Cheat Seeking Missiles

oming in just a few days under the wire in C-SM’s Most Ridiculous Story of the Year competition is a story on a subject that I’m sympathetic to - the difficulty women who’ve stayed home with their children have coming back to work. But it still clearly earns a spot on the “most ridiculous” list.

Kids most decidedly do better when mom stays home, and nearly as important, moms do better, too. I saw Incredible Wife’s guilt and anxiety amp up considerably when she worked - first, because we needed her income, then so she could make her Voice of the Victims films - then wind back down when she once again was “there for the girls.”

So why is Anne Glusker’s “Personal Business” column on the subject in Sunday’s WaPo so ridiculous? The title tells the story: She’s a Kennedy, But She’s a Lot Like Us.

Yes, Kennedy, who is worth $100 million, is just another mom who decided to stay home with the kids, and now wants to go back to work! Really:

Amid all the recent buzz about Caroline Kennedy’s bid for a U.S. Senate seat, there has been a great deal of talk about her connections, her power, her wealth. But the way I see it, if you strip away the glamour, the name and the money, then Caroline is . . . me. And many of my friends. Maybe even you. If, that is, you happen to be a midlife woman raising kids and returning — or thinking of returning, or hoping one day to return — to the full-time workforce.

Yes, I’ve heard the buzz about connections, but I call it dynasty stuff. And power, and wealth. But what I’ve also heard that Glusker is afraid to put in her lead is Kennedy’s inexperience. You strip away the glamour, the name and the money and you’ve got one inexperienced rich gal. But that most definitely isn’t how Glusker sees it:

A great deal of the criticism around Kennedy’s interest in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s soon-to-be-vacated Senate seat sounds an alarm for women like me. We’ve been at home with the kids, sure, but we’ve also been busy with lots of other things. We’ve been working part-time, consulting, freelancing. Like Kennedy’s, our resumes don’t conform to the conventional, one-job-after-the-other sequence that recruiters expect. When I read a sniping post on Gawker.com that “Caroline has been a happy housewife since getting her law degree, published a few ghost-written books and sat on a few boards that used her celebrity to draw donations,” I thought, hmm, wait a minute. Couldn’t there be a more inventive way to look at her CV?’

Yep, that’s what we need for our incoming U.S. Senators: A more inventive way to look at their CVs. Lord knows, she needs it: She hands out the Profiles in Courage award, she worked part-time for the NYC Dept of Education, she’s been on a private school’s board, she’s currently vice-chair of an education foundation and a couple Kennedy-legacy positions. It’ll take considerable creativity to turn that into a CV for one of the most exclusive and powerful political positions in the world.

Glusker has the creativity: She calls Kennedy’s experience “diverse”‘ and her resume “unconventional.” Too bad non of that unconventional and diverse experience has anything to do with the business of running a country via our complex political machinery.

It’s clear she’s using Kennedy as a symbol for her agenda:

Rather than a privileged aberration, I prefer to view Kennedy as a bellwether, a case study in how things could be if only the workplace were more accepting of an unconventional CV, one that may brim with great experience and skills and talent but is also peppered with gaps and one-off projects and volunteering. …

When we talk about women going back into the workforce, it’s illuminating to consider the circumstances under which they left it in the first place. For many women, it was never truly a choice, never truly voluntary. As Pamela Stone, author of “Opting Out?: Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home,” points out, many are pushed out by jobs with long hours, rigid workweeks and inflexible demands. “These women haven’t opted out,” says Stone. “They’ve been shut out, by workplaces that don’t pair well with family life.”

Of course none of that applies to Kennedy; she’s a “privileged aberration” to Glusker’s model, and somehow I find it hard to accept that stay at home moms desirous of a return to the workplace will join Glusker in seeing Kennedy as the personification of their cause. But Glusker is undaunted:

… Kennedy … is running smack into what social psychologists call the potential vs. performance split. It works this way, according to Kathie Lingle of the Alliance for Work-Life Progress: “The guys in charge say, ‘Oh, John can do it, we know he can.’ They’re assessing his potential.” Whereas, when looking at a female job candidate, they’re likely to say: ” ‘Oh, Sue can’t do it; she’s never done it before.’ ” They’re basing their evaluation on her past performance.

Yep, that’s what’s holding Kennedy back from open-armed acceptance of Her Senatorship: the potential vs. performance split, entirely a guy/gal prejudice thing. We just know that Gov. Patterson is going to judge her differently than he would judge, say, Andrew Cuomo. Patterson would just look at Cuomo as a guy … not a former HUD secretary, not a current NY Atty Gen, but just a guy ‘cuz a guy can do it. (And he’s ex-hubby to a Kennedy!)

Of course the flaw in all of Glusker’s supposition is that Kennedy isn’t angling for a job as a copywriter at an ad agency or a software exec in the Silicon Valley; she’s asking for a free ride to the U.S. Senate, where she’ll have committee assignments that matter to the nation and the world, and will be expected to represent her state during one of the most troubling times in U.S. history. Glusker attempts to deal with this little matter:

Even though the job Kennedy is trying to nab is a far cry from the account executive or publicist positions that my friends might go after, the phenomenon at work is the same. The reaction seems to be: If she hasn’t followed a straight-and-narrow, logical path, we simply can’t imagine her in the role under discussion.

There’s nothing ridiculous in the statement; we simply can’t imagine Caroline Kennedy in the job given her anything but logical path towards it. What’s ridiculous is that Glusker ridicules us for not accepting Kennedy as just another housewife wanting to return to work.

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