It Takes a Village (20 page)

In many cases, AmeriCorps members are filling needs that no other organization or government agency can meet. In Simpson County, Kentucky, for example, they have helped to raise the reading scores of more than a third of the county's second graders by an average of two or more grade levels in a single year, recruiting more than two hundred parents to join in the effort. In Texas, Iowa, and Idaho, AmeriCorps members have helped to immunize hundreds of thousands of children who might otherwise have remained beyond the reach of state health authorities. In Kansas City, a team of AmeriCorps members has worked with the police department to close down more than two dozen crack houses and set up a score of neighborhood watch groups.

 

P
ROGRAMS LIKE
AmeriCorps offer a socially meaningful transition from childhood to adulthood. They also offer a model for bridging private charity and government programs that we can all learn from. It was these rewards—material as well as spiritual, collective as well as individual—that a group of seventeen religious leaders emphasized recently when they asked Congress to support AmeriCorps because it builds and strengthens the bonds that make community possible.

No matter how well our children learn the ethic of service, there will always be far more needs than individuals or charities can meet. That's why so many charities—some of which depend on a measure of federal support—have objected to suggestions that they can fill the holes in the social safety net left by cuts in social programs, particularly those affecting children. Neither government nor charitable organizations alone can keep the net intact, but working together, they can manage it.

Partnerships between government and the volunteer community are most clearly visible when disaster strikes, as my husband and I have observed firsthand following hurricanes and tornadoes in the South, floods in the Midwest, fires in the Northwest, and earthquakes in the West. Volunteers come alone or with friends, as part of church groups or service clubs, all offering their most precious gift, themselves. Government sends experts to help coordinate relief efforts. In tragic situations such as these, people commit acts of extraordinary compassion and readily overcome what might in ordinary times seem to be great differences.

After the bombing in Oklahoma City, we saw a country united in shock and love. When the first survivors emerged injured and bloody from the federal building, we did not see blacks or whites, Christians or Jews, but fellow human beings and children who might have been our own. Fire and police officers, medical crews, and emergency workers who put their own lives in jeopardy in their search for survivors did not pick and choose whom they would rescue; every life was valued and worth fighting to save.

Why does it take a crisis to open our eyes and hearts to our common humanity? As my husband said in his 1995 State of the Union address: “If you go back to the beginning of this country, the great strength of America, as de Tocqueville pointed out when he came here a long time ago, has always been our ability to associate with people who were different from ourselves and to work together to find common ground. And in this day, everybody has a responsibility to do more of that. We simply cannot wait for a tornado, a fire, or a flood to behave like Americans ought to behave in dealing with one another.”

Men and women acting selflessly in the midst of tragedy remind us what really counts. They also remind Americans of our fundamental goodness, and of the essential strength of our nation. No democracy has survived as long or tried as hard to live up to its ideals. Nowhere on earth do so diverse a people live and work side by side every day, and for the most part get along so well.

Children can be our conscience, and the agents of the changes that are needed, if we don't burden them with stereotypes. If we teach them affirmative thinking and feeling, they will learn to live affirmatively—to measure their own lives by the good they do, not just for themselves but for all their fellow villagers.

B
oth of my parents loved sports. My father would stand in front of our house and throw a football to my brothers and me as we ran pass patterns around the elm trees. My mother hit thousands of tennis balls over the net, trying in vain to make worthy opponents of us. Each of them spent summer weekends hitting fly balls for us to field, teaching us to dive, and trying to interest us in golf. (At least they succeeded with my brothers on that one.) My father was focused on our excelling and winning, while my mother wanted us to have fun and get exercise.

Both my parents also cooked. My mother prepared by far the bulk of our daily meals, but most Saturday nights my father made up his special hamburgers. He also had a knack for soups and grilling. My brothers and I did not think it odd that our mother could hit a fastball or that our father could cook. Even within their apparently traditional marriage, we saw each doing things that didn't fit the stereotypes.

More than twenty years ago, when I was working for the Carnegie Council on Children, I heard the trailblazing social philosophers Erik Erikson and Erich Fromm discuss the different roles mothers and fathers traditionally played in bringing up children. From listening to them, I concluded that the conventional parental roles could be summed up by saying that men typically acted as breadwinners and rulemakers, while women were homemakers and caregivers.

What struck me even then was that there are many variations on the traditional parental division of labor that have worked over time and are working today. But it remains true that raising children, like most important work in our society, requires a constellation of skills and perspectives. Children deserve the benefit of what society has traditionally considered to be male and female traits and skills to meet their physical, emotional, and intellectual needs, and to offer them models for a range of human behaviors.

