On Day Care at Harvard

Editor’s Note: This excerpt, reprinted with permission of the author, comes from an article published in a 2004 book, "In Singing in the Fire: Women's Experiences in Philosophy," ed. Linda Martín Alcoff, Routledge

Many baby sitters, in short, were required, and it was impossible to mention the whole topic of child care, for fear of being perceived as uncommitted or unprofessional.  Again, one had to smile cheerfully as if one’s life were the same as any other professional’s, while knowing that this was not so.  I remember vividly the day this began to change.   We had a visiting speaker; because the talk began at the usual 5 P.M., I had gotten a baby sitter to pick up my daughter from day care.  A few minutes into the question period, Bob Nozick stood up, and, with the carefree insouciance of which only the tenured are capable, said, “I’m sorry, I have to go now.  I have to pick up my son from hockey practice.”  For me, this was a world-historical moment.  The forbidden topic had been mentioned, as a normal part of a professional life.   As always, Bob was brash, confident, and unashamed.  So one need not, perhaps, be ashamed of having child care duties.   Perhaps this dual responsibility could be respected in a dignified professional world.   I believe that Bob, who was in surprising ways a true feminist, raised this topic deliberately, in order to pose some questions about how well the department was treating its parents.  But whether or not this was true, it gave me permission to begin getting angry at the totally inadequate arrangements for the support of child care, inside the family, in the workplace, and in the larger society.

There has, I think, been a lot of improvement in our academic lives in the area of sexual harassment. In the area of child care things have changed much more slowly. I believe that men now share child care duties somewhat more than they did before; I had three young male colleagues at Brown who really did split the job roughly fifty-fifty, and it pleased me to see little children in the office in backpacks on their fathers’ backs.  But there is less change than there should be, and in some fields, in particular law, I see a true backsliding. My colleagues who are in their forties and fifties do more child care than those in their thirties and twenties.  In large part, I believe that this backsliding results from the demands of the law firm world, which are so exorbitant that they are clearly incompatible with any family life that has home-based work in it; so young men who enter this world choose wives who say they are willing to stay at home.  And women who enter it end up on a lesser “mommy” track, or remain childless.  But universities are also to blame. Maternity leave is still not automatic at our university; it is given at the discretion of one’s Dean, and it has been refused. It is possible at many universities, including ours, for a man to apply to take paternity leave, but fewer men than women avail themselves of this possibility, because child care is still stigmatized. Work arrangements are now slightly more thoughtful about hours and their relation to duties; but only slightly. And people who complain are still stigmatized.

Martha C. Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. She received her MA from Harvard in 1972 and her Ph.D. in 1975.