UNIVERSITY OF PUGET SOUND LAW REVIEWVolume 34, No. 3SPRING 2011
Introduction
CROWDSOURCING THE WORK-FAMILY DEBATE: A COLLOQUY
Margaret Chon (fn*)
Introduction
Professor Joan C. Williams(fn1) "seeks to build bridges"(fn2) across audiences and disciplines with her latest book, Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter.(fn3) She also attempts to bridge seemingly insuperable chasms of gender and class, to encourage the formation of a political coalition that is simultaneously profamily and prowork. In Web 2.0 argot, "crowdsourcing" is a distributed, networked computing method of solving problems through the combination of ideas from individual sources and different perspectives.(fn4) This issue of the Seattle University Law Review features ten other distinguished legal scholars who add their designs to Williams's bridge blueprint through scholarly crowdsourcing. Their approaches result in surprising, sometimes provocative new ideas for cultural, legal, and policy reform at the nexus of work and family.
As a serendipitous preface to this Colloquy, the Law Review repub-lishes Women at the Bar-A Generation of Change by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg-first published in this Law Review in 1978.(fn5) Justice Ginsburg's early legal advocacy as general counsel for the ACLU Women's Rights Project-reprised in Reshaping the Work-Family Debate(fn6) -resulted in pathbreaking U.S. Supreme Court cases that shifted equality jurisprudence and discouraged unequal treatment on the basis of sex. Professor Williams points out that "[m]ere formal equality was never Ginsburg's goal. Instead her goal was to deconstruct separate spheres, by enabling women to gain access to roles traditionally reserved for men and enabling men to gain access to roles traditionally reserved for women."(fn7) The latter strategy is illustrated by Ginsburg's challenge to "the rule that mothers but not fathers could claim Social Security survivors' benefits to care for the decedent's children"(fn8) in the case of Weinberger v. Wisenfield.(fn9) This argument disrupted the domesticity norm that still typically assigns women to the child-rearing role, and is a direct legal antecedent to Professor Williams's current proposal, which treats masculine workplace norms as one of the primary impediments to family-friendly workplaces. Justice Ginsburg's optimistic greeting of today(fn10) reminds us-two or more generations after her pioneering legal work as a lawyer-that much positive change has occurred since 1978. Yet much still remains to be done in advocating for equality along a gender axis that aligns with family-friendly workplace policies.
The center of gravity of Professor Williams's book is her intersecting analysis of masculine workplace norms(fn11) and class expectations regarding family care. As she puts it, "Masculinity holds the key to understanding why the gender revolution has stalled."(fn12) After telling us why, she shifts her focus to the class culture gap,(fn13) as well as the ensuing conflicts around workplace reform driven by differing class experiences and expectations of masculinity.(fn14) Race is mostly treated as a subset of either the gender(fn15) or class analytical frameworks.(fn16) Each of the responses here addresses at least one of three possible organizing vectors (gender, class, and race norms) as a point of convergence and departure from Wil-liams's underlying empirical, normative, and theoretical assumptions. At risk of either revealing too much or effacing their nuances, I attempt to situate these responses briefly here along these three axes.(fn17)
I
The first cluster of responses-by Professors Burkstrand-Reid, Kessler, McGinley, Ramachandran, and Silbaugh-centers primarily around gender-based masculinity norms. In "Trophy Husbands" and "Opt-Out" Moms,(fn18) Professor Burkstrand-Reid carefully analyzes a subset of men who apparently have been able to withstand strong gender norms to become so-called "trophy husbands." But certain media narratives around these men who "choose" family over work may downplay how they might, in fact, be supporting a woman who is an "ideal worker" (a term coined by Williams in earlier works)(fn19) according to traditional masculine norms. These trophy husbands may not, therefore, be work and family revolutionaries. Rather, they may be reinforcing dominant gender norms within opposite-sex bodies. In making this analytical move, Burkstrand-Reid pays homage to Williams's overall body of work, which focuses on the fragility and possible falsity of the term "choice" as applied to women's decisions to leave the workplace in order to support their "ideal worker" husbands within opposite-sex marriages.(fn20)
Similarly, in Feminism for Everyone,(fn21) Professor Kessler situates this book within Williams's overall corpus, which is grounded in a deep feminist commitment. It also posits a structural, economic basis for the domesticity ideology that separates men's and women's work into two separate spheres. Kessler recognizes that Williams's newer work expands this feminist-materialist approach toward addressing gender-based economic inequalities. At the same time, Williams is also deeply pragmatic in choosing to communicate her progressive vision through language accessible to those with whom she may not always agree, as well as in urging coalitional political reform. Kessler admiringly calls the...