Even in the best of circumstances, it is difficult for any one of us to raise children alone. And when single parents try, they have to perform roles outside their usual repertoire, or get others to take on those roles. Even families with two parents rely on the village for functions that are beyond their scope.

Yet as obvious as it is that children's needs exceed what any individual or pair of individuals can provide, society continues to characterize child rearing as “women's work.” Even when women with children share the breadwinner and rulemaker roles with their husbands, they almost always bear the primary—and disproportionate—responsibility for caregiving and homemaking. One of the greatest gifts we can give our children is the awareness that these roles can and should be shared more fairly and flexibly. In the meantime, stereotypes about women's roles persist.

A recent study done by a University of Michigan psychologist purports to show that young women are exhibiting more “masculine” behavior because they are becoming more assertive, ambitious, and self-confident, while young men are not exhibiting more “feminine” behavior like expressing empathy and caring. Why not consider all these to be human behaviors that both men and women display, depending on their particular temperaments and circumstances?

Is a mother who is assertive or ambitious on behalf of her children or husband acting “feminine,” while a mother who is ambitious and assertive on behalf of her own career or a public issue she cares about acting “masculine”? Is a father who rocks a crying baby or soothes a teenager's hurt feelings “feminine,” while a father who refuses to comfort either child “masculine”? Sometimes we fall into the trap of sexual stereotyping as we grapple with new ways of articulating our changing experiences and responsibilities.

We like to think we've come a long way from the limited range of roles that were considered “proper” for each gender in the past. Most of the women my mother knew stayed home because society expected them to, and they aligned their own expectations with society's, even if they wished they had different choices.

Some of us can recall an aunt who longed to go to college, a grandmother who kept voluminous journals she showed to no one, a female cousin with a head for figures. Much of the fiction written by and about women over the centuries contains an undercurrent of disappointment, dissatisfaction, or simple wistfulness about roads not taken. Part of the reason girls of every generation who read
Little Women
identify with Jo March is that they see her as unafraid to take action on her own behalf, to turn away from a predictable path and chart her own course.

In fact, many women defied convention in the past, by choice or necessity. All through our nation's history, women have worked outside the home as well as in it. Even during the 1950s, plenty of women with and without children were working in factories, offices, schools, and other people's homes. But because these women's lives did not match the conventional image, their work remained largely invisible. Often the official portrait of American life has omitted the diversity of women's experience as well as their needs and desires.

 

W
HEN
I look back on my childhood, I see how my mother and my girlfriends' mothers worked to push open doors of opportunity for us. They supported our academic and athletic pursuits and ferried us to and from lessons and practices. They held us to high standards, even if they spoke of their aspirations for us mostly in terms of their wanting us to do well enough in school so that we could go to college or get training for a job that could provide a good living if we had to support ourselves.

Perhaps because my mother's background dimmed her own prospects for higher education, she was more outspoken in her support of me. From the very beginning she believed that her greatest responsibility to me was getting me prepared to make the choices that were right for my life, even if they weren't the ones she would have—or could have—made. She shared my dismay when, at fourteen, I wrote to NASA asking how I might become an astronaut, only to be told that women were not being considered for the job (a policy I was delighted to see changed eventually).

It wasn't that the mothers I knew growing up did not want to be full-time homemakers and caregivers. Their dedication and discipline reflected how important they considered those roles to be. But they had the wisdom to know that the years devoted to childrearing come to an end, and that divorce or the death of a spouse can leave women on their own, with decades of productive life ahead. And they saw—as their daughters came to see more clearly—that the larger society gave more lip service than real respect or reward to their efforts to nurture families and communities. Because of them, the women's movement, and increasing economic pressures, more and more women began to take up paid work that the marketplace valued: “men's work.”

As with any major societal shift, there have been trade-offs and unanticipated consequences for both women and men. The struggle to give work and family the time and attention they need can be emotionally as well as physically exhausting. By and large, however, as columnist Ellen Goodman observes, “Women still see their lives as better than their mothers'. This is the generation that has traded depression for stress—not a wholly bad bargain. They have more options and more power as well as more obligations.”

