To judge by the recent eruption of books, articles, and editorials with titles like The Crisis of the Working Mother, The Divorce Revolution, Not as Far as You Think, Smart Women/Foolish Choices, “The Birth Dearth,” and “A Mother's Choice,”¹ confusion and distress have overtaken much of American womanhood. Ruth Sidel's Women and Children Last and Sylvia Hewlett's A Lesser Life,² in particular, have received a great deal of attention for the grim picture they paint of the “women's movement,” and are widely perceived to mark a historic turn in that movement's concerns—away from the goal of transforming women into pseudomen and toward a new appreciation of motherhood and children.

It is easy to see what has brought on this talk of crisis and lessened lives. Twenty years ago women were assured that psychological fulfillment and a previously unsuspected need for independence from men could be met by paid employment, or, as it was usually called, pursuing a career. Being “only” a housewife and mother was said to be a sure path to catatonia. More strident voices urged women not to have children at all, or, if it was too late for that, to place self-realization above the demands and the illusory satisfactions of family.

The contrast between those brave promises and current reality could hardly be more stark. A major reward for the 5,375,000 women with childen under six who work full time has been strain and guilt at, in Barbara Berg's words, “the excoriating interface of our two roles.” From what one may observe in any playground in any major American city, this is almost an understatement. At noon, babysitters far outnumber mothers. (Nine-and-a-half million children under six, or 60 percent of all American children under six, have mothers in the part-time or full-time labor force.) In the late afternoon the mothers retake possession of their offspring, or retrieve them from day-care centers, to spend a little “quality time” before a bedtime made excessively early by the mother's need to recuperate or excessively late by the mother's inability to discipline her emotionally demanding children. Working mothers are always tired, and worried that their children will start to call the sitter “Mommy.”

Then there are the single women who blazed a trail into “non-traditional” fields. Now approaching the end of their childbearing years without husbands or children or, in most cases, the career triumphs of men, many are beginning to wonder out loud if preparing legal briefs is all there is to life. This group is relatively small, but the extensive attention, not to say adulation, accorded it has ironically diminished the status of the motherhood its members now yearn for.

For their part, American men have responded to the message that they are no longer needed by giving women their independence in the form of unprecedented rates of divorce and abandonment: 1.6 million women now raise children under six with “no spouse present,” in the language of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Most of these women receive some form of public assistance (whose regulations, many economists believe, encourage men to stay away). Overall, the no-fault divorce laws now in force in most states, along with the Supreme Court's abolition of female-only alimony in Orr v. Orr, have proved financially catastrophic for women. As Lenore Weitzman has amply documented, after the average divorce the husband's standard of living rises while his ex-wife's standard of living falls dramatically.

Not only do a quarter of single mothers and their children end up below the poverty line; most of those who end up in poverty are single mothers and their children. A study prepared for the Census Bureau estimates that, had family composition remained constant throughout the 1970s, white median family income would have risen by 3 percent instead of the actual figure of .8 percent, and black median family income would have risen by 5 percent instead of falling 11 percent. Had the rate of family break-up not increased, there would have been 4,200,000 families below the poverty line in 1980 instead of 6,217,000; of that 2,017,000 surplus, 1,377,000 are female-headed. At the margin, in other words, over 68 percent of those becoming poor are single mothers and their children.

Almost nothing is heard about “traditional” American women—still the majority, if barely—who raise children within a family supported by the husband's wage. Yet the fact remains that families of this sort experience far lower rates of divorce, poverty, and other forms of social pathology. In short, women do best when they raise children with a hard-working man. By the test of experience, sexual egalitarians have lost the argument.

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Not that anyone has stopped arguing, however. In fact, the major participants are currently embroiled in a curious dispute about who should be blamed for a series of mistakes, and in manufacturing new reasons for discredited proposals.

Sylvia Hewlett favorably contrasts the practical “social feminists” of Europe who, she says, pressed for subsidized day care and maternity leave from the beginning, with American feminists, whom she accuses of being so preoccupied with the Equal Rights Amendment and with obliterating sex roles that they forgot to care about the real needs of women. Dr. Hewlett has been roundly attacked, apparently for daring to suggest that feminists might be wrong about anything (and, perhaps, for her candor about the lesbianism and man and child-hating that permeate certain feminist circles); but the particular error, if error it be, of which she accuses American feminists is not one that they have committed.

When paid employment was supposed to be good for women, and the question naturally arose of what to do with the children, American feminists proposed “the institutionalization of motherhood” (to use Jessie Bernard's phrase). In Rethinking the Family (1982), Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom summarized what they took to be the orthodox feminist agenda:

Maternity and paternity benefits and leaves as well as accessible and subsidized parent and community-controlled day care, innovative work-time arrangements, shared parenting, and other non-traditional child-rearing and household arrangements.

