In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

It’s the heat of Summer.

Vanessa

Which means the tragic stories of kids left in their cars by forgetful/neglectful parents will start rolling in. Honestly, I used to really think these parents were terrible, and further proof that some people just shouldn’t reproduce. But after experiencing the total sleep deprivation of the first few months of parenthood, I kind of think the only reason this didn’t happen to us is because the size of our car required the passenger seat to be moved all the way up so the rear-facing car seat would fit. So I had to sit in the back next to her.

So, while I do think these people should still be punished, I feel for them a little more. (Incidentally, now that I have a child who is capable of running off, I’ve also come to understand those stupid child leashes. Not that I would ever get one, but my sympathies now lie more with the leasher than the leashee.)

A few parts of this story seriously pissed me off, though. First, this.

A relatively small number of cases about 7 percent involved drugs or alcohol. In a few instances, the responsible parties had a history of abusing or neglecting children. Still others were single parents unable to find or afford day care.

My emphasis. How sad is that? If I were the employers of those parents, I would consider myself directly responsible for their children’s deaths.

(UPDATE: Jeebus, people. When I said that I did not mean that the employer should feel responsible. If I wanted to say that, I would have said “Those employers should feel responsible.” I also did not mean those employers should be prosecuted. If I had wanted to say that, I would have said “Those employers should be prosecuted.” I also did not mean, Dawn Eden, that those employers were at fault. If I I had wanted to say that, I would have said “Those employers are at fault.” What I meant that if I were those employers, I would feel responsible. Maybe I’m too paralyzed with liberal guilt to run a healthy business. And maybe you wouldn’t feel guilty in that same situation. Fine. But come on, get some reading comprehension, people.)

More aggravating though, is this.

Women were jailed more often and for longer periods than men. But when the AP compared mothers and fathers, the sentencing gap was even wider.

Mothers were jailed 59 percent of the time, compared to 47 percent for fathers. And the median sentence was three years for dads, but five for moms.

“I think we generally hold mothers to a higher standard in the criminal justice context than in just family life generally,” says Jennifer M. Collins, a professor at the Wake Forest University School of Law who has studied negligence involving parents and such hyperthermia cases. A large segment of society, she says, thinks “fathers are baby-sitting, and mothers are doing God’s work.”

Grr. If only this weren’t true. It’s magic baby hormones to the rescue again, transforming women from dizzy, selfish girls unable to make medical decisions about their reproductive future into wise capable supermommies who not only can handle anything, but have to!

27 thoughts on It’s the heat of Summer.

  1. Still others were single parents unable to find or afford day care.

    That’s not that disappointing to me, yes, its hard to not take it personally as a slight against single moms, but fact is, the recognition that there is possibly a an affordable care crisis occurring might come to at least a few readers.

    At least they didn’t say, “Still others were unwed mothers and welfare recipients.” which was the common read when I was a single mother.

    And yes, of course, the wingnuts have been screaming that the world is coming to an end for the last thirty years due to doing things other than washing dishes and making babies. Of course women are more guilty for skirting their responsibilties! That there isn’t a law compensating men for having to touch their offspring, is only that the theocracy hasn’t taken over yet.

  2. A relatively small number of cases about 7 percent involved drugs or alcohol. In a few instances, the responsible parties had a history of abusing or neglecting children. Still others were single parents unable to find or afford day care.

    Interesting that being a single parent unable to afford daycare is grouped in with being an alcohol/drug abuser and a neglectful/abusive parent.

  3. Interesting that being a single parent unable to afford daycare is grouped in with being an alcohol/drug abuser and a neglectful/abusive parent.

    Part of me suspects that’s deliberate. It has shades of the “poor people shouldn’t have sex because they can’t afford children” in it.

