Both "The Mommy Tax" and "Lady and the Tramp" highlight what is a clear discrepancy in wage earnings in America; Simply put, women who rear children on average have much lower incomes than those who do not, and than men.
That being said, I personally did not like "Lady in the Tramp". While it had many intelligent observations and shed light on the poverty that many women who choose to have children face, I think its argument was misguided. Mink repeatedly argued that single mothers should not need to earn wages to receive welfare, and that their duties as a mother should be recognized as labor and compensated accordingly. While this idea at face value seems very fair, I think it has an inherent flaw. What is being argued is that a single mother's sole purpose for society is to raise her children and provide for them, and that the government should pay them to do so. Does this not project the sexist notion that these duties are the sole responsibilities of women? Does this not support the idea that women without husbands/wives are defenseless, and need the aid of some higher power to support them?
Now, I'm not a huge Mitt Romney fan. I actually detest him. That being said, in this article he did state (Among other, more offensive things) that he supported the idea of the government paying companies to establish better daycare services for their employees. He argued that yes, it would cost more money, but it would give women the "dignity" of being able to go to work. Now, this isn't to discount what parents do as anything other than work, but I do think he has a point. Women deserve an equal opportunity to be a part of the work force. It should not be an expectation that they will stay home and raise their children, which would certainly seem like an expectation if the government paid them to do so without earning additional wages. Maybe I'm wrong, but I just feel like "Lady and the Tramp" had an underlying sexism to it. On an individual basis the ideas seemed great, but on a societal level they propagate sexism and disempower women.
Rather than ask, "Why won't the government give single mothers money to raise their children?", questions should be asked like, "What kind of society allows for the reality to be that one cannot efficiently raise children and be part of the labor force as well?" Why is the birth of a child a financial death sentence for a single woman?
This works well into the ideas presented by "The Mommy Tax", which made it quite clear that parenthood in general, whether it be a single parent or a married couple, can financially cripple someone. Combining America's weak laws concerning maternity leave with the incorrect notion that women cannot both have children and be good at their jobs leaves women as prime targets of discrimination. Is it directly because they are women? Perhaps not, but it does feed off the preconceived notion that women will be the primary caretakers of children, and that that work should take precedence over work outside of the home. My favorite point made by Crittenden was to compare having a child to being a veteran, and all the privileges that the latter enjoy to cushion their transition back into the work force. Women are simply expected to have children and allow that to become their life and primary job.
I just rambled for a long, long time, but I think my overarching point is that most of the discrimination against mothers and against parents in general cannot be fixed by simply compensating them for their labor at home. Bigger questions need to be asked, and bigger institutions need to be fixed. Society must be molded so that it does not have tacit implications that women will raise children and that raising children will become their life. The concept of raising children must have its connotation shifted from being a career ruiner to being a career changer, which should force and allow parents to adapt rather than to quit.
No comments:
Post a Comment