Dear All: Let us really dig deep into this discourse of "opting out." Marta is right class must be very prominent in discussion as well as the broader global economic context and quite frankly the economic status of the United States. Is not interesting that this debate arises at a time when the United States has a record deficit, money being siphoned off by the Iraq war, strains on corporate earnings.
Stella
Professor Stella M. Nkomo
Bateman Distinguished Professor of Business Leadership
Graduate School of Business
University of South Africa
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>>>
marta@MGMT.UMASS.EDU 2006-02-10 1:15:40 AM >>>
thanks so much for sending this. much needed correction to the
"opt-out" issue. now, we need somebody to also speak up to the issue being
complicated further, if not primarily, by the question of class, a very
needed discussion in the usa.
best, m.
On Thu, 9 Feb 2006
keithj@PDX.EDU wrote:
> Work vs. Family, Complicated by Race
> By LYNETTE CLEMETSON
> NY Times
> Published: February 9, 2006
>
> Mitchellville, Md.
> THE subject, yet again, was motherhood and work. Over tea and hors d'oeuvres in
> this affluent Washington suburb, a cluster of well-educated women gathered to
> discuss the work-life debate. Most in the roomful of lawyers, technology
> experts, corporate managers and entrepreneurs had read dispatches from the
> so-called "mommy wars," the books and articles grounded in the gulch between
> working and stay-at-home mothers.
>
> But for the women in attendance — all of them black — those discussions
> inevitably fell short. "They don't speak to my reality," said Robin Rucker
> Gaillard, 41, a lawyer and mother of two. "We don't generally have the time or
> luxury for the guilt and competition that some white mothers engage in."
>
> Around the country black women are opting out of the "opt-out" debate, the
> often-heated exchange about the compatibility of motherhood and work. Steeped
> in issues like working versus staying at home, nannies versus day care, and the
> benefits or garish excess of $800 strollers, the discussion has become a hot
> topic online, in newspapers and in book publishing.
>
> It is not that black mothers do not wrestle with some of the same considerations
> as white mothers. But interviews with more than two dozen women suggest that the
> discussions as portrayed in books and the news media often lack the nuances and
> complexities particular to their experience.
>
> For professional black women, debates about self-fulfillment can seem
> incomprehensibly narrow against the need to build sustainable wealth and
> security for their families. The discussions also pale in comparison to worries
> about shielding sons and daughters from the perils that black children face
> growing up, and overlook the practical pull of extended families in need of
> financial support.
>
> Ms. Gaillard and others had gathered to broaden the working-mother debate by
> discussing a new book, "I'm Every Woman: Remixed Stories of Marriage,
> Motherhood and Work."
>
> Equal parts memoir, history lesson and cultural critique, the book, by Lonnae
> O'Neal Parker, a reporter for The Washington Post and a mother of three,
> celebrates the balancing act practiced by black women. Published in November by
> Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins, it takes a sometimes wrenching, sometimes
> joyful look at black motherhood from slavery and the great migration to
> suburbia, the corporate workplace and the ascendancy of hip-hop. And since it
> came out, Ms. O'Neal Parker has been invited to gatherings around the country
> by black women eager to talk about motherhood on their own terms.
>
> "It was a breath of fresh air to have a conversation that resonated with me,"
> said Pamela Walker, 41, a professor at Northwestern Business College in
> Chicago. A married mother of six, she attended a reading of "I'm Every Woman"
> at Sensual Steps, a shoe boutique in the predominantly black Bronzeville
> section on the South Side of Chicago. "My family can afford expensive things,
> but why would I think about spending hundreds on a stroller when I could help a
> cousin buy textbooks for college? That is not my world."
>
> Black mothers have traditionally worked in higher percentages than white women.
> And educated black mothers are still more likely to work than their white
> counterparts. According to census data from March 2005, 83.7 percent of
> college-educated black women with children under 18 are in the labor force,
> compared to 74 percent of college-educated white mothers.
>
> Census figures from 2005 also show that college-educated black women earn
> slightly more than their white counterparts, largely because they are more
> likely to stay in the work force and work longer hours than white women after
> having children.
>
> The commitment of black women to work is in large part economically driven. They
> have lower marriage rates than white women, meaning they are more likely to be
> single parents. Those who are married are more likely than their white
> counterparts to earn more than their husbands, census figures show.
>
> But for black middle-class women from Mary Church Terrell, a charter member of
> the N.A.A.C.P., to Coretta Scott King, working has also been a matter of
> choice. For generations black women have viewed work as a means for elevating
> not only their own status as women, but also as a crucial force in elevating
> their family, extended family and their entire race.
>
> Black women are not the only women feeling airbrushed out of today's images of
> motherhood as represented in the literature of the opt-out debate, which
> includes articles like one in The New York Times last year reporting that many
> women at Ivy League colleges plan to drop their careers, at least temporarily,
> once they start having children.
>
> Another article, by Linda R. Hirshman in the December issue of The American
> Prospect, a magazine devoted to liberal ideas, provoked sharp debate by arguing
> that women who stay home with children are in for a letdown, and that the
> workplace is the only realm where women find true fulfillment. This is, Ms.
