A Woman's Place

We think of economics as “the dismal science” in part because it tries to bracket the question of values, opting for mere description and impersonal laws. Economists talk about goods, but rarely The Good, because they consider that "subjective." This doesn’t mean we don’t have much to learn from economists. One of the most valuable lessons they have for people interested in politics is that policy decisions weigh evaluating tradeoffs. Rarely do politics present us with clear-cut, risk-free options. There are always costs, and while human beings are very skilled at promising benefits, they are far less capable of tabulating the full range of costs.

This occurred to me while reading an 8-year old essay written by Emma Green over at The Atlantic. I’m particularly attracted to essays that make us question things “we all know to be true”: in other words, inviolate conventions that we review at our own peril. It’s never easy to write such an essay without coming across as either a contrarian or a revolutionary, but instead as someone who has a fairly nuanced view of the world and realizes that almost all gain carries within it no small amount of loss, and that it is intellectually suspect to focus only on gains while ignoring losses.

Green offers a nuanced view in her essay “What America Lost as Women Entered the Workforce.” She examines the rapid increase in the numbers of women working outside the home that occurred after the Second World War and neither celebrates nor declaims the development. What she does instead is to take a careful look at a larger range of consequences.

We’ve made no secret of the fact that we admire the work of Alexis de Tocqueville who saw already that American democracy was devolving into increasingly privatized and atomized individuals on one side over whom stood a large, tutelary administrative state that insinuated itself ever more deeply into those private lives. In a mass democracy, we feel ourselves to be more inconsequential and insignificant and insecure, and this large centralized bureaucracy is meant to secure our well-being. The thing that had slowed the progress of this “despotism” was also the thing Tocqueville offered as a response to it: engaging in public life through voluntary association. Only by getting out of our private shells and forming a public life of mutual dependence and solicitude can we form a shared world worthy of ourselves. This is what freedom demands of us and why, Tocqueville said, freedom’s apprenticeship is so arduous. It means trading comfort and ease for discomfort and effort.

Much has been written in the last 50 years about the increase in American individualism that signifies a retreat from public life. What’s interesting about Green’s essay is that she connects this problem to the entry of women into the workforce.

Women have long formed collective organizations intended to improve American society. They volunteered their time, waged political campaigns, and advocated for the poor and elderly. They organized voters, patronized the arts, and protested the government. In the years since women’s liberation, this kind of civic engagement has dropped precipitously. The kind of community involvement that has replaced it, where it has been replaced at all, is a weak substitute: When women advocate, it’s often on behalf of their own kids or families. And when they get involved in causes, they tend to cut checks rather than gather in protest. The most vulnerable members of society have lost their best allies—women—partly because those women are too busy working.

In the process, Green expresses a very Tocquevillian insight, and one we would do well to remember: “The corner office isn’t always the pinnacle of leadership. Often, the most important leadership happens in local communities.”

Green traces the development of women-led local social organizations that operated in a “bottom-up” way to address social needs. These gradually got replaced by well-funded “top-down” national advocacy groups, administered by experts and professionals, and operated on the basis of aggregation. Blind to the particularities of circumstances and need, they tried instead to solve “problems” according to their system of measurement. Individual charity yielded to abstract problem-solving, and any localized push-back was prevented by the increased absence of women from these bottom-up social organizations. Green makes a controversial but I think largely correct observation: women are both more attuned to immediate problems and better at addressing them than are men. Put a crying baby in a room full of people and watch what happens. Observe how moms and dads differ when it’s snack day for their kids’ soccer team.

The decline of participation in local associations can also be connected to the decline of participation in religious services, as regularly churched people are more likely to volunteer their time; and also the hypermobility of American society, since people who have no deep connection to a place are less likely to care for it. But Green focuses on the fact that as women have ascended to more leadership roles in corporations and national governance, they have left a leadership vacuum in many local communities, and rendered those communities fragile and impoverished, not only materially but spiritually as well.

But more: as Tocqueville observed, the township is the nursery of democracy. It is in local community that we learn the art of being free and develop and demonstrate the leadership skills — team-building, forming coalitions, creating consensus, compromise, and so forth — essential to democratic governance. Without that kind of direct involvement we won’t develop the skills necessary to maintain democracy at the macro level. Our current political crisis at the national level in no small part results from the increased absence of women in leadership positions at the local level.

What does it profit us if we gain the world but lose our souls in the process? Employment is not freedom but another mode of servitude. You operate on someone else’s schedule and perform for the them the tasks that they assign you. Roughly half of Americans express dissatisfaction with their jobs, and a smaller percentage still think it’s an important part of their identity. The percentages who find their work meaningful or fulfilling are lower still. In an interesting little précis in The Atlantic, Erin Cech warns us against the dangers of connecting our “passion” to our employment:

Put frankly, the white-collar labor force was not designed to help workers nurture self-realization projects. It was designed to advance the interests of an organization’s stockholders. When people place paid employment at the center of their meaning-making journey, they hand over control of an essential part of their sense of self to profit-seeking employers and the ebbs and flows of the global economy.

Cech recommends that we “trim our expectations about work” and to “diversify our meaning-making portfolios.” this would entail changing our default thinking from “How can I change my career path to do work that I love?” to “How can I wrangle my work to leave me with more time and energy for the things and people that bring me joy?

Green offers a similar sentiment in her essay:

And while many of their educated, wealthier peers now have alternatives to the suffocating housewife’s life that so enraged Betty Friedan seven decades ago, some experience it as an opposite kind of suffocation: a never-ending, ladder-climbing work life, the height of which is making money for someone else rather than building a world in which they’re invested.

We stumble here again on one of the central American paradoxes: Americans are wealthier than they have ever been and more people have more opportunity than ever, and yet they are experiencing historically high levels of depression and anxiety. Sociologists remain baffled by this, but most people intuit the problem: money is not what makes us happy. Relationships are. By losing our ability to get out of our houses and engage one another freely in meaningful ways we have cut ourselves off from the sources of our genuine well-being. Only in face-to-face forging a common life together within our local communities will we find the happiness we seek.

Discussion Questions:

1. Is there anything in life that doesn’t involve calculating trade-offs? Do we become so focused on one thing we are trying to achieve that we lose sight of what we leave behind?

2. Were women more involved in building local community only because they had no options, or because they’re just better at it than men are?

3. How do the skills of local community-building translate to the corporate board room or the halls of Congress? Has our politics become more contentious because people don’t develop their skills at the local level first?

By Jeff Polet

Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation

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