Telling Women's Lives

Unfinished Business – Hannah Lafferrandre

I was struck by Anne Marie Slaughter’s call for the elevation of child care as a profession. This idea can be summed up in the quote “We should think about paid care work, from home health service to therapy to teaching, the same way we think about any other profession, including money management.” Slaughter thinks that childcare is just as noble a profession as any other, but in general, that is not the view held by society. If one parent stays at home, and another works, the one that goes to the office is viewed as doing the more important, vital, or taxing work. However, there is a stigma that goes both ways. The mother that stays at home are looked down upon by the working mothers, and the working mothers are regarded as uncaring, bad mothers by the stay at home moms. On a very basic level, there is an issue of women not supporting each other. My mom stayed at home, and although I never saw women regard her with scorn, some of my friends with working mothers asked me “what does she do all day?” I instantly felt the need to embellish her accomplishments and defend her busy schedule. Of course, not all women are like this, and I would argue that this behavior stems from the legacy of society’s disapproval of them throughout history, and the expectation of perfection in appearance, household tasks, child rearing, and now professional accomplishments.

But Slaughter notes that it is not just the stigma that needs adjustment; there needs to be an actual pay increase in care workers because right now they are being paid minimal wages. But if their pay increases, that means that low to middle class women in the work force will not be able to pay for child care. It is in the interest of lower income women to keep the wages of child care workers low. Cynically, I don’t see how this increase in pay is possible. It is much easier for me to grapple with societal reform than economic.

Unfinished Business- Eric Gorzeman

Revisiting Anne Marie Slaughter’s work, which we read at the beginning of the semester is an interesting read. This time, I felt as though I was able to read her work using a lens and see a lot of the different issues she raised in an alternative perspective. I believe that the final chapter, where Slaughter is suggesting improvements and benefits to our society as a whole is the most interesting chapter because we get to read through and dissect her suggestions. The suggestion to provide subsidized and affordable child care is one of my favorites. We have already seen child care work in other countries such as Norway and Germany to a degree, and providing such care here in the United States would allow equal opportunity for parents to still pursue their careers while being able to raise a family. Another important concept that Slaughter raised, was this work-obsession “workaholism”. Americans work longer than many of their European counterparts and have less time off than many of them too. There’s this idea in America that somehow perpetrated from the American dream, that if you work hard it will pay off and you will be successful. If you want to reach the top, you need to be a workaholic in our culture, rather than a real leader. However, in other countries such as Japan, we work far fewer hours than they do on average. I believe that America needs to find a balance between work hours and time off, and I am not sure we have found that balance yet.

Unfinished Business – Luke Vith

When reading Unfinished Business I was constantly becoming more aware of the issues we have talked about in class at a more tangible level. Throughout the book I was shown various examples of how women are treated unequally throughout the workforce. While reading it I was constantly thinking of ways to correct these problems and when I finally reached the final chapter it was interesting to see how Slaughter thought the best way to go about change. With her public policy ideas such as high quality and affordable child care subsidized by the government I thought that this was one of the most realistic ideas we have been presented with so far this semester. I agree with her on the fact that we need to change the workspace to support caregivers as well as employees. This is essential to an individuals life. In many companies, which we have seen over and over again this semester, often times employees (especially women) are expected to forgo family life in order to work. This is a stigma and overarching idea that I think Slaughter is trying to get rid of. However, in order for this to happen the policy changes must come into effect first. With her idea of making this available at all wage levels it would help women who are working in service jobs all the way up to high profile business women. This would ensure equal treatment to all women regardless of social status or income. The availability to all working women would be essential to unite working women across the board and therefore solve this problem as a large group rather than many small ones at different incomes.

Unfinished Business- Jessica Jordan

I enjoyed revisiting Anne-Marie Slaughter in Unfinished Business now that I have a bit more WGS knowledge. First, I appreciated how at the beginning, Slaughter recognized her experience is completely different than other women’s. She was able to step out of her own perspective, yet still try to make overarching insights that applied to our culture, rather than simply applying to the fast-paced career oriented women. One prevalent issue Slaughter raised is our views on caregiving in our society, for both the elderly and our children. She expressed her familiar view- that women can’t have it all- not because we are not capable, but because of the way society has constructed the roles for males and females. She explained how the male who leaves his family for a fast-paced and time consuming job is doing his duty as the husband, while the female takes over as the lead caregiver. People don’t think twice about these roles- they have been ingrained in our minds as “natural”. Instead, we think it’s odd when the male is lead caregiver at home, while also criticizing women who stop working to focus on their families. It seems we have created this unhealthy system of criticizing the mothers who leave their children while also criticizing the mothers who stop working to care for their children, when really we should be considering the reasons why females make these choices. Slaughter explored these concepts in her book and shed valuable insight on the caregiving attitudes in our society.

Unfinished Business Reader Response – Adam Dailey

Ann Marie Slaughter’s perspective on raising a family as a primary caregiver is hugely valuable and insightful within the larger context of our society. This is a difficult conversation to add any original thought to other than your own opinion, and while it may have been said before I had never heard the assertion that women had to leave the home by emulating men in their search for autonomy and success. It is widely accepted now within Western society that women are capable of doing men’s work, but the incredibly important act of raising a child is still essentially seen as a cop-out from a legitimate career.
A men’s movement for greater autonomy as a lead parent would be a huge step forward in terms of equality for both genders — it would help to further legitimize the act of parenting as a full-time commitment, as well as give stay at home fathers the credit they deserve without any judgment from society.

