Can mothers have it all?

This week, Facebook and blogs and even (gasp!) real life conversations have been lit up by an article by Anne Marie Slaughter, who had worked in policy planning at the Obama State Department, about the (im)possibility of mixing motherhood and career.  The piece, an honest portrayal of the difficulties of second and third generation feminist women to "have it all" has clearly touched a vein among my friends who work as lawyers, policy professionals, doctors... truth is, pretty much everyone with whom I went to Harvard or Williams, and who then went on to be a mother and a high powered professional.

Rita and I have not had to face anything like the world Slaughter describes: no 20 hour work days, no leaving the house before the kids wake and coming home after they are asleep, no impossible choices between a sick baby and a professional deadline.  Next month, Rita will go to an anthropology conference in São Paulo, and it will be the first time that Helena Iara will have to spend a night without her mommy in the same house.  None the less, we have seen enough of the challenges of parenting and working to know how much harder it must be for someone working at the United Nations, in government, in a bill-by-the-hour law firm.  Slaughter is right: after fifty years of feminist successes in policy and ideology, children still make it much harder for women to climb the professional ladder.

I don't recall which of my professors declared that philosophy does not have the role of answering questions, but of asking why we ask those questions in the first place, but it's a good place to enter this debate (and is the starting point for William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein, two of my favorite thinkers).  So here's my poor contribution to the debate:

I've been readying Dostoyevsky recently, and finding some humor amidst the gloom by laughing at the silly hierarchies of state bureaucrats, classed just like military officers in 19th Century Russia, with a "Collegiate Registrar" equivalent to a warrant office,  a "Titular Counsellor" like an Army Captain, all the way up to an "Actual Privy Counsellor" who held the same rank as a Field Marshall.  Russians of that age may have taken the quest for honor so far that it becomes ridiculous, but they aren't that much different than we are, with different levels of professorships, pay-grades for government service, and whether or not one becomes a partner.  Men have always dedicated themselves to honor, in one way or another.

Mainstream American feminism has done an extraordinary job of showing why and how women have been oppressed and excluded, but at a price: it has accepted masculine terms for the debate.  When we look at definitions of success for women (or for feminism in general), we ask about how many women sit in corporate boardrooms, what salary women earn, how many women work in policy roles in government.  I wonder, though, if these concerns don't simply accepted traditional masculine (and not universally human) milestones for success.  Even the question "Why can't women have it all?" uses the verb most associated with honor in postmodern capitalism.  As Marx (among many others) noticed, capitalism moves us from a concern with being to one of having.

That move from being to having was critical: no one would ever ask if you can "be it all."  Of course not: you can't be mother and father, God and man, master and servant... the  verb "be" recognizes that certain things exclude each other.  But "have"... It seems like, hypothetically at least, we could possess everything.

Slaughter addresses this question in a way: she says that she and many women like her (and many men, as well), work as hard as they do because it is the way they can change the world; she herself was working in Planning for the State Department, and cites many women in government, academia, and the international human rights system.  Here, for better or worse, I might be able to add something useful: I know lots of people who have both worked at the grass roots and in "the system", and almost all of them say that they are not only happier on the "outside", but that they do more good (a quick caveat to expose my bias here: after working in Washington think tanks and going to Harvard, I made a conscious decision that I didn't want that life; I'm not an objective observer).  People at UNICEF, the Foreign Service, government education departments... To quote one high UNICEF bureaucrat I met last year, "Let's be honest, I could do a lot more elsewhere.  But when I look at myself, I know that I wouldn't earn as much or get as much prestige elsewhere.  So I stay."

The point isn't that mothers shouldn't try to "climb the latter".  Power matters, and who holds it is no small thing.  But I think we need to ask deeper questions about the nature of success, happiness, and even "having;" it allows us to ask the question in a much better way, and maybe even one that will make us happier and more able to change the world.

Parasites

Over the last week, Helena Iara has been watching a turtledove that has made its nest under the eaves of our house.  Each morning, she wakes up and walks out onto the balcony to say good morning to the bird and see if the chicks have hatched.  We've used the time to talk to her about caring for little creatures, explaining how birds reproduce, and showing her how to wait for something interesting.  So, you can imagine my concern when I walked out onto the porch this morning (well before Helena awoke, thank goodness) to find a dead little bird on the floor.

