Sock Season

Chilly in the morning, abandoned by noon.

No Happy Harmony, pt. 1

New neighbor

I've seen a few mom blogs commenting on Elizabeth Corey's article, "No Happy Harmony," in the latest First Things. Corey seems to have accurately described how the work/family tension appears and feels to a lot of well-educated, conservative women in a fair and non-judgy way. I certainly could have been one of the female students in Corey's office, puzzling over what to do with my talents and interests that don't seem to be of use to the stay-at-home mom.

Corey organizes her piece around a set of dichotomies: on the one side, she places work, career, self-cultivation, achievement, excellence; on the other is home, mothering, self-giving, leisure, nurturing. The one (but crucial!) point at which she veers from what historians have called the ideology of "separate spheres" is, of course, to give women a place in both spheres, rather than adding the additional paired dichotomy of man and woman. This seems to me to be what has, in fact, happened, historically: the line between the sexes that used to divide the world into a public and private realm now cuts through the heart of every mother.

Corey is right, on current terms, there simply is no happy harmony between these two poles: "...this quest for balance, the desire to reconcile radically conflicting demands, is misguided. Work and family evoke from us two distinct modes of being and of relations to others. The conflicts between these modes cannot, if we are honest with ourselves, be wished away or ignored."

But are those two poles "natural"? I'm not convinced that "work and family" by essence "evoke from us two distinct modes of being and of relations to others," even if they do in twenty-first century America by (historical) accident. Parts of each side of the dichotomy may be inevitable, but others divisions are only made to look natural by association. Parsing out which is which is, of course, the tricky part. And the fun part - at least for the achievement-challenged ex-grad student!