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As I received with hard-won indifference a job rejection this week, I contemplated how the do-it-all feminism of the nineties on which I had been raised had rested on two assumptions: (1) that there were plentiful sufficiently-paying and meaningful jobs; and (2) the existence of cheap childcare. The latter, I now understand with a clarity that eluded me in my twenties, was synonymous with the maintenance of a set of class, racial and gender hierarchies in which less-educated and often Black women provided care to professional, often white families.
At middle age, I am now old enough to have had both of these assumptions thoroughly dispelled. There are some people whose interests and training have been lucky enough to correspond with market demands and structural expectations, but I trained first to be an academic and then (primarily because of the failing academic job market) to be a lawyer. I have stayed home for the last few years due to a combination of desire, complications with remote working and never finding the right job in the same city as my spouse. I cannot presently work firm hours with two children and a limited support network. Although outsiders often suggest that I find a public sector position or hang up my own shingle, I know that such jobs are extremely difficult to get (I’ve been rejected from every one to which I’ve applied) and that starting a business is no easy lift (and one for which I have no passion). Although I wouldn’t consider the dismantling of my career(s) a privilege, I enjoy being with my children far more than I expected. I know that if I went back that I would give up some things I value.
My story, however, is just a personal anecdote in what has become an ongoing generational economic and identity crisis. Since entering adulthood in the early 2000s, I have witnessed two major economic downturns that have left many members of my generation stranded. While some fields have thrived, others like academia have imploded or paid workers less while demanding more, using narratives surrounding careers, difference-making and passion to benefit themselves more than their employees. The pandemic has opened opportunities for remote work that I hope will benefit families, but it has also left childcare in tatters and stretched parents to their limits. Even if the pandemic hadn’t pushed childcare to the brink, however, I can no longer conceal from myself that I am deeply uncomfortable with a society that profits by underpaying or not paying those who raise its children, whatever the individual outcomes for those children might be.
From the vantage point of 2021, it’s impossible to deny the fragility and inequity of our economy, institutions and environment. As these change, so must the metrics with which we assess our lives. Values and feminisms intertwined with a collapsing economic model cannot be the philosophies by which we take stock of our pursuits. Feminist debates that structured and reflected the economics of the Twentieth Century–whether prescriptive arguments in favor of women entering the paid labor market or staying home to provide unpaid labor–no longer matter to me when I cannot even make sense of what a career looks like in the Twenty-First. True, there will always be inspirational stories of women who somehow achieved “balance.” In fact, quite a few recent LDS pieces have wanted to persuade me that this is desirable and possible, but it hasn’t yet worked out for me. Similarly, as I browse books like Clayton M. Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life (2012), I can’t help feeling that while I enjoy his framework and theories that he makes basic assumptions, like the fact that one will have a career, that no longer feel applicable to me.
It’s a humbling admission that I no longer feel that the kind of feminism I grew up meets the needs of this moment given how much I’d previously staked on achieving career goals–and would pray in desperation for permission when they seemed in conflict with the gospel. Ironic, even, when the idea of mothers working for pay finally seems to have morphed from a dangerous idea to a concept now so commonly accepted that even official Church venues routinely highlight women’s career achievements. Feminist aspirations directed towards the workplace that I once (and often still) share have become normalized at the very moment the American workplace is itself being called into question.
And so I find myself asking again and again during this pandemic how to live when almost every aspect of our lives is in a state of crisis. What happens when we discover that our values and aspirations are tied to outdated assumptions? How do we measure our lives, to paraphrase Clayton M. Christensen, when the metrics we used no longer make sense (and, frankly, never worked for many women and other minorities in the first place)? When we begin to see that many of the metrics, philosophies and values to which we have clung are tied to temporary economic conditions that don’t have eternal, or even decades-long, relevance? What should I do–and to what should I aspire–as a woman and a latter-day saint in unstable times?
I’ve changed my politics, of course, in response to the failures I’ve experienced. I now long for a feminism that focuses more on universal safety nets rather than exceptional achievement and values unpaid as well as paid labor. But I’ve found answers about how to live my own life in the most LDS of ways: turning to The Book of Mormon, a book that is less about success than it is about the total destruction of societies due in large part to the same issues we confront today: inequality, racism, corruption, member infighting and political partisanship. It’s a book that models how to live in troubled times, not good ones. It does not offer a consistent political philosophy, which is itself a lesson in what matters to God. Certainly few people in it are succeeding in ways we’d value today. Quite a few are refugees.
What it offers instead are examples of people who, to quote Nephi, were “led by the Spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which I should do.” What I hear in these words, spoken by a prophet whose entire existence had just been uprooted and whose family would soon splinter apart, is that living well in transitional times means letting go of our preconceptions and being open to unexpected promptings. To not insist on a favored ideology or life plan, but, in the words of our Prophet, to “let God prevail” as He directs a future only He knows. To measure our lives not by temporary metrics but by how well we are willing listen.
*My title is a nod to and critique of Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth and Karen Dillon’s How Will You Measure Your Life? (New York: Harper, 2012).