Damned if they do, damned if they don't: Working women and the Louise Woodward trial
By Walter Lippmann
Louise Woodward, a 19-year-old English au pair, has been found guilty in the death of eight-month-old Matthew Eappen. A storm of media controversy has developed around this Massachusetts tragedy. Some coverage has focused on the potential problems with child-care arrangements working parents must make. Some has obscured critical issues facing working parents, especially women.
Woodward has firmly denied any responsibility for the child's death. Deborah Eappen, Matthew's mother, has just as firmly supported the prosecution in affirming Woodward's guilt.
At trial the jury was offered two options: finding the defendant guilty of first or second degree murder, or acquittal. Woodward was found guilty of second degree murder.
The trial judge, Hiller B. Zobel, subsequently reduced her conviction to manslaughter. Woodward was sentenced to the time she had already been held in custody 279 days), and released.
Both prosecution and defence have announced plans to appeal Judge Zobel's decisions. No-one is satisfied with these outcomes.
Working women
Women everywhere have been increasingly drawn (or, perhaps better, pushed) into the work force. A host of diverse consequences have followed.
Work outside the home has helped women to gain in experience, financial independence and a strengthened position within their nuclear families. At the same time, women have had to confront exploitation as well as in the workplace.
Resistance to women working outside the home has been expressed culturally through organised religion and employer discrimination, and reinforced by sexist hostility toward women by many men.
In this capitalist society, primary responsibility for the care of children has historically been given to the family unit and, within the family, to women. Women's expanding employment has caused some men to begin to take more responsibility for children, but it remains primarily a women's arena.
Aside from the income tax deductibility of child-care expenses, there is virtually nothing in the United States in the terms of national governmental responsibility for child-care. There are probably more automatic teller machines, more petrol stations and more alcoholic drinking establishments than child-care centres in the US.
Conservative forces encourage women to feel guilty for working outside the home. They blame working professional women, such as Deborah Eappen, when tragedies such as the death of her son occur.
Eappen, an ophthalmologist who works three days a week, came home for lunch every day to nurse her baby. After receiving letters telling her she should have stayed at home, Eappen responded: "People want to blame someone. What if I was a stay-at-home mom, and went to the movies and this happened?"
A media barrage of scare stories attempts to make women feel guilty for working outside the home, or to make them fearful of the consequences. The day Woodward was found guilty, one southern California newspaper filled its front page, from left to right, with Woodward's picture and the headline BABY KILLER. Talk shows and internet discussions often echoed this.
This fear is not without foundation. No national standards for child-care exist. Child-care workers are often poorly trained and paid.
Family historian Stephanie Coontz has assembled and synthesised massive research on the evolution of the modern family. In her recently published book, The Way We Really Are, Coontz asks, "How much longer will we pretend that individual women will be able to cobble together these personal solutions to a major social problem while we continue to slap them across the face every time they fail?"
'Welfare reform'
While female professionals are attacked for working outside the home, and praised if they give up employment to return to the home, poor women are attacked for not leaving home to obtain outside employment. (This attitude is never expressed toward men.)
The federal government, run by the Democratic and Republican parties, is dismantling key social reforms won during the 1930s. One was the Social Security Act of 1935. It established a national floor, very inadequate, under the living standards of families with minor children.
Social Security was adopted in response to growing working-class militancy and the existence of a society (the Soviet Union) which declared its basis the primacy of social needs over private profit. Both were seen as a threat to capitalist society.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the growth of competition between capitalist states mean that the capitalist powers no longer feel compelled to provide a "social safety net". This retrograde process has been called "welfare reform".
The national floor under incomes has been eliminated. A lifetime limit (five years) has been imposed on everyone receiving public financial assistance. Heads of such households (primarily women) are now being told that they must not remain at home, but must obtain paid outside work, no matter how poorly compensated.
Feminist journalist Ellen Goodman explained the current situation succinctly: "There is no child care good enough to justify the working mother staying in the corner office. There is no child care poor enough to justify the welfare mother staying at home."
Women on welfare, forced to accept any paid employment outside the home, have begun seeking to be paid at union wage rates. Others are demanding that the unions organise them. They have appealed for support to organised labour with mixed success.
They also may be used as a wedge or threat against labour unions. In New York City, for example, tens of thousands of city workers, who had permanent positions with union representation, have been replaced by welfare recipients.
Unions have begun to see these ultra-low-paid workers as a potential threat to their own gains. However, the union movement remains politically subordinated to the political parties of the employing class, the Democrats and Republicans.
Racism
As with everything else in the United States, racism is part of the equation, whether directly or as context. Matthew's father, Sunil Eappen, is of Indian descent, and the baby was dark skinned.
Deborah Eappen commented that if Louise Woodward been non-white, her punishment would have been more severe. She was right about that. Had Louise Woodward been black, it's far less likely that support for her would have become a media phenomenon.
David Cole, a professor at George Washington University Law Center in Fairfax, Virginia, demonstrated this in a November 14 commentary on National Public Radio. He told about a 12-year-old black child, Lacresha Murray, who was charged with capital murder for the death of a baby being cared for in Murray's home. Murray, who is black, and 12 years old, has just begun serving a 25-year sentence!
The only mainstream media coverage of this tragedy was the 485-word commentary by Professor Cole. While the two cases have both similarities and differences, Cole pointed out that "the same media that chose to focus on Woodward ignored Murray".
So long as we live in a society whose organising principle is the profit motive and the pre-eminence of the market over everything, working parents will be compelled to develop ad hoc child-care arrangements. And so long as public policy puts a low priority on child-care, tragic accidents are inevitable.
This story is not concluded.
[Walter Lippmann is a child protective services social worker in Los Angeles, California. He writes in a personal capacity. He welcomes your comments or response by e-mail to walterlx@earthlink.net.]