I must admit, I am a chocolate addict. True confession. Turns out I got the family gene that doesn’t let me process alcohol (everyone needs a stress reliever), so for me it’s chocolate.
Because of my habit, I’ve gotten to know the most marvelous chocolate maker, Maya, here in Santa Barbara. I was such a regular customer she renamed her famous Florentines (for me anyway!) Here is a “Bethentine.”
-Dr. Beth
I get together with a group of high school friends a couple of times each year. Though informal, I enjoy seeing these friends regularly.
We have known each other for 60 plus years. Here is our reunion in our 50’s.
– Dr. Beth
Our family was able to manage a “carport” Thanksgiving this year, including a birthday celebration for granddaughter Isabela.
Each of our family “pods” had their own table and went to the buffet separately. Here’s Grandpa and me with son Davis and grandson Vaughn.
We won’t be so lucky for Christmas as we are under stay-at-home rules right now in Santa Barbara.
Stay safe…vaccine on the way.
My little one went back to in person school today for the first time since March. I have mixed feelings about this, but I am so happy for her.
When asked how it went today she said it was “fun!” – Dr. Allison
Recently, my granddaughter asked me how to decide between being a caregiver or a wage-earner. I told her that was not the question. The question should be, how can she do both.
Even after seventy years of profound change in the workforce, our culture hasn’t caught up to my granddaughter’s reality. As a young woman soon to enter the workforce, she has important decisions ahead.
The older patriarchal culture is portrayed as not having women work. Being a “good woman” is defined in this myth as a full time home-based mother. Nothing could be further from the truth. Women have always worked – and worked extremely hard. It was just all on a single campus, the family business, a family craft shop or farm. The difference was our great grandmothers were not public decision makers competing or leading men in the public arena.
The change seventy years ago was to remove the workplace from the home, creating serious problems for my granddaughter.
The first is she doesn’t have the economic security of a family business. The second is she will have severe childcare logistics problems when she has a baby and a family. Her economic security, a modern world paycheck, is separate from her children. My granddaughter needs to feel good about working and caring for her children because that is what women have always done. The third is her work may come into direct competition with men as she steps into the world of paychecks.
She simply needs to redefine her working pattern to suit the modern world. No single right answer exists, only a pattern that works for her. She or a partner can both opt in to work full-time and have a homecare system of caregivers. The challenge with this solution is that this may provide financial security but no family time with children.
Or she or her partner may choose to be a full time caregiver while the other one opts out of a care-giving role. This isn’t optimal for most couples. One person may simply not earn enough. One partner is deprived of intimate family contact and the other one is put at the financial risk of no viable career in their mid-50’s (with no children left in the home to care for).
The answer is often opting for “in between.” Find a career of interest and recognize that at some time you may work part time or flex time or as a consultant in the field when your family is young. You and a partner may choose to do this by fairly dividing up the domestic and paid workload.
You are keeping an oar in the water. In the short run, what you earn may be consumed in hiring help to maintain your house, but this is not a short-term investment in immediate income, this is a long-term investment in financial security and a fulfilling career.
In a modern humanistic world and culture, gender should not define my granddaughter’s home and job. Interest, competence and fairness is how she should organize her world. In the modern world a good mom is a good hands-on caregiver and a good financial provider. My granddaughter will discover her own version of having it all.
Last summer the New York Times did a series entitled “A weeklong look at the biases women face.” Great facts and figures about seven inequities that women have on their plates.
What the articles really didn’t talk about was why all the inequities exist and how to fix them.
For the past seven years, my colleague Dr. Beth Rogers and I have been writing about this. When we met at a Girls Inc. fundraiser in 2013, we had entirely different careers and different life stories, but we connected on a deep level. What we had in common was the fact that we were highly trained alpha females who had met these inequities head on and struggled to understand. We were both business-women. Dr. Beth has a PhD in anthropology and I was a physician with a master’s degree in public health and trained to look at systemic strengths and weaknesses of the healthcare system. We delved in.
What we found was a fascinating interaction of cultural and biological causes of these inequities. We found that if we could understand and make these inequities and their causes visible and name them, that the guilt and the exhaustion from the struggle lessened tremendously.
The biologic causes of these inequities are not what we would think. Yes, men in general are a bit bigger than women, and only women can have babies. That shouldn’t predict who can lead in today’s economy. The ancient patriarchy culture was driven by men being superior in hand-to-hand combat which doesn’t exist in the modern economy.
The biologic causes are all about good chemistry versus toxic stress and bad chemistry. Stress is tied to our fight or flight systems, and chronic stress leads to physical illness like obesity, hypertension and immunosuppression.
What most people and even scientists don’t understand is how the ancient cultural values are ingrained in us and our inner voice says we are “bad” or “good” based on memes that are outdated.
We are all still living in the “men in shining armor and damsels in distress” mode when it comes to evaluating our performance. Women will always be held back if everyone thinks they are “bad” women for doing what successful men do.
