首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
The Choice Myth Last week, The Washington Post ran a front-page story that said most stay-at-home moms aren’t SUV-driving, d
The Choice Myth Last week, The Washington Post ran a front-page story that said most stay-at-home moms aren’t SUV-driving, d
admin
2011-01-01
66
问题
The Choice Myth
Last week, The Washington Post ran a front-page story that said most stay-at-home moms aren’t SUV-driving, daily yoga-doing, latte-drinking white, upper-middle-class women who choose to leave their high-powered careers to answer the call to motherhood. Instead, they are disproportionately low-income, non-college educated, young and foreign-born; in other words, they are women whose horizons are greatly limited and for whom the cost of child care, very often, makes work not a workable choice at all.
These findings, drawn from a new report by the Census Bureau, really ought to lead us to reframe our public conversations about who mothers are and why they do what they do. It should lead us away from all the moralistic bombast(大话) about mothers’ "choices" and "priorities". It should get us thinking less about choice, in fact, and make us focus more on the objective conditions that drive women’s lives. And they should drive us to think about the choices that we as a society must make to guarantee that the best possible opportunities are available for all families.
The basic finding of this latest report—that the more choices mothers have, the more likely they are to work—has been known, to anyone who’s taken the time to seriously look into the issue, for quite some time now. Ever since 2003, when Lisa Belkin’s article in The Times Magazine about highly privileged and ultra-high-achieving moms—"The Opt-Out Revolution" —was generalized by the news media to claim that mothers overall were choosing to leave the work force in droves, researchers have been revisiting the state of mothers employment and reaching very similar conclusions.
In 2005, the Motherhood Project at the Institute for American Values surveyed more than 2,000 women and published a report that said most mothers, given free choice in an ideal world, would choose to be employed—provided their employment didn’t impinge (侵占) excessively on their time with their kids. Approximately two-thirds said they’d ideally work part time or from home; only 16 percent said they’d prefer to work full-time. (Interestingly, the researchers said, it was the least-educated mothers who expressed the strongest preference for full-time work.)
In 2007, the sociologists David Cotter, Paula England and Joan Hermsen looked carefully at four decades of employment data and found that women with choices—those with college educations—were overwhelmingly choosing to stay in the work force. The only women "opting out" in any significant numbers were the very richest—those with husbands earning more than $125,000 a year—and the very poorest—those with husbands earning less than $23,400 a year.
You might say that the movement of the richest women out of the workforce proves that women will, in the best of all possible worlds, go home. But these women often have husbands who, in order to earn those top salaries, work 70 or 80 hours a week and travel extensively; someone has to he home. Many left high-powered careers that made similar demands on their time. They are privileged, it’s true, but very often they have also been cornered by the all-or-nothing non-choices of our workplaces.
The alternative narrative—of constricted horizons, not choice—that might have emerged from recent research has never really made it into the mainstream. It just can’t, it seems, find a foothold.
"The reason we keep getting this narrative is that there is this deep cultural conflict about mothers’ employment," England told me this week. "On the one hand, people believe women should have equal opportunities, but on the other hand, we don’t envision(展望) men taking on more child care and housework and, unlike Europe, we don’t seem to be able to envision family-friendly work policies. "
Why this matters—and why opening this topic up for discussion is important—is very clear: because our public policy continues to rest upon a fictitious idea, eternally recycled in the media, of mothers’ free choices, and not upon the constraints that truly drive their behavior. "If journalism repeatedly frames the wrong problem, then the folks who make public policy may very well deliver the wrong solution," is how E. J. Graff, the associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University’s Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism once put it in the Columbia Journalism Review. "If women are happily choosing to stay home with their babies, that’s a private decision. But... it’s a public policy issue if schools, jobs and other American institutions are structured in ways that make it frustratingly difficult, and sometimes impossible, for parents to manage both their jobs and family responsibilities."
It looked, not so long ago, as though things were going to change. Barack Obama made increasing women’s work/life choices and providing more supports for working families a cornerstone of his campaign. All those lofty ideals, though, seem to have been forgotten in the realities of this recession, where plans to expand universal pre-K, paid family leave and subsidies for child care have gone the way of" state budget revenues. Even workfare, The Times reported this week, is being discarded in California in favor of old-style no-work welfare, because it’s been deemed too costly to give poor mothers job skills while providing decent child care.
