Aha, thinks the writer as she arrives at Nancy Folbre's house in the deep woods of North Leverett: the Working-Mom-
Feminist-Economist angle. Folbre, dressed in jeans and an L.L. Bean sweater, is at her back door, sending off a little boy armed with a squirt-gun, admonishing him not to do any damage.As usual, things are not as they appear. "I don't have kids," says Folbre. "But I do have neighbors," she adds.
If Folbre has never personally had to juggle job and motherhood, she's very interested in women who do. For most of her career, she's tilled the intellectual soil in the place where family and the economy intersect.
It's a busy intersection these days. The work-family struggle is an issue for every parent, affecting, albeit in vastly different ways, both welfare and upper-income families. It's also an issue loaded with emotions and assumptions about men, women, and modern American life. But for Folbre it is at heart an economic question: what is the value of the labor of child-rearing, and who should pay those costs?
"What's going on now is a real cultural shift in which market work is really valued, and family work is really devalued," Folbre says. "U.S. feminism has been very good for career women and very, very bad for mothers, and it created a conservative backlash. I think now there is a strong generation of feminists who are very pro-family, but who don't want those values promoted at the expense of women."
Part of Folbre's mission is to talk about the value of what she calls "caring labor," and to integrate it into economic measurements. When traditional economists tally up the value of everything that moves to determine the gross national product, they stop at the front steps. Unpaid domestic labor is given a value only when it's being replaced by a daycare worker, say, or a nursing-home aide or probation officer.
'Twas not ever thus. In her recent book The War on the Poor: A Defense Manual, Folbre points out that in the nineteenth century, housewives were counted as members of the labor force in Massachusetts and Great Britain. And in Canada last year, census-takers asked citizens how much time they spent caring, unpaid, for children or seniors.
Folbre is one of a group of feminist economists who focus on family policy and publish the journal "Feminist Economics" three times a year. (Former UMass professor Jane Humphries is also a member.) And she is part of the Working Group on Families in the Economy, a MacArthur Foundation project in which economists, sociologists and psychologists come together to look at the economic value of parenting and domestic work.
Folbre likes getting out of the ivory tower: she's not afraid of tangling with conservative talk-show hosts about welfare reform, and through her work with the Center for Popular Economics, she tries to give the public a better understanding of economic policy and how it affects their lives.
She does it with humor and, often, with bite. "Why this rather surprising loss of confidence in Rational Economic Man?" she asked in a paper delivered at Yale last year. "Maybe because his Rational Economic Wife is no longer taking care of him." In War on the Poor, Folbre and co-author Randy Abelda of UMass Boston use cartoons, hip graphics, and pull-quotes to skewer myths about welfare and other right-wing chestnuts. The book has won endorsements from readers like columnist Molly Ivins, who contributed a blurb: "Keep it at your side when calling in to radio talk shows, writing your representative or even arguing with your dim-witted brother-in-law."
To illustrate attitudes toward poor women and the value of domestic labor, Folbre compares welfare payments with Social Security survivor's benefits. "Did you ever see an article in the newspaper about a widow falling into the trap of dependency when she was on Social Security?" she asks. "No, and in fact, you've never seen any really strong movement to impose a work requirement on anyone except the poor."
Folbre believes that the federal welfare reform law is not only mean, it's wrong-headed. By taking away federal health insurance, failing to provide childcare and reducing benefits when recipients get jobs, the government merely creates a new set of disincentives to work. "There's a lot of evidence that positive incentives are very effective, and they're also very much more humane," says Folbre.
She also has little faith that state programs will be any more compassionate. Despite its liberal patina, Massachusetts, with its family cap and time limit on benefits, now has one of the most punitive welfare policies in the country, says Folbre.
"The main reason for this is Governor Weld. He has a kind of liberalism on some issues, but an absolute, total lack of sympathy for welfare recipients. When he was talking about legislation, he said it was really bad for our children to have a mother who hangs around the house. Mothers who don't work for pay aren't just hanging around the house! What was Bill Weld's mother doing when he was growing up?"
Conservatives won the welfare debate, Folbre says, because they were able to frame the "story" of welfare in benevolent terms."The genius of the conservative assault on welfare was that they made the public believe welfare was actually hurting people," she says. "You could say 'I want to cut spending on the poor because it's really hurting them.' It was all couched in compassion, but what it was really about was spending less on the poor."
In the end, Folbre says, it's children who pay the price: nearly twenty percent of American kids (and almost half of African-American children) live at or below poverty level, without much help in sight.
If making financial ends meet is the problem for the welfare mother, at the other end of the economic ladder are two-career families struggling to find family time. The squeeze results partly from a real decline in wages, which, along with the income tax deduction for children, are significantly lower than twenty years ago. But it results also from cultural influences. If poor people are virtually invisible on television, Folbre observes, the average family is portrayed as downright opulent.
"Someone who is making $60,000 a year watches TV or goes to the movies and they wish they were rich," she says. "But if you look at the figures, they are rich. If you're making more than $55,000 a year, you're in the top third of the country. People who are in the top think they're in the bottom because they're constantly surrounded by these images of people who have much more than they do. It's a mirage."
Folbre earned her B.A. in philosophy, and her master's in Latin American Studies, at the University of Texas before coming north to earn a Ph.D. in economics at UMass in 1979. She became interested in economics of the family when she began looking at fertility rates: how and why do people decide not to have kids? "I got interested in the distribution of the cost of children," she says.
Folbre sees some bright spots in the national discourse on families. A recent Newsweek story, "The Myth of Quality Time," placed the problem in the laps of both parents, not just the mother's. The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, a new book in which sociologist Arlie Hochschild argues that work is becoming a refuge from stressful home-lives, is also getting people talking.
"There has to be a cultural revaluation of non-market work and family time." Folbre says. "Unless you do that, and that accompanies some specific policies creating more time and less stress for families, the trend Hochschild is describing is going to continue and intensify."
School schedules, for example, established in the days when farm families needed children to help with crops, have become the bane of family existence. Scholars like Folbre point to its economic inefficiency. "People generally go to work from nine to five, and kids are in school from eight to three," she says. "If we just synchronized our school system with work schedules, we could make tremendous improvements in productivity."
The hope of feminist economics, says Folbre, is that along with the political and economic equality for which women have fought for over a century will come a new stage of feminism which insists on creating more time for what were traditionally women's roles.
But the prior stages were indispensable, she says. "If you don't have gender equality before you create more time and space for families, all you do is reinforce the roles that got women disempowered in the first place.
