Lisa Belkin had a really interesting piece in Sunday's New York Times about the ways in which the public concern over New York Senator hopeful Caroline Kennedy's experience mirrors a much larger work/life issue. She writes:...
...women changed the culture of the workplace, not least when highly visible women began to leave it. The rhythm of office work -- its hours, its demands, its life cycle -- is designed for a man, ideally a man with a wife back home with the kids. Ever since the industrial age, career tracks have been built on the assumption that you can work around the clock in your 20s, shoulder increasing responsibility in your 30s and 40s and begin to ratchet down and move over for the next generation in your 50s and 60s.That doesn't work for many women, who are apt to want to pause, physically and emotionally, for children, maybe slow down in their 30s, when men are charging ahead, and come back with a new energy in their 50s, when men are slowing down.
She goes on to talk about how work "experience" used to be defined, visually speaking, as a ladder. Just keep on climbing and hope for the rewards on your way up. But a new paradigm is taking over, one that looks less like a ladder and more like a "lattice"--a shape that allows for stepping off and stepping back on, caretaking for children and aging parents, working non-traditional hours, taking detours into various fields, developing various skills etc. In this paradigm, success would be less defined by one's years of experience or status within a particular linear framework, but the quality of one's work, the breadth of one's experience, one's capacity for reinvention and adaptation.
It's, undoubtedly, a very middle class way of looking at the problem of women and work (but what else would you expect from the Times and Belkin?!). I do find it interesting, nevertheless. Your thoughts?
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I agree, it's a very white, white-collar way of looking at things. Poor women may be working their whole lives whether or not they think they're "Career oriented" or "family oriented".
I think the very option to be "family oriented" is a luxury of wealth.
I like the way that the word has been redefined. It enforces complexity and breadth rather than focusing on one particular skill. I think that it's more important to have more than one set of skills (maybe it's because I'm a graduate from a liberal arts college...who knows).
Interesting but on balance I think unrealistic, outside of narrow niches (eg, media) where experience in & of itself has never been valued.
I think the "workday" has much more to do with natural human cycles--starting w/ hunter-gatherers who started & ended their day with the sun--than on some conspiracy of white men to while away daylight hours in flourescent lit cubicles.
first: gatherer-hunter.
Today we don't work and stop work once the sun goes up or down. You have plenty of jobs that require non-stop attention or long hours, or working on international time clocks. I think the problem is that you dont have fathers doing their duties in the house in respect to doing what one is supposed to do when you have kids and so this ends up being the rule reflected in the workplace. This ends up disproportionately taking up a womans day as she's expected to do more for the kids. And as the work world still is done like it was decades ago when men werent really involved fathers and women were expected to stay home you have a revolve around the non-involved father rule of thumb. It hasnt reflected the changes and ideals in society. I think if things changed at home, it would start to manifest in the work world.
We dont live in caves anymore. Its impossible to try and connect it to something that was done 10000000000-ect's of years ago.FYI I'm also not huge and hairy.
fyi, paleolithic society as we understand it required about 2-3 hours of work per day on average. our current workday model owes more to all the bullshit that rich white men have been pulling since the industrial revolution.
It's a good piece. And of course, part of the shift from the ladder to the lattice paradigm involves inviting men to reconsider their own relationships to work and to family. Not all men want to spend their 30s "charging ahead" at the expense of family, just as not all women want to spend their thirties pregnant, nursing, and supervising toilet-training..
The greatest number of options are available to the greatest number with better low-cost child care, longer paid parental leave, and the further encouragement of a paradigm shift towards a gentler, more nurturing masculinity.
I agree, it is a good piece and she says up front that she's talking about "white collar" jobs. Social change has never happened "on its own" so to speak. It has only EVER happened because people demanded for things to change, and yes, as more men have begun to redefine masculinity and their relationships to their families, changes, though small, have occurred. However, I don't think it would be unfair to say that the process likely begins with individual women negotiating with male partners parameters of domestic and child-rearing duties. While some men may indeed take the initiative to get more time off work, leave work entirely to stay home, etc., I have to think most times it is women saying to their partners, "Hey, enough with the double duty on my part, you need to step it up here."
And on her analysis of "experience" I have to wonder if the "lattice" paradigm might be creating two standards: old ladder type for men, new lattice type for women. While they may both have their advantages, I would hate to see a new work experience paradigm emerge at the expense of reinforcing other gender stereotypes.
I dont like how she exclusively refenced women as the ones who might want to be nurturers in their 30's. Many men may want that too. That comment only seems too have stereotyped women. It also overlooks the fact that many women opt to leave work because they dont have good partners at home. Their husbands expect she'll be 70% of the house cleaner, the partner in the relationship and child care provider while working. I would like to see that issue addressed before she starts saying it's because mothers want to be 'nurturers.' And by nurtureres she is insinuating a non-working mum, and is therefore making the claim that working moms arent as good nurturers as working mums. It seems a sly way of scewing working mums.
This pattern of life may only be available to middle-class women, but I'd venture that one of the biggest problems with low-income jobs is that they are structured for 'American Dream' male workers: putting in long hours with little flexibility, assuming that someone else is taking care of every family need.
I don't think this is unrealistic. In fact, I sincerely hope that as the upper-middle class elitist snobs everyone loves to deride demand that THEIR careers be structured this way, it will become commonplace enough that most careers will be.
Don't get me started on Caroline Kennedy, though... I find her pretty irritating.
There are any number of seasoned women political activists in New York State who are far more qualified than Caroline Kennedy:
Carolyn Maloney (congresswoman, former city councilwoman)
Lillian Roberts (executive director, District Council 37, AFSCME,former state labor commissioner)
Olga Mendez (state senator, former assemblywoman, former councilwoman)
Eva Moskowitz (assemblywoman, former city councilwoman)
Ruth Messenger (former borough president of Manhattan)
Una Clarke (former city councilwoman)
Velmanette Montgomery (state senator)
Doris Turner (former president, Drug, Hospital and Health Care union local 1199)
and there are many others - who defied the glass ceiling to get their positions, and got where they are due to hard work, rather than having the right last name and a famous dad and two famous uncles.
I agree. Caroline Kennedy has made contributions to the community, but is that enough to get an entry level job as a Senator? State senator maybe, City councilperson definitely, maybe a congressperson at most. Senator is over-reaching by a person who is too much of an unknown entity in terms of actually working with diverse people and getting things done.
Thanks to Gregory and Eileen for bringing the conversation back to Kennedy. Not only do I know little about her, but what I do know is negative.
Her public life consists of working with New York City public school chief Joel Klein, who has made New York City schools even more bureaucratic than they were before.
In her informal "campaign" she mostly avoided the press, but the interviews she did give were Palinesque in their grasp of the issues New Yorkers care about.
I love the word "Palinesque"!
Ms Kennedy also lives on the same block as Mike Bloomberg, our city's billionaire mayor - who's deputy mayor has been actively campaigning/arm twisting for Kennedy among major New York State unions (including mine - the New York City District Council of Carpenters, which endorsed her...without consulting with the members first, of course!)