As I’m sure you know Yahoo recently hired Marissa Mayer as their new CEO. Ms. Mayer also happens to be pregnant. Which is wonderful personal news for her and her family. Twitter lit up with the announcement and the New York Times ran a profile: Maternity Leave? It’s more like a Pause.
Oh, how the New York Times is turning into the Patriarchy Times.
But back to Mayer. She told Fortune magazine that her maternity leave would be “a few weeks long, and I’ll work throughout it.” Of course this was to reassure stock holders, but the coverage of this quote further continues the “have it all” monopoly on women’s lives.
However, one woman’s maternity leave or lack thereof is not indicative of all women. And it shouldn’t be.
My issue is not with Ms. Mayer or her maternity leave, but the ravenous coverage of HER maternity leave throughout traditional print and pretty much all over the place. The bigger question is this: Why does any woman have to choose between her child and her income.
It’s a false choice. A non-choice. No choice at all.
The real discussion is not about one woman and her child or even one company (regardless of how big that company may or may not be), but why “successful” women are supposed to act like men even when they are, in fact, pregnant.
That’s what’s missing here. Followed up with a frank discussion about inequality in America: the lack of paid maternity leave, family leave, paternity leave, quality and affordable child care. Then quickly followed by the very real corporate mentality that good workers work 80 hours a week and have a wife.
If you’re a woman, your wife is your “help.”
That’s not a choice, it’s the same way it’s always been except you’re paying your “wife.” She just used to do that stuff for free. Oh and she’s probably brown. Oops, that’s not new either.
When the media holds up one woman as an example and then goes out and finds other women to back up their “see, she didn’t need maternity leave, look at all of these superhuman women doing it all,” you should be immediately suspect. What’s their agenda?
That the U.S. doesn’t need paid leave whatsoever. That corporate culture doesn’t need reform and that women work better pretending to be men with a wife than women with family obligations. Men, obviously, have those too but good luck being one and saying you are.
And as this example shows, good luck being a woman and saying you have a family.
That whole story is annoying me, because as you said there is so much that isn’t being said. There is the larger picture and the straight up inequality and even on a micro level, Ms Mayer is far more privileged than say the clerk at Walgreens. So what Mayer does shouldn’t be held up as some possible new standard, hell poor women and WOC have been going back to work right after birth for years.
Great post as always!
Blackgirlinmaine recently posted..On writing, blogging and validation
Thanks, Shay.
You know Mayer didn’t ask for this, right. The public comment on having a baby and to be a “representation” for women AND maternity leave and class and privilege. I feel like “no comment” would have done wonders here.
Thank you so much for saying it better than I could (or did). I have absolutely no wishes to judge Ms. Mayer one way or the other for her personal choices. She’s a grown-up and she can do what she wants. But… with the US significantly behind the rest of the world in paid maternity leave policies (http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/05/24/489973/paid-maternity-leave-us/?mobile=nc), I think that we should absolutely, as you said, be suspect of anything that seeks to point to one woman and offer her up as an example because of her willingness to turn away from maternity leave.
Jessi recently posted..Tales of a Post-It Ninja
One woman = just that: one woman. Not a representation. Not even an example. But like you said it’s ALL in the coverage. And the U.S. is deplorable at every level of social service. GAH! SOCIALISM. Help. Us. All. The Horrors.
I couldn’t agree with you more, especially the part about our society praising women who don’t use their full maternity leave. Women *brag* about cutting their leave short and going back sooner, like it’s a standard of how healthy/resilient/hard core they are.
I wrote a post about how crappy our American maternity leave is and got horrible comments from OTHER MOMS. Lots of stories about “Grr! I didn’t even need my full 6 weeks!” to “There’s a woman at my husband’s office who’s had 3 kids back to back–can’t imagine how many more she’d pop out if she got A YEAR OFF.” Someone even said holding a woman’s job for longer leaves would kill what’s left of American small business.
It really left me scratching my head. I argued for a 6 month maternity leave, and the PEOPLE IT WOULD BENEFIT were having none of it. Why? Because we’ve been sold that the Strong Can Do It All.
Jaci recently posted..Wanted: Someone Older Than You
Jaci: Oh man, apologies about that. It’s not a badge of hardcoreness. We’re not ballers, we’re mothers. Kudos on writing about it though even with a ton of push back because for all the squeaky wheels there’s a whole bunch of people nodding their heads in agreement. Paid leave — regardless of the type — hits at the unique American expectation that giving to another somehow takes away from the individual. It’s absurd.
Amen. Marissa Mayer is damned. No matter what she does now someone in the media is going to tear her decision to shreds. Luckily, it seems that she is smart enough not to care. Even when a woman breaks the glass ceiling there’s still someone waiting to smash her on the head.
Jessica @FoundtheMarbles recently posted..How to Stand Your Ground
She really is. Because any woman that becomes a first at anything is held as a representation / example for ALL women. There is no better example than Hillary Clinton. Regardless of how anyone feels about her politics; it’s fascinating to see her vilified, yet, as Secretary of State — the third woman to be in that position — not so much.