Goodman's observation is supported by the findings of a 1994 survey of more than 250,000 working women of every income level, job category, and family status, conducted by the Women's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor. Their responses, which Vice President Gore and I presented and discussed in a public forum, are detailed in a report, “Working Women Count!” For working women with children at home, the number one issue was the struggle to integrate work and family and to find and pay for decent child care. A working mother from Milwaukee spoke for thousands of women when she wrote: “Between balancing home and work and job, you always feel like you are doing four things at one time. You're doing your job but you're thinking about what you are going to cook for supper and who is going to pick up the kids.” The women's descriptions of their lives are peppered with words like “hectic,” “tough,” “hard,” and “rough.” Many women said they were tired all the time.

Mothers working outside the home believe their employers could be more understanding about children's illnesses and doctor's appointments. They say they need expanded leave policies to care for children or ailing relatives, but many note that they cannot afford to sacrifice pay for long or at all. In general, women in lower-paid jobs found their workplaces less family-friendly and flexible than women in executive and management positions.

Before I had Chelsea, I noticed that in all the offices where I worked, most of the female workers began whispering into their phones every afternoon at around three o'clock. Finally, it dawned on me that they were making sure their children arrived home from school safely and were doing their homework or whatever else they were supposed to be doing. They whispered because they felt they might be penalized for carrying out their family obligations.

Underlying all the survey responses was a familiar refrain: women believe that their work contributions and responsibilities are undervalued, including their responsibilities to children. They know how hard they work for their families, and they believe that other sectors of society, including their employers, should do more to help. Their concern for the well-being of children fuels their opinions on broader issues and their desire to be heard. As the report notes, “They care deeply about their jobs, their co-workers, their workplaces, and the state of the national economy.”

Although the personal demands on women are heavy, they take pride in their contribution to the family's income, and eight out of ten respondents say they “love” or “like” their jobs. But they are not stereotypes—neither “upbeat super-moms that unequivocally love their jobs and never have a problem or a hair out of place” nor the equally stereotypical “angst-ridden women so torn apart by competing demands that they return to the home” or “driven career women who give up their personal lives to ‘make it' in the world of men.” They are responsible adults with real lives and real needs, including the need to contribute according to their talents and abilities and to be granted the assistance that will enable them to do a good job at work and at home.

The survey responses are a reminder that we still haven't broken the mold—or, more accurately, broken the mold that makes the molds, the mechanism that insists on forcing complicated needs and desires into neat little boxes. Are we “career women” or “stay-at-home moms,” “traditionalists” or “new traditionalists”?

The attempt to attach labels to our lives takes us backward. Whenever we pose women's options as an “either/ or” choice—most commonly between work and family—we do a disservice all around. In earlier generations, we lost artists, doctors, and engineers. My generation lost good mothers and dedicated community volunteers among women who did not see a way to combine their work life with making a home or nurturing a family. We are fond of saying that women “juggle” work, marriage, children, and myriad other obligations. I used the phrase too, until author and scholar Mary Catherine Bateson pointed out that when you juggle, eventually something gets dropped.

Now I prefer the metaphor of composing that Bateson illuminates in
Composing a Life
—making something beautiful, like a patchwork quilt, of the elements we choose. Perhaps it would be easier if the stuff of our lives were cut from a uniform social and familial pattern, even if the cloth is not the pattern we would have designed for ourselves. Easier maybe, but not so beautiful or well suited to our particular needs, desires, and circumstances.

 

T
HE FOOLISHNESS
of stereotyping was brought home to me when I was a young lawyer but not yet a mother. I was asked by a client, an insurance company, to attend on its behalf a juvenile court hearing at which two brothers, ages ten and twelve, were to appear because they were accused of vandalizing a neighbor's house.

I will never forget the mother of the boys as she testified on their behalf. Fierce as a lioness defending her cubs, she denied—in the face of overwhelming evidence—that her sons were the vandals. They couldn't be, she explained, because she had quit work and stayed home to raise them. (That was the first time I really understood the meaning of the saying “Denial ain't just a river in Egypt”!)

Pitting stay-at-home moms against work-outside-of-the-home moms makes everyone a loser. There is no magic formula for raising children. You will find successes and failures among parents who do the work of staying home with their kids and among those who leave home to go to work. What makes the difference is whether parents have the competence and commitment to give children what they need for healthy development.

It is time for us to make our peace with the past. We can begin by taking care not to denigrate the roles of women as mothers and homemakers and by not jumping to conclusions about the mothering skills of women who work outside the home. I suggest that, in private and in public, we stop paying lip service to motherhood and start giving parents—men as well as women—the physical, financial, and emotional support they need to raise children well.

As I said in my speech at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, “We need to understand that there is no formula for how women should lead their lives. That is why we must respect the choices that each woman makes for herself and her family. Every woman deserves the chance to realize her God-given potential.”