I should know better than to watch prime-time television. One show Friday night bothered my more feminist sensibilities-on Ghost Whisperer, a dead boy was haunting his mother and baby sister. The father had disappeared after the boy's death, never to be seen in this episode.
The reason for haunting the mother? She was a successful career woman and hadn't spent enough time with him. As a ghost, he was driving away nannies so that she would have to spend time with the baby.
The show's premise raises an issue brought up again and again by women in graduate or professional school. We are at Duke in order to enable our careers. But much of society seems to expect that we'll drop it all to become mothers.
Pop culture advances the view that a mother's place is in the home. At the end of the episode, the career woman promises to give up work to spend more time with her daughter. It doesn't seem to matter that the father is absent, so long as children have a mother at home.
It's a catch-22 for women. Those who focus on a career are seen as ignoring their responsibilities, whether they have children or not. Many women who have decided to not have children will tell you about the questions and censure they receive. How many of you have already dealt with the question, "When are you going to settle down and start a family?"
Women who have children and pursue a high-powered career are viewed as bad mothers. In Marie Wilson's book Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World, she reports the results of a 2001 RoperASW poll that found that 56 percent of Americans find it more acceptable for men to work overtime and not spend time with families. On the other hand, 73 percent found it more acceptable for women to be the primary caregivers and give up careers. Men who have 80-hour work weeks are providing well for their families, which is the accepted role for men in our society. In fact, that role is often used as a justification for outright discrimination. I've heard more than one female speaker this year mention discrepancies in hiring or pay because "he has to support a family."
Many women today enter partnerships with the assumption that it's a new world now-men and women can and should share responsibilities at home equally. Most later find that life doesn't work out that way. In the book The Bitch in the House, essayist Hope Edelman wrote a piece called "The Myth of Co-Parenting" in which she talks about slowly giving up her career to parent while her husband worked up to 92 hours per week. It was supposed to be an equal partnership, but as with many couples, he brought home the bigger paycheck, and when push came to shove, she had to choose between taking on childcare responsibilities or going through the guilt many women associate with hiring help.
Some equal partnerships do work out. In the same book, Laurie Abraham writes about sharing the childcare responsibilities with her husband and the guilt and competition she feels to be the "better parent." Even when couples do work together, women feel the pressure to be the nurturing one.
The issue of balancing career and motherhood-or protecting the right of women to choose to not have children without censure-is not one that Duke alone can tackle. As evidenced by the current culture, including the latest episode of Ghost Whisperer, this is a societal problem. It's one that women in graduate or professional school discuss at meeting after meeting.
There is good news, though. Even at Duke, times are changing. The Women's Initiative two years ago found in the Medical Center a generational gap between male doctors. Members of the older generation, many of whom had stay-at-home wives when they were raising families, couldn't understand the younger men who refuse to work through the night because they're expected at home to put the kids to bed. Maybe there is progress.
Maybe. I still intend to seriously negotiate parental duties before starting a family, and I hope that society will become more accepting of the choices women make when it comes to balancing career and family.
Heather Dean is a graduate student in neurobiology. Her column runs every other Wednesday.
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