With Mother’s Day approaching (this Sunday), Erika Bachiochi has a powerful essay in Plough today, arguing for better government support for caregivers, especially mothers, drawing on the analogy to veterans’ benefits. You want to go read her piece in its entirety, but here is just a tiny taste:
Today, the United States has the highest rate of female-headed households in the world, as well as very high rates of maternal and infant mortality. As Maxine Eichner writes in her recent data-rich book, The Free-Market Family, most of the economic gains that middle-class households have made over the last half century are due to increased income from working mothers, gains that sole earners – especially single mothers – do not enjoy. Meanwhile, those two-earner families “put in twice as many hours of paid work than couples did two generations ago,” more combined time away from their families than couples in any other wealthy country. It’s no wonder, Eichner observes, that the United States is the third most depressed nation in the world.
American parents need not only opportunities for justly remunerated work, as that nineteenth-century union boss declared; they also need pro-family policies that, as Eichner rightly argues, “insulate family life from market pressures” so that parents have time to provide the nurture and care that only they can do. Reviewing the panoply of veterans’ benefits for their transferability as caregiver benefits would be a good place to start.
Bachiochi has been doing ground-breaking work on a number of fronts, and just last week, I highlighted the new magazine Fairer Disputations, in which she plays a leading role. Her recent book (on which she draws in the Plough essay), Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision is a very worthwhile read (and you can see my review of it for Anxious Bench).