added to families when mothers and fathers share the nurturing power.
All we hear about, all we talk about, are the problems the stresses,
for women, of combining work and family the deficit for children, growing up in a single-parent family. We don’t hear about the studies at the Wellesley Center for Research on Women which show that combining work and family reduces stress for women, is better for women’s mental health than the old either-or single role,
and that women’s mental health no longer declines sharply after menopause as it used to do. We don’t hear about the different kinds of strengths and support single-parent families need and could get from their communities. But there is anew awareness that something has to change now in the structure of society, because the hours and conditions of jobs and professional training are still based on the lives of the men of the past who had wives to take care of the details of life. Women don’t have such wives, but neither do most men now.
So the family friendly workplace becomes a conscious political and collective bargaining issue—flextime, job sharing, parental leave. It turns out that companies on the cutting edge in terms of technology and the bottom line are also the ones adopting family friendly policies. The United States has been backward compared to other advanced industrial nations in this regard 98 percent of three- to four-year-olds in France and Belgium are in a preschool program The United States was the
last industrial nation exceptSouth Africa to adopt a national parental leave policy, only after Bill
Clinton took office.
There’s also a growing sense that it takes more than one mother- one father, much less a single mother, to raise a child. It takes a village to raise a child First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a bestselling book in 1996. Theresa new awareness of the values of diversity—and of the need of all families fora larger, stronger community. It’s afar cry from that single model of the isolated suburban feminine mystique family of the sixties, not only the many variations—some couples
having babies in their forties, women and men, well established in careers some juggling work, profession,
training, and home with babies in their twenties and thirties;
sometimes the woman taking a year or two off, or the man,
if they can afford it, and single parents—all of them relying more than ever on support from grandparents, playgroups with other parents, company,
church, or community childcare. And more and more women and
men, living alone or together, young and older, in new patterns. The recent campaign to legalize same-sex marriage shows the powerful appeal of lasting emotional commitment even for men or women who depart from conventional sexual norms.
In 1994–95, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars at
the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, I led a seminar for policymakers, looking beyond sexual politics, beyond identity politics, beyond gender—toward anew paradigm of women, men,
and community. In 1996, we focused on “Reframing Family Values,”
in the context of new economic realities. I have never bought the seeming polarization between feminism and families. A demagogic reprise of the old feminine mystique, the recent reactionary family values campaign is basically
an attack on abortion, divorce, and,
above all, the rights and autonomy of women. But there are real values having to do with families, with mothering and fathering and bonds between the generations, with all our needs to get and to give love and nurture that are women’s public and private concerns today and the crux of the political gender gap in 1996. The question is,
when will men turn on the culture of greed and say, Is this all?”
The old separatism—women vs. men—is no longer relevant, is in fact being transcended. Just as the Playboy Clubs were shutdown some years after the women’s movement—it no longer seemed sexy,
evidently, for women to pretend they were “bunnies”—in 1997
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