as child care providers (changes wrought by or reflected in civil rights litigation?).  In a later discussion with another student in the same class, the subject of a type of male ennui arose: fathers stuck in competitive and time-restrictive jobs who are encouraged much less (if at all) than their female counterparts to take time off to care for their children.  Indeed, anecdotal evidence of law firm life suggests that men who work part-time to help care for their young children are penalized in the partnership race, whereas women who do the same are praised for agilely juggling work and family.  (Indeed, law firms that advertise as family-friendly tout the fact that they have promoted women to partner who have been working part-time to care for their children. I have seen no such self-promotion on the part of these same law firms with regard to male partners. Have I missed it?)

The diaper changing stations may be proliferating in men's bathrooms in Manhattan, but (call me a cynic) I am unconvinced that this material change reflects changes in our "deeply rooted traditions" of who cares for children and who financially supports them.  Case on point: Next week we study Nguyen v. INS, 533 U.S. 53 (2001) in which the Supreme Court upholds as constitutional an INS regulation that imposes greater procedural hurdles on a US-citizen father whose child is born overseas and seeks US citizenship than on a similarly situated US-citizen mother. The differential treatment is justified, says the Court, because of the "significant difference between [the mother's and father's] respective relationship to the [child] at birth" (i.e., the biological difference of giving birth and not giving birth) that can prevent, in the father's case, the "opportunity or potential to develop ... a relationship  ... that consists of the real, everyday ties that provide a connection bewteen child and citizen parent."  Have we come that far when the Supreme Court says the "opportunity for a meaningful relationship between citizen mother and child inheres in the very event of birth," whereas the "meaningfulness" of the father-child relationship requires more work, is less, oh, natural?

Betty Friedan and Working Women

Betty Friedan  died over the weekend, at 85.  I read her most famous book, The Feminine Mystique as an undergraduate in a feminist theory course. Her book, a founding text of second-wave feminism,  analyzes and decries “the problem that had no name,” the anomie and discontent of educated, middle-class women who had no practical alternative to a stultifying, suburban existence of tending to home, husband, and children – women who got everything they thought they wanted and were then left asking themselves, “Is that all?”

I remember feeling a sense of gratitude when I read the book:  in significant part because of books like hers, the world that she described wasn’t the world I expected to inhabit.  But accompanying that sense of gratitude was an equally strong feeling of disconnection: the recent past that she described was a foreign country, not a place that struck me as familiar.  These problems, I thought, weren’t my problems.

I’m now struck – and slightly embarrassed – by how  disconnected I felt from what she described.  I grew up in a milieu in which, quite honestly, it truly never occurred to me that I wouldn’t have a professional life.  Back when I was a junior in college reading her book, I didn’t know what I’d be – journalist? Lawyer? Anthropologist? – but I certainly knew that I’d never identify with the label ‘housewife’!.  I vaguely expected to have a family someday too, and perhaps I even wondered every now and then about how I’d juggle the various roles, though I suspect that I didn’t give those matters too much detailed thought back in those days.  Why couldn’t I have it all?

No doubt the world is a very different place now than when Betty Friedan published her book in 1963.  And yet:  I look around at my friends, at my law school classmates, at the people all around me, and I am struck by what an enormous number of talented, highly educated women are choosing to forego their professional lives in order to stay at home with their families.  (We don’t talk about  housewives any more, of course; the terminology du jour is the ‘stay-at-home-mom’.) 

Unexpected Conversational Turns

So, my son really loves a book right now called “Little Brown Hen’s Shower” which is about a little  hen who overhears talk of a shower. She's due at the farmer’s house that afternoon, and so she carefully totes both her precious egg and her umbrella, determined to keep her baby-to-be dry in the face of the rain. But it’s a beautiful sunny day without a cloud in sight. The ‘shower’ in question turns out to be a surprise baby shower for the hen herself and the book concludes by explaining, “sometimes words sound the same but they mean different things.”

All this is to say that right now, my son is intrigued by homonyms. (No, he doesn’t know that word yet; c’mon, he’s barely three!)  We talk about lots of words that mean different things. Sun in the sky and son like him.  Ate like dinner and eight the number. But recently he gave me as an example  chicken the food, and chicken the animal.

Um, those are really the same thing, I told him.  “No,” he answered, laughing.  “That’s crazy.” And he went running off, having lost interest in the game for the moment.

When my daughter was about the same age, we had a virtually identical conversation.  I vividly remember when her mouth dropped open at the thought that chicken, the farm animal, bore any relation to the chicken that she ate at dinner (preferably nuggets, if she had her druthers).

I remember a sinking feeling in my chest, as I proceeded to explain that the food ‘chicken’ in fact came from the animal.  Was she about to go vegetarian on me? She wasn’t a big eater in the first place, and that would have made feeding her even more complicated. . . . But the conversation took a turn I never would have expected.