Everyone knows about the “double bind” that women who would dare to lead contend with. They cannot be too aggressive or they are a “bitch.” They can’t be too meek or they are a “bimbo.” Real world interactions though lead to constant bitch/bimbo (and other double bind) feedback that activates our bad chemistry. We don’t like to talk about this as women – “we can take it.” But as the pandemic is showing us, there is a tipping point where the stress is too much. Our forthcoming book delves into this in great detail and how we can lessen the inequities that we face on a daily basis. – Dr. Allison
__________
In Her Words: 7 Issues, 7 Days
A weeklong look at the biases women face.
“I was in the pro-life movement. But then, widowed with 6 kids, I prepared for an abortion. The pro-life movement’s caricatures make for good propaganda but terrible policy. People, real people, become pregnant.” – Shannon Dingle
Shannon’s phrase about the pro-life’s caricature of contemporary women particularly struck me in this article. Here she is a mother of six, at risk of dying in a pregnancy, feeling “shamed” and under threat of ostracism if she terminates a pregnancy to save not only her own life but those of her living children. Any responsible woman who is her own decision maker would make the decision to terminate the pregnancy.
And yet Shannon feels shame. She sees herself as thrown under the bus by her religious community as the caricature of a baby murderer. A wanton slut who should have kept her legs crossed. Or the mindless victim of a malevolent doctor who relishes surgical abortions for reasons none of us can fathom. This is criminal and should stop. Her narrative should be that she is a good mother. Any other story is just the fallout from an older put-down culture that slams women for decision-making about sex and reproduction. A story whose tentacles reach into the modern world. A story that should be rejected.
I was in Shannon’s shoes. My husband was dying of cancer and we believed he was sterile due to intense chemotherapy and radiation. Suddenly I was pregnant with a child who most probably would have special needs if the pregnancy even came to term. I had no way to make a living, was in business school, had two babies ages one and three and a terminally ill husband. Another child was impossible. Fortunately, this was after Roe v Wade and I terminated the pregnancy. The doctor told me the fetus was badly deformed as we had feared. I was raised as a woman whose culture supported me as an adult, a decision maker, and as someone who would have the judgement and should have the right to decide what would work for my family. I was raised in the part of our society that is modern and humanistic and sees women as decision-making adults. My body does not belong to a cult or a community.
Unfortunately, Shannon also had the terrible tragedy of widowhood. What is criminal is that she had to suffer shame. She was trapped in the carryover from an older society, a society based in warfare entirely run by men. The authoritarian religions have roots in an earlier culture based in warfare and control by the men who put their lives on the line in combat for the community. Women’s bodies were owned by the community since membership of that community only grew with new babies. The individual life of the mother meant nothing. The community would care for the children.
Clearly the modern world is not set up for the community to take on Shannon’s six children. We live in a different world. Daily hand to hand combat is not depleting our ranks. We need women to have the power to make the decisions that affect their lives. Clearly the attack on women being the ones who make this decision is an issue of women’s right to determine their reproductive lives and is not about the bizarre caricature that women are murderesses.
Shannon Dingle’s (@ShannonDingle) writing for USA Today inspires Dr. Beth’s comments on the pro-life movement’s caricatures of women in the contemporary culture.
I was in the pro-life movement. But then, widowed with 6 kids, I prepared for an abortion.
The pro-life movement’s caricatures make for good propaganda but terrible policy. People, real people, become pregnant.
In the 1960’s and 70’s upper class white women attacked the all-male bastions of elite organizations in the second-wave feminist movement. Quite correctly they were criticized by women of color for focusing on elite white lives and ignoring the issues of the rest of society. Women not only wanted suffrage, the first-wave movement, they wanted to be decision makers at the table of power. Their white male peers had that privilege and they did not. They rightfully attacked the structure.
The conservative defense currently surrounding Amy Coney Barrett suggests that she is evidence that a pro-life woman can have it “all.” How to untangle this conflation of issues? While it is great that Amy is as gifted and successful as she is, and that formerly male bastions can be open to her. But what does it mean to have it “all”? “All” is defined here as the type of 24/7/365 upper class job that characterized men in the 50’s, added to a stay at home mom who was 24/7/365 in the house. In case no one noticed, this adds up to 48/14/720, which does not exist in the modern universe.
What Amy’s career underscores is that she is upper class. She and her husband are spending a large block of time at work, (we assume) a big piece of emotionally necessary time with their children and outsourcing everything else with money. Of course, they have acres of paid support. You can’t do it any other way. Nothing wrong with this at all. But some combination of extended family and paid support has replaced the 50’s model and the whole world needs to recognize and accept that fact. I did what she was doing. I had a ton of degrees, I had five kids and I can promise you it took an arm and a leg financially and a grandmother across the street to make this form of “all” work! A family structured this way has challenges like any family has.
Let’s not pretend that Amy is your everyday mom. Modern domestic life is built on some form of well-heeled support system especially if you have seven kids. Less affluent women are right. This is not about women’s lives as normal people experience them.
She is not a role model for anything except wealthy, upper class women. It is great that she can bring a woman to the table of elite institutions, but she is far from your everyday woman.
We will see if her opinions reflect her class blinders or the interests of all women.
Dr. Beth’s response to the following article:
