Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Children in day care-and the mothers who put them there

National Review, May 28, 2001 by Richard Lowry

Returning to a regime that discourages women's work as a matter of law is, of course, out of the question. But at the very least young women shouldn't be constantly told that they should want what they don't. Indeed, vestigial motherly urges have proved an insuperable obstacle to the full achievement of the feminist project. Ann Crittenden in her new book The Price of Motherhood details how women have voted with their feet to abandon the most ambitious goals of the feminists, after discovering that the most prestigious, high-pressure careers are simply incompatible with motherhood.

Crittenden reports that the representation of women in the top positions in law, accounting, science-you name it-has barely budged, because women tend to duck out of the labor force to have kids. Even in labor unions, which march in lockstep with the feminists, "less than 10 percent of top local officers are women, who are less likely to be married than their male counterparts." According to Crittenden, "The women without children have been twice as successful in achieving a career as the women with children." Nor have men begun to embrace the brave new role of housecleaners and nursemaids that feminists have outlined for them. Even when the wife earns more than half the family income, even when the husband is unemployed, he will typically pick up no more than 30 percent of housework and child-care duties.

What the feminist project is bumping up against, fundamentally, is the differing desires of the sexes. The survey data have told the story again and again: Most women value their children more than their careers, and would prefer to create a life for themselves that reflects this preference. As Brian Robertson points out, "Americans now assert, by a margin of two to one, that they would prefer to be a part of a one-earner couple rather than a two-earner couple." According to a nonpartisan Public Agenda survey last year, roughly 80 percent of parents with children five and younger say a stay-at-home parent is best able to give children the "affection and attention they need." Roughly 70 percent of today's young mothers call day-care centers the "option of last resort." The day-care revolution, it seems, is hardly riding a wave of popular support.

Feminists counter such data with the argument that working mothers are economically inevitable. As Ann Hulbert has written in The New Republic, "the two-paycheck family, as even its detractors increasingly admit, is largely the product of economic necessity." Yes, wages for men stagnated for a period beginning in the mid 1970s. Yes, single mothers have to work. But day care isn't primarily for single moms. According to the Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector, "Nearly 80 percent of the preschool children using any form of day care come from married-couple families with two-income earners." And women married to men up and down the income scale avail themselves of day care-it's not necessarily an economics-driven choice. It is odd indeed that so many mothers are supposedly forced into the workforce when American society is so much richer than in the 1950s, an "affluent society" that would seem hopelessly penurious today.