Behold: those dreadful “career gals”
I suppose I should leave this train wreck behind. Maggie Gallagher – no rabid radical feminist – has a wry comment up on reply she got when she called Forbes to interview Michael Noer, “which well, sort of says it all, don’t it?” It’s a reply to which some poor career woman had to sign her name, saying that Forbes really didn’t expect to profoundly offend career women by writing an article about how career women suck. They were just joking, you see.
One of the creepy things about the whole deal was the way pulled bunches of men out of their holes to argue in the comboxes in earnest in defense of the article. These men actually still exist? Seriously? In real life, and not just as net trolls? Because this totally isn’t what my life is like. I work in a mostly male field. I’ve often been the only woman in the room in a meeting. And, there have been rare occasions when I’ve been disrespected because of being a woman, like the time when I was working tech support and someone refused to believe my explanation of how a product worked until I got a man on the phone to tell him the exact same thing I’d been saying. But those are the exception. My coworkers treat me with respect. In the decades I’ve worked in the computer field, generally the worst I’m likely to hit, as a woman, is a little well-intentioned confusion about which set of manners a guy is supposed to be using toward me – the ones that would treat me a little different because I’m a woman, or the ones that would treat me as one of the guys.
Likewise, for my whole marriage, even when Joel was well, I’ve earned more than him (for some of the time just sliightly more than him), and he’s always encouraged me in my work.
But evidently there are still men out there, in the twenty-first century, who seriously don’t believe that women should be educated and hold jobs.
So, let me take a moment to show just how reactionary that “don’t marry a career woman” article was. Behold, the awful “career gal” that Noer was warning men not to marry.
Even back before NOW and before Title IX, married women were working as school teachers. It’s a good job for one person to have, of a couple who are raising children: interesting, challenging, worthwhile work, and vacations which correspond to those of your children. Now, here’s what the Bureau of Labor Statistics has to say about teachers:
Requirements for regular licenses to teach kindergarten through grade 12 vary by State. However, all States require general education teachers to have a bachelor’s degree and to have completed an approved teacher training program with a prescribed number of subject and education credits, as well as supervised practice teaching….
Median annual earnings of kindergarten, elementary, middle, and secondary school teachers ranged from $41,400 to $45,920 in May 2004; the lowest 10 percent earned $26,730 to $31,180; the top 10 percent earned $66,240 to $71,370. Median earnings for preschool teachers were $20,980.
College degree required? Check. Generally working at least 35 hours a week? Check. Probably earning at least 30k? Check. This is the career woman Noer is warning men not to marry, and yet married women held most school teacher jobs even back when I was a small child in the early sixties.
Noer’s article isn’t just about the high flying Hillary Clintons and Janet Renos of this world. It’s not just about the pioneering Sally Rides and Sandra Day O’Connors (though I can’t resist noting that our first female Supreme Court justice is still married to her husband as he reaches the point of developing Alzheimers). It’s not even just about women like me, who’ve joined professions that traditionally have been reserved for men. Those awful career women who supposedly neglect their husbands include the women doing all those useful jobs that women have been doing all along. School teachers. Nurses. I don’t think we want to live in the world where all the married women doing these jobs just up and quit.
Now, let me take a moment to look at just who was being advised to look down on those hardworking school teachers and nurses. zuzu of Feministe has a post on the likely effect of the controversial article on Forbes’ advertising bottom line – do they win by getting more hits on their sites, or lose by driving away their career woman readers? In that post, she quotes some information about Forbes subscribers:
Its own ads proclaim that “more people get their business news from Forbes.com than any other source in the world,†saying that its sites drew about 15 million unique visitors in a single month earlier this year. It was a well-heeled crowd, according to Forbes.com, which says that the average household income of its users is $149,601.
In real life, of course, many of those nearly $150,000 dollar incomes must come from two income households. So some Forbes readers are married to those women they’re being encouraged to see as bad wives, and others are those women they’re being encouraged to see as bad wives. But, whether a two career household or a one career household, you don’t get a $150,000 income without someone in the house making rather more than the average school teacher.