> Hirshman acknowledged, not a new idea. It was the theme of "The Feminist
> Mystique" written more than 40 years ago by Betty Friedan.
>
> Some white working-class and middle- class women have complained that both sides
> of the opt-out debate have an elitist tone. Recently members of a group called
> Latina Mami in Austin, Tex., vented about the lack of perspective in many of
> the motherhood books in bookstores.
>
> Some insiders in the battles have acknowledged the narrowness of public
> discourse. "The conflict seems to be pretty much driven by white
> upper-middle-class angst, and the debate has been taken over by that," said
> Leslie Morgan Steiner, a white mother of three and the editor of "Mommy Wars,"
> an anthology of essays to be published by Random House next month.
>
> Ms. Steiner's book includes essays from Ms. O'Neal Parker and two other black
> writers, as well as a Pakistani mother who writes of her struggles with child
> care, and a Latina who was introduced to stay-at-home mothering through a bout
> with cancer.
>
> Tension between working and stay-at-home black mothers — friction that seems
> less prevalent and intense than among their white peers, many women said — is
> often driven by a pressure for persistent racial striving. Smiling at the
> circle of friends gathered in her Mitchellville living room, Frances Luckett,
> the principal at a private, predominantly black elementary school, welcomed her
> guests with an exhortation. "Your journey is not just about you," Ms. Luckett
> said to the two dozen women, aged 19 to 85. "It's about adding to the journey
> of those who came before you and paving a way for the journeys after yours."
>
> There were knowing groans as Ms. O'Neal Parker read aloud from "I'm Every Woman"
> about "bone memory" and the specter of a weary but resolute slave woman, who
> "sticks a knee in my back and squares up my shoulders" when life feels unfair.
>
> There was empathetic laughter when she lovingly discussed the "kink
> coefficient," a term she coined to describe the extra hours black mothers build
> into their packed schedules to groom daughters whose kinky hair "grows out
> instead of down."
>
> The personal motherhood struggles that black women face are often complicated
> variations on more broadly voiced themes. Some professional women have mixed
> emotions about hiring nannies when they can recall women in their own families
> who cared for other women's children and cleaned their homes.
>
> Some of those who consider leaving jobs to raise children worry that it will be
> more difficult for them to resume their careers than for white peers. "As black
> women who still have a hard time moving up, there is a fear that opting out will
> be one more strike against you," said Linda Burke, the owner of an executive
> search firm and a founder of a Washington group called Sistermoms that invited
> Ms. O'Neal Parker for a book reading last month.
>
> Linda McGhee, a lawyer and member of Sistermoms, got her son into a private
> elementary school in Northwest Washington but decided against sending him, in
> part because she wanted to help her parents, who raised 12 children on meager
> resources, with health care.
>
> Her neighborhood public school did not meet her standards, so Ms. McGhee and her
> husband, a computer specialist for the federal government, pushed to get him
> into a high-performing public school in the same neighborhood as the private
> school they turned down.
>
> "I grew up in a housing project, and without my parents always pushing I
> wouldn't have three degrees," said Ms. McGhee, 44, who just completed a Ph.D.
> in clinical psychology. "We just decided that, in the scheme of things, we
> didn't want to spend $20,000 on kindergarten."
>
> Some concerns are more social than personal. Cheryl Roberts, a college
> administrator in Seattle, was the host at a private reading featuring Ms.
> O'Neal Parker on Martin Luther King Day. The guests at the catered affair
> included several federal judges and banking and aerospace executives whose
> successes eased worries about outcomes for their children. But as the
> discussion opened up, the women engaged in a passionate exchange on the
> lingering effects of a ballot initiative that ended the state's affirmative
> action programs.
>
> "Our discussions have to move to a socially conscious place," said Ms. Roberts,
> 48. "It is part of the ethos of being an African-American woman. We understand
> there but for the grace of God go I."
>
> Like their white counterparts, black mothers who leave careers to raise their
> children do sometimes face disapproval from working mothers. But even that
> judgment is driven less by gender politics than racial sensibilities, some
> women say.
>
> Tracie Miller-Mitchell, the daughter of Frances Luckett, was the only
> stay-at-home mother at her mother's afternoon function. Ms. Miller-Mitchell,
> who belongs to Mocha Moms, a national support group for black at-home mothers,
> said her mother was the person who most disapproved of her choice.
>
> "A lot of financial sacrifice went into helping her get two degrees," said Ms.
> Luckett, recalling her struggles as a divorced single parent. "There are no
> guarantees in life, and I worry that if she just gives up her career, is just a
> wife and a mother, she will have nothing to fall back on."
>
> Ms. Miller-Mitchell, 39, replied: "I have my degrees to fall back on. Isn't what
> all that sacrifice was for? So I could have a choice?"
>
> Differences aside, the women gathered at Ms. Luckett's home said they felt
> refreshed by the discussion.
>
> "I understand and respect the issues of white mothers, I truly do," Ms. Gaillard
> said. "But I also need for them to understand and respect
>
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