Anna Louie Sussman, a liberal writer at the New York Times, agrees it would be good to help women have more kids, because women want more kids than they’re having. She is also understandably creeped out by some efforts to push up the birth rate.
“The mayor of a city in southwest Russia encouraged men to ‘sneak up on their women so that 10,000 children will be born in exactly nine months,’” Sussman reported.
In a New York Times op-ed, she argues that most pro-natalism is a clueless reinforcement of the patriarchy. Russian ideas and American GOP ideas, such as a $5,000 birth bonus, she writes, “fail to demonstrate even a passing familiarity with the lives and concerns of modern women.”
So Sussman sets out in this essay to educate us on the “lives and concerns of modern women.” Read her piece carefully, though, and you realize that her idea of “modern women” is a very particular one: The type of woman who would rather not have anything to do with a man.
The first tell is that this Father’s Day article about parenting doesn’t include the word father.
Then, when she talks about fertility rates falling short of aspirations, she says it boils down to two questions: “What is it that is making this hard for women right now? And how do we solve those things?”
I agree these questions are great, but it’s odd that men are totally excluded from the calculus. Women are obviously the gatekeepers when it comes to sex and babymaking, but men still do play a role, both in the procreative act and in the raising of most children. Ignoring men is ignoring some significant portion of the baby bust’s causes and possible solutions.
When not ignoring husbands and fathers, Sussman attacks them.
Check out this odd passage: “Women are unlikely to willingly cede their newly won educational gains, financial independence and reproductive autonomy, no matter how loudly policymakers insist that what women actually want is eight children, a useless husband and a medal from the government.”
That’s one of two passages in which the word “husband” appears in this fatherless Father’s Day piece. Here’s the other: “Despite women’s growing earning power, they still do the lion’s share of housework, even when their husbands are unemployed.”
The study Sussman linked to made this conclusion: “The female breadwinner does more home production than the non-breadwinning male partner.”
Thus, the dismissal of husbands today as “useless”: Even without the excuse that they are bringing home the bacon, men just laze about the house.
But there are a few interesting details here. First, the data in that study include only some housework: “cooking, cleaning, and interior maintenance and decoration.” Splitting firewood, mowing lawns, power-washing the sidewalk, cleaning out the gutters, and pruning the crape myrtles do not count, in this calculus, as housework.
Second, the particular knock against men in this paper has nothing to do with child care. The cited paper basically sets aside child care because the slacking by non-breadwinner husbands was not a driving factor in the “toxic gender dynamics” the paper unearthed.
Taking care of the yard? You’re being useless. Taking the kids to the zoo? You may still be a useless husband. Tutoring Susie in math or field hockey? What about the dishes?
Dads today spend a lot more time taking care of their kids than our dads spent with us. Those children who have present fathers do a lot better than those who don’t. These facts undermine Sussman’s claims that marriages today are plagued with “toxic gender dynamics.”
Sussman doesn’t discount the importance of caring for children — she actually values child care very highly. “The most woman-friendly and birth-friendly regime I have come across so far is in Denmark, where child care is subsidized,” she writes. When she lays out her own policy priorities, “affordable child care” is her very first item.
So, how is it very valuable for a government to subsidize paid child care, and for formal child care to be affordable, but not terribly useful for dads to be schlepping the kids to the zoo?
The words “autonomy” and “independence” throughout the op-ed give a clue. So do the references to in vitro fertilization and reproductive technology. The vision of “modern women” in this Father’s Day piece is a vision of women liberated from men. Women will be free, in this vision, when they can form and raise a family without needing to rely on men.
As pro-natalist visions go, that’s just as out-of-touch with the needs of women as the weirdest Russian ideas.