Domestic Disturbances: a blog at the NY Times by Judith Warner

September 13, 2007, 6:40 pm

Horned and Scorned

Tags: cuckolds, the clintons, the sarkozys

“A prudent cuckold (and there are many such at Paris), pockets his horns, when he cannot gore with them; and will not add to the triumph of his maker by only butting with them ineffectually.”
– Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, “Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman, 1753-54 ”

One last, lingering thought on France:

It was fascinating to be on the other side of the Atlantic this summer while Americans were chewing over our latest rounds of slimy political sex scandals.

It wasn’t that the sinning, maneuvering and marital posturing of the Larry Craigs and David Vitters received so very much attention. It was, rather, that their stories seemed so dreary, so tawdry and so second-rate compared with the much more dignified and attractive tableau vivant of family disorder exhibited by France’s new president, Nicholas Sarkozy, and first lady, Cécilia.

In case you missed it, Sarkozy last year greatly entertained France by running a campaign in which his wife was almost entirely absent. Cécilia, a former model whom Nicholas first eyed, in his previous incarnation as mayor of the city of Neuilly, while administering the vows that consecrated her last marriage, left him in 2005, eventually showing up – and being photographed – with her lover in New York City.

The Sarkozys ultimately reunited. But life together remained rocky. Cécilia made major headlines once again last May when she pulled a no-show on the night of her husband’s final run-off race against his Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal.

She was rumored not to have voted at all.

Yet by summer, in the press at least, all was forgotten. When I was there, every major magazine featured glowing profiles of the new first lady. They praised her charm, her fashion sense, her break-the-mold modernity.

Could such public forgiving and forgetting of a wanton political wife ever have happened here? And could Americans, like the French, ever elect a cuckold to the presidency?

The question is more relevant than it seems.

I’m thinking, of course — aren’t I always? — of Hillary Clinton.

I spent the end of the summer thinking how remarkable it was that Cécilia’s affair hadn’t sunk Nicholas Sarkozy’s presidential prospects. After all, throughout history, the “cuckold” has typically been viewed as a fool, lacking in wit, power and general masculine wherewithal. It’s believed that the image of a cuckold as horned fool dates back to a legend of European villagers donning horns and parading around to humiliate betrayed husbands.

Although a female version of the word cuckold exists (it’s cuckquean), it’s little used, probably because, as far as the larger sense of the word’s meaning is concerned, there has been no female equivalent of the cuckold. Wronged wives typically have been figures of sympathy, not jest. The difference has stemmed, I think, from the fact that, throughout history, a wife’s infidelity meant that male power and privilege was upended. The natural order of things was usurped.

At least, that’s the way it’s traditionally been.

Sarkozy has made a lot of bold and defiant gestures since winning the election – appointing Socialists to key government posts, vacationing in America – but perhaps one of his boldest, cleverest and most successful has been the fact that, by keeping his head high, standing by his woman and steadfastly, defiantly, professing his love and desire (she is “the only non-negotiable part” of his career, he has said), he has transcended the old role of cuckold. He has instead been something more like a political wife.

As for Hillary – contemplating the Sarkozys this summer drove home to me the gender-bending aspect of her own unfortunate personal history. A formidable woman of real power and prestige, she emerged from the Monica affair much more cuckold than cuckquean. Her husband’s perfidy did, in a sense, disturb the natural order of things; in the post-feminist age, women like Hillary are not supposed to be subject to such indignities.

Hillary has never been, as she herself once put it, “some little woman standing by my man.” Perhaps that’s what made the spectacle of her public humiliation so unique and so unsettling and, ultimately, so unforgivable for the many women who came away from it all despising her.

I think I now understand that particular aspect of the Clinton conundrum in a way I never did before. It comes down to this: nobody likes a cuckold.

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Domestic Disturbances: A blog at the NY Times by Judith Warner

September 6, 2007, 9:50 pm

Slummy, Yummy . . . or Dummy?

Tags: france, school, Yummy Mummy

When you arrive, she will already be there. Well-coiffed, but not too well. Suntanned, but not too tan. Chic, but not too chic. Hanging off each arm she’ll have a perfect child, with a new backpack and a pretty, excited smile … begins the editor’s note in the current back-to-school edition of French Elle.

Naturally, she will have already done everything necessary so that her son is with the “right” third grade teacher. Naturally, she will already have told the lunchroom lady about her daughter’s problem with fish…. You, on the other hand, will grow even paler under your non-tan. Because, of course, you did not have the time to buy new backpacks, nor to attempt the slightest lobbying campaign for good teachers …

I do not usually read women’s magazines like Elle when I am in France. I prefer the newsweeklies and, for a special treat, the French People-substitute, Paris Match. (All Ségo/Sarko, all the time.)

But this summer was special. I went to France not just on vacation, not just to reconnect with the place where my children were born and I put down the first roots of my adult life, but on assignment. I wanted to research how to be a Yummy Mummy.

A Yummy Mummy, in case you’re not familiar with the phrase, is the term used in Britain for moms (mums) who are soignée. Trim and fashionable, well-turned-out and groomed, equipped with the latest must-have bags and shoes, widely smiling, insouciant, skilled in home decoration, furniture restoration, competitive skiing, dressage, and … well, they’re not really all that. I am indulging in a little bit of wish-fulfilling projection.

Indulge me.

You see, I’ve never actually met a Yummy Mummy. I’ve read about them in the British press; I spent a good bit of imaginary time in the company of one earlier this summer, when I read Fiona Neill’s hilarious new “mum lit” import, “Slummy Mummy.”

Reading “Slummy Mummy,” the account of an unbelievably spacey, slatternly, careless and careworn stay-at-home mum, made me acutely aware of my own borderline slumminess. It awoke in me a desire for yumminess.

But lacking the time or money to put into being truly yummy (“Come on now,” you are saying, “even if you did have the time or the money you wouldn’t waste it on such shallow, narcissistic consumerism.” You are wrong.), I decided to go for the next best thing, and use my vacation time to study my French sisters for how to ape the grace, style, joie de vivre and simple, seemingly effortless chic for which they are famous.

(“Ugh!” American expats in France are now snorting. “You’ve been reading too much Mireille Guiliano!” And they would be right.)

In fact, for the past nearly seven years since the moving truck closed its doors on the rue St. Dominique and we left Paris for Washington, I have spent, I see now, far too much time nourishing the fantasy that motherhood in France is lived more prettily, more graciously, more calmly, happily and romantically than on this side of the Atlantic.

I maintained this belief even after “Perfect Madness” was published in France last summer and women there told me that there was a lot in my portrait of the anxious, self-doubting, self-effacing, guilt-ridden, sexless American culture of motherhood that they could relate to. I didn’t believe them. I figured they didn’t know how good they had it, with their five-week vacations, multi-month paid maternity leaves, government-subsidized nannies, 35-hour work week, guaranteed right to part time work, free public schooling for three-year-olds – all things that freed up plenty of time and money for vacations in the sun, exercise, dinners out, séduction and other vectors of yumminess. It was all so taken for granted by them that they couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

But this year, for the first time, I saw it. Trawling for vestiges of yumminess among women who, like me, were now pushing middle age, I was confronted time and again by the yuckiness – the stress and mess and sense of too-muchedness — that so many of us know all too well in the United States. My friends, overwhelmingly, were kind of worn out.

They now all have children who are in the equivalent of middle and high school – far past the golden period of parental leaves and charming preschools that I remember from my time living among them. They’re facing an increased gap between the very best public schools and the mediocre mass. They’re seeing an increased tendency (in government-subsidized private schools) to kick out kids who don’t perform well enough to guarantee the school a 100 percent success rate on the baccalaureate exams.

There’s an increased sense of urgency to get into the very best colleges; there’s a sense that only top-level math and science studies can lead to admission to the best colleges; there’s a sense that the job market is being flooded by young talent from China, India and the rest of Europe; a sense that the fruits of success are being distributed more and more narrowly, that the gap between the rich and everyone else is being dug more and more deeply and that you have to do absolutely everything you can, from the earliest possible age, to guarantee your child a slice of the shrinking pie of prosperity.

The atmosphere of dogged competition provides fertile terrain for the Mommy Wars. (In the café, it’s with a heavy heart that you drop a third chocolate into your too-strong espresso and sit across from her, as she drinks an herb tea without sugar and finishes filling out the sign-up sheet for Wednesday afternoon swim lessons, Elle concludes. But be assured … The psychiatrists – no idiots – are already rubbing their hands. They know that, soon, in the privacy of their offices, it will be the children of the perfect mothers who will have the most to tell them.) The atmosphere fires all-too-familiar domestic wars. (“He does nothing around the house but criticize me when things go wrong,” one friend confided in me.)

Even vacation – always so precious – has now been compromised. By kids sitting at the dining room table doing remedial math. Or heading back early to attend pre-term class prep. Or taking off for an intensive language program or to meet a learning “coach,” or for a last-ditch attempt to find a place in a new school after all the neighborhood schools said no.

