The consequence of all the endings this spring (grad school, dissertation, etc) is that I have a lot of beginnings to put together, and it's kind of scattershot and distracting work. Preparing course outlines for two classes, preparing lectures for one of those classes, putting together updated job application materials, extracting journal articles from my dissertation manuscript, planning the early research phases for my next project, so on and so forth. Oh, and dealing with paperwork. When I worked in computer services at Harvard, lo these many years ago, I couldn't help noticing that the post-docs and short-term lecturers were the ones who were most likely to have things go horribly wrong with their paperwork (often resulting in their ending up at the help desk, venting their frustrations at our student workers). Now that I am myself a short-term lecturer, I'm seeing the same situation from the other side. I'll spare everyone the endless tedious details, but I do want to point out that I still haven't managed to restore my library access, which is creating a non-trivial amount of hassle in my life.
One thing I'm also trying to do is catch up on my backlog of unread issues of the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly. Mostly this is an enjoyable process, but one does encounter the occasional snag. The June Atlantic, for instance, has another Caitlin Flanagan essay. I'm mostly over my whole Flanagan problem; it's hard to generate fresh annoyance over an author who just keeps rehashing the same small set of talking points while generally failing to make any coherent argument. The June piece, ostensibly a review of some Hollywood nanny tell-all, hits all the notes in her small repertoire: valorizing a golden age where people knew their social roles, airing out her own (apparently ongoing) personal insecurities about motherhood, something something liberal guilt, something something paying strangers to love your children. This one was surprising only in that I hadn't realized it was possible to get paid for an essay in which fully half the material is recycled almost verbatim from your own previous published works.
One thing that is interesting about reading it, though, was realizing just how far the definition of "middle class" stretches in this country. Flanagan believes herself to have had a middle-class upbringing, and I similarly believe myself to have had a middle-class upbringing, and yet I can't read her personal reminiscences without being nearly overwhelmed by the moneyed privilege oozing out of her stories. She opens with an anecdote about being fired from a babysitting job she took in college, and notes that she had only taken the job because she liked children, not because she needed the money. "At the time," she writes, "I received a generous allowance from my parents, which arrived in my campus mailbox each month in the form of a check, cut and signed by their accountant." I'm not going to say that the generous allowance and the accountant are signs that she wasn't middle-class, I'm only going to say that her experience of being middle-class is very different from my own.
What keeps tripping me up about her whole nanny-angst routine is the insistence that mothers who hire nannies (I want to say "parents" here, but fathers are always so absent from her analysis of child-rearing among the professional classes) are looking to pay someone to love their children.
Well, in a big-picture sense, that's what trips me up. In this particular piece, I got much more seriously hung up on the phrasing "every housewife I knew had a once-a-week 'cleaning lady', the title itself an oxymoron that revealed perfectly the ambivalence the employers had about hiring help." I read that sentence over and over again, trying to figure out what was oxymoronic about the phrase "cleaning lady". My eventual best guess is that this is some kind of affected archaism about the use of the word "lady" to mean "social superior," but even that doesn't really make sense to me.
I can't help but wonder if what's really going on here is some deep-seated ambivalence about paying other people to do things that were traditionally classed as unpaid female labor. I've always felt that the most enduringly radical vision in feminist utopian fiction was the recognition that any meaningful social equality had to start with breaking the gendered expectations of household work. Women and men can both have fulfilling professional lives, but clothes still need to be washed, groceries need to be bought, floors need to be vacuumed, bills need to be paid, bathtubs need to be scrubbed, bookshelves need to be dusted, empty toilet rolls need to be replaced, lightbulbs need to be changed, so on and so forth. And, like it or not, one's time allocation is ultimately a zero-sum game. Every ten minutes I spend washing dishes is ten minutes that I'm not spending on writing the next landmark work of modern historical analysis.
I do, in fact, realize that I'm not saying anything groundbreaking or original here. But I just don't see why there has to be shame or guilt associated with paying someone to do some of the routine drudgework for you. Provided you pay them a fair wage and treat them with professional respect, of course, which I gather is where the real drama usually enters the equation. Is there similarly supposed to be a sense of shame or guilt associated with being the person paid to do that work? (Is this why "cleaning lady" is an oxymoron?) If not, where does the shame-and-guilt factor get introduced? I'm starting to wonder if it's an internalized belief that a woman's real value as a person derives largely from her role as a housekeeper and a caretaker. (Is that why the fathers are so consistently absent in these articles?)
There's a lot of value in being able to do things for yourself. I always feel a little sorry for people who just plain don't know how to cook themselves a simple dinner, or keep their finances in order, or do their own laundry. And of -course- you want to avoid the extreme Nanny Diaries kind of situation with child care providers, where parents have only perfunctory and affectionless contact with their children. But having a competent and kind professional (whether a nanny, or a babysittier, or a day-care worker) take care of your child for part of each day? I just don't see how that makes you a bad person, or a bad parent. And I am so tired of Caitlin Flanagan.
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