Photographic still from the “The Good Wife” showing Alicia (Julianna Margulies) taken by John Paul Filo/CBS ©2009 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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The hot new CBS series The Good Wife tells the story of a political wife who returns to practicing law after her husband gets caught toe-sucking and stealing. The show is one of several recent cultural nods of approval to women going back to work. Old-time comeback broads have been making a sneaky return on the big screen, what with the incomparable Meryl Streep as both Anna Wintour and Julia Child in two terrific movies. In the New York Times, we read stories about the struggling sippy cup crowd trading their sandals for stilettos; compare them to Lisa Belkin’s famed “Opt Out Revolution” article six years ago. And on reality TV, iconic supermom Kate Gosselin tries to support the family by filming a pilot for “The View for working moms.”
For more than two decades, educated American women (who are the only ones with a real choice about whether to work or not) were fed a pretty steady diet of tales of the joys of hearth and home. Remember Newsweek’s announcement that (all together now) a 40-year-old woman was more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to find a husband, and by extension a family? In the 1987 movie Baby Boom, Diane Keaton left her job as an advertising executive and went home to Vermont to tend to her dead cousin’s baby. To be sure, no trend is perfectly consistent—1992, after all, was the “Year of the Woman” election in which we stood in solidarity with Anita Hill. But most of the time, the stay-at-home hits kept on coming. Pepsi’s female CEO quits to stay home with her family. She has baby hunger. Other reasons not to work: Toxic nannies. Saintly husbands. Diaper-free toilet training. It was probably predictable that someone would suggest, as Belkin did in 2003, that all this quitting and mothering was actually a new version of feminism—a revolution, no less.
But now back to work looks like a candidate for the new black. What happened?
The economic downturn is a candidate. The American Prospect’s Dana Goldstein reads The Good Wife as an object lesson in the danger of separating one’s self from secure paid work. As labor economist Heather Boushey told me recently, the recession’s impact on families highlights the importance of women’s wages. And there is some statistical evidence that since the economy tanked, women are staying at or going back to work after a period of reduced labor force participation.
Linda Hirshman writes "The Princess" column for Double X and is the author of Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World. Before she retired, she taught Philosophy and Women’s Studies at Brandeis University.
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Sure, women *should* make their own decisions...
By: risatrix | Sun, 09/27/2009 - 12:23
I agree women shouldn't listen to fairytales of any sort -- but (as certain types delight in telling us) people should also be making responsible decisions about their own money/health/etc. More often than not, they don't.
Until every individual in the world is making thoughtful choices, social pressure (via pop culture) is a powerful force. Enough cultural propaganda will make people "choose" things they haven't really thought about deeply.
For this reason, I think part of the solution needs to be more women participating in the creation this culture, making sure "The Good Wife" isn't just a passing trend. Why shouldn't there be more stories showing returning-to-work women in a positive light?
We'll know we're doing OK when a woman can get away with she regrets not being with her children as much as she would like -- but not apologizing for her career, either. Obama did this on Father's Day. I have yet to see it happen for a female politician.
Hirshman is right
By: Connie Boyd | Fri, 09/25/2009 - 18:25
My first reaction to the Lisa Belkin “Opt-Out Revolution” piece in the Times was, “So what? Who cares what this tiny group of rich women do?” But then I read Hirshman’s book, Get to Work, and I changed my mind. Hirshman convincingly makes the case that these privileged women are in a better position than the rest of us to effect the major changes that hostile, sarcastic commenter Madeline seems to call for in her response to this doublex article.
Women are such ding-dongs!
By: Madeline H | Fri, 09/25/2009 - 14:21
Hirshman's got it right: women are such ding-dongs! The way workin' gals fall for tales of hearth and home, trade in their power suits for French terry yoga pants, and spend day after day following kids (and cultural trends!). But what do you expect when, as Hirshman points out, we ladies use tabloids and TV shows for career counseling and long-term financial planning. (Rielle Hunter ... a cautionary tale we'll be telling our daughters and our daughters' daughters, because THAT'S never happened before.)
Three cheers for that cold-bucket of recession dumped on our heads! Or more powerfully -- hour-long dramas. Had it not been for "The Good Wife" we'd all be turning circles wondering how we were going to keep the beach house, once our sugar-daddies lost their jobs/hooked up with a younger woman. Go back to the firm! We'll just go back to the firm!
Why, oh, why did we ever leave the firm in the first place? Six weeks maternity leave, in hindsight, would have been plenty -- such greed and, let's get real, laziness, to have convinced ourselves we needed more time off with the babies (and paid, ha! You get paid to work, people).
How could we have passed up all of those opportunities to work part-time when the baby was young? Who cares if 40 hours constituted part-time ... so skip a few lunches, you know?
Dr. Hirshman's always had her finger on the pulse of this opt-out beast, whose prognosis, she tells us, isn't good (nevermind that there really wasn't a revolution, etc., etc., and that the only non-fiction accounts her prognosis is based on are of two women who weren't mothers). Still, who isn't looking forward to laying this opt-out thing to rest? It's time to quit all this bitching about paid leave, more flexibility, and decent childcare options -- suck it up like they do in the movies and get back to work.