Time to challenge the ‘motherhood penalty’

My early days as a mother passed in a waft of wonderful new baby smell, the usual hormonal upheavals — and a serious lack of cash.

As our savings account dwindled and leftover-leftovers became a menu staple, I had moments of realizing this time in my life would be temporary. But other days didn’t seem quite so hopeful.

I overheard my grandmother assess my life one day. “She doesn’t have a thing,” said my grandmother, who had run her own business for 40 years and always wielded her own checkbook. “Not a thing.”

It wasn’t so dire as my grandmother thought. It’s quite possible she just didn’t grasp the concept of graduate school. And maybe she’d forgotten the appeal of a baby girl’s tulip blossom smile.

That time in my life, unlike that which came before it and that which followed, seemed the result of individual choices I’d made along with my husband. But last week, just before Mother’s Day, Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, a Kirkland, Wash., mother, political activist and wife of Republican state Sen. Bill Finkbeiner, put a name to it.

Young parents, she said, often experience “a poverty slump” after the birth of a baby. It’s frequently caused by the lack of paid parental leave for working parents. It also can be caused by job discrimination against mothers, a lack of flexible and part-time work schedules, and by the high cost of child care and health care.

It’s perpetuated by government and workplace policies that treat young parents just like they do people who adopt puppies at the pound. Fine, bring home that new baby if you want, society often seems to say, but don’t expect help from the rest of us.

Rowe-Finkbeiner has written a book with Joan Blades called “The Motherhood Manifesto.” Together they started a Web site called momsrising.org designed to give busy mothers a way to advocate for political change.

Blades, a Berkeley, Calif., native, also started moveon.org, a progressive political advocacy organization, with her husband.

Momsrising.org sent out a press release in late April. They’ve been amazed by the response — 45,000 new members in one week.

Rowe-Finkbeiner, 37, with exactly 30 minutes to spare before she had to dash out to pick up the kids, spoke to me over the phone one afternoon last week. She said Internet-based activism works perfectly for women like her. It doesn’t require attending meetings or hiring a babysitter, and it can be done with the kids coloring right alongside.

She rattled off statistics:

“These issues affect the majority of American women. Eighty-two percent have children by the time they’re 44. Of all American mothers, 72 percent work outside their home.

“It’s mothers, not women in general, who are most affected by workplace discrimination. According to a Columbia University study, women without children made 90 cents to a man’s dollar, while women with children made about 73 cents and single mothers even less.

“Cornell University researcher Shelley J. Correll recently found a “motherhood penalty” exists. She devised two sets of resumes, identical except that one set noted that the applicant had two children and served as an officer in a parent-teacher association. Eighty-four percent of study participants said they would hire the child-free woman, but only 47 percent would hire the mother. They offered an average of $11,000 less in starting pay to the mother.

Rowe-Finkbeiner says too many American mothers hit “the maternal wall” created by policies many other countries would never stand for. These strains are caused, not by individual decisions, but our collective system.

“Our society just has not caught up with the modern realities of parenthood,” she says.

This Mother’s Day, I’m hoping we catch up soon. I don’t want my grown daughters to one day hit that wall either.

Hold the breakfast in bed: Societal change makes the perfect gift this morning.