"Bennett’s lack of attention to scale becomes the default politics of her book. One of her big demands (or “asks,” in corporate-speak) turns out to be dedicated lactation rooms in offices, the absence of which leaves nursing women to figure out how and where to pump breast milk at work. No, a supply closet won’t do. The lactation issue comes up repeatedly (avoiding repetition is not this book’s strong suit) and gets many pages, though in fact it’s a battle won, at least formally, as per the 2010 Affordable Care Act, according to which bathrooms can’t serve as lactation rooms either.
Yet somehow she devotes zero pages to the far larger question: what you’re doing with the kid while you’re pumping at the office. The universal child care “ask” gets not a mention, despite the fact that the months of her working life the average woman spends pumping milk make up a minuscule slice compared with the years she’s going to spend raising and tending children...
Bennett tries to sell such measures by citing research indicating that they increase productivity. Here’s the question she doesn’t take up: Where would the benefits of that increased productivity go?"
This scale point, in the world of cutesy corporate feminism, is a really interesting one and I think it will help me to articulate my concerns more generally. There's a point when some feminisms just kind of trail off into a vague sense that things will be better. I think it's feeds the frustrating phenomenon of institutions making small disconnected changes (like adding lactation rooms, or creating an award just for black/Latino people or offering a halal option in the cafeteria...) and then stop because, obviously, they've don't the thing from that one TED talk and now the rest will take care of itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment