Conservatives Say They Want to Help 'Parents' Stay Home. They Mean Mothers.

By Jill Filipovic, The Washington Post

09 May 21

Gender-neutral language sounds like progress. But look at the policy ideas.

n the long tail of a pandemic that has been financially devastating for working mothers, Democrats are pushing to expand child-care options and potentially bring the United States in line with much of the rest of the developed world in offering a universal child-care system.

In response, conservatives are freaking out.

The most visible anti-child-care Republican at the moment is J.D. Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy” and rumored to be considering a run for a Senate seat in Ohio. Vance went on a recent Twitter tear in which he leaned into gender-neutral terms — “parents,” “Americans,” “people” — while criticizing “corporate daycare” and arguing that “a healthy society should make it easier for parents to care for kids.” President Biden’s proposal for universal pre-K, Vance declared, was a “war against normal people” and their preferences for their households.

When Vance talks about the people who primarily care for children, and who struggle to raise kids and work for pay, he isn’t talking about “parents” or “Americans” or “people” or even “the working class.” He’s talking about mothers. And when it comes to the people whom Vance and other self-styled conservative populists imagine should be at home, it’s not “parents” but married women financially supported by their husbands.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), for example, compared universal day care to communism and went on Fox News to argue that by offering child care, Democrats were seeking to “incentivize women to rely on the federal government to organize their lives.” When Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) introduced his “parent tax credit,” he noted that “millions of working people want to start a family and would like to care for their children at home, but current policies do not respect these preferences.” Neither, apparently, does Hawley: His bill has an earnings requirement, meaning the neediest families — disproportionately headed by single mothers — wouldn’t qualify because Hawley and other Republicans want to ensure they’re working for pay. And while Hawley said he’s pushing the bill because “American families should be supported,” his legislation wouldn’t support all families equally: It would give single-parent families, which are largely headed by women, half of what two-parent families receive.

On the surface, talking about “parents” rather than “mothers” might seem like progress. The fact that gender-neutral language has become more standard in these discussions does reflect a real shift in gender norms: Men are doing a lot more parenting than they used to; fathers increasingly say they want a better work-life balance and more time with their families; feminists have pushed for a world in which fathers do their fair share, women can work for pay, and it’s not presumed that women will be the primary caregivers for children.

Such language can reflect changing ideas and our hopes for the future. But it can also be slippery and evasive, a way to obscure whom policies would really affect. It’s mothers who still do the majority of child-care in the United States (and around the world) and who spend much more time with their children than fathers do with theirs. Mothers are much more likely than fathers to raise their children without a partner: The number of unmarried parents has exploded, but the proportion of unmarried parents who are solo dads hasn’t changed since the 1960s. One in four American children are now being raised in single-parent households, and overwhelmingly by single moms.

Solo moms who must put food on their kids’ plates need child care more than just about anyone. So far, no Republican has proposed paying them a full salary to stay home. Working-class and poor women are more likely than middle-class and wealthy women to have a child before getting married, if they marry at all. Despite a move to rebrand themselves the representatives of the working class, Republicans have never wanted to financially empower the many working-class solo mothers to have the choice to stay home. And even as they talk about “parents” having that option, they’ve certainly never pushed for dads to quit their jobs and become full-time homemakers.

The number of dads who purposefully quit jobs to raise their kids remains pretty tiny. In two-parent families where one partner stays home, that partner is almost always the mother. And while some fathers are the primary caretakers for their children, men are still much more likely to say they’re at home because they’re ill or disabled than to say they affirmatively chose to stay home to raise kids. Women, on the other hand, are much more likely to have left work specifically to raise their children. Only a quarter of stay-at-home dads intentionally left the workforce to care for kids, compared with three-quarters of stay-at-home moms.

It is mothers particularly, not parents equally, who do most of the work of raising America’s children. It’s mothers specifically, not parents generally, who are pushed out of the labor force when child care is unavailable or inaccessible. And when Americans say it’s better to have one parent at home full time with young children, a little digging shows that they overwhelmingly mean it’s better to have the mother at home full time: Very few say that’s an ideal situation for dads. When conservatives tout policies that would enable one “parent” to stay home, they’re really saying they want mothers to do so.

The disruptions of the pandemic have only magnified these inequities. With kids out of school and at home, it was working mothers who were suddenly charged with figuring out how to be full-time employees, full-time caregivers and full-time teachers. A lot of them couldn’t do it: More than 5 million women lost their jobs during the pandemic. Single mothers were hit hardest of all, and Black and Latina single mothers the hardest among them. Unemployed women were nearly three times as likely as unemployed men to cite child-care demands as the reason they were out of the labor force.

What self-styled pro-family conservatives rarely want to address is that women working is good for both women and families. It brings a wide assortment of financial and social benefits, such as children who do better in school, daughters who are more likely to be employed and boys who grow into more involved fathers. Working mothers are better off financially than their stay-at-home peers; they wind up with more retirement savings; they are less likely to say they feel angry and depressed; and they are better insulated from divorce, the death of a spouse, and other sad but common upheavals that leave all families reeling but put stay-at-home mothers in much more dire straits. A lot of data supports the conclusion that it’s good when women work outside the home. What’s not good is when working mothers are squeezed from all sides, juggling more-demanding workplaces, a dearth of affordable child care and ever-higher standards for what it means to be a good mom.

It’s far past time Americans had serious discussions about child care, and such debates about some of the most intimate and important parts of our lives will always force us to work through what we most value: female independence or long-enforced gender roles; the false promise of “choice” or the wide unknown of unrealized opportunity. But if we want to find solutions that meet the needs and desires of more Americans, we need to talk about what we’re actually talking about. All parents do not shoulder the burdens of parenting equally. When it comes to expectations about who forgoes income and the independence it brings, who gets pushed out of the workforce when child-care demands scale up, and whom conservatives expect to stay home with kids, we’re not talking about all parents, regardless of gender.