It was this vision that propelled the Mondale-Brademas Comprehensive Child Development Act through Congress in 1971 (after which Richard Nixon vetoed it).

The issue is of far more than antiquarian interest. As it has become apparent that paid employment is not living up to its billing as the road to female happiness, the argument now is that women must work. Divorced and abandoned women must support themselves somehow, and declining real wages have made it impossible for one income to support a family. According to a Newsweek poll, 56 percent of all women who work do so for the money; the figure is presumably much higher for mothers who work. Something must be done for the children, and if Americans really cared they would institute a “national family policy.”

Thus, although eloquence about the glories of paid labor has given way to eloquence about its miseries, the end remains the same—and so, for the most part, do the means. Betty Friedan, for example, announcing her willingness to “accept—rather than deny—the fact that 93 percent of American families fit patterns other than the traditional one,” has called for “new responses to the conditions that are cause and effect of such change.” And what, putting aside the contrived statistic on the demise of the family, are these responses to be?

[A]lternative forms of quality child care, both center and home based, and creative development (by business, labor, and government) of . . . flextime, flexible leave policies for both sexes, job-sharing programs, dependent-care options, and part-time jobs with pro-rated pay and benefits.

It is difficult to distinguish these proposals from Dr. Hewlett's list: “pay equity,” “federally-mandated partially-paid parental leave,” public preschool for three-year-olds, “Public-Sector Initiatives” for child care, private-sector day care, flexible work schedules, and federally-funded health care for pregnant women and children. Ruth Sidel adds only “collective action enabling women to enter male-dominated occupations” and a much less compromising insistence on “a national system of day care and after-school care.”

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Now, it is generally agreed that a national day-care system should be geared to serve at least nine million children. Even strong day-care advocates urge that the ratio of children to adults not exceed 5 to 1, which means that 1,800,000 “care-givers” will have to be recruited and paid a living wage. Pegging that wage at a modest $20,000 a year (about 85 percent of what the average teacher makes) already runs the bill to $36 billion. Then there is the equipment for the hundreds of thousands of individual facilities, the administrative salaries, licensing, inspection, insurance, etc. With very moderate assumptions, total costs quickly approach $90 billion.

Ruth Sidel is aware that “There will be those who say that we cannot afford such a program. To them I say we cannot afford to continue on our present course.” (She, like Dr. Hewlett, raises the specter of public disorder if three-year-olds are not properly socialized now.) Yet even if day care and maternity leave were intrinsically unobjectionable, the persistence of these recommendations is puzzling. One would think that the goal of anyone who takes seriously the problems of the mother who must work would be to make her working unnecessary, and one way to help do so would be to increase the dependent deduction for minors on the federal income tax. This deduction is intended to allow families to retain income sufficient to raise their children. In 1948 it was $600; it is now $1,080. Had it risen with inflation—and it costs just as much today to raise a child as it did in 1948—the deduction would be about $4,500 more. As the average marginal tax rate is 25 percent, raising the deduction to match inflation would lower the tax bill on the average family by $1,125 per child—and end up costing the government less than national day care. Yet this is a proposal which advocates of “national family policy” pass over in silence, though it is surely more sensible to let people spend their own money on the day-care facilities they need, or stay home with their children and buy groceries with the money, than to spend it for them on the same thing with all the overhead attendant on bureaucratic transfer.

Or consider the argument that women must work because a single wage no longer suffices to support a family. It is true that average weekly gross earnings fell from $189 in 1977 to $173 in 1984 (in constant 1977 dollars); no doubt, too, expectations are higher today, and for many there are new expenses perceived as necessities (such as private school for parents who find the public schools unacceptable). But wages are not doomed to fall; in 1955, let us remember, average gross earnings were only $153. An increase in husbands' earnings is known to lower the labor-force participation of women and increase marital stability. Would not a curb on inflation and a rise in real wages solve a big part of the “feminization of poverty”?

Dr. Hewlett is alone among family-policy advocates in even considering this topic:

In May 1983 I interviewed Faith Whittlesey at the White House. At that time she was assistant to the President for public liaison and dealt with policies toward women and children. . . . She told me that Ronald Reagan was tremendously concerned about the care and nurturing of children and that he did in fact have a policy in this area. The policy was to lick inflation and encourage the economy to grow so that men could once more earn a family wage.

Dr. Hewlett, an economist by training, professes puzzlement at this idea and sets forth the following objection to it:

The odd thing is that Reagan himself grew up in the 20's and had a working mother; she worked in a dress shop for $14 a week in order to help out with the precarious family finances. You might imagine he would relate to the difficulties faced by contemporary working mothers. Instead, he clings to a vision of motherhood 50's-style which did not exist in the 1920's and does not exist today.

