Not long ago, I told a friend of
mine that I thought the term, stay-at-home
mom, was outdated. “Of course it is,” she answered. “It makes us sound like all we do -- all day
long -- is sit on the couch.”
Fortunately for us,
dissatisfaction with the term may be on the rise. Just a few months ago, Slate ran a piece entitled, WhyDo We Call Them ‘Stay-At-Home Moms?’ There Must Be a Better Term, in which the
writer urged that “we, as a culture, are free to come up with a new word[.]”
Having the freedom to change
something, of course, doesn’t mean it’s easy.
I think there are some big cultural barriers to changing the term,
including some that live in the hearts and minds of my fellow “stay-at-home”
mothers. Still, I think a good argument can
be made for sending the term into early retirement. It comes from feminist theory, and it’s
about the cultural power of language.
1.
Language
is power.
One of the most important contributions
of feminist theory has been to show us that language – the words we use to
describe ourselves and others -- has the power to shape culture. The best-known theorist of discourse was probably
Michel Foucault, whose early studies of mental illness and punishment and sexuality
demonstrated that cultural institutions and cultural languages are mutually constitutive.
In fact, this fundamental idea
has informed everything from medicine to politics. Discourse analysis has shed light on the ways
in which the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)
classifies psychiatric disorders, for example.
While the classifications are based on dominant notions of what is
normal (and therefore, abnormal), people have argued that the assumptions
behind these notions -- about how people should behave, how they should act, and
even, what they should want -- are culturally
biased. So rather than taking our normative
cultural words like hyperactive, or depressed, at face value, we need to
interrogate them.
This analysis was not lost on the
earliest of second-wave feminist writers.
Feminist writers from Betty Freidan and Germaine Greer to Judith Butler
to Joan Scott fought gender discrimination, at least in part, by exposing how
it operated through language. It would
be impossible for women to attain more rights and freedoms, they taught us,
without interrogating dominant cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality.
Discourse analysis is a popular
pet theory in academia, but it’s at work in popular culture all the time. To this day, dominant assumptions about how women
should act -- and even, what they should
want –inform how women are treated under the law. One of the clearest examples is the language
used in rape trials, where people’s understanding of concepts like force and consent are driven by dominant assumptions about how women should
dress, talk, or otherwise behave. Without interrogating language that
presents itself in courts all the time – about a woman “getting herself raped” or
“asking for it” -- prosecutors can’t even clearly establish victimhood.
2. Language is totally power at
work.
The same theories explain why women have always challenged gendered language in the work place. If your boss doesn’t call you a lady or a girl, you have feminism to thank for not being patronized and infantilized.
And if your boss does call you those
things, you now have recourse to complain.
Because women now have rules against denigrating and sexualized language
in the workplace, which create hostile work environments, and disrupt our
capacity to get our jobs done.
Feminists didn’t get too far with
symbolic terms like Herstory and Womyn.
But it was good they tried. Because
they focused our cultural attention on the ways in which language reflected
male dominance, and female marginalization.
And in specific vocations, women workers made changes to help them create a more modern, gender-neutral
work culture.
The list is long. Women struggled to be called flight attendants
instead of stewardess. People insisted
on saying office or administrative assistants, instead of secretaries, which
was a loaded and old-fashioned term. We
say child care providers instead of babysitters. We say firefighters instead of firemen, mail
carriers instead of mailmen, and police officers instead of policemen. Increasingly,
our culture is even coming around to calling prostitutes and strippers by the
term, sex workers, to underscore
their labor and their rights. It’s the
right thing to do.
As a culture, we really do change
terminology all the time. Women have
lobbied for such changes in order to make work more visible, to make
professions more inclusive, to gain more respect in their vocations, and to
emphasize the rights of entire categories of workers.
3. The
language of staying at home is disempowering.
So, having established the
constitutive power of language in women’s lib, why should we care about stay-at-home moms? The main reason is that the term,
stay-at-home mom, embodies no discursive
association with the concept of work. And even conceals one. And this basic fact makes the work that a lot of stay-at-home moms do seem
undervalued, and invisible.
This is partly a problem of
gender-neutral terminology.
Colloquially, when we say work,
we mean paid labor. And there really isn’t a great way to
describe the work done by women who don’t
work for pay. Stay-at-home moms do not,
in fact, receive a paycheck.
I know women who underscore their
own work (at home) by referring to other women as working for pay, or working
outside the home. Some feminist
writers, of course, have tried to assign hypothetical salaries to their daily
labors to show exactly how much value stay-at-home mothers should have. Germaine Greer and others have even argued
that mothers should paid, on the grounds that it would better redistribute
wealth toward families and children.