“You don’t understand what it’s like here,” a stay-at-home friend told me, one chilly late afternoon in Paris, as we sat outdoors drinking tea.

Seven years earlier, I’d interviewed her, also over tea, as she’d neared the end of her third maternity leave. I was writing an article on French mothers’ workplace advantages. Shortly after the article was published, she’d returned to work to find she’d been moved to an intellectually stultifying, more “family-friendly” position. “Petits-fours and seduction,” she’d e-mailed me. And she’d quit.

“It’s total madness,” she said.

I shifted in my seat, shivered, and stirred my tea.

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Poisonous Choices, Women at Risk

By JUDITH WARNER

Published: August 7, 2007

When the Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to uphold the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act this spring, the ambivalently pro-choice public was largely quiescent, believing, as Congress had previously ruled, that the procedure was “gruesome and inhuman,” medically unnecessary, highly controversial in the medical community and so rare as to be little missed.

What’s clear, however, as the ban has become a reality, is that fetuses will be spared no brutality. Second trimester abortion is still legal and the most common method for it — dismembering a fetus inside the womb before removing it in pieces — is no less awful to contemplate than the outlawed procedure, in which an intact fetus’s skull was punctured and collapsed to ease its removal. But women are now more at risk. And doctors have been forced into a danger zone where they must weigh what they believe to be best medical practices against the need to protect themselves from the threat of prosecution.

This kind of ethical tightrope walk, this sort of judicial meddling into standard medical practices, is unprecedented — and poisonous. An article in this month’s volume of the trade journal Obstetrics & Gynecology treats the dilemma with a mocking tone. “At our recent Annual Clinical Meeting in San Diego, I asked several colleagues if they intended to make referrals to the Supreme Court. All said ‘No’ because the court is not available for telephone consultations and makes rounds infrequently,” it says.

But in truth, dealing with the ban is no laughing matter. You see, as it turns out, the Supreme Court didn’t just outlaw “partial-birth” abortions (known in the medical community as “intact dilation and extraction” or D & X,) when it upheld Congress’s ban. It criminalized any second trimester abortion that begins with a live fetus and where “the fetal head or the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother.”

The big problem with this, doctors say, is that, due to the unpredictability of how women’s bodies react to medical procedures, when you set out to do a legal second trimester abortion, something looking very much like a now-illegal abortion can occur. Once you dilate the cervix — something that must be done sufficiently in order to avoid tears, punctures and infection — a fetus can start to slip out. And if this happens, any witness — a family member, a nurse, anyone in the near vicinity with an ax to grind against a certain physician — can report that the ban has been breached. Bringing on stiff fines, jail time and possible civil lawsuits.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court’s majority, asserted that prosecution for accidental partial births won’t occur; there has to be “intent” for there to be a crime. But as doctors now understand it, intent could be inferred by the degree of dilation they induce in their patients. What, then, do they do? Dilate the cervix sufficiently and risk prosecution, or dilate less and risk the woman’s health? And if they dilate fully, how do they prove it wasn’t their intent to deliver an intact fetus?

This dilemma is the latest product of the awful algorithm that, in anti-choice rhetoric of the past few decades, has increasingly pitted the “interests” of the fetus against the health of the woman. It makes the true intent of the partial-birth abortion ban clear: the point is not (in the short term) to stop seemingly brutal fetal deaths, but rather to make all abortions as burdensome, as difficult and as emotionally and physically trying for women — and for doctors — as possible.

To escape having to choose between their patients’ interests and their own, physicians who perform abortions around the country now are taking steps to ensure that doctors won’t find themselves accidentally allowing a live fetus to be partially “born” in the course of a second trimester abortion. The Planned Parenthood Federation of America and other independent providers are now making it policy in abortions that could become legally risky for doctors to use digoxin — a cardiac drug — to kill the fetus up to one day in advance of the procedure. The upshot for women will be more time-consuming and costly abortion services, additional rounds of amniocentesis, more pain and more risk of infection.

And the outcome for the fetus won’t change.

Judith Warner is a contributing columnist for TimesSelect and a guest Op-Ed columnist. Bob Herbert is off today.

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The Columbine Syndrome

By JUDITH WARNER

Published: August 4, 2007

Have you followed the series of articles in The Times about Joshua Komisarjevsky, the Cheshire, Conn., 26-year-old who, on early parole for a long string of late-night home robberies, teamed up with an accomplice and broke into a nearby house, sexually assaulted a woman and at least one of her young daughters, beat the father with a baseball bat and left them all to die in a fire? (The father alone survived.)

Buried in a report on Tuesday was a sinister detail that piled on a broad insult to all the gruesome injuries, victimizing a whole new set of people who should have had no link whatsoever with Komisarjevsky’s crimes. It was that, while pleading for leniency for his client’s earlier break-ins, Komisarjevsky’s lawyer, William T. Gerace, had in 2002 told a judge that the young man suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and the learning disabilities dyslexia and dysgraphia as a child.

A.D.H.D., dyslexia and dysgraphia — invoked as logical potential causes for home invasions and theft? I don’t know if you all find this as appalling, offensive and cruel as I do. Perhaps you shrug it off as the work of a defense lawyer doing his job. I just can’t do that, because I know that Gerace isn’t alone in supporting and promulgating the view that kids with problems like A.D.H.D. — and depression and perhaps soon, thanks to this case, learning disabilities — pose real dangers to society.

Call it the Columbine Syndrome. Ever since the news got out that school shooter Eric Harris was taking Luvox, an antidepressant, kids’ mental illness and eventual mass murder have been linked in the public mind. This past May, the journal Psychiatric Services published the results of the first large-scale nationally representative survey of public attitudes about children’s mental health. Eighty-one percent of respondents said they thought children with major depression would be dangerous to themselves or others; 33 percent said they believed children with A.D.H.D. were likely to be dangerous.

This despite the fact that scientific studies have shown only a modest relationship between mental health issues and violence, “a relationship that is largely attributable to co-occurring substance abuse,” wrote a team of authors led by Bernice A. Pescosolido, a sociologist at Indiana University. “Unfortunately,” they concluded, “public perceptions that mental illness and violence go hand in hand may be more important than the evidence.”

Another study released in March found about one in five parents saying they would not want children with A.D.H.D. or depression as their neighbors, in their child’s classroom or as their child’s friends.

It’s deeply ironic that at a time when more than ever is known about children’s mental health needs and more methods than ever exist to help kids with behavioral or emotional issues, the stigma attached to those problems won’t budge. Instead, our brave new world of diagnosis and treatment has spurred new kinds of myth-making and prejudice. Chief among them is the idea that a diagnosis of A.D.H.D. is an escape hatch for selfish and permissive modern parents who are too lazy to discipline their badly behaved kids and prefer instead to medicate them into compliance.

There are very serious consequences of trivializing conditions like A.D.H.D. There is real harm done by instrumentalizing disorders — whether it’s in the service of a legal defense, as in Komisarjevsky’s case, or more generally to buttress ideological arguments about the decline of the American family. The more the disorders are banalized or made ridiculous, the more parents and kids dealing with them are stigmatized. The net result of this stigma, according to numerous studies, is that families don’t seek the help they need. And children with A.D.H.D. need help — not because they’re at risk of becoming rapists and arsonists but because, untreated, they’re likely to be in for a lifetime of frustration and unhappiness.

Health officials at a local psychiatric hospital apparently tried once to put Komisarjevsky on antidepressants, but, according to The Times, his parents refused, saying their son needed to deal with his problems “on a spiritual level.” I don’t know whether Komisarjevsky’s behavior stems from sickness or from evil. But I do know there’s something sick, in general, about turning kids with difficulties into actors in the morality play about family life that’s forever being staged in our time.

Judith Warner is the author of “Perfect Madness” and a contributing columnist for TimesSelect. She is a guest Op-Ed columnist.
Bob Herbert is off today.

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‘24’ as Reality Show

By JUDITH WARNER

Published: July 31, 2007

“I hope people will make the distinction between television and reality.”

Jack Bauer stood with his back to the sea, the variegated light of early evening playing upon the features of his careworn face. Pondering the future, he lifted a cigarette to his lips, its golden ember a searing reminder of his perpetual courtship of death ...

Sorry, I got confused.

Let me start again.

Kiefer Sutherland was smoking a cigarette and fielding reporters’ queries at a Fox TV party on the Santa Monica pier last week, when the issue was raised of how, well, freaky it is that his show’s first female president will make her debut just in time for the Iowa caucuses.

There is a difference, he suggested, between “24” and real life. “But,” he went on, “I can tell you one thing. We had the first African-American president on television, and now Barack Obama is a serious candidate. That wasn’t going to happen eight years ago. Television is an incredibly powerful medium, and it can be the first step in showing people what is possible.”

