Woman Watching Commercial--and other disappointments
It's hard to be unemployed. It's harder to be unemployed and a woman and mother--when all the forces of the world seem to work to keep you unemployed.
According to The Nation, we have now moved from "mancession" to "womancession." Women's jobs are at risk now. Women lost 366,000 jobs between July 2009 and January 2011, but during that same time, men gained 438,000, with a difference of 804,000. Considering the jobs that are particularly in peril--teachers, for example, are disproportionately women--we will see this divide growing.
I am a teacher, though of higher education, who is unemployed. One problem that affects women, that affects men less, is that while men remain "unemployed" until they find jobs, women are often recast as stay-at-home moms. In our house, as I'm sure in many homes across America, one of our first personal budget cuts was childcare. After all, if I'm home, why wouldn't I tend to the children full-time--not to mention the cooking and cleaning?
My only break from children comes by way of the Y, where caregivers mind the children while parents workout.
Today my husband, The Scientist, decided to join me. While I waited for him to get ready to leave the house, I checked the mail.
It was the first depressing moment of the day.
It was a card, addressed to the baby, who is turning one. It was from my parents. The name on it was wrong.
When I got married, I didn’t think twice about keeping my birth name. Neither did my sister. It's a right we have here in North America--one that women in, for example, Japan, were recently fighting for (before issues of a grander scale likely eclipsed it). But my first two kids and my sister’s 4 kids all got their fathers’ last names. So when the last of my line came out of me, I knew that he would have to be the one to carry my last name — a last name rich with the history of North African Jews, multiply-migrated — forward into the next generation.
You would think my parents could remember their own last name.
It was an oversight, of course. No one was willfully sabotaging my attempt to create an egalitarian household, but it added to the climate of sexism that is omnipresent. That carries into every aspect of every day.
Continued on the next page
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