Confronting Difference and Finding Common Ground
| Publication year | 2011 |
| Citation | Vol. 34 No. 03 |
On sitting down to write my contribution to this Colloquy, I found myself pulled in many directions, as Joan Williams's new book is rich with fascinating and provocative ideas. From the incredibly valuable documentation of how rigid masculine norms harm men who want to do right by their families,(fn1) to the highlighting of deep tensions between "femmey" and "tomboy" feminists,(fn2) to the courageous exploration of cultural and political tensions driven by class performance,(fn3) there is much in
One of the aspects of the book I deeply admire is Williams's attempt to spur different groups to make nice-femmes and tomboys, working-class parents and upper-middle-class progressives. This is driven not by a Pollyannaish desire to see us all get along, but by an acknowledgement of political reality. Without collaboration among these currently divided groups, the progressive policies that Williams hopes will improve the lives and chances of many will never gain wide enough support.
I'm admittedly skeptical about coming together with femmes or working-class parents, particularly in the context of the work-family debate, because I'm skeptical that we really share enough common ground to create policies all these groups can get behind.(fn4) But there's no way that common ground, if it exists, could ever be discovered without confronting and examining our differences, and Williams is doing just that. Thus, this book is the only thing I've read in the past five years that even begins to mitigate my skepticism. Unwillingness to confront these differences is a major barrier that Williams is bravely breaking down. With that in mind, in this Essay I hope to explore some of my hesitations, in the hopes of making finding common ground more likely.
Like education, access to a reasonable quality of child rearing can be valued by almost any social liberal or progressive as necessary for a healthy society. But I am not sure that social liberals and working-class people, nor even tomboys and femmes, can come to a broad agreement over how child rearing should be delivered and paid for.
Williams describes how many working-class people desire their child care to be performed by family, including tightly knit kin networks, rather than by professionals.(fn5) They also desire a traditionally gendered breadwinner-homemaker model, in which one (male) parent performs wage labor and makes enough money to permit the other (female) parent to exclusively perform nonwage labor caring for and rearing children, cooking, cleaning, and the like, with perhaps occasional part-time wage work.(fn6) It seems to me that this is also a model that many femmes, even upper-middle-class ones, would like to access, at least temporarily. This is the fantasy that the "Opt-Out" media narrative plays on and Williams so expertly deconstructs.(fn7)
As Williams explains, few working people can actually access this model, as not all parents are married, and jobs that actually pay enough to sustain this model are scarce.(fn8) Almost all working-class parents need wage work. Unfortunately, those workers, male and female, with child-care responsibilities find it nearly impossible to conform to workplaces that assume all workers are breadwinners in a two-parent breadwinner- homemaker model with no child-care responsibilities.
Moreover, Williams describes how this model is dangerous for even upper-middle-class femmes to follow, as those who stay home to care for children become economically vulnerable in the long run, unable to return to the jobs they may have enjoyed before having children because they face...
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