SAXTONS RIVER — Back in the 1980s, I was a card-carrying member of “the Sandwich Generation.” That was the term coined for women who found themselves taking care of their children while also looking after aging parents. Many of us had delayed marriage or childbearing while we completed higher education and built our careers. And thanks to medical advances, our parents were living longer. Thus we were caught unawares by the call to be caretakers to two generations simultaneously while juggling the rest of our lives.
Noted feminist author Ruth Rosen, writing in The Nation last year, has coined a new phrase, placing our experience into a larger, more political context. She calls it the “care crisis,” referring to the “burdens that affect most of America's working families.”
With a health care system in dismal need of repair, she says, the crisis of caring for the young, the sick, and the elderly has become “the elephant in the room.” It is ignored “at home, at work and in national politics.”
Our government, Rosen charges, has repeatedly and miserably failed to address the needs of working families. As a result, people suffer - and strive to deal with their individual crises - privately. For many women this means agonizing about how to combine work and family, feeling all the while that there must be something wrong with them. It's a reprise of what the late Betty Friedan called in her groundbreaking book, The Feminine Mystique, “the problem that has no name.”
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Now, however, people like Rosen and sociologist Arlie Hochschild are identifying the problem. Hochschild calls it a “care deficit” and says society's failure to recognize and deal with it constitutes a “stalled revolution.” It is time, these analysts say, to realize that this is a political problem requiring a political solution - or at the very least, a political debate.
Women in all societies have three key roles. At some level, they are engaged in productive, reproductive, and community activities. (One needn't be a mother to be engaged in reproductive, or caretaking, work.)
Let's use me as an example. While I was sandwiched between my kids and my sick mother, I was working full-time, studying for a graduate degree, and volunteering at my children's school. It was really tough, and if I hadn't had a supportive husband and wonderful help at home, not to mention good health insurance, I would have had to give up something. That would have been traumatic for me and therefore for my family. (Everyone knows a happy mom is a good mom.) I loved each aspect of the life that was making so many demands on me, and I would have felt deeply deprived if I'd had to relinquish any of my activities.
By 2000, two-thirds of women with young children were working outside the home. Even though men increasingly assume a greater share of the burden, women still do two shifts a day. If they are caretaking elderly parents, there may even be a third shift.
These women are understandably exhausted. They need government-funded child care and family-friendly workplaces. What they don't need is to feel guilty for “wanting it all.”
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Why in the age of “family values” is this self-described compassionately conservative government unwilling to address the care crisis in America? For that matter, why has no other administration adequately addressed it? With work hours and pressures increasing, leisure and volunteer time decreasing, and more and more parents on their knees, why don't we have public policies that would shore up and strengthen working families?
Ruth Rosen's reply is that “market fundamentalism - the irrational belief that markets solve all problems - has succeeded in dismantling federal regulations and services but has failed to answer the question.”
And so America's family policies continue to lag far behind the rest of the developed, industrialized world. It's downright embarrassing. One recent study conducted by Harvard and McGill Universities revealed that of the more than 170 countries they studied, 168 guarantee paid maternal leave. The United States ranks with two small African countries, Lesotho and Swaziland. At least 145 countries mandate paid sick leave. We do not. More than 130 countries legislate a maximum length for the work week. Not us.
This is not the problem of an “interest group” and it is not about “identity politics,” as Rosen points out. This is about understanding, and legislating for the common good. And there are some signs of hope with the Democrats in power. The Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues is pressing for reform. The Senate Caucus on Children, Work and Family has formed, and several senators are introducing legislation aimed at child care and caring for the elderly. Universal health care is back on the table.
The care crisis in America is real. It requires - indeed, begs - attention. It is at the heart of “family values.”
Now is the time to let your legislators know how important it is.