Content provided in partnership with
Sister speak: a divided duty
Ebony, July, 2003 by Joy Bennett Kinnon
GUILT is the common denominator of working mothers. What mother doesn't know or remember the wrenching cry, the outstretched arms and the straight baby tears when she leaves her baby at the sitter.
The guilt is the same for all working mothers, whether they are the cafeteria worker or the CEO, the migrant worker or the media mogul, the businesswoman or the cleaning woman, the rap star or the fast food worker. Working moms are the Ginger Rogers of the work world, doing everything the regular employee does, just backwards and in high heels.
- Most Popular Articles in News
- The Ten Best Laptop bags
- Tata plans cheapest-ever car for Indian market
- GLOBALIZATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF THE THIRD WORLD
- Corn is good for you; Corn is not only a tasty treat, but also a cereal that ...
- THE 50 BEST STYLISH HANDBAGS TO CARRY
- More »
This is not, as some think, a modern situation, a 21st century problem; it crosses centuries and millennia, and we must know the past to have perspective on the present and hope for the future. Picture this scene: Two activist women are talking, one the mother of a nursing baby, the other single by choice. The single woman "checks" the married one. "Since you married, agitation seems practically to have ceased," she says. Since you had that baby (I'm paraphrasing now) you're distracted because you feel he's not being looked after as he would be if you were there, and that makes for a divided duty. Although that conversation could have occurred at any coffee shop or kitchen table, the year was approximately 1899 and the two women speaking were the great journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells Barnett and her friend, suffragist Susan B. Anthony.
Anthony's rebuke stung Wells-Barnett, who virtually singlehandedly led the country's anti-lynching crusade. Wells recounts the conversation in her autobiography, Crusade For Justice. She was too polite to tell Anthony to mind her own business, but Wells said she could not get the support that Anthony enjoyed, and she was discouraged in her efforts to carry on alone. But Black men and women kept on getting lynched and people kept asking Wells to come to investigate. Black women banded together and provided a 21st century solution to a 19th century problem. Black women's clubs around the country provided her with a nurse at every town she visited, and she continued her great work while raising four children. In 1910, the Chicago Defender said of her: "If we only had a few men with the backbone of Mrs. Barnett, lynching would soon come to a halt in America." If she had given in to guilt and the disapproval of friends, and retired to the hearth, it is conceivable that lynching would have remained a recreational activity in this country for a far longer period.
Today's working moms ever are giving guilt the boot. "I do think that my advice to young women, all women, but certainly African-American women is not to stress about any sense of guilt when they leave their children," says trailblazing businesswoman Janet Hill, mom of professional basketball player Grant Hill. In the new book Having It All? by Veronica Chambers, Hill says it does not help you or your child to feel guilty, just make sure that your child is well taken care of. And find creative ways to stay connected. Hill is known for the 4 p.m. phone call. She talked to her son every day at 4 p.m. until he went to college. She was working at the Pentagon then and she says she would walk out of meetings with generals and the Secretary of the Army to take his call.
Another busy working mother and trailblazer, the Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook, has been known to return business calls and calls from her parishioners on her cell phone between innings while sitting in the stands watching her two sons playing Little League. Working and mothering are both duties, but they don't have to divide the heart. With ingenuity and a 4 o'clock phone call they can both be done to perfection.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group