I giggled a bit nastily over this at first. What was next — claims that fingering China as a one-nation axis of evil on “24” had presaged the country’s exposure this spring as the source of all perishables tainted and fatal? That screen first lady Martha Logan’s descent into minimadness anticipated Laura Bush’s increasingly beleaguered late-term demeanor? (Has anyone but me noticed her astounding resemblance to Dolores Umbridge in “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”?) That foolish Vice President Noah Daniels’s narrowly averted war with the Russians had its real-life equivalent in recent Bush-Putin wrangling over Eastern European missile defense systems?

Silliness upon silliness. But still, something about this idea of “24” as a political crystal ball spoke to me. So, eager to get some advance notice on what we might one day see in a woman president (What to Expect if You’re Expecting Another Clinton), I went to the show’s Web site, looking for season seven clues.

I didn’t find any. Instead, I spent a marvelous afternoon browsing through “research” files on Joint Direct Attack Munition missiles, suitcase nukes, hyocine-pentothal (a fictional drug), C-4 explosives, A.A. sponsors and Air Force Two (not technically a plane). I learned, to my surprise, that Jack Bauer has a bachelor’s in English literature, and that Audrey Raines — not surprisingly — is a product of Brown and Yale. It was like shopping in a mall without windows, gambling in a casino without clocks — a total, disorienting departure into a self-contained alternate reality.

Kiefer Sutherland and I may both be silly, but we’re not the only people guilty of blurring the boundaries when it comes to “24.” In recent weeks, a surprising number of journalists have seemed ready to play along with the conceit that the fictional creation of the show’s first female chief executive could actually have some bearing on the American political scene. The Hollywood Reporter, for one, proclaimed this change “could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

I don’t remember people holding their breath for major political developments every time a new season began on “The West Wing.” There’s something different, I think, about “24” that gives its cartoonishness a bizarrely compelling sense of reality.

The past six or so years — the years of the show’s existence — have given us a parade of imagery seemingly tailor-made for Bauer’s TV world. The crumbling of the World Trade Center, Saddam Hussein in a hole, stress-deranged U.S. soldiers-turned-prison-block-pornographers — the dividing line between what’s believable and what’s not, between fantasy and reality, has become utterly permeable.

What was once unimaginable, or imagined only for entertainment value in “Die Hard”-type thrillers, is now all too real. Anything is possible in a world of falling towers and Abu Ghraib. Kiefer Sutherland’s magical beliefs about his show’s potential impact on politics are forgivable. Even quaint.

The big difference, unfortunately, between real life and small-screen fiction is that, on “24,” Jack Bauer actually catches the bad guys and saves the world. Good guys are incorruptible; fatuous politicians are made to pay for their sins. There is redemption; there is comeuppance.

Oh, and torture works.

*************************

Judith Warner is the author of “Perfect Madness” and a contributing columnist for TimesSelect. She is a guest Op-Ed columnist.

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The Cleavage Conundrum

By JUDITH WARNER

Published: July 28, 2007

The Washington Post’s penetrating exposé of Hillary Clinton’s “surreptitious” show of cleavage on the Senate floor last week (“To display cleavage in a setting that does not involve cocktails and hors d’oeuvres is a provocation”) sent me trawling on the Internet, digging through sites like eBay and Hijabs-R-Us, desperate to buy a burqa.

I’d come upon the article on a very bad day, one in which I’d made the fatal error of wearing a sundress that had shrunk at the dry cleaners. Zipping up the top required a fair amount of exhaling and spousal assistance and a certain compression of body parts. All of which meant that, when I dropped my eyes down from the computer screen where I was reading the piece and turned them in the direction of my ever-contemplatable navel, I was confronted by an unmistakable bit of, well, “provocative” décolleté.

It wasn’t — I ran to check in the mirror — discernable from head-on or from the side. In fact, you pretty much had to be looking straight down to see it. Still, I didn’t want to take any chances. I did not want to run the risk, as Clinton had, according to The Post’s Robin Givhan, of giving passers-by the impression that they were “catching a man with his fly unzipped.” (“Just look away!”)

I have a hard enough time making friends around the office.

And so, I spent the rest of the 90-degree day buttoned up in a warm jacket. Grumbling and muttering all the way.

You see, I’d always thought that, when you reached a certain age or a certain stage in life, you sort of bought your way out of the sexual rat race. You could be a “person of cleavage,” to borrow a Pulitzer-worthy phrase from Ruth Marcus, a Post columnist, but you could nonetheless make it through your day without having to give the matter much thought.

After all, isn’t every woman past a certain age, at a certain weight and after a certain amount of breast-feeding, a “person of cleavage?” And aren’t you allowed, at a certain time of life, to escape from the world of at least my youth, where you couldn’t walk down the street licking an ice cream cone without inviting a stream of leering commentary?

I always thought that middle age afforded some kind of protection from prying eyes and personal remarks. I thought this was the silver lining to growing up and growing older. Clearly, I was wrong.

Funny that it took another woman to drive that point home to me. Funny, too, that when I looked closely at the photo that accompanied Givhan’s article, I couldn’t see anything vaguely resembling cleavage. I guess you had to have just the right angle.

Givhan is a fashion writer, which means she spends a great deal of time in the company of professional anorexics, sunken-chested young women whose attempts at cleavage are gerry-rigged for the cameras. These are women whose images are tightly controlled, for whom every millimeter of flesh shown or unshown is a matter of careful planning and styling and aesthetic hand-wringing.

Normal women are different. Normal women — real women, dare I say? — women who have other, more important things on their minds than their looks, women who have other people on their minds than themselves, the kinds of women, in other words, whom you’d probably want to have running the country, aren’t likely to be so “perfect” in appearance. Their flesh (minus the knife) will bulge or sag; their clothes will pull and shift, showing this or that lunch stain, this or that wrinkle, this or that unbidden bit of skin. It’s a mark of how stunted we are as a society that, no matter what their age, accomplishments or stature, we still expect these women to maintain a level of image control worthy of a professional beauty.

The difference between a real female commander in chief and a woman who plays one on TV will one day prove to be that the former is not always shot at a flattering angle. She will have bad shirt days and the occasional run in a stocking.

At least, I hope she’ll be the kind of woman who would permit that to happen. I hope, at the very least, that predatory eyes won’t force her to spend a chunk of precious work time every day being packaged into an impenetrable, invulnerable suit of professionally styled armor.

But I wouldn’t count on it.

Judith Warner is the author of “Perfect Madness” and a contributing columnist for TimesSelect. She is a guest Op-Ed columnist.
Bob Herbert is off today.

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The Full-Time Blues

By JUDITH WARNER

Published: July 24, 2007

The news from the Pew Research Center this month — that 60 percent of working mothers say they’d prefer to work part time — was barely out before it was sucked up into the fetid air of the mommy wars, with all the usual talk on “opting out” and guilting out, and the usual suspects lining up to slug it out on morning talk TV.

But the conversation we should be having these days really isn’t one about What Mothers Want. (This has been known for years; surveys dating back to the early 1990s have shown that up to 80 percent of mothers — working and at-home alike — consistently say they wish they could work part time.) The interesting question is, rather, why they’re not getting it.

Only 24 percent of working mothers now work part time. The reason so few do isn’t complicated: most women can’t afford to. Part-time work doesn’t pay.

Women on a reduced schedule earn almost 18 percent less than their full-time female peers with equivalent jobs and education levels, according to research by Janet Gornick, a professor of sociology and political science at City University of New York, and the labor economist Elena Bardasi. Part-time jobs rarely come with benefits. They tend to be clustered in low-paying fields like the retail and service industries. And in better-paid professions, a reduced work schedule very often can mean cutting down from 50-plus hours a week to 40-odd — hardly a “privilege” worth paying for with a big pay cut.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In Europe, significant steps have been made to make part-time work a livable reality for those who seek it. Denying fair pay and benefits to part-time workers is now illegal. Parents in Sweden have the right to work a six-hour day at prorated pay until their children turn 8 years old. Similar legislation helps working parents in France, Austria, and Belgium and any employee in Germany and the Netherlands who wants to cut back.

Even Britain has a (comparatively tame) pro-family law that guarantees parents and other caregivers the right to request a flexible schedule from their employers. European employers have the right to refuse workers’ requests, but research shows that very few actually do. And workers have the right to appeal the denials.

None of this creates a perfect world. Feminists have long been leery of part-time work policies, which tend to be disproportionately used by women, mommy-tracking them and placing them at an economic disadvantage within their marriages and in society. The American model of work-it-out-for-yourself employment is Darwinian, but women’s long working hours have gone a long way toward helping them advance up the career ladder.

“We know that family-friendly policies encourage work force participation,” says Professor Gornick, who has extensively studied family policy on both sides of the Atlantic. “But do they lower the glass ceiling or make it thicker? That’s the million-euro question.”

