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Sam and Hanna’s conversation about breastfeeding and its correlation with women’s earning power has me thinking about the series on “idle parenting” currently being published on Slate, excerpted from Tom Hodgkinson’s new book The Idle Parent. Much as I enjoy Hodgkinson’s magazine The Idler (and its accompanying website), with their pleasingly old-fashioned design and good-humored endorsement of the art of loafing, there’s something about this parenting series that’s been bugging me, and I think it has to do with gender. Hodgkinson’s argument, that our family lives and personal happiness would be better served by slowing down and doing less, makes intuitive sense to any working parent, but in practice, it's a lot easier to slow down when one has already established a career to do less of. Given that the period during which women have young children corresponds with the time when they’re building their work identities—and given our cultural assumptions about reduced hours and the “mommy track”— maternal “idling” might read very differently to employers than its paternal counterpart. Choosing to quit or radically downsize one’s job (like prioritizing extended breastfeeding over full-time work) could mean the difference, not between making partner next year or doing so in five years, but between having any meaningful paid work as an adult and having none at all.
That said, I’ll probably read The Idle Parent with pleasure, if only to daydream vicariously about the enviable design for living the Hodgkinsons have worked out: Sleep till ten while your kids make their own tea and porridge, then sit in front of the farmhouse and watch the wild bunnies hop by.
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Here's an unfortunate story from my neck of the woods: Next week, the Ohio Supreme Court will hear the case of a woman who says she was fired for taking extra restroom breaks to pump breast milk.
The company—Totes/Isotoner—isn't commenting, so we only have the side of LaNisa Allen, who
said she began taking the extra breaks at 10 a.m. after she found her 10-minute scheduled break at 8 a.m. was too short and she couldn't stand to wait until her 11 a.m. lunch break.
About two weeks after she started taking the breaks, an agency supervisor came into the restroom and told Allen she was breaking workplace rules. She was fired by a Totes supervisor that afternoon.
The company prevailed in both the trial and the original appeal, arguing that "breastfeeding doesn't legally constitute an illness or medical condition" that it needs to accommodate.
Now, as a conservative, I usually support the right of businesses to establish their own workplace policies. But I don't defend a company's dumb policies, and that's what this seems to be. Do they allow employees to take smoking breaks? If so, how do you justify allowing smoke breaks but not give a woman a few extra minutes to pump? Do you have to clock-in/clock-out to use the restroom? (Yes, I've heard of places that are so draconian.) Also, I suspect that the lawyers making the arguments that breast-feeding doesn't constitute a medical condition are either men or maybe women who've never arrived at work with a breast pump in tow only to realize that part of the device is sitting at home on the kitchen counter. I can assure you it's painful.
On the other hand, can working mothers help their own cause by being proactive with their employers, explaining upfront what their needs are and how easy it would be to accommodate them? Offer some flexibility? (As in, "I can be here 15 minutes early/stay 15 minutes late, but I really need this block of time in the middle of the day.)
To me, it behooves both the company and the employee if the company has a clear policy on what it can accommodate, and if the employee is vocal and upfront about her needs. What do others think?
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Shout out to Broadsheet for noticing this video of Salma Hayek breast-feeding a sick African 1-week-old. I always want to make fun of dear Salma, only because she starred in my least favorite movie ever—Dogma. And the Angelina bitch-fight jokes write themselves. But, in fact, the short clip is quite moving, because it scrambles our fixed proto-Victorian image of who is the mother and who is the wet nurse. Unlike, say, the infamous Alex Kuczynski photo in the story about her adventures in surrogate parenting. Plus, Salma is quite humble and practical about the thing, not aiming for the Madonna pose Angelina likes to strike.
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