Toward the end of her new book, Making Motherhood Work, Washington University sociologist Caitlyn Collins observes that the mothers she interviews in Italy often complain about having “no help from anyone.” When pressed, however, it turns out these working moms have extensive help, both from their extended families as well as from low-wage immigrant laborers who clean their homes and help care for their children. In other words, there are certain things these mothers take for granted, because in their country, these things are the norm.
In America, too, there are certain things working mothers take for granted. So, it turns out, does the author. She describes how some of the mothers she interviewed in D.C. decided to quit their jobs when they had a child and then found a new job when they wanted to return to work a year later. Others kept working full time or worked out more flexible arrangements with their employers or worked part time. In Italy, by contrast, with an unemployment rate three times as high as America’s, the idea that a middle-class woman can simply switch jobs or quit one and expect to find another easily is far-fetched.
While Collins criticizes aspects of the Italian system, there is, in her mind, pretty much no place worse for working mothers than the U.S. “Every working mom in the U.S. is in dire straits,” she tells us, quoting the rhetoric of Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., as evidence that it’s time for a political revolution on behalf of working mothers.
Collins’ book focuses on only middle-class mothers in the U.S., Germany, Italy, and Sweden. So even if you could reasonably argue her case if it applied to American working-class women making hourly wages in inflexible jobs, the idea that all middle-class working moms in America are in “dire straits” needs some further examination.
For one thing, Collins, who one surmises from statements in the book is not a mother herself, should take the complaints of middle-class working mothers with a grain of salt.
As a working mother, I have witnessed and, yes, even participated in plenty of mommy kvetching sessions such as those Collins records. It’s true that having a sick child or a sick babysitter can demolish the whole house of cards. And yes, sometimes everyone in your house is throwing up, and you blow by a work deadline. And yes, occasionally you miss a school event because of a work trip. But what seems like a catastrophe in the short term is rarely as bad in hindsight.
But wouldn’t it be better to live in Sweden, though? In this working-mother paradise, almost no mom stays at home with her children, so there’s no guilt about going to work. Everyone has reasonable hours, as well as 480 days of paid maternity or paternity leave, with special incentives for sharing it more evenly. And when that’s over, there is high-quality, low-cost child care, not to mention helpful husbands who see gender roles as interchangeable.
Collins acknowledges that the homogeneity of Swedish society makes some of this possible, as does the country’s high tax rates. What she does not dwell on is the glass ceiling this creates for many Swedish women. Spending a year or two out of the labor market has consequences for women’s job skills and makes it harder for career advancement when they come back. They are more likely to succeed in public sector jobs, which, thanks to a lack of profit motive, are more relaxed about productivity. But when it comes to rising through the ranks, women in America are more likely to be managers than their Nordic counterparts.
Which would actually be fine with a lot of working American mothers, who tend to respond in surveys that they would prefer to work part time more than they are able to. But for unabashed feminists such as Collins, the Swedish ideal should be worrisome because it does not encourage ambitious women, either mothers or nonmothers, to pursue work with the kind of drive that would get them to the top in a global economy. Collins describes how, when an Australian company took over a Swedish one, the women had to find ways to explain to overseas bosses why they were leaving at 3 or 4 p.m. each day.
However, this curbing of ambition is exactly what bothers Collins about American working mothers and a system that has each woman make decisions for herself. How many hours a day can I devote to my family? How many can I devote to work? These are hard choices. Collins seems to think we shouldn’t have to make them, and is even annoyed that mothers in each of her research sites have “accepted the prevailing discourse that they had to dedicate intensive time and energy toward their children.”
If by “prevailing discourse” she means some combination of biological impulses and common sense, then yes, we’ve accepted the prevailing discourse. No matter what country you live in, working motherhood requires trade-offs. Even in Sweden, they only have 24 hours in a day.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Be the Parent, Please: Stop Banning Seesaws and Start Banning Snapchat.