There follows a grotesque caricature of what the 50's supposedly represented motherhood to be. Such evasive maneuvers strongly suggest that, like the radical egalitarians she is allegedly criticizing, Dr. Hewlett does not want the problems of women to be solved except in ways which facilitate their working.

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The main argument by which family-policy advocates attempt to reinforce the “need” for mothers to work, and to rebut the countercharge that subsidized day care is too expensive and/or may harm children, is to invoke the example of Sweden, where most mothers work, most children spend most of their time in government-run crèches, and 90 percent-paid parental leave is mandatory. (The example of the Soviet Union, which has also socialized child care, is less frequently invoked. Israel, where the egalitarian experiment has failed, is not mentioned at all.)

One crucial difference between the American situation and Sweden, however, is that the Swedish government was not responding to any prior need; the Swedish experiment was part of a conscious decision made by the Labor party in the mid-1960's to implement the full feminist program of obliterating sex roles. It was to encourage women to work that crèches and maternity leave were established in the first place. The costliness of these and allied measures then raised taxes so high—the Swedish government currently consumes over 70 percent of the nation's GNP—that one income no longer sufficed to support a family. Sweden took advantage of the situation by abolishing the joint tax return in 1971, making the marginal tax rate on any extra income the husband might earn prohibitively high, and effectively forcing a non-working wife to seek employment, in a (relatively) lower tax bracket. Swedish women are thus working to finance the facilities that allow them to work. While nothing so drastic is likely to happen in the U.S., this tale does illustrate how governmental steps to create the “option” of work outside the home tend at the same time to create incentives to work, and are thus not neutral.

The Swedish experiment is too new for its full effect on the generation of Swedes currently growing up to have been measured longitudinally, but certain trends have already emerged. Marriage is becoming a thing of the past. The cohabitation rate has risen from 1 percent in 1960 to 30 percent. Almost as many conceptions result in abortions or illegitimate births as in live legitimate births. Most significantly, the Swedish birth rate, like that of other Scandinavian countries committed to sexual equality, has fallen far below replacement. The average pair of Swedes is producing only 1.5 new Swedes, about the same rate as in Germany; in Denmark, the rate is 1.4.

A birth rate this low—replacement is 2.1 offspring per woman—is a consequence of biology and arithmetic. It takes a woman nine months to have a baby; she will normally wish to spend at least three years with her child before sending it off somewhere, and it is considered advisable to space pregnancies by no lesser an interval. Therefore, a woman who has three children will typically spend at least a decade of her most energetic years in maternal pursuits; conversely, the practical limit on the number of children that can be born to a woman pursuing a career has been found to be two. We need not think of a low birth rate as a symptom of some deeper malaise to see that a society which encourages its women to work away from home to anything like the extent men do will eventually disappear.³

The long-term effects of institutional child-rearing are unclear. Its advocates have recently announced the discovery that day care actually benefits children by offering them “alternative role models,” and that a child raised institutionally need not be emotionally deprived if he receives sufficient love and attention. That is the sort of thing known as a mighty big if. Clinicians are unanimous that a child needs the attention of his mother for at least his first year, and continuity in his personal caretaker for at least his first three years, if he is to have the best chance for satisfactory personal relations later in life. These inconvenient truths irritate Dr. Hewlett, since they “would rule out a job for most women. . . . What [working women with children under one] need is decent maternity leave and high-quality child care, not another guilt trip.” Surely, however, since the large-scale rearing of children by strangers is new to human history, it would be prudent to place on its advocates the onus of proving that it does no harm. It is not enough to intone “day care, day care,” and thereupon consign to it the most valuable things anyone will ever possess.

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It is becoming an intellectual commonplace that social institutions cannot be understood apart from the biological sources of human behavior. It is no more possible to explain what creates and sustains a society in terms of that society itself than it is to explain how a clock keeps time by positing another clock inside it. By the same token, social norms and government actions based on ignorance of human nature are doomed to be irrelevant or positively mischievous.

Those who take seriously the innateness of sex differences could have predicted (and in many cases did predict) the woes besetting women liberated wholly or partly from motherhood and marriage. Women have not risen as high in business or government as they were supposed to do, not because of discrimination but because they have not wanted to rise as badly as men. It is generally the career woman with children, rather than her husband, who diverts energy toward the children—because she is the one with the more intense desire to do so. Those women who have reached the top experience abnormal rates of divorce, childlessness, and spinsterhood because, like other women, they are attracted to men of status higher than their own, and far up the ladder such men are rare (and these men can select mates from the much wider range of women of lower status). Children impair a divorced mother's earning ability not merely because having them interrupts the accumulation of working skills, but because, unlike a man who wins custody and is psychologically capable of hiring a nanny and getting on with his work, a mother cannot easily put her children out of her mind. These impulses, besides being self-evident, all make perfect sense from the point of view of evolutionary biology.