I think that when it comes to setting priorities for (currently nonexistent) American work-family policy, we ought to go for the greatest good for the greatest number.

The place to start, ideally, would be universal health care, which is really the necessary condition for making freedom of choice a reality for working parents. European-style regulations outlawing wage and benefit discrimination against part-time workers would be nice, too, though it’s not a terribly realistic goal for the U.S., where even unpaid family leave is still a hot-button issue for employers.

A British-style “soft touch” law could, however, be within the realm of the possible. Senator Edward Kennedy and Representative Carolyn Maloney are circulating draft legislation modeled on the British workplace flexibility law that would give employees — all workers, not just moms or parents — the right to request a flexible schedule. The legislation — which would require employers to discuss flexibility with workers who request it, but wouldn’t require them to honor the requests — has a little bit of something for everyone: protection from retaliation for workers who fear letting on that they’re eager to cut back, protection from “unfunded mandates” for businesses.

Critics might say the proposed legislation’s touch is so soft as to be almost imperceptible, but it’s a start. At the very least, it’s a chance to stop emoting about maternal love and war and guilt and have a productive conversation.

Judith Warner is the author of “Perfect Madness” and a contributing columnist for TimesSelect. She is a guest Op-Ed columnist.

Bob Herbert is off today.

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A Crack in Team Bush

By JUDITH WARNER

Published: July 21, 2007
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It was a shock to see Defense Secretary Robert Gates battling tears Wednesday evening as he spoke about Maj. Douglas Zembiec, a Marine and father of a 1-year-old daughter, who was killed in May after requesting a second tour of duty in Iraq.

Shocking and yet somehow profoundly validating and cathartic.

Choking, pausing, visibly suffering and clearly fighting off an onslaught of unwelcome emotion as he addressed the Marine Corps Association’s annual dinner, Gates seemed, for a moment, to tap into national sentiment in a way that the Bush team has never before done.

Sure, they tapped into our anger, fear and hatred in the days and months after 9/11. Sure, their swagger stoked our desires for vengeance and soothed some of the terror that took up residence in our guts in the weeks following the attacks.

But here was something new: an acknowledgment, however unbidden, of the complex range of negative emotions — sadness and frustration and, yes, I think, guilt — that’s now weighing upon the nation’s soul after four disastrous years in Iraq.

We’d never seen anything like it in the “Henny Penny” brush-offs of Gates’s predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld. We probably never will discern any inkling of it in Condoleezza Rice’s robotic equanimity. President Bush is known to meet privately with wounded soldiers and families of the fallen and is said, at those times, to become emotional, but little of that softness seeps into his often cocky — and defensive — public demeanor.

It’s hard to imagine much sympathy emanating from a man who admits to no soul-searching on Iraq, who vacationed through the panic and devastation of Hurricane Katrina and who recently shrugged off the issue of health care reform with the line, “I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.”

Rice, I read in the recent biography, “Twice as Good,” is so incapable of empathy that, in her late teens, and after years of assiduous and ambitious practice, she was forced to give up her dreams of becoming a concert pianist because her teacher felt she didn’t have the “interest or inclination” to “make someone else’s thoughts and emotions [her] own.”

We’ve all seen by now where such emotional sterility, coupled with a ferocious attachment to ideology, leads. And I think, as a nation — as Gates just did so publicly — we’re starting to show cracks from the strain.

I kept waiting yesterday for signs that, after his almost tearful performance, Gates would be labeled a “nut” or a “wimp” or some kind of national disgrace.

They didn’t come.

Instead, on a discussion board at Military.com, an online organization for active members of the military and veterans, I found Gates referred to as “a man of honor and integrity” by a former Marine Corps officer, who admitted that he himself, hearing Zembiec’s story, had broken down and cried, for the first time, before his 9- and 11-year-old children.

“He is obviously a man who tries his best to serve his country as best he possibly can, and he isn’t afraid to show his emotions,” wrote another poster.

Another wrote of being moved to tears nightly by the evening news: “I ache when I think of America’s sons and daughters being killed in a distant land. I am so relieved that Robert Gates is the decent, caring man he is proving to be.”

I pictured Vice President Dick Cheney miming, “Gag me,” and Rumsfeld swaying with the motions of playing an imaginary violin. And I thought: how wonderful it is that someone, on high, has had the strength to own the pain that’s been caused by our disastrous course in Iraq.

One has to wonder, of course, what public opinion would have been if the first cabinet official to lose it — just a bit — had been not the stoic bureaucrat Gates but instead our female secretary of state. Had it been Rice up on that podium, and were she constitutionally capable of that degree of non-Bush-centered feeling, would she have been denounced? Would she have been belittled, punished politically, dismissed as too irrational and emotional — too girly — to deal with the ugly realities of war?

We’ll never know, because she — like all powerful women in politics — will never let us find out. They can’t afford to. Not unless much more of official Washington decides it’s man enough to truly feel our nation’s inner disarray.

Judith Warner is the author of “Perfect Madness” and a contributing columnist for TimesSelect. She is a guest Op-Ed columnist.

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Domestic Disturbances: A blog at the NY Times by Judith Warner

July 12, 2007, 6:59 pm

Visiting Day

Tags: parental guilt, showing up, working parents

===================================

I went to Visiting Day at my daughters’ day camp this week.

I had a lovely time.

I used some of the mindfulness meditation techniques that I’d learned recently in Yoga Nidra to keep out of my mind thoughts of the two-foot-high stack of papers I was scheduled to go through that day, which was one of exactly nine days I’d set aside for working on my now-two-years-overdue book.

The techniques worked very well. I was present to myself and my daughters, relished the feeling of the cold pool water on my skin, sang along heartily with the camp songs and, when asked to participate in gymnastics, connected so well to my long-betrayed inner child that I found myself cowering behind my daughter Emilie’s back, hoping that, if I dropped my eyes to the floor, I’d become fully invisible.

(As a teenager, I applied for a job as a camp counselor once. Under skills, I put “typing.” Not much has changed.)

I am fortunate to have a profession that, on non-deadline days, doesn’t require me to be in any particular place producing work at any particular time. If I miss a couple of hours of work or even an entire day no one necessarily notices – though my anxiety level is sure to rise and my bank account, if the situation drags on, is sure to dip.

Other people – most people – don’t live their work lives that way.

“My dad promised he’d come,” one of the 7-year-old girls complained, as we crowded together on Emilie’s towel, sharing cookies and Ritz Bits and sandwiches — in that order, unfortunately — at lunchtime. “He always breaks his promises.”

“My parents always break their promises, too,” another lunch companion chimed in.

Their eyes fell on Emilie.

“You know how it feels, Em,” said the first. “Your dad isn’t here, either.”

Indeed, he wasn’t. He couldn’t be. Max had a story closing that day and was chained to his desk.
“What’s more important to him – work or us?” 10-year-old Julia had cried when I’d told her, the week before, that he wasn’t going to be able to attend.

We were in the car. It was the post-camp-bus-pickup cranky hour, and we were all a bit testy. It was also the end of a work period for me in which I’d been reading a whole lot about family leave – about the 40 percent of Americans who have none; the 50 percent who have no right to sick days; the 25 percent who get no vacation. I let Julia have it.

Don’t you think that Daddy would rather be running around with you in the woods than sitting at his desk in front of a computer screen? I snapped.

I lectured her on the unfairness of judging parents for things that were beyond their control. I lectured her on the injustice of presenting parents with demands that they can’t meet. I peppered her with rhetorical questions: Does the fact that I, with my flexible schedule, can manage to take a day off from work make me a “better” mother than another woman who can’t?

“Okay, okay,” Julia said, staring glumly out the window. “I get it.”

“Can we pause this now?” Emilie chimed in. “Can we listen to ‘Harry Potter’?”

Conversations about parents who break promises or let their kids down or generally make them feel less important than work shouldn’t be common. But they are. I hear snippets of them every time I attend a school event during the workday. And I’m fed up. I’ve just about had it.

But not with the ill-accused parents.

I’ve had it with a culture that willfully refuses to face up to the fact that almost 80 percent of mothers with children beyond pre-school age – and, of course, a much greater percentage of fathers – work. This refusal to face facts, coupled with the ideology of “parental involvement” as a panacea for all social ills, has created a situation in which not only guilt-ridden parents, but children are needlessly suffering.

It doesn’t need to be this way. It only takes a quick look across the Atlantic to see that many other countries have done what’s necessary to grow up and embrace the 21st century. They provide kids with a longer school year, a longer school day and subsidized summer activities. And they consider that a parent’s place is in the home – not in the classroom.

Parental involvement is key for school and life success and truly does need to be encouraged in struggling communities where parents aren’t able to be hands-on enough in their kids’ lives. But that’s simply not an issue for most middle- and upper-middle-class people.

