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Amy Coney Barrett and the Myth of the Working Mother

Photo credit: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds-Pool - Getty Images
Photo credit: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds-Pool - Getty Images

From Harper's BAZAAR

In a 2019 interview at Notre Dame Law School, Amy Coney Barrett, mother of seven, is asked the eternal question: “How do you do it?” She speaks of a supportive spouse, an equal partnership, a flexible workplace where she kept a basket of toys for her firstborn. Crucially, she also mentions her husband’s aunt, an unnamed woman who has evidently provided 16 years of what Barrett calls “consistent childcare in the home.” In the same interview Barrett cites the changing norms of her profession, greater numbers of women lawyers driving new family-friendly accommodations in law firms. Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmed her nomination to the Supreme Court, clearing the way to a Senate vote. If confirmed, she will be the fifth woman to ever serve the court.

When Barrett appeared on Capitol Hill for her Supreme Court confirmation hearing, she brought several of her children with her. Over and over the children were referenced approvingly, Barrett’s status as a working mother lauded by legislators on both sides of the aisle. Barrett introduced the children, both those present and those who remained at home (with “friends and fearless babysitters”), giving biographical details for each. Even confined to the audience, the children were very much part of the proceedings.

In America, seeing a woman bring her kids to the biggest moment of her professional life—hearing ancient senators laud her for the size of her family—feels not like progress, but like gaslighting. Barrett’s apparent dual success as a mother of many and a highly competent professional (her brief and alarming judicial record notwithstanding) cements the myth that childcare and work-life balance in America are essentially private and individual challenges to navigate—challenges that needn’t stop a woman from attaining the highest professional achievements.

Photo credit: Pool - Getty Images
Photo credit: Pool - Getty Images

In America, every family situation is a distinctive patchwork quilt. We have no guaranteed paid leave, very little public childcare or preschool, costly and terrible health insurance. Money can ease the problem, or, in some cases, a very accommodating aunt; neither of these is a coherent national policy around childrearing and work.

There are commentators who have cited an interest in Barrett’s childcare arrangements as sexist. I want to know about her childcare arrangements not because I question whether they allow her to do her job but because I wonder how the rest of us are expected to do ours.

Greater flexibility is not a societal trend enjoyed by women who earn minimum wage, who are stymied by the dual need to make rent and find a safe place for their children to play and learn. A not-insignificant fringe of Americans still don’t think mothers should work outside the home at all. Once when I tweeted what five years of daycare and preschool cost my family someone replied “This is just conspicuous consumption and child abuse.”

Listening to the congratulatory Senators, I wanted every parent in that hearing to disclose their childcare arrangements, what it cost and who did it.

I started writing this while it was dark and my family was still asleep. Tomorrow the younger one will go to a preschool that costs 1,100 dollars per month for four days a week, a number that does not align with the typical American work week. The other one will do online kindergarten under my supervision with a classmate who comes over every day. It turns out that online kindergarten is not set-it-and-forget-it. There are some things that are literally not possible to do simultaneously. (It’s nice if you can keep a basket of toys at your office, but it’s not childcare.)

I don’t doubt that Amy Coney Barrett works very hard. America was built by mothers who worked. And yet Judge Barrett also represents a paradox inherent in that phrase “working mother”. On the one hand, it is frustrating when the work of mothers, paid or not, is denigrated or overlooked; on the other, there is no innate morality that attaches to the role. The pioneer women who appear on coins and stamps were often mothers who worked very hard; so were the indigenous women whose land they tore up for their own kitchen gardens and crops. Enslaved mothers lived and died in labor camps and cared for the children of people, also mothers, who enslaved them. Sometimes acknowledging the labor of women means acknowledging work that should never been done at all, or work that was only possible because another woman worked harder for less.

In a country that has failed to meaningfully address these sins and imbalances, it makes sense that the only solidarity on display at Barrett’s hearing was not between women and their peers of all classes, but between wealthy elites whose experiences are wildly at odds with the ways that most people live.

Yet perhaps some women out there saw Barrett fail to name the fundamental rights guaranteed under the Constitution and cheered, “Don’t worry mama, you got this.” I don’t feel the need to extend her special grace, exhausted mama though she may be. I reserve grace for my friend who endured a stillbirth at 27 weeks that Barrett would likely insist she carry to 40. I reserve grace for Americans who wonder whether their marriages and adoptions will be considered valid by her court. I reserve grace for Americans who need pandemic relief more than they need whatever Dianne Feinstein (another working mom) thinks she was giving them with her obsequious performance. I reserve grace for myself and countless other people for private reasons—a privacy that, for now, is constitutionally protected.

Amy Coney Barrett will be cheered on in her meteoric career by the people who continue to sell the lie that every work-life challenge in America can be solved with a little personal gumption and ingenuity. Yes, she does appear to be having it all. And that illusion will keep the rest of us fighting like hell to keep what little we’ve got, when it’s long past time to demand more.

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