As I buried the little critter, I looked at it more carefully: the beach was different from that of a turtledove. The feathers weren't anything like the mother.  And it was huge for a neonate.  In fact, the dead baby bird wasn't even the turtledove's child: it was a chupim.  The mother chupim lays its eggs in another bird's nest and then goes away, leaving the host mother to care for her babies... and since the chupim is a huge bird, it generally eats all of the food that the mother brings for her own kids, leaving them to dies of starvation.  The turtledove's expression as she sat on her nest this morning, something I had taken for sadness, was actually something very different, maybe even the pride of a mother who had seen the danger and defended her chicks (as yet unhatched) by pushing the interloper out of the nest (all of that is a projection, of course; who knows what emotions a bird really feels).

In Brazil, a chupão isn't just a bird: it's a metaphor, and incarnation of evil.  In Brazilian popular culture, the greatest possible sin is to be a parasite, to take advantage of others without giving anything back: in a poor society where reciprocating favors and paying off debts was often the difference between starvation and survival, it's an ethic that makes sense.  Rita tells stories of her brother going off into the woods to hunt baby chupins when he was a kid, a boy's idea of defending the weak against a species that is both parasitical upon and stronger than its victims.  Whether in the favela or the countryside, you hear similar stories, and much of the progressive, left wing orientation of contemporary Brazilian life and politics depends on the critique of the chupim (and things like it).

What does all of this have to do with philosophy and a baby girl?  We generally see philosophy as a story of genius: Plato wrote..., Kant thought..., Nietzsche said...  In fact, though, it's hard to know how much of that "individual" genius isn't merely an effective expression of social ideas.  William James's pragmatism, for instance, serves as a splendid critique of European metaphysical overkill, but he himself recognized that he was merely channeling American attitudes, looking for "what works."  The amazing gift of Emmanuel Levinas, one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, was to put centuries of rabbinical Jewish thought in dialogue with phenomenology.  No thinker is just himself: he speaks the metaphors of his culture.

The attack on the chupim, whether by my brother-in-law when he was a boy, or by a mother turtledove defending her chicks, expresses a profound ethics, an idea as important -- and probably with more impact on the lives of poor people in Brazil -- as the reflections of any academic philosopher.  I'm still glad that Helena didn't see the dead baby bird, but when she wakes up, I'm going to tell her the story.

William James

The last several nights have involved more crying and less philosophy than I might have liked.  After a couple of weeks of great digestion, it seems that Helena Iara has run into some bad colic.  Today, however, as we rocked back and forth on the hammock, I was able to get her to calm down as she listened to my voice, as I sang bossa nova and eighties rock (I don't have much of a repetoire of lullabies), and when I failed to have any more songs, I talked about whatever came into my head.  In this case, the psychology of William James.

Helena Iara already has an immense archive of facial expressions, ranging from the obvious and simple (the sucking movements that indicate hunger, a certain kind of cry for colic) to what seem much more complex and nuanced: many shades of happiness, a kind of curiosity, an introspective gaze, and several looks that seem rather like existential dread.  Now, not only will most experts in child neurological development insist that introspection is far beyond a baby of two weeks old, they will say that even smiles at this age are simple a reflex, not an expression per se.

And that's where we get to William James, who wanted to challenge that simple idea that facial "expressions" are, in fact, expressions or manifestations of some complex inner state.  Our common sense, he said, teaches that we first feel something, and then express this feeling on the surface of our body through gestures and expressions.  James wanted to see the phenomenon in a more materialist way: what if, he said, we think about the smile as the cause of the feeling, as opposed to the other way around?  Or as things that are so intimately linked that we cannot call one of them cause and the other effect?  Try forcing a smile onto your face, for instance, and observing the effect on your emotions; or the next time you jam your toe or hammer your finger, try not to scream.  Separating the "expression" and the "essence" has strange consequences.

The smiles that pass over Helena Iara's face, then... are they "real" expressions?  Or simply reflex?  Or does this reflection on William James let us say that they are both?  Her face moves through any number of gestures and movements as she tries them out and feels the results.  The smiles are not, probably, true expressions of inner happiness, but they may cause brief flutters of that feeling they are said to express.

I had plans to then move on to tell her about the debates in Revolutionary Russia on how to represent emotions on the stage, pitting Stanislavsky against Meyerhold... but her stomach started to hurt her again, so I passed her on to Rita to give the care that only a mother can.