We’re talking about mothers.

How 'Socialism' Stopped Being a Dirty Word for Some Voters - and Started Winning Elections Across America

By Joshua Kluever, The Conversation

09 May 21

 

he leftist Democratic Socialists of America, which helped congressional star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez get elected in 2018, looks to be a big political player again in New York City’s 2021 municipal elections.

The group has not yet endorsed anyone for mayor – the top prize in New York’s June 22 Democratic primaries. But all 51 city council seats are up for grabs this year, and the DSA has members running for six of them – including Queens public defender Tiffany Cabán and Brooklyn tenant activist Michael Hollingsworth.

With two state senators and five representatives out of 213 lawmakers, the New York State Legislature already has the country’s largest DSA legislative caucus. These Democrats share a leftist platform that includes guaranteeing housing as a human right and ending mass incarceration

The DSA has upended local politics in this Democratic stronghold, and its wins extend well beyond New York – into Virginia, Nevada and beyond. How did socialism jump from the fringes of American politics into its very center?

American socialist history

The DSA’s roots trace back to the Socialist Party of America, which was formed in New York in 1901 to promote such issues as establishing an eight-hour workday and public ownership of utilities like water and electricity.

Writer Upton Sinclair, Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger were prominent early members. But many early American socialists were Jews and Eastern European immigrants – groups that were considered well outside mainstream “white” society at the time.

My research as a historian of American socialists finds that early 20th-century socialists found electoral success by running candidates who represented the economic and racial diversity of their communities and championed the issues that mattered to working-class, immigrant constituencies.

In 1918 – the heyday of New York’s socialist caucus, when socialists held 10 of 121 seats in the State House – socialist politicians were teachers, settlement house lawyers and union leaders. They proposed New York’s first birth control bill, allowing advocates to give women educational pamphlets about contraception, and put forward programs to create old-age insurance and rent control.

The Socialist Party began losing members to the growing Communist Party in the 1930s. By the mid-20th century, it had responded to Americans’ growing anticommunism with a rightward turn. In 1972, party leaders actually renamed the party the Social Democrats, USA because so many people associated the word “socialist” with America’s great antagonist, the Soviet Union.

The DSA, past and present

Disillusioned, the activist and Marxist professor Michael Harrington left the organization and in 1973 formed the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, which later merged with another leftist group, the New American Movement, to form the Democratic Socialists of America.

Unlike the Socialist Party of America, which was a registered political party and ran candidates on its own ticket, the DSA is a political group. Harrington wanted to create the “left wing of the possible” within the Democratic Party.

For four decades, DSA members have mostly run in Democratic primaries, attempting to push the party leftward – on the Iraq War and NAFTA, for example – while endorsing Democratic presidential nominees from Walter Mondale to Barack Obama.

It had some early local successes. From the 1980s to the early 2000s, DSA members were elected to city councils nationwide and won mayoral races in liberal college towns like Berkeley, California; Ithaca, New York; and Burlington, Vermont, where the openly socialist politician Bernie Sanders was mayor from 1981 to 1989.

In 2016, Sanders ran for president. His campaign, coupled with Donald Trump’s subsequent victory, created a surge in DSA membership among young voters. The group’s median age dropped from 68 in 2013 to 33 by 2017. The DSA now claims over 90,000 dues-paying members, up from 6,000 in 2015.

The DSA’s electoral strategies also changed after 2016, partly due to the influx of new members and partly in frustration with mainstream Democratic candidates.

In Democratic primaries across the country, DSA candidates ran to replace older, centrist, white incumbents with young leftists who promised to fight for “Medicare for all” and to “hold elected officials accountable.”

It was a winning strategy for the Trump era. Since 2016, DSA-backed candidates have won district attorney races from Philadelphia to Travis County, Texas, and hold four seats in Congress. Forty DSA members sit in 21 state legislatures. DSA members hold five of Chicago’s 50 city council seats.

The professional backgrounds of today’s DSA legislators resemble those of their forebears. New York State Sen. Jabari Brisport, elected in 2020, was a teacher and tenant organizer. New York State Rep. Phara Souffrant Forrest was previously a tenant organizer and nurse.

The DSA’s legislative proposals – rent control, free college and reproductive rights – are classic socialist issues, updated for the 21st century. The Democratic Party has now embraced many of these proposals, but moderates like West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin have not.

As in the past, the DSA tends to back candidates from marginalized groups – whether African American, Caribbean, South American or South Asian – who reflect the racial makeup of the neighborhoods they represent.

Angry Dems and DSA infighting

The DSA’s growing political profile has caused tensions within the Democratic Party.

Shortly after DSA-backed candidates in March 2021 swept all five leadership positions in the Nevada Democratic Party, many longtime party staffers quit rather than work under the new leftist leadership. But first, according to the Nevada Independent and other local newspapers, the Democratic staffers transferred US$450,000 from the DSA-controlled Nevada Democratic Party coffers into the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which is controlled by the National Democratic Party.

Some DSA policies that diverge sharply from the Democratic party line – such as its support for the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel for its militarized occupation of the Palestinian territories – draw fierce criticism from other Democrats.

The DSA has also been accused of having a “race problem.” Despite running primarily candidates of color, the organization’s leadership is largely white and male. Some DSA members say the group silences the concerns and voices of people of color.

After new groups arose within the DSA to recruit more Black leaders, the DSA’s national committee announced in February 2021 that it would start an initiative to better attract, mentor and retain people of color.

In the 20th century, American socialism cracked under the weight of infighting and social change. Can the modern DSA survive its 21st-century challenges?

Its next test is in New York City on June 22.