  4. The meteorologist quoted in the article notes that heat deaths in cars were rare before airbags in cars became popular. Parents trying to protect their kids from airbag injuries put them in the back seat, where they’re easier to forget about. http://ggweather.com/heat/index.htm
    One way to solve the baby forgetting problem would be to have an alarm go off if when a car door opens when there’s a baby in the back. It could work like the seatbelt buzzer (Person in seat + seatbelt not attached = buzzer; Child in seat + door open = buzzer) For the sake of the sanity of parents taking their kids out of the car, the buzzer could be a less annoying but still persistent sounds like chimes. If the driver’s door then shuts while the system detects there’s still a kid in the car, then the full alarm system would go off — strobe lights, siren blasts, etc.

  5. A large segment of society, she says, thinks “fathers are baby-sitting, and mothers are doing God’s work.”

  6. Huh. Commentary disappeared there.

    God, I hate it when men refer to taking care of their own kids as
    “babysitting.” My tv survived JC Penney’s “Where is your mother” ad campaign only because I could not afford to replace it if I threw things through the screen.

  7. If I were the employers of those parents, I would consider myself directly responsible for their children’s deaths.

    That’s an exaggeration, right?

  8. Don’t knock the leash thing too much…I had a phone cord thing connecting my wrist to my mom’s wrist as a kid. I actually didn’t mind it because it allowed me to do a little more exploring than if I didn’t have it and had to hold Mom or Dad’s hand. I was also a notorious wanderer, a situation which led to my near-poisoning and near-drowning as a child.

  10. Gah. Here’s the comment I posted there.

    Okay, it’s my post you’re talking about here, so I thought I’d take a moment to clear up some misconceptions you’ve had about it.

    I do not think being pro-choice or being a feminist means that you don’t have to be responsible if your child dies. In fact, I’m sure I said in my post that I think these people should be punished.

    When I said that if an employee of mine had a child die in the car because they couldn’t find day care, I meant that I’d feel guilty about it (wouldn’t you?) not that I think they are legally responsible. (In addition, it’s difficult to get your employers to agree to additional maternity leave, should you need it.)

    And my real anger, and the driving point of my post was that women are more likely to be sentenced and for longer periods of time for the same crime. Now feel free to disagree with me but I don’t think a father is any less legally responsible for his children than a mother is (and let’s not get into an abortion debate as to what is a child or not. I’m happy to agree to disagree on that right now). In essence, culpability for child neglect is not a gender-based issue. Or at least it shouldn’t be.

    If you want to call me a hypocrite for saying that fathers should be equally legally responsible for their children but that women shouldn’t need a permission slip from a man to get an abortion, then fine. But what you’ve written seriously misrepresents my own post, and I wanted to go on the record with a correction.

    Also, to be clear, I was just a guest-blogger at Feministe. And Feministe is a feminist blog, not an ‘abortion-advocacy’ blog. The two issues (feminism and pro-choice) intersect, but they’re not the same.

    And to the person who said the thing about breastfeeding vs. formula, with one not being any better than the other, I agree with you 100 percent. Breastfeeding is very difficult physically and time-wise (and powered breastpumps these days run between 200 and 300 dollars), and there shouldn’t be a huge stigma placed on you if you choose to go either way.

    And Dawn, since you are notorious in some circles for deleting/editing comments you find objectionable, I will be reposting this at Feministe and at my own blog.

    Even some of her readers were calling her on this. Way to totally make me out to be a baby-eating monster, Dawn.

  12. Breastfeeding not any better than formula? *GUFFAW* That was satire, right?

    It’s a good thing I steadfastly refuse to call myself anything but a feminist in the context of, “believes in equal rights for women and men, requiring society to give women greater rights than we currently have in order to level the playing field of rights,” because stuff like this really makes me wonder about the movement sometimes. I mean, when we have to pretend a can full of powder cooked up in a lab is as good for a mammalian baby as the stuff it ought to be obtaining naturally from its mother just so some random woman somewhere won’t have to feel guilty because she didn’t even try, what exactly is this movement trying to accomplish again?

