Right around March every year, my inbox is inundated with announcements for Women's History Month presentations, discussions, and exhibitions featuring the stories of ordinary and extraordinary women who overcame legalized discrimination, entrenched social attitudes and lack of educational and professional opportunities to succeed at their jobs and careers. Because of my work and family obligations, I don't get to go to a lot of them, but when I do, I'm always amazed by how much has changed for women, and how much hasn't. Call me a working women's history geek.
So, I was thrilled when journalist and CurrentMom founder Katherine Lewis Reynolds tipped me off to an online symposium - "Is the Gender Revolution Over?" - that I could read on my laptop during my post-work, post-kids' bedtime blogging block. The virtual symposium, sponsored by the Council on Contemporary Families(CCF), features contesting papers by well-known researchers and advocates that provide a nuanced look at the evolution of gender roles inside the workplace and out. (You can read Katherine's coverage of the CCF symposium here and here.)
While the CCF symposium covered a wide range of topics, as a working mom (and a working mom blogger), I was struck most by the attitudinal shifts towards working moms and family roles. Interestingly, while the CCF papers show how women may be losing ground in some ways (for example, in declining rates of labor force participation and stalled representation in management positions), society, as a whole, seems to be more accepting of working mothers and egalitarian family and parenting arrangements than in the past.
Indeed, according to the keynote paper's authors, data from the General Social Survey(GSS), which has been surveying Americans' attitudes towards working moms since 1977, shows that support for working moms is - despite a few bumps in the road - on an upward trend. While more than half of the Americans surveyed in 1977 felt that a mother’s working was harmful to her children, by 2010, 75% of Americans agreed that "a working mother can establish just as warm and secure a relationship with her children as a mother who does not work." And 65 % said that preschool children were not likely to suffer if their mother worked outside the home. (Whew!)
Other GSS gender attitude questions show (almost) the same pattern. In 1977, 66% Americans agreed with the statement that, “It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family, " while only 34% disagreed. By 1994, this flipped, with only 34% agreeing that such traditional marital arrangements were better and 66% disagreeing. By 2010, 64% disagreed witht he assumption that men should be breadwinners, and women homemakers, two points lower than in 1994, but not a significant difference. (Of course, then there's Rick Santorum).
What does this all mean for working moms and working families?
In some sense, it's hard to know because these shifts in Americans' attitudes may simply reflect economic conditions and imperatives. It's harder to say that women should be at home and men at work when more men than women lost jobs in the recent recession.
And in other ways, it may not matter all that much because the greater societal acceptance of mothers in the workforce (and of fathers taking on more family responsibilities) hasn't yet translated into concrete changes and supportive policies for working moms and their families. As Deborah Siegel, in her great Occupy (Working) Motherhood piece in last month's Forward wrote, working families need "[a]ffordable quality childcare, paired with a change in the cultural expectation that women’s careers are expendable." They want "[w]orkplace structures and a society transformed to allow for the fact that workers have families, too." We're obviously not there.
Still, I have to believe that these major shifts in public opion will ultimately bring about the kinds of workplace and public policy changes that are critical for working families. Otherwise, America's move towards a more egalitarian society may, as some of the CCF symposium participants predicted, stall or simply end. That wouldn't be a good result for working moms, our partners and kids or the rest of us.
Photo from the National Archives' Women's History collection on flickr.com.
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