Elite Meet Teat

Ok, that’s a bit of a crass headline, but when I thought of it while trying to make up a silly headline, I couldn’t keep from posting it.

The New York Times (free registration required) published an article (thanks to my friend Karen for pointing it out to me) on Ivy League women students considering a career as Mommy over a career as Lawyer, and their plans to either cut back on work or quit altogether once they have kids.

Bear in mind that this is all about Ivy League females, most of whom, according to the article, "are likely to marry men who will make enough money to give them a real choice about whether to be full-time mothers, unlike those women who must work out of economic necessity." So, in other words, this is all theory for people like you and me.

The article cites several surveys of female students at Ivy League schools about their plans for family and career, and a few interviews with students and faculty. Speaking as a working mom who knows other working moms, the results of the surveys aren’t shocking - a significant number of female students find the idea of staying home with their kids more enticing than working.

Not surprisingly, there appears to be a diastema between some interviewed faculty and students in theories of mixing family with career. Laura Wexler, a professor of American studies and women’s and gender studies at Yale, said,

“Women have been given full-time working career opportunities and encouragement, with no social changes to support it.”

That, right there, is the crux of my own ennui about this whole working mommy thing. I work for my family’s benefit. I even get a bit of self-satisfaction out of it. But then AlphaMom comes along, or 19 year-old Yale student Cynthia Liu and her mom. She said,

“My mother’s always told me you can’t be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time. You always have to choose one over the other.”

I’ve talked to enough working moms out there to know it’s not just me - working moms are being pulled in different directions, each one arguably the “best.” I get along ok, with a few tearful moments when the kids are crying for me and I’m at the office, or worse, on travel. But then I read something like what Uzezi Abugo from the University of Pennsylvania said, and anger, if not disgust, sets in:

“I’ve seen the difference between kids who did have their mother stay at home and kids who didn’t, and it’s kind of like an obvious difference when you look at it.”

I have to take to heart that at least my kids will probably be obviously different from Uzezi. After all, it’s Dad who stays home, not Mom. And, they will hopefully be even more obviously different from Harvard student Sarah Currie, who appears to *like* (you’ll see why I used that word) the fact that men in her class *approve* of women’s plans to stay at home with children.

“A lot of guys were, like, ‘I think that’s really great.’ One of the guys was, like, ‘I think that’s sexy.’”

Yes, dear girls, male sexual approval is what life is, like, all about.

Still, I see nothing wrong with, as the article puts it, a woman expecting her career to take second place to child rearing. Certainly, my family takes precedence over anything, work or play. It’s the standard raised by Marlyn McGrath Lewis, the director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard that worries me. She said,

“[women leaving careers for motherhood] really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?”

Ummmmm, educated women? Educated mothers? Educated voters? Is that a problem?

The only saving grace from this article for Yale is the Dean of Yale College, Peter Salovey. He said,

“What does concern me is that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn’t constructed along traditional gender roles.”

I have a BSc in Zoology and an MBA. That combination of sheepskin by itself makes me three standard deviations from the norm. Maybe even four. Add to that I have a husband who’s a stay-at-home-dad (SAHD), and I’m an outlier sure to be thrown from any sample. I’m so far out of the box FedEx won’t ship me. Only three percent of 138 respondents to one survey, all women students at Yale, even mentioned the possibility of Dad staying home with the kids. So, yes, it does concern me, too, Dean Salovey, that a SAHD option is not often considered, and I appreciate you bringing it up. Not in any sociologic or economic sense, just in that these people aren’t considering a viable option that meets their stay-at-home parent desire, like poor Uzezi. This myopic view isn’t helped by Dean Salovey’s colleague, professor Cynthia E. Russett of Yale who said,

“At the height of the women’s movement and shortly thereafter, women were much more firm in their expectation that they could somehow combine full-time work with child rearing. The women today are, in effect, turning realistic.”

Pinch me. I must be dreaming. ‘Cuz apparently, I’m not in, like, reality.

P.S. For a SAHD viewpoint on this article, check out RebelDad’s comments.

UPDATE: Echidne has some interesting discussion on this topic, too.