Madeleine M. Kunin

Madeleine M. Kunin (b. 1933) was the first woman governor of Vermont and the first woman in the United States to serve three terms. Author of Living a Political Life (1994), she served as the ambassador to Switzerland from 1996 to 1999 and currently is a professor at the University of Vermont. Following is “Time for a Revolution,” the opening chapter of The New Feminist Agenda: Defining the Next Revolution for Women, Work, and Family (2012).

Five of us were meeting for lunch and reminiscing about the women’s movement. “I was never one of those angry women,” one said. “I’m still angry,” I blurted. My reaction surprised both me and my friends. Where did that come from? A source I hadn’t tapped before. Upon reflection, I realized that I’m not angry enough to carry a placard down hot macadam streets in front of the nation’s Capitol, like I did in my thirties when I marched for women’s rights. But now in my seventies I’m still dissatisfied with the status quo and harbor a passion for change. Old age allows me the luxury of being impatient—there is not so much time left—and it permits me to say what I think, to be demanding, and, best of all, to imagine a different world where there is true gender equality in the workplace, the home, and the political arena.

Why the anger? What did I expect?

I expected that the women’s movement of the 1970s would give me a good answer to the question my students regularly asked: how do you manage to have a family and a career?

I expected that affordable, quality child care would be widely available, that paid family leave would be the law, and that equal pay for equal work would be a reality. I did not expect that women would still make 77 cents for every dollar that men earn.

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I expected that one-third to one-half of our Congress, governors, state legislatures, and mayors would be female. I did not expect that in 2010 that number would be 17 percent in the Congress, and the United States would be tied at 69th place in the percentage of women in parliaments, out of 178 countries.

I expected that one-third to one-half of corporate board members would be women. I did not expect to see that proportion stuck at 17 percent.

I expected that a high percentage of the Fortune 500 companies would be led by women. I did not expect that figure to be 3 percent.

I expected that misogyny, rape, and other acts of violence against women would be widely condemned and sharply reduced. I did not expect that a female journalist could be sexually abused in the middle of Cairo’s Tahrir Square and then blamed for bringing it on herself, as Lara Logan of CBS News experienced in February 2011.

I expected that Roe v. Wade would remain the law of the land. I did not expect that it would be eroded, state by state.

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I expected that by the year 2011 grandmothers like myself would be able to tell their grandchildren of how life used to be “long ago,” when families had to figure out for themselves how to be both wage earners and caregivers.

Some changes occurred that I had not expected and could not have imagined: that women would comprise nearly 60 percent of college undergraduates, that women would comprise half of the medical and law students, that women would enter the workforce in record numbers, and that the traditional family supported by the father would be overtaken by the two-wage-earner family.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that many women who have careers that we never could have imagined for ourselves are still flummoxed by the most age-old problem: how to have a job and take care of the children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled. Until we find a way to sort out how to share these responsibilities—between spouses, partners, employers, and governments—gender equality will remain an elusive goal. Progress for women will remain stalled. But it’s not only about gender anymore. As I write, Italy is in an economic crisis, in danger of defaulting on its government debt. One reason given for its economic woes is that it has the lowest percentage of women in the workforce in all of Europe. Why? Whether because of the country’s macho culture or lack of family support programs, Italy offers little in the way of encouragement or assistance for working families.

Time for Change, Again

The countries that do support working families benefit from greater productivity and social well-being. It is time for another social revolution, not for the benefit of women alone, but for the most traditional of reasons: for the sake of the family. We need to reweave the fabric of society to provide the love and care necessary for the more fragile members of our families. The workplace must be reconfigured to harmonize with these responsibilities. The urgency for change is felt by families at all income levels, even those who are able to negotiate flexibility for themselves and can afford to pay for quality child care. Middle- and low-income employees are most starkly affected by today’s work/life stress. They cannot make ends meet, financially or emotionally. They experience a severe time deficit that does not allow them to give enough of themselves at work or at home. These frustrations are commonplace. If the kitchen table, the water cooler, or Twitter could talk, these stories would overwhelm all other conversation. If one family’s text messages about who is picking up the children or shopping for dinner were gathered in a book over a few years, it would be too heavy to lift.

