David Brooks Hates Women

Am I cheating? Whenever I need something to write about, I read Brooks or Will and they always, always provide me with a topic. One of the original purposes of this blog was to critique conservative arguments: to provide a ready guide to explain to your friends why conservative arguments were wrong. Is this helpful? Or should I stick to other stuff? I write many kinds of posts - philosophical application to politics, rebutting points for conservatives, strategic analysis for liberals. Which kind of post do you prefer? Where should I specialize? I'd like to get some input from my readers.

Anyway.......

As per the title, David Brooks has been particularly offensive in his latest New York Times op-ed. Brooks wears a false cloak of sensitivity when he sympathizes with the dilemma of today's professional women. What they really want (of course) is to have children (lots of them) but that more and more of today's women are never able to do so because of the career paths they have chosen. Professional women wait too long to have children, which means that often they don't even get married. What we should be doing is helping women stay home and make babies before they begin a career, rather than after. This would be both more helpful in terms of women's real interests and might also increase the birth rate, which Brooks seems to think is a real problem.

This is a very evil piece. It evokes compassion for the working women and even offers policy changes that sound very nice (like tax credits for stay at home parents). At the same time its underlying assumptions are insidious. What Brooks is suggesting is that for women to be truly fulfilled, they must embrace their role as mothers rather than as workers. This is the basic conservative backlash argument so well documented by Susan Faludi. I wonder at Brooks' statistic that 70% of women over 40 who have never reproduced regret not having done so, since it is a loaded question (there is a "right" answer - like when asked "did you vote in the last election" people are likely to lie).

Leaving that aside, Brooks just assumes that women must be the primary caregivers. Why is that? In our new, modern society, why is it that we must continue with these hoary old traditional roles in which men are assumed to have no interest or capacity to raise children or take care of the home, while women don't "really" want a career? Why can't we design social policies that allow BOTH parents a chance to raise their kids? And what about divorced households? Brooks's position would seem to push us either to making divorce laws more restrictive or returning to the "bad old days" or welfare for single mothers who don't work. Which is it Dave?

As for the idea that women should defer their careers until after reproducing.... Well, we have already tried this. It was called the 1950's, and the result was a common social belief that women are not serious about or truly suited to long-term employment because they are going to quit and have kids. You still see this kind of discrimination today, even in academia, where universities won't give women tenure-track jobs because they fear the female Ph.D.'s are just going to quit on them one day in order to stay home with babies. The fact is that if women have children early, they will never have meaningful careers, because they will be 35 year old entry-level candidates competing with 22 year-old men. Yeah, that's going to work. So this argument is just a very sly way to force women back into the kitchen. Again.

And what is this crap about "marrying earlier"? Do you really think there are millions of people in their early twenties who meet wonderful potential spouses and turn them down because they want a career? Maybe sometimes, but I think the real reason that women are getting married later is that they finally have choices other than marriage. Fifty years ago, if you were an 18 year old girl, getting married was the only choice you had, unless your family was affluent enough to permit you to go to college. Then you were a 22 year old expected to get married. No real substantive change. I think that most people wait to get married because it takes awhile to a) figure out how to be in a real relationship and b) it's not easy to find what you're looking for (once you figure our what you're looking for!). So asking people to get married younger is asking them to settle. How romantic.

Finally, whose crazy idea is it that he U.S. isn't producing enough children? Are you aware of much of the world's resources Americans consume? That's right, a quarter, with only 5% of the world's population. Don't you know that each additional child puts tremendous strain not only on the environment but on household finances? Don't you know that the U.S. has the fastest growing population of any industrialized nation? Sigh.

So don't be taken in by David Brooks' seeming sympathy. What his approach really calls for is a return to Ozzy & Harriett, when men were men and women knew their place.