    I’m sorry, I know this is off-topic (mostly) and I know a lot is expected of mothers that shouldn’t be and it’s pretty sick. But I see feminists denying that they want women to be like men ALL THE TIME and yet… An argument like this seems to infer that only when women, like men, don’t have to breastfeed children will we be truly equal to men. My response is, since when should women have to be like men in order to be equal, and why are you having a kid anyway if you’re just going to let chemicals and machines raise it for you?

    Yes, starting breastfeeding is harder than starting a bottle. Assuming proper training and no physical defects in mom or baby, however, in the final tally breastfeeding is EASIER than bottlefeeding: cheaper, no prep needed, no washing bottles, and hardly any spitup. You don’t even have to hardly wake up to feed your baby at night if you’ve got them sleeping next to you. I’ve done both methods of feeding and it was such a contrast when I BFed my second child that it was just breathtaking. I will never touch formula again if I have another child.

    I feel sorry for women who have to struggle more with BFing logistics because it’s work or be in abject poverty. But again, pretending that formula grows on the Boob Tree and is just as good as human milk does no one any favors. We should be expending that energy instead to ensure that nursing mothers can feed their children with as little inconvenience as possible. It’s THAT kind of thing that will ultimately make women equal.

  13. No, I wouldn’t feel guilty. What an interesting example of post-modern rejection of personal responsibility!

  14. No, I wouldn’t feel guilty. What an interesting example of post-modern rejection of personal responsibility!

    Really? You wouldn’t feel guilty for not paying your employee enough to be able to afford daycare?

    Look, I’m not saying that employers in that situation should be prosecuted or anything. It was a one-off remark stating that if I were in that situation, I would feel bad for paying people such a slave wage that they couldn’t afford daycare. How is that a rejection of personal responsibility?

    If anything, what you’re saying is a rejection of responsibility. You don’t think that employers are responsible to pay their workers a living wage? Why pay them at all, then?

  15. And RE, I’m glad you had such an easy time with breastfeeding. I sure didn’t. It sounds like you were spared the exhaustion of having to use a breastpump…because that was twice the cleanup, preparation, and washing little plastic bits that using bottles is. Also, half the sleep, because I couldn’t just roll over and feed the kid, I had to feed the kid then have a pumping session. (Either that, or try to pump at school, which I only tried once.)

    It’s attitudes like yours that had me so torn up about using formula when I had to (because there weren’t enough hours in the day to allow me to pump enough milk). If I just realized – hey, I was raised on formula my mom made herself out of condensed milk and corn syrup – take that, expensive formula companies! – and I turned out fine. Formula isn’t poison.

  16. We do not live in a socialist society. No employer owes me more than the job I do is worth. If that is not enough to pay for the things I need or want, then I need to find another job or take a second job. That is just the nature of reality.

    So while the employer might be and probably is saddened when bad things happen to his employees, he has no responsibility for them happening and no need to feel guilty.

  17. Regarding the desired employer guilt:

    People don’t seem to understand that employers aren’t magic fairies who can do anything. Many employers simply can’t afford to provide “affordable daycare” and the like, which in many cases costs more per hour than the wages of the people who need the childcare.

    And what, exactly, is a “living wage”? When I was 18-24 I worked at jobs in three cities that rarely paid more than minimum wage, or a couple of dollars above if I stayed at the job long enough — $4.75 to $5.15 at the time, while I finished school (which I paid for by myself, partly with money from the minimum-wage jobs and partly from loans).

    This was a “living wage” for me because I managed well — I lived in cheap cities in cheap apartments, with a roommate sleeping in the living room to share costs. I took the bus, and when I didn’t have a dollar for the bus, I walked, a long way.

    If I had had two kids at the time, it wouldn’t have been a “living wage” — but isn’t that sort of the point, that you’re supposed to wait to start a family until you can afford to? (That doesn’t mean that you have to be wealthy.) Of course, we should have compassion for poor single mothers who took on more responsiblity, often at a too-young age, than they could ever reasonably handle, and we should have compassion for anyone who accidentally leaves a baby in a car, but we shouldn’t build all our public policies around encouraging people to be single mothers.

