Heidi Hartmann. (The Progressive Interview).

Heidi Hartmann is a pioneering feminist economist. Founder of the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) in Washington, D.C., she writes, lectures, and testifies before Congress on issues ranging from Social Security to family. She received a MacArthur "genius" award in 1994 for her groundbreaking work applying economic analysis to women's concerns.

I visited her recently at IWPR's offices in downtown Washington, where we talked about feminism, welfare reform, and the changing role of women--especially the problems of balancing work and family. We continued our conversation later by phone.

Controversy over the book Creating a Life by Hartmann's fellow economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett has rekindled debate about whether feminist emphasis on women's equality in the workplace--Hartmann's life's work--has led a generation of women to lose out when it comes to raising children. I asked her about this, and about her own experience bringing up three daughters (she had just returned from her middle daughter's Harvard graduation), while building her own career and fighting for social change.

"Unfortunately, that book is contributing to a kind of pro-family, anti-woman view," Hartmann said of Creating a Life. "I was at one conference where I heard a woman executive say that she thought it was part of the rightwing conspiracy to get women to go back home. But I'm sure that's not how Sylvia Hewlett intended it. I'm sure she intended to say we need more family-friendly policies."

A gleefully pugnacious and energetic talker, Hartmann started out by challenging my premise--that mothers desperately need more time to stay home from work so they can be with their children. "Eight weeks was about all I could stand!" she said. She's not about to give up that fight for workplace equality. But neither does she blame people who complain about the time bind.

Q: I interviewed Edward Zigler, the father of Head Start, recently [see June issue] and he told me he was bitterly disappointed the women's movement never became a lobby for children. He suggested that if feminists had fought for quality day care and better family policies, mothers and babies might be a lot better off.

Heidi Hartmann: Well, for one thing we have other issues to lobby for, like equal pay; is the children's lobby working for that? But I am not aware that the women's movement ever made a decision not to go after either child care or paid family leave. I am really not aware of that. What I am aware of is that there was a difference of opinion among those who felt that maternity leave per se was a good idea, and those who felt it was a bad idea, and we shouldn't go after paid maternity leave unless we could get paid parental leave for fathers and mothers.

Q: So, like Social Security, it applies to everyone?

Hartmann: Right. And that did multiply the allies. You had male steelworkers bringing Congress to tears because they would say, "My baby had cancer, and I couldn't stay home and be with her." It was a good strategy. But the price of it was that we don't have a paid maternity leave. It's possible that we could have gotten that. What we got was the unpaid but universal family leave act.

Q: What about the fact that women continue to do most of the housework and child care? And they're in the workforce, too. People are just terribly stressed. How do you alleviate this problem while still carrying the banner for equal treatment?

Hartmann: What's the alternative to carrying the banner for equal treatment? What banner do you want to carry? "I'd like my husband to make enough money so I can stay home?" You're just complaining--rightly so--that the rest of the world hasn't adjusted enough. You're not against equal treatment.

Q: But we simply haven't done anything about this massive demographic change. We've got all these women in the workforce, and how are they supposed to deal with their families?

Hartmann: We have done something about it.

Q: What?

Hartmann: Well, for the most part we have a lot fewer kids than we did in 1900. We have birth control. I mean, it does help to have fewer children. Yet what angers me is that women are making the adjustment, doing most of the accommodating, themselves.

Q: They are doing it without social support.

Hartmann: Well, I would even challenge that. You really have to look at the way it was before. Before 1978, when the Pregnancy Discrimination Act was passed, the average woman quit her job. She just quit. In fact, you didn't even have to announce you were quitting. You would have the baby shower, and it would be a good-bye party. It's not true that society hasn't made any adjustments. We got a law that said you couldn't fire a woman for having a baby or make her quit if you didn't do the same for a man who had a heart attack. So more and more women went back after they had babies. And women aren't stupid, so there's got to be a reason they're doing that. They have to think that's better. Otherwise they'd just stay home with the kids.

Q: They need the money.

Hartmann: That's not true, either.

Q: You don't think that's true? There's no family wage anymore. People don't have this option to live like Ozzie and Harriet.

Hartmann: Oh, untrue, untrue! Do you know what I considered extremely middle class when I was growing up? I considered it a house of 1,000 square feet with three bedrooms, one bathroom, one car, and one TV. To me, that was an unattainable, middle class dream. Now you tell me that on an average man's wage today, you can't have a 1,000-square-foot house. You absolutely could with one car and one TV. But what has happened is that the middle class standard of living has gone up a lot.

Q: But there's no blue collar middle class. Wages have tanked since the 1970s.