In Fresno County, one of the first places in California where welfare recipients are being told about the policy change, which is voluntary for now, the new regulations aren’t being viewed as good news.
"Especially when you have kids, you can’t just sit around and collect checks," one mother told The Times. For now, 90 percent of beneficiaries in Fresno County are choosing to keep working and receiving child care subsidies.
When mothers can choose, they choose self-empowerment (自助自强). Because they know that there is no true difference between their advancement and the advancement of their children. Why do we so enduringly deny them the dignity of choice?
Women have limited horizon because of ______.
选项
A、more housework to do
B、cultural conflict
C、the demanding child-rearing
D、their confined employment
答案
B
解析
根据题干关键词women,limited horizon定位到原文第七段,进而定位到第八段第一句:The reason we keep getting this narrative is that there is this deep cultural conflict about mothers’ employment…可知妇女的视野窄,是因为由来已久的文化冲突,B)项符合原文。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/X5y7777K
0
大学英语四级
相关试题推荐
Manychildrenfirst【S1】______thevalueofmoneyby【S2】______anallowance,(零用钱).Thepurposeisto【S3】______childrenlearnfrome
Manychildrenfirst【S1】______thevalueofmoneyby【S2】______anallowance,(零用钱).Thepurposeisto【S3】______childrenlearnfrome
A、Mostofthemareboardingschools.B、Noneofthemtakeday-pupils.C、Pupilscanbeadmittedwithoutanyexam.D、Mostofthemh
WhenMikeKellyfirstsetouttobuildhisownprivatespace-ferryservice,hefigureshisbread-and-butterbusinesswouldbelo
Today’spolicemeninlargecitiesthroughouttheworld【C1】______onmodeminventionstohelpthemintheirwork.Inmostplacesm
A、Sheregrettedhavingboughtthesecond-handcar.B、Itisunnecessarytorentanotherhouse.C、Theyshouldselltheirsecond-ha
A、TheformerCEO.B、TheCEO’srivals.C、TheCEOhimself.D、Theemployees.A题目询问新的总裁从谁手里得到三封信。关键是听到文章开头两句“正退位的总裁私下里见了他,并赠送给他三封信”,
Thedifferencebetweenaliquidandagasisobvious【C1】______theconditionsoftemperatureandpressurecommonlyfound【C2】_____
WhenmenreturnedfromWorldWarIIandthepostwar"babyboom"began,Americansbegantomoveingreatnumberstothe【B1】______
Thefiremenacted______andpreventedthefirefromspreading.
随机试题
A、出生至1岁B、1~1.5岁C、1~2岁D、2岁半E、1~3岁前囟门关闭的最晚年龄大多是在
房地产估价就是对房地产的()进行估算和判定的活动。
若y1(x)是线性非齐次方程y’+P(x)y=Q(x)的一个特解,则该方程的通解是下列中哪一个方程?
根据《建设工程施工合同(示范文本)》,当合同中没有适用或类似于变更工程的价格时,变更价格由()确认后,作为结算的依据。
背景资料:某市政工程公司承建城市主干道改造工程投标,合同金额为9800万元,工程主要内容为:主线高架桥梁、匝道桥梁、挡土墙及改道,如下图所示。桥梁基础采用钻孔灌注桩,上部结构预应力混凝土连续箱梁,采用满堂支架法现浇施工;边防撞护栏为钢筋混凝土结构。说
根据项目进度控制不同的需要和用途,业主方和项目参与者可以构建多个不同的建设工程项目进度计划系统,如( )。
若含有18个元素的有序表存放在一维数组A[19]中,第一个元素放A[1]中,现进行二分查找,则查找A[3]的比较序列的下标依次为()。
中国历代文人雅士和诗人墨客为一个个传统节日谱写了许多脍炙人口的诗词,为我国的传统节日注入了深厚的文化底蕴。下列古诗词与节日对应正确的是()。
鲁迅先生曾在《无声的中国》中写道:“中国人的性情总是喜欢调和、折中的,譬如你说,这屋子太暗,说在这里开一个天窗,大家一定是不允许的。但如果你主张拆掉屋顶,他们就会来调和,愿意开天窗了。”这种先提出很大的要求来,接着提出较小、较少的要求,在心理学上被称为“拆
比例原则是行政执法应遵守的原则。下列符合比例原则的是()(2019年一综一第9题)
最新回复
(
0
)