Telling Women's Lives

Moriarty “Unfinished Business” Reader Response

My greatest takeaway from “Unfinished Business” was the necessity of establishing a symbiotic relationship between competition and care. As a society, we view these two crucial pillars of existence as mutually exclusive. The runner who stops to extend a hand to a fallen competitor does not win the race; the fraternity brother who develops deep feelings for a girl is “soft”; the executive who steps down from a coveted White House foreign policy position is “leaning out.” But by allowing our mindset to continually be governed by praise for “winning” and scorn for “caring,” we are persistently underestimating the value “caring” adds to our society. My mother—a woman with business and law degrees from two top universities and former Wall Street Journal reporter—always used to say (half-jokingly, half-bitterly) during her days of commuting into New York that she worked two jobs. One as a lawyer for which she was paid, the other as a mother—both more time-intensive and taxing—for which she was not. Why do we continue to undervalue the act of caregiving—a field that is perhaps more demanding than any paying job and adds more value to society than any corporation, law firm or government bureau? “Behind every successful man,” as the saying goes, “there is a woman called mother.” In all of the tasks that we perceive as negligible—the late night algebra homework assistance, the midday runs to the grocery store, the loads of laundry, the cheers from the seats of a school auditorium– women are developing our society’s reserves of human capital. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a person cannot reach the ultimate goal of self-actualization until his physiological (food, water, warmth, rest), safety, belonging and love (intimate relationships/ friendships) and esteem (feeling of accomplishment) needs have been met. While male primary breadwinners may support this hierarchy of needs in certain aspects—earning they money to provide food and housing, for example—mothers disproportionately assume the brunt of the responsibility. Every 5:00 scramble to put dinner on the table, every intimate pre-bedtime talk, every post of an “A” paper on the refrigerator door—moves a child on his or her way to becoming the lawyer that puts a criminal in jail, or the entrepreneur with a new invention, or a doctor who discovers the cure to cancer. Reassigning value to the role of the homemaker rather than subordinating these equally vital responsibilities will not only acknowledge the reality of the sustaining factors behind our society, but also increase our respect for the “caregiver” so that men can feel as equally important in this role as they do in the corner office.