Hartmann: There have been declining real wages for non-college-educated men, that is true. But I don't think that's the group that we're necessarily talking about. Men's declining real wages are a small part of the reason why more women have gone to work for more hours. All the studies show that. It is a factor, but it is a very small factor. And for most families if the standard of living hadn't increased they could survive on one salary. I once complained to my partner [whining], "Why do I have to work with three kids? I just can't stand it anymore." And he said, "Honey, we could move out to Gaithersburg in a three-bedroom apartment with one bathroom, and then you could stay home, would you like that?" And I said, "Oh, yeah. Never mind."

But I agree that society should do a heck of a lot more--and we've written many papers and reports on it here at IWPR--to adjust to women's increased labor force participation. We need universal pre-kindergarten, and we need paid family leave. Eventually we're going to get them, and if we're very lucky we'll get some reduced work hours, too. But I am constantly pushing for doing it in a way that will maximize equality between the sexes.

Q: What about women on welfare? Has welfare reform failed to emerge as a feminist issue the way issues that affect professional women have?

Hartmann: I think it's fair to say it hasn't captured a lot of public sentiment among women the way, say, breast cancer research or the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings did. It doesn't get as much support and exposure in the media as something like the pay gap sometimes does. But I definitely think the leaders of the women's groups are very focused on it, and pretty horrified at what happened in 1996, and similarly horrified at proposed tougher work requirements and the Bush Administration's $300 million for marriage promotion.

Q: I talked to Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (Democrat of the District of Columbia) about that, and she was very quick to say, "I'm not going to get caught in that trap of arguing about the marriage thing" because she felt that was pure politics. The Republicans were going to talk about marriage in order to paint Democrats into a corner, and she wanted to pursue education and training, child care, the other bread and butter components.

Hartmann: Well, I think that's a reasonable position. I mean, you can view the marriage proposal thing as a relatively small amount of dollars. The bigger battles are over other issues. But something like 75 percent of Americans don't think the government should get involved in encouraging marriage.

Q: So why focus on it?

Hartmann: It's important culturally. I think you could view all of the 1980s and 1990s as part of a conservative backlash against feminism: the pushing of the evilness of the single parent, the illegitimate births, the pro-marriage, pro-family, anti-woman view. So I think the value of combating the pro-marriage proposal in welfare reform is to stand up and be counted and say we don't think that's an appropriate role for government, and we don't think it's necessarily good for poor single mothers to be encouraged to marry men that may not make good partners or fathers. Let the woman be the best judge of that.

It is important to speak up against wrongheaded ideas. That is an obligation, I think, of both feminists and progressives.

Q: How did you get involved in feminist economics?

Hartmann: My mother was a single parent most of her life and had to raise two children on a woman's salary. She was a clerk in a fabric store. And it was obvious to me that women earned less. Even though my mother's boss was quite progressive, women as a group were discriminated against in the jobs that were open to them. I think I always knew that. I think I was born knowing that. My brother and I were the first in our family on either side to go to college. I attended Swarthmore on a scholarship. So in choosing my undergraduate major I was very practical. I think economics and math just looked practical--you'd be able to support yourself with those majors. My brother chose engineering

Then I moved to New Haven, where my husband--I got married right out of college--was a student at the Yale Law School, and a lot of my friends who had graduated from Swarthmore in his class or earlier were in economics at Yale or Harvard. And that was just when URPE, the Union for Radical Political Economics, was starting. It's hard to explain those times because there was just politics in the air. There were so many activist projects in so many cities. In 1967, we went around to communities and got people to sign petitions against the war in Vietnam. There were the Black Panthers in New Haven. And then, when I started graduate school at Yale in the fall of `69, I was told there was a meeting of a group called New Haven Women's Liberation. So I started going to those meetings. The women's movement was just part of the political ferment, and it made sense to check it out. I went to those meetings, and I liked them. They somehow spoke to me.

Q: Did you discover something as a student that led you to found the Institute for Women's Policy Research?

Hartmann: There was a small group of us in economics, interested in women's issues. We would write our papers on issues like women in the industrial revolution. Then we discovered all these women who had written about it in the `10s and `20s and `30s. They had magnificent scholarly tomes that were never assigned. And that was frustrating. How come all this stuff had been overlooked?

We were aware of women's studies starting up. Women vs. Connecticut was an organizing project that contributed to the success of Roe v. Wade in 1973. And Dollars & Sense was forming, so somehow there was a sense that you could use all of this knowledge for the practical purpose of changing people's lives.