Whatever need these parents have to “be there” for their kids 24/7 (and no one is more guilty of such neediness than me), we’ve got, for the greater good, to counterbalance it against the realization that meeting these needs – constantly – is creating an unfair situation in which some kids are left feeling like second-class citizens. (And if you think that young kids whose parents don’t show up for daytime events don’t feel – at least briefly – like second-class citizens, you’re wrong. They do.)

We need to push back against the trend toward excessive and inappropriate parental involvement that weighs so heavily upon families in certain communities. We should start by requesting – ever so politely – that school events requiring parental participation be scheduled in the evening. Or on weekends. And not too often at that.

Let’s get parents out of their school-aged kids’ 9-to-3 lives. It’s a cost-free solution to one of the major sources of family angst today. And, more globally, let’s grow up as a culture and face reality – so that our kids can grow up less stressfully.

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Domestic Disturbances: A Blog at the NY Times by Judith Warner

June 28, 2007, 8:01 pm

Reading the Ink Blot

Tags: Hillary Clinton, readers

Well, it took me two weeks to work up the nerve, but I finally read all your comments about my last Hillary Clinton column and see that we have had a pretty major misunderstanding.

I never meant in that piece to take on the topic of why women, in general, do or do not like Hillary Clinton. Rather, what I wanted to explore was the phenomenon of “Hillary Hate” – why is it that so many women, particularly within Clinton’s ostensible cohort, have the reaction, when her name comes up, of shrugging their shoulders, closing their eyes, waving their hands in a shoo-ing away gesture and saying, with feigned horror, “I don’t know what it is about her, but I just can’t stand her.”

I was not talking about women who voice reasoned opposition to her vote enabling the Iraq war, or her support of anti-flag burning legislation or her handling of her failed health care initiative of the first Clinton administration. I meant rather to explore some possible roots behind the “I-just-hate-her” sentiment that dates back to 1992 (or even further) and remains alive and well today.

That’s the kind of sentiment that Melinda Henneberger, the author of “If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians to Hear,” was talking about when she told me that Hillary “rubs a lot of women who are like her the wrong way.” It’s what the Clinton’s campaign adviser Ann Lewis was referring to when she rolled her eyes (at least, that’s what I imagined her doing via the phone) and said, “We’ve been through all this before.”

The irrational, gut-level kind of Hillary-hate — not, again, opposition to her political actions or views — has fascinated me now for more than 15 years. It was the topic that propelled me to write a biography of the then-revolutionary new First Lady-to-be back in 1992. Back then, the hatred of Hillary could be best summed up, as the American Spectator put it, as a reaction to her perceived “consuming ambition, inflexibility of purpose, domination of a pliable husband, and an unsettling lack of tender human feeling.”

In 2000, the hatred had shifted to become a condemnation of her dependency upon her husband, her over-flexibility of purpose and her excessively tender human feelings. And yet, in the Senate race, the old words were bandied about again: “Lady Macbeth,” “phony,” “ambitious.”

And now here we are, again.

There is something enduring about Hillary that — independent of policy and politics — rubs some people the wrong way. It used to be her headband. Now it’s her voice, her life of compromise, her “poll-driven” scriptedness, (“She’s all brain and no backbone, a carefully programmed ventriloquist’s dummy, controlled by poll results and spin doctors”) her “appearance as an angry, insecure, compromised person with a big chip on her shoulder over something or other, who covers it up with a fairly sophisticated kind of bluster” and, of course, her ambition.

Much of this comes back to the matter of her “authenticity,” or lack thereof, although it seems to me that the frozenness, the defensiveness, the shut-downedness that people so criticize now when they see her is probably the most “authentic” reaction a person could possibly have to the public flogging she’s long endured. Openness, trust, chattiness, vulnerability would probably be great things for Hillary to project, if she could pull them off; but there’s no way, humanly, that they could ever be real, given what she’s lived through.

Say what you like (“While I find this essay thoughtful, I also find it feeding the old presumption that the political choices women make are more emotional — and thereby less logical — than the ones made by men”), you’ll never convince me that women’s reactions to Hillary are primarily rational. My saying this has nothing to do with my view of women. It has to do with the fact that poll after poll – and now a fascinating new book by political psychologist Drew Westen, “The Political Brain” – indicate that voters, all voters, are primarily irrational. They have their issues (and single-issue voters do tend to vote only according to their issues), but the instincts that generally cause them to cleave to one candidate over another are, on the basest level, Westen argues, well, base.

This doesn’t change according to education or income level; it’s neurologically hard-wired. Even our most reasoned and conscious political decisions are in fact motivated, it seems, by our dark and emotional unconscious.

It has often been said that the figure of Hillary Clinton functions like a Rorschach test, drawing out whatever anger, anxiety, disgust, fear and hope circulate just below the surface of the national consciousness. So what does it mean if someone stares at her image and sees someone who just “gets under my skin”?

I made a stab the other week at analyzing that particular reaction to the Hillary inkblot. I did it provocatively, peevishly, perhaps, even a bit too nastily in tone. (Sorry about that: too many readers read my love letter to my girls as an anti-motherhood rant, and that unleashed, shall we say, a little bit of unconscious aggression.)

Now I’ll throw the question back at you: policy aside, what do you think we see when we look at Hillary Clinton?

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Domestic Disturbances: a blog @ Times Select by Judith Warner

June 21, 2007, 6:42 pm

The Veil of French Politics

Ségolène Royal was the first woman from a major political party to run for President of France. She was the first French cabinet minister to give birth while in office. And now she has become the first French political figure to break up with her boyfriend – Socialist party head Francois Hollande, her concubin, according to French law, and the father of her four children – on the public airwaves.

“I’ve proposed to Francois Hollande that he live his life on his own, and he has accepted,” she told France Inter radio last Saturday, in a taped interview whose airing was intended to coincide with the publication of a new tell-all book, “Ségolène Royal, Behind the Scenes of a Defeat.” In that book, Royal put things even more clearly: “I have asked Francois Hollande to leave the house to live his love affair, now spread out in books and newspapers, on his own.”

Hollande, apparently, learned that their separation had been finalized and was being made public from a French newswire story. “It was like she was firing one of her ministers!” Claude Askolovitch – the co-author, with former Royal collaborator Eric Besson, of the anti-Ségolène screed “Who Knows Madame Royal?” – exclaimed on the phone to me, “That’s not how you do things!”

Not until now, anyway.

In the United States, much has been made of Royal as the first woman to climb to the very, very top of French politics. But in France, the woman question has never really gotten her all that much traction. Instead, Royal has come to be associated with another, more questionable sort of revolution: the peopolisation (think: “People-ization”) of the French political process.

Royal has for decades lived her highly photogenic life in front of the cameras. In 1992, when she was minister of the environment, she invited Paris Match (France’s People magazine) and a television crew into her maternity ward to photograph her newborn baby, Flora – and to document the presence of a mini-mountain of government dossiers spread out across her bed.

She justified this unusual incursion into her private life on the grounds that it advanced “the cause of women.” She also posed at home with Hollande and their children to showcase the kind of “organization” that was necessary to balance high-level government work with the needs of a large family, and scored big points – with this consumer of celebrity news, at least – when she was photographed, bikini-clad (at 53!), on a beach on the Atlantic coast last summer.

Flat belly aside, all this exposure isn’t necessarily shocking from an American perspective. Royal’s penchant for making the personal political can even be seen as an admirable form of public expression for a woman who has consistently spoken out on behalf of working women and their families since escaping from the home of her domineering, authoritarian father in the 1970s. But it’s been a major style shift for France, where the separation between public and private life has traditionally been so absolute – and protected so assiduously by the judicial system, politicians and the inner court of Parisian journalists who cover (and sometimes sleep with) them – that Francois Mitterrand was for decades able to maintain, at taxpayer expense, an illegitimate daughter and a mistress without the knowledge of the broader electorate.

This secrecy, we might say, is self-serving and elitist. But it has also led to a somewhat higher level of political discourse than Monkey Business and Monicagate.

At base, the French would say (they said it to me, in fact, incessantly, when I was there covering politics at the time of the Clinton impeachment scandal), it’s emblematic of a profound philosophical difference that sets them apart from Americans: the fact that the French don’t subscribe to the idea of “transparency.” “Transparency,” in this context, is the notion that a person’s innermost soul is revealed in each and every one of his or her acts. To believe in that kind of transparency is naïve, the French believe; it’s more realistic to recognize that human behavior is murky and messy and, in the case of politicians in particular, often highly compartmentalized. So it’s pointless to make sweeping judgments about a person’s political valor by his or her private life – and it’s none of the public’s business, anyway.

That attitude, apparently, is now changing. The 2007 presidential election brought France its first true Internet-age campaign, and the blogosphere was rife with citizens weighing in on the personal lives of “Sarko” and “Ségo” – though many held their noses all the while. As candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy certainly did his bit before the cameras, appearing, ripplingly, in a pair of Nike shorts for a paparazzi-chaperoned summer jog and hamming it up for photo ops in the (brief) periods when his estranged wife, Cécilia, decided to appear at his side.

