What if the “jobs at the top” aren’t worth sacrificing 24 hours a day for? Why should “running things” be valued more than a happy daily life?

Maybe women are showing their wisdom in preferring to stay out of the corporate rat race.

We’re all just human beings trying to make the most of our time on the planet. Recognizing and removing the barriers to women in academia is important, and ongoing, and may take several more decades. In the meantime, second-guessing any individual person’s life choices is unhelpful. Whether you’ve quit your job to be a SAHM, opted for adjunct work to find better work-life balance, or hired a live-in nanny to let you focus more on your career, your choices are yours to make and they are valid. We all have different limits, different comfort zones, different levels of ambition, different approaches to parenting, and different externalities. We should support each other, and enjoy the diversity.

There’s a big difference between the folks who say, “I have privilege, how can we make sure everyone has the privilege I have?” and “I have privilege, nobody else should have it.” We should celebrate folks who say the former, and absolutely condemn the latter (as in Historiann’s more recent post on the NYTimes whiny chick).

And I’ll also say, because I’m having a beer while I do some work, and my programs are taking longer than I expected to run, so I’m cranky AND a little less guarded than usual…

The sort of comment that anonymous left is one of the reasons I don’t hang out on feminist blogs.

I’m your natural ally- I’m a professional woman who has benefited from prior generations’ feminism and knows it. I work in a male dominated field so I get frequent- almost daily, really- reminders of how far we have left to go. I’ve thought about what makes it possible for me to enjoy my life as a working mother, and I’m well aware that a lot of that comes down to the money I have- and I think that is wrong. I’m left-leaning and I cast my vote and even occasionally write my congresspeople with an eye towards extending the benefits I’ve received to women in other income brackets.

But apparently, I’m not feminist enough for some of you guys. I am wallowing in privilege and entitlement and I should be… what? Cleaning my own damn toilets? Piously refusing to take my paid FMLA because it is not available to everyone, just to people who work in California for companies that employ at least 50 people? Storming the barricades and yelling loudly to get this fixed? So cowed by my knowledge of the great weight of privilege that I have that I never post any comments?

How does any of that help?

I keep posting because I remember being a grad student and everyone and their freakin’ dog was telling me that I “couldn’t” combine my chosen career with motherhood and that work-life balance was impossible in the sciences. It scared me and almost made me drop out. I had no role models to look at to counter what I was being told- my professors were mostly male. I was the first (and so far) only person in my extended family to get a PhD. Most of my female classmates were saying they weren’t going to have kids or quietly making plans to go into the science-related careers that are perceived as more family-friendly. So I believed what I heard, but for some reason, I stuck it out, anyway. And now, here I sit, happily combining my chosen career with being the mother of two adorable little kids… and I’m so very, very glad that something made me stick it out. So I post to be the counter-voice for other young women who might be where I was 10-15 years ago.

But that viewpoint doesn’t feel welcome on feminist blogs. It seems to me that there is a large subpopulation that is so busy waiting for perfect solutions that they won’t accept the partial progress we have made, and just want to make women like me feel guilty. Well, no thanks, I’m too busy for that.

@Historiann, I appreciate that you and @Nicole defended me. I’m sorry to dump this crankiness here. But I really needed to say it.

In practice, they come and clean my house while I am not there. A lactating cleaner could take her pick of private rooms in which to plug in a pump and take the 15 minute break the law requires. Heck, she could take 30 minutes. I pay a flat rate, not by the hour.

I’ll give you, though, that it is a lot easier to absorb the lost income (FMLA does not cover 100% of income) at my higher income bracket. But it has a cap, so I got a lower percentage of my income covered than a lower income person would have had.

And, not that you care, but I shopped around for a cleaning service that gives its employees paid time off and benefits.

(A)…keeping those women in the paid workforce so that they can climb into positions of real decision-making power can be one way of expanding those rights to more classes of workers. (B)In any case, the male-dominated workplace hasn’t done this for most classes of women workers–so we might as well see what women in power might do.

Taking point “B” first, absolutely. We absolutely might as well see what women and power might do. Let’s do it.

However, point “A” is dicier. Why would professional, power-identified women intuitively/naturally use their hard-fought positions to increase access for lower-status women? I think applying that notion to women (and other minorities) requires expecting some greater mystical insight about their own condition and sisterhood and connectedness and fairness than we would ever expect from men. And, in fact, my own experiences with outsiders who have risen to the top of the inside crowd is that they’re very interested in reaching “down” and mentoring up some individual person who reminds them of themselves…but when it comes to increasing general access to (and therefore decreasing the prestige of) their own positions and organizations, they’re simply not interested.