They say that as a good graduate student you should have a good summary of your dissertation of various lengths; one minute (an elevator ride), five minutes (meeting a colleague in the corridor), or ten minutes. They also say that if you can't explain your dissertation to people at a party you don't understand what you're doing.
There's another challenge in explaining your dissertation topic at a party; the people who have a fixed idea about something relating to your topic, and aren't shaken by what you have to tell them. You're grateful that someone is interested, but it's like any conversation with a dogmatist—not much fun.
Back in the last century when I was researching department stores, people in New Zealand would often assume I was interested in the famous [in New Zealand] Ballantynes' store fire that killed 41 people in 1947. Little could be done to dissuade them from this belief, not even being told that I was most interested in the period before 1940. 1947. 1940. Just a long time ago.
My mother tells me that when she was writing her dissertation on New Zealand women authors of the early twentieth century, people would ask her if she could recommend any good new books. Jane Mander and Edith Grossman having been dead a while by 1978 she often didn't have so much to say.
I went to a party the other week, and met several of these types of people, who appear interested in what you're researching but really just want to tell you their opinion about a somewhat related subject.
As I may have mentioned my dissertation looks at married women's work in the United States between 1880 and 1940. I'm not unaware of the connection to current debates about "work and family." Indeed I wrote in a fellowship application, "The extent of paid work by married women remains controversial, with recurrent public and scholarly debates about the effects on children and marriages."
Not that I've promised to say anything about that current debate in the dissertation. Which is why I was sort of unprepared for two conversations in a row at a party where people tried to convince me that married women's paid employment was bad, bad, bad for children. Well, maybe ... It's quite a different question than the one I'm asking. I'm looking mostly at how families made decisions about whether wives worked, what factors (incomes, children, unemployment, racial differences etc ...) impacted those decisions, and what married women's experience in the pre-World War II workplace was like.
For the purposes of the dissertation I really couldn't care less about the kids! I exaggerate to make the point, of course. At least at that time, the impact of mothers work on children's lives was mixed. On the one hand, infant mortality amongst families with working mothers was much higher. On the other, mothers and wives going out to work let children in some families stay in school longer. It's not immediately clear to me what the relative costs and benefits for children of mother's working was in the early twentieth century. There's a calculation that would be interesting to do ...
My reading of current research about the effect of parents' work on children's lives is that it's pretty much a wash. Some good, some bad. It's probably the case that parents [understandably] over-estimate their own impact on their children, and also true that what works for some children and their families doesn't work for others. Personally, I feel that as an only child it was much, much better for me to be in daycare and meeting other kids than at home with my mother. <sarcasm>Daycare made me the well adjusted person that I am</sarcasm>
What I can't fathom is the notion that somehow the late nineteenth or early twentieth century was a better time to be a child because mothers were at home more. This was the proposition put to me at the party. First of all, there's just the huge general increase in material well-being in the western world that makes everyone's lives better today. Second, it's entirely fanciful to imagine that because mothers were at home that they spent lots of time on quality time with the kids. Not only did housewives spend a lot of time doing work around the house, there were also more children to take care of. Third, whatever the impact of mothers' work on infant mortality historically, infant and childhood death rates in the modern, developed world are much, much smaller than they were just 60 years ago. Those are huge, huge advantages to being a child today.
This is not to say that families choices about work and time with children are not subject to sharp constraints. The shortage of cheap daycare and inflexibility in working hours in many workplaces would be a national disgrace in America, if it weren't replicated in other countries making it an international one. But I will save my tongue-in-cheek advocacy of socialist daycare for another party ... It might make for more amusing conversation.
Posted by robe0419 at August 9, 2005 10:56 AM