Laments About Working Women: Can Common-Sense Prevail?

Vigeland Park, Oslo, Norway

The amusing and deeply traditional G. K. Chesterton asserted, over 100 years ago, in What's Wrong With The World, that the world's rotation in optimal fashion absolutely depends on half the population (guess who??) devoting itself altruistically so that the other half can interact with the world, i.e., work outside the home.

Chesterton was quite bright, so a pillar of his argumentation was that this made sense because women were simply by nature.... better, i.e., capable of this immense sacrifice.

In this century, we are still exposed to avalanches of opinion (or, in some parts of the globe-coercions) regarding this issue: Biology, Economics, Developmental Psychopathology...all kidnapped out of their much greater and complex contexts into sound bites to continue arguing, at a noticable level, for the logic of a simpler division of labor: women at the hearth & men at the helm.

You think I'm exaggerating? I don't think so.

Check out this weekend's NY Times Sunday Book Review of Alison Wolf's "XX Factor": A comprehensive (if biased) Chestertonian argument -ostensibly based on Economics-that.... highly educated women are a brewing menace.

It would be nice to move on to a more evidenced-base phase of argumentation.

Here are some well established findings to start with:

1-Children have similar developmental outcomes in a variety of care settings, with quality of care a very important factor.

2-Children do better when attached securely to their parents. This takes attunement/parenting mindfulness regardless of whether a parent works or not.

3-We are biological beings, similar to our animal cousins...however, have evolved much less constrained behavioral repertoires in many key endeavors (e.g., food, relationships and...work, if work is at core a survival enterprise). This, in fact, is one the characteristics of being human.

If indeed there is an economic argument to be made, dividing the population by gender makes less sense than dividing it by personality, aspiration, drive.

So, let's have more intelligent arguments, shall we?

Till Later,

Anne