The media are not responsible for women's sense that they must choose between family and work. The problem is more systemic, and for social change to occur, we must remember our own history of turning private problems into public policy debates, which ultimately resulted in changes in the law and in customs.
To what EJ has said, I'd like to add my historian's perspective.
Is water a human right or a commodity to be marketed for profit? Should water be run by local governments or by distant corporations in order to make a profit? Why do we pay more for a six-pack of bottled water than for a gallon of gasoline?
These are some of the tough-minded questions Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman first asked in their provocative and memorable 2004 documentary, also titled "Thirst." In that film, they exposed how foreign corporations are privatizing water all over the world. Among the stories they recounted was the rebellion of Bolivian citizens against Bechtel, which privatized water and then raised its price. "Water for life, not for profit!" local residents chanted at demonstrations. Eventually, after riots and too many deaths, Bechtel was forced to leave.
In their new book, "Thirst: Fighting the Corporate Theft of Our Water," the authors focus on our own country and investigate how the growing "water business" is trying to privatize water systems in cities scattered across the United States.
A baby is born. A child develops a high fever. A spouse breaks a leg. A parent suffers a stroke. These are the events that throw a working woman's delicate balance between work and family into chaos.
Although we read endless stories and reports about the problems faced by working women, we possess inadequate language for what most people view as a private rather than a political problem. "That's life," we tell each other, instead of trying to forge common solutions to these dilemmas.
That's exactly what housewives used to say when they felt unhappy and unfulfilled in the 1950s: "That's life." Although magazines often referred to housewives' unexplained depressions, it took Betty Friedan's 1963 bestseller to turn "the problem that has no name" into a household phrase, "the feminine mystique"--the belief that a woman should find identity and fulfillment exclusively through her family and home.
The great accomplishment of the modern women's movement was to name such private experiences--domestic violence, sexual harassment, economic discrimination, date rape--and turn them into public problems that could be debated, changed by new laws and policies or altered by social customs. That is how the personal became political.
Although we have shelves full of books that address work/family problems, we still have not named the burdens that affect most of America's working families.
Call it the care crisis.
