Feminism and Nannies

In response to an article in Ireland’s Sunday
Business Post by one David McWilliams, my friend Sarah writes cogently about
nannies and housework here
and here.
Coincidentally, I had just finished reading this excellently-written
treatise on the same subject from Atlantic Monthly. I sent the Atlantic
Monthly article to Sarah, who replied:

What is absolutely clear is that David Mc [expletive removed] Williams
read it too and ripped off entire paragraphs for his article in the Business
Post and got paid for it and there’s me like an eejit trying to write stuff
to get published.

Tangent: This comes as no suprise to me. When I lived in Ireland, it always seemed like somebody was cheating. I guess that’s what 800 years of oppression does to you.

I highly recommend the
Atlantic Monthly article. It’s long, and cites a lot of books (it appears,
somewhat unwisely, in the magazine’s Books section), but it effectively articulates
the working mother’s philosophical crisis. As a liberated post-feminist, when
I return to the workforce and hire a nanny, am I not just contributing to that
nanny’s exploitation? It debunks a lot of myths (with apologies for the nested
quotes):

So here we have the crux of the problem: ask an upper-middle-class
woman why she is exploiting another woman for child care, and she will cry that
she has to do it because there’s no universal day care. But get a bunch of professional-class
mothers together, and they will freely admit that day care sucks; get a nanny.
This was a truth that Naomi Wolf—feminist, Yalie, Rhodes scholar, big thinker—learned
the hard way after giving birth to her first child. In Misconceptions, Wolf
reports:

I never thought I would become one of those women who took up a
foreordained place in a hierarchy of class and gender. Yet here we were, to
my horror and complicity, shaping our new family structure along class and
gender lines—daddy at work, mommy and caregiver from two different economic
classes, sharing the baby work during the day.

Her dreams of parenthood, apparently formed while tripping across green New
Haven quadrangles on her way to feminist-theory classes, were starkly different:
“I had wanted us to be a mother and a father raising children side by side,
the man moving into the world of children, the woman into the world of work,
in equitable balance, maybe each working flexibly from home, the two making
the same world and sharing the same experiences and values.” She had wanted
a revolution; what she got was a Venezuelan.

To lower the brow of this conversation slightly, whenever this subject arises,
I always think of Melanie Doane’s paean to the conflicts of the modern woman,
Happy
Homemaker.