Barbara Ehrenreich: Corporate Home Wreckers
Corporate Home Wreckers
By Barbara Ehrenreich
March 2006 Issue
I was in the Atlanta airport recently, cruising a bookstore, when this catchy title leaped out at me: Women Who Make the World Worse: and How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports. Since the author is National Review Washington editor and Fox News pundit Kate O’Beirne, I indulged my vanity and looked up my own name in the index. There I was, right up front on page four, credited with ruining our families.
If O’Beirne had done a little more research, she might have found me responsible for wrecking our military and schools, as well. But I can’t complain: Destroying the family is a hefty accomplishment all by itself.
This isn’t the first time I’ve gotten rightwing attention as a home wrecker. Back in the mid-’90s, James Dobson’s Focus on the Family once described me as a woman who’d dedicated her life to the destruction of the American family, in more or less those words. Partly this is just the rightwing translation of the word “feminist.” Some of you may recall Pat Robertson’s attack on feminism during the controversy over the Equal Rights Amendment in the ’80s. Feminists, he said, busy themselves becoming lesbians, killing their children, and advancing Marxism—a formidable agenda to say the least, especially if your children are fast on their feet.
What brought me to the Atlanta airport was not a trip to a convention of lesbian, Marxist, child-killers. I was returning from a holiday spent with my son and his girlfriend and my nephew and his wife, and I was rushing home because I was eager to rejoin my granddaughters (ages four and one), who are the light of my life. News of the Dobson attack had hit at a similar moment: I was returning from a visit to my grandmother and an ailing aunt in Iowa. My job may be to “destroy the American family,” but I’ve never managed to destroy a single family member, even one of the more irritating ones.
If anyone is “ruining” the American family, it’s all the employers who refuse to recognize that their employees have family responsibilities, as well as jobs. I’m thinking of two categories of employers, which often overlap: 1) Those who don’t pay enough for their employees to live on, thus forcing them to work second jobs, and 2) those who abuse their salaried employees with expectations of ten or more hours of work per day. Apparently there are more and more such anti-family employers, as Americans now surpass even the famously workaholic Japanese in annual hours on the job. From 1979 to 2000, Japan reduced the average annual hours worked by 305, whereas the United States reduced its annual hours by a whopping total of four, according to The State of Working America, 2004-2005.
All variety of things suffer when work expands to fill evenings and weekends—health, for example, and citizenly participation. How can you frame an opinion on the issues if you never get a chance to read or have long discussions with friends? But families—and especially children—take the worst hit. It’s just not possible to be a responsible and responsive parent or spouse if your work leaves you with barely enough time to shower.
But to get back to Kate O’Beirne: Will you help me save the family by joining me in a campaign for adequate wages and a return to the concept of the eight-hour day?
If not, let’s at least fight fair. You get out your photos of your grandkids (if any) and I’ll get out mine.
Barbara Ehrenreich is a columnist for The Progressive. Her latest book is “Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream.” Her website is www.barbaraehrenreich.com.
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Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine, which is one of the leading voices for peace and social justice in this country. Rothschild has appeared on Nightline, C-SPAN, The O'Reilly Factor, and NPR, and his newspaper commentaries have run in the Chicago Tribune, the L.A. Times, the Miami Herald, and a host of other newspapers. Rothschild is also the author of a book entitled You Have No Rights: Stories of America in Our Repressive Age (New Press, 2007). A graduate of Harvard University, Rothschild prior to coming to The Progressive worked as the editor of Multinational Monitor, a magazine founded by Ralph Nader. Rothschild came to The Progressive in 1983, and has worked for the magazine in many different capacities, first as associate editor, then managing editor, then publisher, and since 1994 as editor. Rothschild brought on distinguished social critics as columnists, including Barbara Ehrenreich, Eduardo Galeano, and Howard Zinn. He added monthly original poetry from the likes of Martín Espada and Adrienne Rich, and he added the humorists Kate Clinton and Will Durst. On the magazine's website, Rothschild contributes several times a week with his "This Just In" commentaries. And he keeps a running tally of civil liberties infringements in his "McCarthyism Watch." Rothschild writes monthly in The Progressive. He has interviewed Senator Russ Feingold, singer Ani DiFranco, Robert Redford, and the journalist Robert Fisk. He also hosts Progressive Radio, a syndicated weekly half-hour program, and he does radio commentaries Monday through Friday. Rothschild is also the co-founder and director of The Progressive Media Project, which since 1993 has been distributing opinion pieces to newspapers around the country in an effort to diversify and democratize the national debate. In 2007, Rothschild published his first book, You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression (The New Press). In 2009, he edited Democracy in Print: The Best of The Progressive, 1909-2009 (Univ. of Wisconsin Press).
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