This is a challenge but not an insurmountable one. As a culture, we have no problem saying the
word work when we’re talking about the
unpaid work that people other than mothers
do. When people volunteer for an
organization or a cause, it’s often called volunteer work. When people get an unpaid internship, even if
they don’t get the same labor protections, we say they’re working as interns. Domestic
work isn’t an option for mothers, because that carries a different kind of baggage. But in regards to the unpaid work of moms
(and increasingly, I might add, of dads), we could embrace words that imply or
invoke some parity with paid work. Such
as primary caregiver. Or full-time
parent.
A bigger problem, to my mind, is
that there’s still a segment of our culture that doesn’t really think the work done by stay-at-home moms should be
valued according to modern, workplace standards. Some of these people are stay-at-home moms
themselves. According to this viewpoint,
women who are privileged enough to have the choice
to stay home – a choice that comes with other social benefits, and is absent of
the pressure of providing financial support -- don’t need to be any more empowered. Staying at home might be hard work but theoretically
and practically, they would argue, it’s nothing
like paid work.
Choice is a real issue, and it’s
correlated with cultural empowerment.
But I think this is a truly misleading bias. It’s not only misleading because mothers
choose to leave paid jobs for all kinds of reasons, and often sacrifice some
financial stability in order to do so.
But more important to this case, feminist activists have never made the rightness of a choice -- or the absence of choice -- an eligibility
requirement for liberation. Some women choose
to become sex workers. I don’t agree
with that choice, but I’d never suggest we belittle their labor through
language. Other women choose to go to medical school, or
work at low-paying non-profit jobs – choices that may be funded through
parental or governmental or spousal support. The amount of choice, like the amount of pay
received, should be irrelevant.
Even when you sideline the work-language
issue, though, the terminology is disempowering. I can understand how it may once have sounded
liberating, as a replacement for the term, housewife. Defining women who were caring for children
in a modern cultural context solely in association to their husbands was
antiquated.
But the language of staying home was obviously constructed
out of a certain feminist historical moment, too. It was constructed in opposition to another social group. That group was not
men. It was women who were not staying
home. Women, in other words, who were
doing what men did. Work.
Associating stay-at-home moms with the home wouldn’t be nearly as detrimental
if our culture valued the domestic sphere as highly as it values the public
sphere. But it hasn’t. And it doesn’t. Women’s
work in the home has historically
been less valuable and less visible. The
fact that the myriad tasks performed by modern stay-at-home moms also take
place in the car, at the school, on the soccer field, in the grocery store, at
the doctor’s office, in the dentist’s office, at the car repair garage, at the laundromat, at the
tutor, and in the park hasn’t done much to change their visibility by the
standards of the public sphere.
But even if we accept that home is meant as a kind of linguistic
shortcut -- representing any number of child-rearing related tasks -- the
language of women staying at home
still connotes a lack, a failure to do…. something else. Think
about the issue in reverse. If we talked
about working women in the same oppositional way, but privileged the domestic
sphere instead of the public sphere, we’d call them: leave the-home moms. But of course, we don’t. That would be totally disrespectful.
Working outside the home became linguistically
normative to women for good reasons. Women
had been excluded from a fuller range of work choices outside the home. But by using language that continues to privilege
one role over another – even now, when women are gaining equality in the public
sphere -- we make the work of stay-at-home mothers seem even less valuable.
All of these problems, to my mind, are made worse by the passive nature of the word, stay. Let’s fact it: The word staying happens to be one of the most
passive, unproductive, and motionless words in the English language. Staying
implies a choice and for many, that choice is empowering. But the choice to stay is fundamentally a
choice to do nothing, rather than something. We
teach dogs to stay when we want them
to wait. People stay – in a physical space, on
a board game, in a job – when they can’t move forward. Stay
can mean to persevere – patiently, and tactically-- but its more common meaning
is postponing, stagnating, lingering, or stopping.
This may sound like nitpicking, but
when it comes to work and the history of feminism, modernization has often
meant moving away from passive, gendered language and toward active, task-oriented
language. Many of the professions I
addressed earlier – stewardess, secretary, babysitter, prostitute – have been renamed
to include more active, task-based words. Attending.
Assisting. Providing. Working.
Ultimately, the fact that we
define stay-at-home mothers mainly in
terms of what they don’t do – leave
and work -- becomes only clearer when we consider that other people who work in
the home, are spared the same label. There
are entrepreneurs and website designers I know, for example, who work in home
offices. There are child care providers
who do the same set of tasks that mothers do, and get paid for it. Yet we don’t call them, stay-at-home entrepreneurs, or stay-at-home web designers, or stay-at-home nannies.