  18. we shouldn’t build all our public policies around encouraging people to be single mothers.

    Leaving aside the fact that somehow you seem to think only single unwed mothers need to be able to afford daycare, whose talking about building public policy? All i said was that if I were an employer I would feel responsibility to pay my employees enough to meet their needs.

    Maybe I’m too full of liberal guilt to run a business. That’s fine if you feel that. But please respond to what I was actually saying, not what the strawman Vanessa in your head is saying.

  19. Leaving aside the tragic consequences of leaving a child unattended in a car or elsewhere, the child-care crisis is a national problem. It is very difficult for individual parents, and for individual employers, to address it adequately, especially in situations where neither has “deep pockets.” An employer, for example, might idealistically wish to pay a “living wage” – but to pay above-market wages would drive it out of business. (In general, incomes have not been kept pace with the increasingly unaffordable costs of housing, energy, transportation, food, higher education, child care, elder care, etc.) The so-called “free market” (not free these days, so much as corporatist) simply does not provide the solutions for critical social needs.

    What is needed is government policies and incentives that encourage government-funded childcare and family-friendly workplace policies. Here’s a link to an article that appeared in The Nation (3/07) that suggests that women need to unite and make their voices heard in order to get this important issue on the national political agenda, where it squarely belongs.

    http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070312/rosen

  20. Actually, there is no childcare crisis. Every study I have seen demonstrates that. Undoubtedly individual families have problems– who can doubt that? But you would be hard-pressed, I think, to find statistics to support the view that there is any sort of national crisis out there.

    More to the point, we do not need the government involved in family life. The government has no business “raising” children. Think about it. What does the government do right? What makes anyone think that it would do a good job raising anyone’s children? These are the same daft buggers, who arrest 5 year olds for kissing another 5 year old playmate on the cheek. Or for waving a chicken leg and saying “bang”. Keep those lunatics away from children!

    As far as family friendly workplaces are concerned, what would such a place look like? It is already a morale killer that people with children get to go home early for a variety of expected and unexpected child-related activities– ball games, teacher conferences, gymnastics, etc. while single people, or people with grown children, are expected to stay on the job, give appropriate advance notice when they want to take some time off, etc. I know this because I am a manager and I deal with the complaints about this regularly.

    Child care is the responsibility of the family. I whole-heartedly support tax breaks for families with children and any incentive anyone can dream up so that one parent is able to stay home with the children. But keep the government out of it!

  21. The “care crisis” is to name the burden that working families in America face, and it’s not just the lack of quality, affordable child care. Most institutions have not adopted family-friendly policies. As a result many women feel they need to choose between pursuing a career opportunity, or ditching it in favor of home and children, or to take care of aging parents. Regardless of their preference, most women (single or married) have to work simply in order to make ends meet.

    The right wing talks about “family values” but does not offer policies and solutions that would actually support working families. Here are policies that *would* support working families: universal healthcare, paid parental leave, a living wage, job training and education, flexible work hours, greater opportunities for part-time work, investment in affordable housing and mass transit, and the reinstatement of a progressive tax structure. And, yes, high-quality subsidized on-the-job and community childcare.

  22. Vanessa says: “Leaving aside the fact that somehow you seem to think only single unwed mothers need to be able to afford daycare, whose talking about building public policy?”

    Actually, statistically, the majority of poor families are headed by single women. And yes, most of the time they’re single by choice — i.e. these women weren’t widowed and didn’t have husbands who left them.

    “All i said was that if I were an employer I would feel responsibility to pay my employees enough to meet their needs.”