What Unfinished business is trying to do is to start a new conversation, and it is one that is inherently valuable and important for us to talk about as we begin another chapter of social development and acceptance. In that regard, I think that Slaughter’s book succeeded hugely.

Unfinished Business – Madison Woodruff

I truly appreciated that Unfinished Business ends with a way we can solve these issues through public policy changes. As of now, as a woman, I am consistently told that I have to choose one or the other with family and career. I can strive to have it all, but inequality exists and that’s something I have to accept. Sometimes I’m told I can have it all if I work twice as hard as a man. More often than not, this issue is presented and women are offered internal or individual way to combat this issue, but we are rarely offered ways the system can change. Policy change is essentially the only way that the system can be entirely changed and this has often been ignored. This book presents tangible policies that can actually allow women to have both career and family. Offering that affordable and high quality child care be provided for anyone that needs it is an excellent way of allowing women to stay in the work force instead of feeling financial pressures to stay home with the children to avoid paying for child care. While I think this is essential for any career one may have, I also think that there must be a shift in mindset. There is often a negative stigma around sending your kid to child care instead of raising them yourself. While policy may be the first step, a change in culture is also necessary for a successful balance to be possible.

Gormley: “Unfinished Business” Reader Response

One Issue raised in Unfinished Business that I found interesting was in part 2, chapter 6: “The next phase of the Women’s movement is a men’s movement.” I found this to be particularly interesting because I had never thought about the pro-feminism movement in regards to boys. It seems valid to point out that boys are generally not being brought up with the same amount of encouragement for different future life roles as women are. Where girls are now, increasingly, being brought up in a world where they are encouraged to do whatever it is they want to do, whether it be a stay at home mom or an engineer, boys are still being brought up under only masculine values for the most part. This section of the book pointed out that for equality to be achieved, boys and girls alike should be brought up with the same set of universal encouragement so that when these boys grow into adult men, they don’t hinder the progress of women by feeling as though they need to be the one that has a high paying and important job, even if they would rather be spending more time with their families. This cultural norm makes it harder for women to advance professionally if the men in their life have beliefs that they have to have a more important job and earn more money than their wives. If there was a cultural shift in which both boys and girls were brought up believing that having a big time corporate job or being an excellent stay at home parent are equally important, I think men and women would both be left in happier positions in which they can both serve the role they would prefer without any internal feelings if shortcoming and without any external societal pressures of the different roles in which men and women “should” serve.

Kailen Gore: Unfinished Business Reader Response

I found a quote in one of the first sections of the book to be very interesting. It’s the following: “It’s human nature to absorb the values and practices of the system that we survived and succeeded in and to demand that others make it the same way.” Slaughter says this in response to that ‘someone’ who has a female boss who is less sensitive toward family-work conflict, than the male bosses of the same office. I understand the point that she is trying to make. Everyone, not just men, wants other people to work just as hard to reach the same milestones. However, I think to say that it’s human nature, as if it’s a general intrinsic way to handle high positons, is mostly false. I don’t want to believe that that is every female leader’s first line of thinking when it comes to how she treats the women under her. I think, if anything besides just a difference in leadership style, a female leader would be less accommodating to family issues either because of the timely needs of the company. I think there are multiple ways to approach high positions and I don’t think that my subconscious goal would be to make other people work just as much as I do. This may be coming from the fact that I’m used to being the person who takes 3 days to do something that most students only take 3 hours to do. I don’t really care about what other people are doing to get to where they want to go. If they get to where I am without doing as much work as I did, that’s good for them. I can only do the best that I can, and at the same time, there will always be someone out there who’s better than me. So there’s no point in me getting frustrated by those kinds of things.

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.

Unfinished Business Reader Response

One issue in the book, Unfinished Business that came up in the eighth chapter, “Change the Way You Talk” that is subtle but significant is how the small, structural cues of our language can have large implications on how women and men are viewed. For example, before reading this book, I thought Miss and Ms. were the same but spelled differently. I never even thought about how the way women are addressed—”Mrs.” vs. “Miss”—solely depends on whether or not she is married, whereas men are just called “Mr.” either way. Now, from reading the book, I know that “Ms.” and “Miss” have an important distinction because “Ms.” addresses a woman as herself, not in relation to her marital status. As Slaughter points out, this difference may seem trivial, but it has an impact, on how we interact with people of different genders.

Slaughter also talks about her law professors who deliberately changed gender messages by using the pronoun “she” when mentioning a judge, doctor, or engineer. This year, I have also noticed my professors switching off between “he” and “she” when talking about examples. My philosophy professor last semester switched off between “she” and “he” both in examples of general people or in examples of philosophers. It felt weird to hear a philosopher described as “she” because all of the philosophers we studied (except for one) were male. Similarly, my art history class last semester, which covered Western Art from the Stone Age to the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the U.S., mentioned a total 2-3 female artists (I know there were more than that! We didn’t even cover the big ones like Georgia O’Keefe or Frida Kahlo). Switching off between “he” and “she” when talking about hypothetical examples of professionals is a step in the right direction, but I think professors do need to work on covering more actual real-life women from their field in class so that women have more than hypothetical female artists and philosophers to look up to.