Emily Matchar Quotes
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Sweden had paternity-leave policies in place for years but found that few men were taking advantage of the benefit. While women felt comfortable taking time off to be with baby, men worried that they would look less dedicated to their careers if they did the same. So the Swedish government implemented a “use it or lose it” policy, mandating that the country’s thirteen-month parental leave cannot only be used by one parent – the other parent must use at least two months of the leave, or both lose those months entirely. Today 85% of Swedish fathers take paternity leave. The policy has helped redefine notions of masculinity and femininity in the already-egalitarian country.
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But she realized that modern homemaking could be creatively fulfilling in a way she'd never imagined. Unlike previous generations of housewives, who Erika imagines were bored and dissatisfied, Erika says women her age treat the duties of the home as outlets for their creativity.
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You have a teenager who desperately wants to separate...If you don't have a career, these New Domesticity types are likely to find themselves standing in the kitchen with all these domestic skills and no outlet for them, no way to earn a living... At that point your kids are not thanking you for having made the hand-pureed baby food and for giving them homemade cookies. They don't feel you've done them a big favor; they say, "Why didn't she ever grow up and take responsibility for her own life?"
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Dozens of my own friends and acquaintances--ambitious, educated women who might have turned up their noses at anything domestic had they been born a generation earlier--have blogs dedicated to cupcakes or knitting or vintage home decor.
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In progressive, middle-class circles these days, there's the overwhelming sense that procuring and cooking freshest, healthiest, most sustainably sourced food should be a top priority for any thinking person.
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Food has always been a class code, and since Alice Waters, the way to give an upper-middle class act is with food that is fresh and local...The class code of the upper-middle class literally links morality and political virtue with certain forms of high-intensity food-preparation activities.
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If you're not at least a tiny bit jealous at this point, you might want to check for your own pulse.
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The problem is that the media rarely discusses the real reasons behind why women leave their jobs. We hear a lot about the desire to be closer to the children, the love of crafting and gardening, and making food from scratch. But reasons like lack of maternity leave, lack of affordable day care, lack of job training, and unhappiness with the 24/7 work culture-well, those aren't getting very much airtime.
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Our neurotic quest to perfect the mechanics of mothering can be interpreted as an effort to do on an individual level what we’ve stopped trying to do on a society-wide one.
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There’s no evidence that women are actually happier at home. In fact numerous studies show that working moms are happier and more fulfilled than stay-at-home moms.
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You just have to follow your own heart" when it comes to medical decision-making.
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My grandfather so throughly considered cooking to be "women's work" that he wouldn't even enter the kitchen to get his own glass of water. My husband, born sixty-one years after my grandfather, shows his love by bringing me coffee every morning and whipping up chocolate-chip cookies for friends' birthday parties. I think it's fair to say that few young men these days feel less masculine for knowing their way around a kitchen.
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American culture at large has failed working mothers.
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It's not the nineteenth century; I'm not meant to be judged on how good a housekeeper I am. Getting down on the floor with a lemon and a bucket of vinegar does not make me a better person.
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Gardening and making your own soap and home-birthing your babies are fine, but these are inherently limited actions. If we want to see genuine food safety, if we want to see sustainable products, if we want to see a better women's health system, and if we want these things for everyone, not just the privileged few with the time and education to DIY it, then we need large social changes.
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Attachment parenting, Sears writes, "immunizes children against many of the social and emotional diseases which plague our society," producing children who are "compassionate," "caring," "admirable," "affectionate," "confident," and "accomplished" ("faster than a speeding bullet," "more powerful than a locomotive," and "able to leap tall buildings in a single bound" seem to have been left off the list!).
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If women cut back on their ambitions en masse, institutional change will never happen and the glass ceiling will lower. We need to be there to demand equal pay, mandatory maternity leave, more human hours. Leaving the “dirty work” of working to the men is a way of muffling our own voices.
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When we combine very real workplace inequalities with these romantic opt-out stories, the idea that "having it all" is a laughable goal becomes enshrined as immutable truth. And when we portray opting out as a simple matter of "choice," we ignore the systematic problems that make combining work and motherhood so difficult.
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Being a stay-at-home mom to one child, a baby, when you’re a mom of one is not really a full-time job,” she says sotto voce, as if revealing a dirty secret. “You’ve got a lot of other time. I think that’s where all the canning and the cloth diapering and that frenzy comes in. You have this time vacuum. It really isn’t that hard to look after one kid all day long.
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A privileging of individual rights over group goods can lead to serious problems, as we’ve seen with the antivaccination movement.
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Now let's make Virginia Heffernan a man. Can you imagine the same kind of spittle-flecked rage directed at a busy working father who admits to feeding his kids Annie's Organic Mac & Cheese?
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For women with children, the new handmade economy offers the tantalizing possibility of flexible, part-time, at home work--the "egg money" of the twenty-first century.
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Does the burden of “do it yourself” fall harder on women than men?