    Well, OK, but I’m still making the reasonable point that employers aren’t charities with unlimited pockets. Good intentions can’t trump economics; if a person’s skill set, experience, etc. doesn’t warrant much about the minimum wage, no employer will be able to pay him or her twice the minimum wage on a sustainable basis just to be nice. The employer would be out of business soon enough. A

    nd other people here are talking about public policy, so it was perfectly fair for me to bring it up: the fact is that too many of our public policies, including the marriage penalty in the earned-income tax credit, encourage willful single motherhoold, which keeps families poor.

  23. Oh no, the libertarian personal responsibility trolls are out in force in this thread.

    Here is a thought, that I think Vanessa isn’t saying but might agree with — perhaps an employer might feel responsible in the sense that making profit should perhaps not come before the health and well-being of any human being (you know to start, I would argue that list is longer)?

    Perhaps, a workplace that offered on site daycare that employees paid for (much like offsite day care employees pay for) would be a more productive environment and also be one where children were less likely to be killed because their parents were desperately trying to arrive at work on time or meet a new schedule.

    Perhaps, we are not isolated and alienated individuals in a free market society (which, btw, has not existed for eternity, but only the last 400 years, I know it may be hard to believe, but capitalism is not a “natural” state, contrary to your arguments here), but we are interconnected with a responsibility beyond ourselves to care for the people who are inevitably going to be poor in a system that mandates the existence of poor people in order to have rich people.

    Or, to quote John Dunne, “ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee”. Any death, any death at all, diminishes us all. I am sorry for you that you use “personal responsibility” to avoid feeling compassion for the suffering of other human beings. I hope no tragedy ever befalls you or anyone you love and you find yourselves alone to cope with it.

  24. We hear all over the world what a great nation the US is. How wealthy you are, how your citizens flourish, how you have a life style that you want to export all over the world.
    Yet you seriously, seriously think that a company’s profits overrides paying an employee a living wage. Surely any company that can’t pay it employee a living wage should not be considered a viable company! Please explain why the poorest people in your community should put their children at risk to make their employer’s lives better? It would explain, I guess, why companies such as Nike feel that it is all right to go into a third world company and pay people there starvation wages, and then make huge profits for US companies selling shoes at an enormous mark up!!
    wilful single motherhood! hang on – what about wilful single fathers? what about the fact that little human beings are going without a parents care, without adequate nutrition, without medical care – the allmighty dollar is really more important that that????????
    Your nation is rich. You could educate sole parents, so they could better support their children. You could house the homeless, and make them safe. You could provide a great public health care system, so people could work well and contribute to your nation. you could recognise a woman with a young child is vulnerable – and show magnificent compassion and care.
    but instead you say ‘good intentions can’t trump economics.’
    And your wealthy live in mega mansions, while your poor work their arses off for a pittance and die of treatable diseases.

  25. willful single motherhoold

    That phrase just makes me chuckle, typo or no. I know I am late to this thread, but, c’mon! I really doubt there are thousands of women out there who really, truly want to raise a chlild completely alone with no help. Sure, there may be women who don’t want to get married, but that is an entirely different matter. Women raise kids without a support system because life happens that way. Behind most “willfuly single” mothers who struggle to make ends meet are deadbeat dads who couldn’t be bothered with coparenting.

    Oh, and the breastfeeding Nazis are getting old.

  26. Vanessa, I absolutely with what you said about feeling guilty if one of my employees was unable to properly care for her children because of the low wages I paid her. I did own my own business (still do) and my employees were welcome to bring their children to work if they had do – hell, I brought my baby to work, why shouldn’t they? We had a big basement and a back office where they could sit quietly and play. We took turns minding the store and minding the kids, it worked out great, it didn’t cost me a dime, and as a bonus, I had honest, happy employees that loved their job. They usually didn’t need to bring their children, but shit does happen, and knowing they won’t be punished for having child care issues is a huge burden lifted. Just because I don’t think an employer should be found legally accountable for terrible situations like in the article you linked to doesn’t mean I don’t care about my employees and wouldn’t feel horrible if something like this happened, and I could have done something to help but didn’t.

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