WE ARE ALL UNDEREMPLOYED COMPARED TO OUR GREAT-GRANDPARENTS.

Suzanne Venker says, act like it, ladies.

Of course, motherhood has never been easy; but compared to today our own mothers’ experience was a walk in the park. Case in point: I recall a friend who told me how her working mom friends are stressed to the max trying to get dinner on the table every night. When she brought this to her mother’s attention, her mother reminded her that in her day, mothers weren’t responsible for working a full-time job in addition to getting dinner on the table. Getting a healthy dinner on the table was the job.

All of which is to say, the ‘to-do list’ [Sarah] Friedberg described is real. And it exists, whether modern women realize it or not, because for years feminists disparaged the work of motherhood and told women to leave their homes in search of greener pastures.

Only it turns out those pastures weren’t so green after all. And now many women who want to stay home now or in the future feel stuck, for they’ve created lives that demand two incomes because that’s what they’ve been encouraged to do.

Gosh, if only there was a name for that phenomenon.

General equilibrium theory only goes so far, though.  Here's another mom pushed beyond endurance.

Like most families in which both parents work full time and year-round, Tina and her husband live what can only be described as a rat race. For starters, every day they must decide who’s going to schedule their work life in such a way as to accommodate the children’s needs. That alone sounds exhausting.

Moreover, their children don’t wake up according to their own body clocks to a calm house and warm food on the stove. Instead, they’re awakened from their slumber, dressed as they’re half asleep, fed protein bars, and then shuttled from daycare to round-the-clock babysitters. And God forbid they get sick. Then all hell breaks loose.

None of Tina’s children sleep through the night and more often than not end up in their parents’ bed. Needless to say, Tina is utterly sleep deprived and as a result her sex life is non-existent—much more to her husband’s dismay than to hers. All she wants is sleep.

Finally, her son has behavioral problems. Unable to control him, Tina took him to a psychologist, whereupon he was immediately diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder.

Tina’s son doesn’t have oppositional defiant disorder any more than her children have a sleep disorder. Her children are simply too young to express what they want and need—order, stability, Mommy — so they act out their pain instead.

Change immigration policies, or the employment opportunities for entry-level workers, and what happens to the supply of day care and babysitters and nannies.

Something has to give.

It’s true we’ve created an economy that demands two incomes to maintain (particularly if you live on either coast), but we did it by insisting mothers couldn’t be happy at home and would be letting down the Sisterhood if they did. That message came first.

The economics came later. All the income growth in the US since 1970 has come from women working outside the home. That’s what raised the GDP, making it harder for families to live on one income.

And note the date: 1970. That’s when feminists began their push to get mothers out of the home and into the workforce. It was a calculated ideological and political move, and it worked.

Married mothers didn’t leave their homes en masse because they needed money; they left because they were pulled in that direction. People want to be be valued for the work they do, and the workforce was fast becoming the place to get it—for everyone. It was this loss of respect, this elitism really, that fueled the dual-income family.

So that’s where we begin, then, in turning things around. Yes, mothers who want to be home need practical solutions for how to make it work—how to live on less, how to use their time at home to everyone’s benefit, how to keep a toe in the professional waters, etc.—but first they need respect.

They need cultural support to stop running around like chickens with their heads cut off so they can enjoy motherhood and understand that raising one’s children is crucial to the health of their families and our nation.

Until we get that across, the rest is just fluff.

Perhaps it was coastal elites that first devalued stay-at-home-moms. Perhaps it is coastal elites, such as Laura "11-D" McKenna's neighbors, who will be first to recalibrate.

[A neighbor] stopped working a couple of years ago, because she couldn’t manage her accounting job in Manhattan with its 3 hour commute, 60 hours weeks, along with all the parenting work, even with high levels of support from her mother and mother-in-law. Her husband’s accounting job involved lots of travel on top of the major hours. So, she quit. When the two-year is older, she might work part-time from home, but she’ll never be able to manage a major job again.

1-1/2 jobs is the norm around here. The NYT acts like this formula is totally new and radical, but this has been going on for a long time. That’s what Steve and I do.

I recall a wag who once quipped that increased labor force participation by women, particularly professional women, meant that women could begin to neglect their families the same way the men always did (and apparently still do.)

Jobs, like accounting or Steve’s work in finance, are a minimum of 60 hours per week. Workers have little time time during the day to handle emergencies or the list of chores. Because I handle all the crap, he’s been able to move up the ladder. We’re better off, because we work 1-1/2 jobs, rather than 2 jobs.

What's next, "Ward, you were a little hard on the Beaver last night?"

That's always been the challenge though.  Work-life balance is tempering two principles, "I want a life of my own" and "I will outwork you and advance."

Friends that do manage 2 full jobs, often have careers in education or work very locally without any commute.

The good side of this family/work dynamic is greater income, the ability to handle family crises and day-to-day nonsense, and usually a hot meal on the table by 7 every day.

The cons are that part-time, flexible jobs in any field kinda suck. Adjunct professors and freelance writers aren’t exactly well respected. A 1/2 job doesn’t necessarily mean fewer hours, because I sometimes put in long hours at weird times, like on weekends and evening.

Is this all a tragedy? Not really. This is working for me. I suppose I’m a bad feminist, but I no longer care about that.

And because the economy does seem to want smart people, there is a way to ramp up when the kids go to college, as long as the 1/2 job is a real job and not being a substitute teacher. One friend just turned her 1/2 job as a Hebrew school teacher into a full-time gig as a Hebrew school principal. I talked with a woman who quit her job in the fashion industry to start a new company making high quality, branded sweat shirts and baseball caps for the local high schools.

Of course, some women are looking at the 1/2 job compromise and are saying “nah.” They’re just not having kids at all.

That last development appears to trouble Helen Andrews.

The obstacles to expanding women’s options and empowering them to make the choices they want are now, in many areas, precisely the products of that egalitarian revolution. By making it easier for women to pursue success in the workplace, we have made it harder for them to do anything else. Pressing the brake on the trends set in motion by the feminist revolution would leave women more free to follow a diversity of paths.

That freedom might be of greater value to people far from the bedroom communities of New Jersey.

The result is a two-tiered system that isn’t working for anybody. In the bottom tier, marriage is disappearing as lower-income women have too few men with solid jobs to choose from and as the growing number of men without regular work — by one analysis, 20 percent of prime-age males were not working full time at the start of 2018 — are being cut out of the marriage market altogether.

In the top tier, college-educated women feel they can’t afford to take time off from their careers to raise their children even when they want to, as many of them do. According to an analysis of American Community Survey data by the Institute for Family Studies, only 17 percent of mothers with children 3 or younger say they prefer to work full time. Many career moms manage their stressful work-life balance thanks only to low-wage immigrant labor to take care of their children, clean their houses and deliver their takeout. Even with hired help, working women still spend nearly as much time on household tasks as their stay-at-home mothers and grandmothers did. The result is stress, frustration — and cries for national action.

The problem with national action, dear reader, is that national action turns into a one-policy-fits-all approach: and the anecdotal evidence from these posts (and I'm excerpting from several longish columns) is that there is no one policy that will fit all.