Why not? Because their work roles and identities aren’t
defined exclusively in contrast to
entrepreneurs and web designers who work in offices. What
they do isn’t fundamentally about where
they are. Or in the case of mothers who stay-at-home,
where they aren’t. Small wonder why
some women feel the term detracts from their cultural value. As a culture, we don’t talk about stay-at-home
moms as people (gender-neutral) who work in the home. We don’t even talk them about mothers (social
role) who work in the home. We talk about them as mothers. Who stay.
At home.
Over the years, a lot of feminist
writers have discussed the terms and boundaries of women’s domestic work. But we’ve now reached the point where the
term stay-at-home mom feels like it’s lagging behind the
curve of cultural enlightenment.
If this were still the ‘80’s or even the ‘90s
-- and we hadn’t been discussing the issue of work/family balance for the
better part of three decades -- it would be harder to make this case. But our culture has changed. Every time we talk about jobs, the notion of “opting
out” enters the debate. For good reason. Many women just don’t believe in having it
all. Many women don’t want to juggle it
all, to be sure, and they have that choice.
But many women have discovered
that their professional choices are still shaped too much by biology and institutional
sexism and unequal pay, and so, find themselves “staying home” for at least a
portion of their children’s lives. Since
the language we use affects how millions of women are treated and identified, since
many of them will eventually return to the paid workforce, and since how we
treat them influences how our culture views the work of all mothers, we should come up with something new.
Eventually, maybe stay-at-home
mothers will have reclaimed the term in an empowering way, the way women have
(sort of) taken ownership of the word, bitch. This would definitely be easier than talking
about paid work, unpaid work, full-time
parenthood, and part-time work outside the home. Getting people to use more words in place of stay-at-home is objectively harder than
changing secretary to office assistant. But really, it’s not that hard. And it’s not whiny. And it’s not radical. I’m not suggesting moms get paid. I’m not suggesting anyone itemize their
labors. Or find financial equivalency in
their daily tasks.
So, call me a bitch if you want. But please,
don’t use passive, negatively defined, and totalizing language to erase my
everyday labors. It’s just outdated.
6 comments:
Great article. Now, let's talk about "Lean in" and how the woman who chooses to stay home and raise children and build her family can apply this theory!
I dream of staying at hohome...and you are right, it's choice versus circumstances...
Leaning in to stay home? Interesting. Tell me more please.
Lean in, speaks to women in the Corporate and noncorporate world. Encouraging women to support, lean in, build up and help one another succeed, instead of being cutthroat, ruthless and just plain not nice. SO, for the woman who raises children in the home it comes down to labels. you point out the detriment of labels, often reinforced by women at women about women against women. and you discuss how choice matters. How can the Lean In movement make a difference to the women who choose to stay at home and raise children? certainly, there are many women/moms, finding each other, at schools, soccer fields, basketball courts, dance classes or science clubs. What facinates me, still about feminism, is that women will always compare ourselves to each other, find a label that negates the success of a nother mother, and not bat a lash saying the negative.
I find your article interesting and when you toss on a little sheryl sandberg, it comes down to:
do what's right for you and your family and don't buy into the labels.
forgive my ramblings: i work out side my home, do all the housework, all the kid work, and i'm out of wine.
Hi Erin,
You might not know me but our moms go way back. Love, LOVE this blog post. I always refer to myself as an "at-home parent." That gets rid of the "stay" part and it's gender inclusive.
It's gender inclusive because I really believe that THE answer for gender equality is more men staying home, and I'm delighted that they are. More men at home means
(1) more respect for at-home work (sad, but very true); and
(2) more women who will eventually break the glass ceiling, since they have a partner taking care of all the house stuff instead of trying to "balance" it with work.
My brother plans to be an AHP; his wife's career is really taking off. I'm an AHP and my husband's career has also known no bounds.
I'm not saying it's ideal for every family - lots of people's families function better with both parents working. But it's often a great setup and I really believe having more of it the only way to achieve eventual gender equality. Because let's face it - even though lots of women work outside of the home, childcare is still done by other women - and that just makes it a class issue. And I don't doubt what the other poster says about still doing lots of house stuff on top of her regular job. Even out here in liberal Boston, almost the posts on my parenting list serves about "how to get out the door by 7 am" and "advice on childcare" are by moms, not dads. Working outside of the home doesn't mean gender equality, just like "staying" home doesn't mean gender inequality.
My post on this topic:
http://bostonwed-murakami.blogspot.com/2013/03/yes-you-can-be-feminist-housewife.html
Yes . More at home parents can still be fantastically successful by building a business, net working, and the daytime freedom to get to meetings...i agree that home label is a class and society label. Women need to stop bashing women. And, the suppot and success from women by wpmen grows us all.
Thanks for your great thoughts and yes, I've checked out your blog before when my mom sent it. I'll go read this now.
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