Yet Sarkozy also did things the old-fashioned way: reportedly pressuring a friendly publisher to squelch publication of a tell-all about his wife (it was subsequently reborn as a novel about a woman named Célia), and demanding the firing of a Paris Match editor who published photos of Cécilia’s lover.

Only Royal truly pushed the envelope. “I needed truth, clarity and transparency,” she said on France-Inter this week, justifying her decision to go public and tell (almost) all. This was a personal need; it was a necessity for her children, she said. But, she also implied, it was a good thing for the fractured state of France. “I think truth and clarification of the situation is an element of appeasement,” she said.

I don’t know if that’s true. I think that transparency – as an excuse for publicly airing dirty laundry – is far overrated. Recent history has shown us, after all, that there’s no genuine connection between being a “good” person and doing good as a politician. Straight-laced, God-fearing, wife-abiding Good Men have long brought us policies that do a great deal of harm to major portions of our population, while philanderers have managed to do a lot of good.

The capacity for successful compartmentalization – not a Jimmy Carteresque devotion to personal transparency – is probably among the most important character traits required of a person who would be president. Royal may have had it (during the campaign, she said on France Inter, she put her personal problems “in parentheses”), but in the wake of her recent failure, she’s clearly lost it. And a lot of her personal dignity – hard-won, and long-established – has fallen by the wayside as well.

Whatever one might have thought of Royal as a presidential candidate (and I was not a fan), there’s no denying that she has, for decades, been an exceptional woman. It’s a pity now that, in the wake of her electoral defeat, she is taking what was formerly a quite worthwhile aspect of l’exception francaise down with her.

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Domestic Disturbances:

June 14, 2007, 10:53 pm

Who’s for Hillary. And Who Isn’t.

Tags: authenticity, Hillary Clinton, the election

According to a Washington Post – ABC News poll published earlier this week, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s most consistent and enthusiastic female support is now coming from high school graduates with incomes of less than $50,000 a year. Young women like her best. Over age 45, college-educated, higher-earning women like her least. In fact, asked who they found most “honest,” “trustworthy” and “inspiring,” these women – Clinton’s peers – expressed more of a kinship with Barack Obama.

In a sense, none of this should really come as a surprise. Back in 2000, Clinton bonded like glue with middle class women in upstate New York – they liked the way she came to speak with them and learned about their lives – but was a hard sell in the wealthy suburbs downstate.

“Non-college-educated women really like that she’s smart, that she’s a woman who has worked for what she has, supported her family, kept her family life private and handled her marriage the way that she has; they’ve often made similar choices in their own lives,” says Celinda Lake, who has done extensive polling on women’s attitudes toward Clinton since the time of Hillary’s first Senate race. “Upper-middle-class women are more judgmental. They see her as polarizing; they second-guess how she handled her personal issues. Non-college women react to this argument with: ‘They always say this about women. They always try to drag the woman down.’”

Melinda Henneberger, political editor of the Huffington Post, found similar Hillary-hostility among the senator’s best-educated and most successful peers around the country as she traveled, talking to women about politics, before and after the publication of her recent book, “If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians to Hear.”

“She rubs a lot of women who are like her the wrong way,” Henneberger says. “There’s a feeling that she’s too poll-tested; that she’s too willing to say what’s required. Obama, Hennebeger says, strikes these women as “authentic.” Hillary does not.

All of this isn’t overly disturbing to the Hillary for President campaign. After all, Clinton is the undeniable Democratic front-runner with overwhelming support from women. (Fifty-one percent of women in the Washington Post – ABC poll said they’d give her their vote in the Democratic primaries, and women at all income levels chose her as the candidate they would “trust most to handle a major crisis”).

And it goes without saying that there are a lot more women who aren’t just like her – upper-middle-class by birth, Yale-law-school-educated, a multimillionaire – than who are, although the latter group consistently receives disproportionate attention in the media. Ann Lewis, senior advisor to the campaign, sighed yesterday as she recalled to me the multitude of “I hate Hillary” press coverage that preceded Clinton’s landslide victory in the 2000 Senate campaign, when she ended up garnering the support of 60 percent of female voters. “We’ve been through all this before,” she said.

Whether or not upper-middle-class female discontent ends up being an important force in the Democratic primaries (and if the past is any guide, it won’t), the disconnect between the senator and the women who should, on the face of things, be her most natural supporters is troublesome. Not, to my mind, for what it does or doesn’t say about Hillary; but rather for what it conveys about the women ostensibly most like her.

I wonder if it’s precisely the things that make non-college-educated women feel an affinity with Hillary – her toughness, her independence and her sometime status as an underdog – that alienate the elite. I worry that there may be among some elite women a certain disregard for, even a certain distaste for, the bread and butter middle class family issues that Hillary has placed front and center.

Take her “It Takes a Village” mentality: the idea that as mothers we’re all interrelated and need a helping hand (from government, among others) to keep our boats afloat. This resonates among women who struggle to pay for health care, who labor to find safe and affordable child care, who have to fight for sick days and for time off for school visits – who struggle to make ends meet, generally, as most people do.

But I’ve repeatedly found that better-off women, who have decent health care, child care, education and, to a greater degree, job flexibility, tend to often be hostile to this sort of communitarian notion of shared responsibility. (“Do you want the government raising your children?” is the frequent riposte.) They’re big believers in the American ethos of individual “choice” and “personal responsibility”; after all, being the winners in our society, it has worked out well for them. And they – rightly – perceive that they’re bound to be the losers, tax-wise, if their own gated community of family comfort is opened up to the larger village.

But that’s political. What rankles about Hillary – so uniquely – among better-off women is much more personal at base. Is it possible, now that stay-at-home momdom has become a fixture of the suburbs and when wealthy women have bailed out of the workforce in the face of family pressures, that the image of one who toughed it out – uninterruptedly, and with little or no publicly expressed angst – is less than welcome? (Michelle Obama, Barack made sure to share at a Momsrising.org advocacy event last fall, scaled back her career for a while to accommodate his, and still struggles, “juggling big things … juggling small things and everything in between.”)

Could Hillary, the first woman to make partner at an old boy Southern law firm, a working mother who kept it all together – with a lot of household help – feel like a reproach to those who just couldn’t hack it? Does this explain, in part, some of the “who-does-she-think-she-is” rumblings that run through the Hillary-hate?

Clinton made a point, throughout her married life, to keep herself financially viable – unlike a rather decent portion of our current female elite. Close to 20 years ago, she hesitated to leave Bill, according to Carl Bernstein’s new bio, because she feared she wouldn’t be able to adequately support herself and Chelsea. This may or may not be true, and may well strike those of us who aren’t corporate lawyers as far-fetched, but it’s also all too typical a fear shared by many unhappily married women – except, of course, the most wealthy and successful.

Clearly Hillary feels “authentic” to a whole lot of women who, on the surface of things, have little in common with her. But among those who do, there is a sense that she’s less than real.

Which raises the issue: is being real – for a political candidate, in the eyes of the public – actually a matter of being true to him or herself? Or is it a matter of properly mirroring us to ourselves? Do we judge as “authentic” those who reflect us as we actually are? Or rather, do we celebrate as “real” the ones who make us feel we’re who we want to be?

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Domestic Disturbances

By Judith Warner

June 7, 2007, 9:57 pm

End of (School) Year Frenzy

Tags: children, Holidays, school

That time of year thou may’st in me behold
When sitters to their far-off homes hath fled,
When camp and health forms make my blood run cold
And all I want to do is lie in bed.
In me thou see’st the frenzied wide-eyed stare
Of one whose work time has been cut in two
And yet cannot resist the year-end snare
Of read-a-louds, teacher gifts, and hot glue.
In me thou see’st the envy, vile and green
Of those who smile while Spring turns into heat
Suiting up for tennis, Pilates, too
And sporting perfectly manicured feet.
This thou perceiv’st, all around me I hear
Others expressing their equal ill cheer.

I have, there’s no question, gone off my gourd. (That still scans.)

It always happens at this time of year.

In recent weeks, we’ve had two grade-parent cocktail parties, one all-school gala, a Spring Fling, three music recitals, a camp open house, a working moms’ lunch (missed it; had to work), two overnight camping trips, a “cereal breakfast,” an “authors’ tea,” a baby naming, a birthday party, a pool party, an end-of-year party and various teacher appreciation tidbits to buy, bake, embroider and accidentally burn in the oven. (“Mommy, how could you!”)

These are all, individually – burnt clay baby dragons aside – very nice things.

But taken together – and in the absence of my eight-hour-a-week student babysitter, back home for the summer in rural Pennsylvania – they can get to be a little bit much.

I know that you know what I mean.