In following the family-policy literature, one is repeatedly struck by the completeness with which it has absorbed the basic errors of the sexual egalitarianism it is said to have transcended. The first error is the assumption that the female traits which are causing all the trouble are learned by socialization, and can be unlearned. Ruth Sidel deplores “the continuing socialization of women to perceive themselves as dependent.” For Barbara Berg, the guilt experienced by mothers who spend too little time with their children is not a response to a nurturant drive gone unheeded but to

the decision to be different from our mothers, to choose a different lifestyle, to challenge her values, attitudes, child-rearing practices—this appears to conflict with what we learned from our mother, with her standards of mothering, which are also ours.

Her solution is correspondingly superficial: “streamline the family chores, . . . hire as much help as [you can] afford. . . . Exercise—biking, dancing, jogging—are all good for stress management, and they have the added advantage of keeping you in shape.”

At a deeper level, while the family-policy literature catalogues with bitter relish all the trials of motherhood-on-the-run, it expresses little joy in motherhood itself, and has no praise whatever for the male protective role, the natural complement of the mother's need for protection. Not only does family policy begin with the mother who must be eased back into the workforce after her man has left her (the task of keeping him at home in the first place being treated as mission impossible), but its call for teaching young girls “realism” about the unreliability of men often lapses into open hostility toward male protective impulses. During the 1981 congressional hearings on “Sex Equity in Vocational Education,” Carol Jabonaski explained the problem:

We are beginning to see that younger female students are recognizing the fact that they do have to work and they are beginning to plan for those careers. . . . The young males, however, are still seeing themselves as the sole breadwinner and that the females will be at home. That presents a conflict. . . . These conflicts are there and no one has helped to train them or to let them understand that it is OK to have an alternative lifestyle. All of that area still needs to be addressed.

“A wife is only a divorce away from welfare,” goes the slogan, and most family-policy advocates do not want anyone to forget it.

But the fundamental error retained from feminist egalitarianism is the idea that the elements of a satisfying life are ultimately the same for women and men. Despite the to-do accompanying the recent discovery that women have maternal impulses—which was never doubted for a second by anyone but sexual egalitarians—it has yet to be grasped that these impulses weaken the drive for extra-familial achievement so evident in men.

The female as currently conceived is literally too good to be true, possessed of female needs superimposed on male aspirations. Because, in Dr. Sidel's words, “The opportunity to work at a job that offers some measure of dignity, security, and respect—with rewardable recompense—is a fundamental right of both women and men, as well as the foundation of a meaningful family policy,” the best female life is taken to revolve around a fulfilling job, paid maternity leave, then back to the 9-to-5 challenge. The wife is to be secure in the knowledge that her child is being cared for by a licensed, federally-inspected caregiver, just as men once went off to work secure in the knowledge that their children were being well cared for by their wives. In the end, Dr. Hewlett and others acknowledge the physical impossibility or difficulty of returning to work only for the period immediately after giving birth. Motherhood remains an obstacle to be circumvented.

For two decades now, Western society has reserved its highest praise for atypical women, indirectly encouraging all women to judge themselves by and pursue standards they are unlikely to meet, and to judge motherhood, which virtually all women can succeed at, as of little intrinsic worth. It was inevitable that the “status of women” should fall in a world of firepersons and affirmative-action astronauts. The conditions under which the typical male and female drives evolved may no longer be present, but our genes have yet to receive the message. Meanwhile, despite changes in the rhetoric of the women's movement in speaking of motherhood, the pressure for collectivized child-rearing continues.

¹ Barbara Berg, The Crisis of the Working Mother, Summit, 249 pp. $16.95; Lenore Weitzman, The Divorce Revolution, Free Press, 504 pp., $19.95; Lynda L. Moore, ed., Not as Far as You Think, Lexington, 201 pp., $15.95; Ben Wattenberg et al., “The Birth Dearth,” Public Opinion, December 1985/January 1986; “A Mother's Choice,” cover story, Newsweek, March 31, 1986. See also “What NOW?: The Women's Movement Looks Beyond ‘Equality,’ ” New Republic, May 5, 1986, and “The Marriage Crunch: Too Late for Prince Charming?,” cover story, Newsweek, June 2, 1986.

² Women and Children Last, Viking, 236 pp., $16.95; A Lesser Life, Morrow, 461 pp., $17.95.

³ On these grounds alone it is hard to understand the appeal of a system of values which guarantees the end of any society that embraces it. Yet it certainly continues to exercise an appeal, even to those, like Ben Wattenberg, aware of and worried about the falling birth rate. Wattenberg wants there to be more children, but he also wants to preserve the triumphs of feminism. His solution to the birth dearth: parental leave and day care.