Julie DelegalLast of three parts.
There is a train of thought that says women — particularly feminists — are responsible for the breakdown of the traditional family.
Phyllis Schlafly, the 1970s-era antifeminist icon, has re-entered the news in conservative circles. On Jan. 14,the right-wing online outlet WND captured Schlafly saying that feminism is “the main reason why we have broken families, high divorce rate, illegitimacy.
“They are the biggest enemy of the family,” she said of feminists, in an article about how the Equal Rights Amendment (which was never ratified) ushered in conservatives’ second enemy, gay marriage.
“I think the feminists have been responsible for destroying the family,” Schlafly said.
Even a liberal member of the British Parliament, the Labour Party’s Diane Abbott, has stated that feminism has failed to address the breakdown of two-parent, married, stable families.
Abbott told the Telegraph newspaper on Jan. 26, “As a feminist, perhaps we have been ambivalent about families. … Those of us who came of age at the height of feminism had very mixed views about the family, since it seemed to be defined as a heterosexual thing with a certificate, children and mum at home.”
Not so fast, says Judith Erwin, a Jacksonville family law attorney. Just because feminism hasn’t yet tackled how to value work shouldered mostly by unpaid or underpaid women doesn’t mean we can blame women for the death of marriage. Erwin argues that feminism has been largely good for women.
“Women stopped depending on men. Women don’t accept maltreatment anymore. They can say ‘I don’t have to put up with you.’”
Women are also freer now than ever before to pursue the careers and vocations that suit them. “Women should have options,” Erwin says.
More often than not, though, as Anne-Marie Slaughter has written in an oft-cited Atlantic magazine piece, desirable and well-paying career choices don’t include caring for the vulnerable, including children. Feminists, in our rush to pursue new work choices and make headway for all of us, have not yet had the time to tackle this question: How should society recognize and compensate the undervalued — but critical — work of caring?
Slaughter, a politics and international affairs professor at Princeton, argues that caring for others has been devalued in the American economy. For a society to survive, she writes, it needs to balance competition with caring. The U.S. excels at the former, less so at the latter. Slaughter wants policy changes that encourage and support caregivers.
But even as early feminists may have inadvertently contributed to the economic devaluation Slaughter describes, a new breed is changing the family-values landscape. Stay-at-home husbands, at least in some upper-middle-class households, are helping the cause of equality.
In marriages where men have taken on primary household or parenting duties, enabling their wives to pursue high-powered careers, the wives readily admit the value of their partners’ unpaid work. And their employers do, too.
In a New York Times piece titled “Wall Street Mothers, Stay-Home Fathers,” a Wells Fargo executive acknowledges that women whose husbands stay home are some of the “top performers.”
Their husbands speak for legions of women who have postponed or altered their career plans to benefit the couple or family.
“It goes both ways,” Erwin says, steering the conversation back to alimony reform. Fixing limits on alimony, she says, will punish either partner who decides to trade career time for childrearing time. Without the opportunity for a judge to weigh the sacrifices of the lesser-earning spouse if the marriage ends, giving up a potential career path becomes dangerous business.
“Marriage comes with disillusionments,” Erwin says. “But then you realize, it’s give and take.”
Unless, that is, it ceases to exist.
Julie Delegal is a writer who lives in Jacksonville.