I know this because I hear the chorus of complaint all around me. Every day, on the school steps, on the phone, in the office, there is the gnashing of teeth, the exchange of grimaces: Surviving? Just barely. Can’t wait for it all to be over.

Chill, everyone, I want to say, with the horrific condescension of one who has confronted her demons and passed over to the other side. Don’t sweat all the silly stuff. Embrace it. Surrender to it. At the very least, consider it material. I’ve been doing that for the past couple of weeks. And, on the whole, it’s been working for me.

Of course, I didn’t start out at this level of Zen.

(I cannot reach any kind of level of Zen. I tried yoga nidra the other night and, when relaxation hit, I immediately burst into tears.

“What an overachiever!” the instructor cried. “The very first time – and she hits nirvana!)

I discovered it in a chance encounter with my two-doors-down office neighbor, David Brooks. Who, on or around May 8 (VE Day in Europe; D – for departure – Day for my sitter) had the misfortune to stop in the hallway right before school pickup time and ask how I was doing.

“I wake in the morning and go to bed at night stalked by a feeling of incipient failure!” I stopped hyperventilating long enough to almost scream.

He blinked for a moment, impassively.

“Some people thrive on that,” he said.

Yes, I thought, I’ve built an entire career in just that way.

So, after that, I started looking on the bright side. Less babysitting, more parent-involved activities, meant more time with my children. It meant more fun and more peace and more pleasant relaxation.

This focus on the upside lasted a couple of weeks, which was quite pleasant. Lately, though, I’m sorry to admit, a downside has also become clear. And that downside is this: more time with my children has meant my children are spending more time with me. The way upped Mommy-dosage has, I fear, started to reach a level of potential toxicity. The symptoms: they’re starting to act and talk and dress and think a lot like me.

“There’s a big ugly house.” Emilie now likes to provide real estate commentary as we drive around the neighborhood on what has become our daily supermarket run. (I forget the milk. I forget the orange juice or the paper towel. Sometimes, I drive away and forget the grocery bags.) “There’s a great big new one. Isn’t it tacky? And there” — pointing to some sad structure, smaller, even, than our own cute little house, “is a cute, cute little house.”

“The line, ‘I gotta work it’ has no meaning,” Julia now likes to tell anyone who will listen, every time Hanna Montana’s “Nobody’s Perfect” comes on the air. “It’s a cheap rhyme. Well, at least,” she then tells the dead silence, “that’s what my mom says.”

That makes me cringe. You want to teach your children by example. But what if the example you set is, well, maladaptive? A little bit sub-optimal? A little bit … weird?

I’ve spent a lot of time, in this period of extreme togetherness, taking the girls out for ice cream. You see, I’ve found it’s an excellent way to multi-function: put the leash on the dog, a helmet on Emilie, get out the razor scooter (Not a book, Julia; you don’t read while you’re walking. You Talk to Me About Your Day) and you mix exercise, a form of nutrition, care for the dog and meaningful connection.

Or, if you’re so inclined, you can just zone out.

I took Emilie alone one day while Julia was at a violin rehearsal. We walked to Ben and Jerry’s. We got ice cream, then sat on a bench. Emilie looked off one way, I looked off the other, and the dog closed his eyes in yet a third. Fifteen minutes passed in silence before a passerby sent us a quizzical look and I startled back into consciousness.

“Em,” I said.

“What?”

“Are you okay?”

“DON’T INTERRUPT ME WHEN I’M STARING OFF INTO SPACE!” she shouted. And then, eyes fixed on a blank wall: “I never realized how interesting it is around here.”

Camp’s starting soon. It’s 9-to-5 childcare coverage, I think.

More’s the pity for me.

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Domestic Disturbances: A Blog at Times Select

May 31, 2007, 9:47 pm

Topic A, for Abduction

Tags: parents, Reader comments, the McCanns

I was going to move on this week and write a column about end-of-school-year dyspepsia, but your answers to last week’s post have been so voluminous and so passionate that I don’t feel ready to let that topic – the response to Madeleine McCann’s abduction – go just yet. You will note the phrasing: the topic here (as last week) is “the response to Madeleine McCann’s abduction,” not the abduction itself.

Madeleine McCann’s disappearance is an unspeakable tragedy. Her parents’ decision to leave her – and their two-year-old twins – alone in a ground floor apartment was stupid and irresponsible. I’m saying these things now – stating the obvious – because so many of you seemed to think I was remiss in not saying them last week. Yet last week I didn’t say them for a very specific reason: I think they really ought not to be said.

What, after all, can the purpose be to piling on to the McCanns’ self-recriminations and suffering? Is it to safeguard others – to send a warning and thereby protect other potential Madeleines from danger? It would be nice to believe so, but the degree of anger and emotion behind the comments of those who condemn them lead me to think otherwise. I think that here, as in the United Kingdom, where the public has for weeks now been locked in debate about what kind of judgment to pass upon the McCanns, something larger is going on.

In Britain, there is clearly a backlash afoot against the kind of hyper-present, anxious and involved parent behavior that University of Kent sociologist Frank Furedi has famously dubbed “paranoid parenting.” (For his latest thoughts on this in the light of the Madeleine McCann case, here’s something to read that will make me look Not So Bad After All.)

In the United States, I think, we’re pretty unanimous in the feeling that keeping children under (relatively) tight watch is a good – if unfortunate – thing. Like most of you, I would never leave young children in a house or apartment or hotel room or ground-floor vacation suite unattended. Indeed, I can’t leave my children in the backyard unattended; were it not for our outrageously barky dog, I probably wouldn’t feel comfortable letting them out of my sight – even on our own tiny property – at all.

I don’t tell you this to prove my virtue as a parent. On the contrary, I know that excess parental anxiety is a poison. I grew up with a father who adjusted my Venetian blinds every single night, always finding a way – though they hadn’t moved an iota during the day – to better position them so that, as he put it, attempting to make his voice relaxedly neutral, and doing nothing to hide his terror, “You can look out, but no one can look in.” Not only was I never left alone in a ground-floor vacation suite – as were the McCann kids – we never, as a family, spent a night in a ground-floor hotel room (or any hotel room, for that matter) unless the doors and windows had been examined and were found to meet his exacting safety standards.

In every single photograph from my early childhood I look worried.

I agree with most of you that the McCanns should not have left their children unattended. But are they, for having made that decision, irresponsible, neglectful, abusive, selfish, “bad” parents? Not necessarily. To get behind that statement would be to imply that those of us who would never do such a thing are, by definition, “good” parents. That’s a judgment that isn’t earned quite so simply.

I do not agree, for a moment, with Frank Furedi, who recently told the Times of London’s Andrew Billen that Madeleine’s parents were right to have made the “well-balanced” and “legitimate” decision to go out alone because “they made a decision that they were going on holiday with the kids, they would have fun with them and would also have some adult time.” I think Furedi went rather nastily off the rails when he argued against Billen’s suggestion that “paranoid parenting” practices may actually lead to fewer children being abducted with the following:

You cannot hold to hostage every child, every parent, on the worst-case scenario. You are saying that saving one child from being kidnapped makes it worth creating this culture of suspicion and mistrust. We are currently sending out signals that adults are so untrustworthy that the police need to check them all out. That’s what every kid is learning, and that is a far bigger tragedy for the nation than if one child gets kidnapped. Because that’s just one child, but if the whole nation becomes dominated by this dysfunctional, disorienting culture it has all kinds of destructive consequences.

But I do know that there are many ways to harm children. There is harm that is caused by selfishness and bad judgment. There is harm that is caused by excessive, unrestrained anxiety. And, frankly, there is harm that is caused by being smug, self-satisfied, self-righteous and judgmental. How dreary – how potentially confidence-eroding – it can be to grow up as the child of a parent who is always right.

I think that there is one sad purpose being served by all the talk of the McCanns’s negligence: parental self-protection. Criticizing the McCanns is a distancing technique. It is a way to redirect the excruciating emotions elicited by the abduction of a three-year-old. It’s a way to put a thick layer of insulation between the McCanns’ unsafe world – where bad things happen – and our world, where they do not. In the end, this self-distancing is a form of magical thinking: by vocally being not-them, by declaring our otherness to the McCanns, we secure for our own children a better fate.

Our public incantations – I would never, They should never, Anyone who would ever should be arrested – don’t work, though. They just – and this was my point last week – add to the sum total of awfulness in our world.

I will not run from the criticism so many of you lobbed my way for having focused my treatment of the McCann tragedy through the prism of America’s attitudes toward working mothers. I threw the same criticism at myself – before, during and after writing the piece. I felt guilty about it. It seemed trivial, narcissistic. Why this irrelevant focus, I asked myself, when a little girl’s life was at stake?

I couldn’t – and still can’t – rationally answer that question. I just keep coming back to the raw feeling I had, standing in the supermarket checkout line and reading People magazine, of having been punched in the stomach. It was adding insult to injury. And it turned sadness and fear to rage.