The question families ponder is: how can we be better parents and employees without neglecting either our families or our jobs? We are beginning to understand the individual cost that the schism between work and family exacts. We have not added up the national cost. Our reluctance, or outright refusal, to enact policies that would bridge the gap between family and work has contributed to disturbing national statistics: alarmingly high child poverty rates, declining college graduation rates and test scores, and a growing chasm between the rich, the middle class, and the poor. Our inability—for political, economic, or cultural reasons—to invest in families leaves us vulnerable to being reduced to second-rate status in the global economy. Impossible to measure, but not to be ignored, is the moral cost we pay by depriving so many young Americans of the chance to realize the American Dream.

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It is time to mobilize a constituency for change. Who is to be charged with calling a halt to the “push-me, pull-me” tug-of-war game that families are forced to play? The obvious answer is: women, as part of a broad coalition, attending to the unfinished business of feminism.

As New York Times columnist Gail Collins concluded in her book When Everything Changed, “The feminist movement of the late twentieth century created a new United States in which women ran for president, fought for their country, argued before the Supreme Court, performed heart surgery, directed movies, and flew into space. But it did not resolve the tensions of trying to raise children and hold down a job at the same time… . They had not remade the world the way the revolutionaries had hoped.”

Do feminists have an obligation to complete their mission of gender equality? Yes, but not single-handedly. The issue of accommodating both work and family has outgrown the parameters of our current perception of feminism. The entire family is affected when women and men cannot find equanimity in their lives: women, men, children, grandparents, and uncles and aunts. The new constituency for work/life policies is inclusive. We have left the female ghetto of family/work issues and moved into every neighborhood.

Women have traditionally led the charge on family issues, in part because of experience: fatigue from too many late-night feedings, red knees from too much scrubbing, and creased brows from too much worrying about where the children are and what they might be doing. Women spoke up because they knew what they were talking about, but more often they were out front because no one else would volunteer. Women remain the key sponsors of legislation affecting women and families, both in Congress and in state legislatures, because they understand the chapters of their own lives. But women alone can no longer complete the mission. We need that other half—men—to march at our sides, linked arm-in arm as we approach the Capitol steps. What demands will we make? Let’s translate the easy rhetoric of “family values” into tough action. Enough sweet talk; we want results that will enable us to be good parents, good caregivers, and good workers.

When women try to figure out the conundrum of finding a good match between work and family, we believe it is only a question of balance. We add an ounce or two on one side of the work/life scale, and subtract an ounce from the other. Perfect—for one moment, but not for the next, when a child gets sick or a new supervisor changes the schedule, or there is an unexpected pregnancy. Suddenly we’re out of kilter. And the responsibility for being out of balance is ours and ours alone. We have failed.

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We are not alone. When we fall, we bring our families down with us. They bear the consequences of either less income or less care, or both. A minority of highly skilled, highly paid women can negotiate paid family leave and flexible schedules, but the majority cannot because they don’t have the power to ask without fear of losing their jobs, and they rightly fear that they are easily replaceable.

One by one, women’s and men’s requests for policies that support families have been denied. Demands made by a broad and diverse coalition are harder to ignore. This has been the pattern of change throughout history: when the “I” becomes “we,” a cause begins to move from the fringe to the center, as has been exemplified by the social changes brought about by movements for disability rights and gay and lesbian civil rights.

Who are “we”? We are the disparate constituencies—children, women (all women, not only those who call themselves feminists, but also those who shudder at the idea of being called feminists), the elderly, the handicapped, the sick—who can give one loud shout out for change. Such a large chorus will increase the volume, but noise is not enough. To build strong bonds among constituencies that have not often worked together, we have to start by redefining ourselves. Can we mobilize under the banner of Feminists for Families?

(2012)