Is that a valid topic for commentary? To answer that, just look at the breadth and depth of our conversation.

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Words That Wound the Working Mother

Domestic Disturbances

--by Judith Warner

The story of Madeleine McCann, the British three-year-old kidnapped from her resort apartment during a family vacation in Portugal, has obsessed the British public and media for the past three weeks. “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling, Simon Cowell from “American Idol” and Virgin founder Richard Branson have offered rewards for her return; a findmadeleine.com Web site has received over 65 million hits; Madeleine’s aunt, Philomena McCann, has reported more than 2,000 responses to a chain e-mail appeal she sent out internationally in the hopes of increasing the odds of a chance sighting of her niece.

The initial wave of press coverage in Britain – a mixture of empathy, despair and blame (by some) of Madeleine’s parents, Gerry and Kate, for having gone out to dinner, leaving Madeleine and her twin siblings alone in a ground-floor apartment – has now given way to a secondary shock wave of self-questioning: Why, pundits ask, has the public turned itself inside out to find this one child? Isn’t there something awful about the degree of attention she has inspired while children in Darfur and Iraq – or in Britain’s public housing – die or disappear unnoticed?

Comparisons to the paroxysm of national mourning that followed the death of Princess Diana have been made. And, again, the whole issue of Britain’s new penchant for public displays of emotion has been dissected and, by some, found inappropriate. “The spasm of national grief that followed her abduction, the generous donations to the Madeleine fund, the lighting of candles, the celebrity appeals, the brimming lakes of sympathy: all this is of a piece with the way we deal with vicarious tragedy in these 24-hour, rolling media, emotive times,” Jan Moir wrote this week in The Daily Telegraph. “As in the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, people are no longer content to merely sympathise or empathise; they need to feel a part of things, too.”

In the United States, only People magazine has so far given Madeleine’s abduction the kind of front-page play it has garnered in Britain. And, as did the British press, People anchored its coverage around a “there-but-for-the-grace-of-God” kind of emotion; what happened to Madeleine, the magazine’s cover copy read, was “every parent’s nightmare.”

But then People went on to do something very American. The writer, Bill Hewitt, said: “Those closest to the McCanns described Kate as a devoted mother who had scaled back to working only a day and a half a week as a general practitioner (Gerry is a cardiologist) so that she could be with her children.” He went on to quote Aunt Philomena: “She’s working to keep her career up but spends the majority of her time with the kids.”

Message: Kate McCann is a Good Mother. Hence – unlike some other mothers – she didn’t even remotely deserve to have terrible things happen to her.

It’s at times like this that I just hate being a mother in America.

I did a pretty thorough article search through the British press this week. I searched “Madeleine McCann” and “mother” and “career” and “doctor” and “part-time” and countless other permutations. I found many, many mentions of Kate and Gerry as doctors. I found a description of how, by working hard, they’d raised themselves up from their modest roots to a solidly comfortable middle class (we would, I think, say upper middle class) lifestyle. These aspects of the McCanns’ life were evoked to spur sympathy and identification; to identify the McCanns as good, solid, striving Everypeople. Nowhere did I find Kate McCann’s Mommy Track work status exploited as a sign of personal virtue.

Only in America can you count on such drivel. Only in the country that, in 1997, attacked the working mother of eight-month-old Matthew Eappen (the infant who was shaken to death by the 19-year-old British au pair Louise Woodward) as “self-absorbed,” “materialistic” and “negligent,” would the push/pull of self-distancing and self-mirroring that binds the reading public to the Madeleine McCann case be framed, so unquestioningly, around the issue of her mother’s working status.

You may wonder why I feel so strongly about this matter of wording, which pales in importance next to the horrific tragedy of a child’s abduction. The epidermal ill-temper and sense of besiegement that fills me at the end of the school year (more on this next week) is undoubtedly part of it. But there is more. And it is this:

I fear that, at this point, there may well be nothing that you or I or any other journalist or reader or celebrity or politician can do to help poor Madeleine and her family. But there’s much we can do to cut down on the level of insulting and idiotic verbal pollution that creeps into the discourse of our everyday lives. The vile discrimination against working mothers in our country is now so ingrained and so poisonous and so taken for granted that it seeps, all but unnoticed, into the oddest of places, like an otherwise unrelated People story about a distant and heart-rending crime.

The foul poison of working-mother-hate is not, of course, absent in Britain, nor is the maternal guilt and self-doubt, the hand-wringing and the agonizing over other-than-mother care that generally accompany it. Clearly, the McCanns were susceptible to some of this cultural noise. They reportedly left their children in an apartment unattended, even though their resort offered both drop-in child care and babysitting. The reason: they didn’t want to hand their children over to “strangers.”

Had they not fallen victim to this fear of babysitters – this grossly over-generalized terror that is a corollary of the cultural hysteria over working motherhood – Madeleine might be with them today.

Or perhaps that’s wishful thinking on my part, an attempt to find rhyme or reason – and a blueprint for safety – in an incident of random horror.

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The Irrational Voter

Domestic Disturbances
by Judith Warner

The New York Times

The ever-controversial Linda Hirshman, had an article in the Washington Post this past week, in which she depicted American women voters – and suburban stay-at-home moms in particular – as politically ignorant, disinterested and ultimately self-defeating.

Citing studies and anecdotes culled from a few conversations with Washington-area suburban moms who appear to spend a fair amount of their time sitting around on their living room sofas and reading People magazine, she painted a rather damning portrait of women who don’t read newspapers, don’t read up on policy, and very often get their information on the outside world from their more tuned-in working husbands. Ignorant of the issues, they cast their votes based on such slippery stuff as “character,” and then, in election after election, blow their chances of being “the decisive force that will elect someone who embraces their views.”

Women are not “rational political actors,” Hirshman writes. “Instead, they vote on impulse, and on elusive factors such as personality.”

Some of what Hirshman has to say is, unfortunately, true. Survey after survey shows the consumers of news today to be disproportionately male. In my own anecdotal forays through the living rooms of America’s suburbs, I’ve often been struck by the degree to which women – particularly mothers of young children – don’t keep up with world events.

The reasons are quite obvious – for stay-at-home moms in particular, who don’t have the excuse of in-office dead time to read the paper or browse the Internet, there are just no free moments in the day. But, however understandable the phenomenon, the results can be worrisome. Hirshman cites a recent Pew Research Center study showing that nearly half the women surveyed said they “sometimes do not follow international news because of excessive coverage of wars and violence”; a New York Times/CBS poll last year found that nearly 10 percent more women than men still believed that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. In an age when Americans are showing a troublesome tendency toward irrational belief (There were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark), keeping up, at least minimally, with the news probably ought to be a prerequisite for the job of childrearing.

That said, while Hirshman’s statistics on female ignorance of the news are worth note, her conclusions about women’s particular irrationality as voters truly miss the mark. These days, all voters vote “irrationally” – if such factors as personal appeal and character can be said to be irrational.

Just look at the presidential election results of 2004: a solid majority of voters said they disapproved of George Bush’s handling of the war and the economy. Most voters, furthermore, said they believed the country was headed in the wrong direction. But 70 percent of voters also rated the president as “likeable.” They overwhelmingly said they’d rather have a beer with him than with John Kerry and would be much more likely to trust him to walk their dog. No matter where he was on the issues, Kerry’s “personality gap” just couldn’t be breached.

Look at how John Edwards feels the need to fuss with his hair; how pundits worry that it’s his temper and general bonkers factor – not his anti-choice or pro-war votes – that will prove John McCain’s undoing. Character, personality, “likeability” as the pollsters put it – they’re huge issues for voters now, in particular for the swing voters who don’t have strong ideological leanings. Regardless of gender.

“It’s sort of the same thing that makes us believe celebrities are one of us,” Sherry Bebich-Jeffe, a senior scholar of policy planning at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, told me. “When we see these people in our living rooms all the time, it’s as though they are among us, and then it becomes important for us to feel we can relate to them. We all tend to vote on personality. Women are no different than any other voters.”

In fact, last October, in the run-up to the Congressional midterm elections, another New York Times/CBS poll found no significant difference between the percentages of men and women who cited “personal qualities” as the main reason they were supporting their chosen candidate for the House of Representatives.

Singling out women voters for alleged soft thinking is misguided, and a little bit bizarre. It reminds me of the arguments used historically by the French left to deny their countrywomen the vote. The ladies, the leftists said, were much too close to their village priests; hence, a vote for a woman was a vote for irrationality – and, of course, a conservative candidate. (This worked; French women didn’t get the vote until 1945.)

Hirshman’s disdain for the way many women live their lives today shouldn’t lead her to underestimate their cognitive skills – or overestimate those of their spouses. Our country may well be sliding towards idiocracy (to borrow from the title of Mike Judge’s recent dystopic), but it’s not just a girl thing.

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