My first teaching job was a visiting appointment at the New School. I went through a divorce and I had a small child, so having the security of a stable job was attractive. I went to work in Washington at the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. And then I was recruited to work at the National Academy of Sciences on pay equity. I developed more definite plans for starting a think tank on women's policy using quantitative social science research techniques, the kind used by the Urban Institute or Brookings.

Q: So what did you do when you were raising your children? How did you manage it?

Hartmann: Ah, well, in the early era with my first husband, when Jessica, who is now thirty, was born, all the parents in the feminist left community were starting parent co-op day care centers.

It was a pretty big movement. And we lived communally with another couple with a child the same age as ours, and another adult. There was an ethic that child rearing should be shared equally between men and women, and the community as a whole should cooperate on providing these services.

Then I moved to Washington, and I found Jack, and we had two more children. By then we had more money. We were more advanced in our careers. We hired a babysitter to come to our house, and, at first when we had only one young child, shared her with other parents of young children a few days a week to reduce costs for all of us. Also, Jack and I both reduced our work time to 75 percent for a few months after our first child was born. Basically, between babysitters and au pairs we had the kids covered until they were about twelve or thirteen.

Q: That sounds familiar. When I was a little kid I lived in a graduate student commune. My parents had the same sort of thing--parent co-op day care.

Hartmann: Yes, I imagine it was the same with university towns everywhere. If you didn't live through it, it's hard to realize just how politically effervescent that time was. To challenge the status quo was just taken for granted. There's no child care? OK, we'll organize child care. There's no economics course you like? OK, you'll start a course you like.

Q: And from that a sense that the whole world could be changed?

Hartmann: Yeah. I think we thought we were changing the world. We were changing relations between the sexes and between parents and children, and it wouldn't be the same old traditional way it's always been.

I realized moving to Washington and working in professional jobs--Jack was working at GAO [the General Accounting Office] at the time, I was working at the National Academy of Sciences--that it wasn't like the movement days back in New Haven. But even in New Haven, the movement days were gone. And you sort of just accommodated as best you could to the way things were being done here, hiring an au pair or a babysitter because there weren't other people to start parent co-op day care with from scratch. Still, Jack had to ask GAO to give him that 25 percent off in 1980, and they looked at him like he was crazy and said, "No, of course not." So he said, "You know, I think if I were a young mother you would routinely give me this leave." And they said, "Oh, yeah, you're right, you can have the leave."

Q: I wonder if you find it galling to run into women my age who are determined to work less when we have kids?

Hartmann: I don't find it galling so much as I'm depressed and disappointed that my generation didn't make more of a lasting difference. We had enough enthusiasm and support among our peers to create these alternatives that challenged the status quo at the time we had our first children. And we worked for public funding of child care (we had demonstrations on that in New Haven in the 1970s) and paid family leave, too. But we haven't been successful in getting it as a movement. So it's depressing having our children or our friends' children facing some of the same problems we faced.

It takes a lot of energy to develop collective solutions. And if you're not in a time or political climate where everyone simultaneously wants to put in that energy to make it happen then it's not going to happen. Our solution now as progressives is to work to institutionalize these changes through more public funding, universal pre-K, paid family leave.

Q: I'm struck by the tension between the needs and desires of individual women and the progress of the group. You once opposed part-time professional jobs as a women's ghetto. Now, since men take advantage of them, you're willing to support them. The same with parental leave. The individual woman who wants to work part time or take maternity leave might just not feel represented.

Hartmann: Yup. I think that's right. It's interesting because if you spend your energy building parent coop day care, like this little group of feminists and progressives did, it works for your little cohort of people in your short period of time. But you haven't necessarily left anything lasting. If you work in a more indirect way, through public policy, it takes longer, and it doesn't help you right then. We faced that decision, and we chose to help ourselves with our own parent co-ops. Now, in this time period, I don't have young children and I'm working on the help-everyone approach through these broader public policy movements. But sure, if you're an individual parent you're going to try to figure out what's best for you.

Q: Do you think in the culture generally we've backslid in terms of feminist consciousness, or do you think we are continuing to move steadily forward?

Hartmann: I think it's mixed. There's been a lot of progress. Every now and then something strange happens. Progress gets challenged, and it's shocking. A good example was when that au pair from Britain was accused of killing an infant. And the mother got hate mail. She was an ophthalmologist and she chose to work part-time. She got hate mail for not staying home and protecting her baby, because obviously she could afford not to work. Her husband was also a doctor.

And there was the huge outpouring over Bill Clinton's candidate for Attorney General, Zoe Baird, who hired illegal immigrants to care for her kids. And it was shocking to me that this happened because the acceptance of women working has, for the most part, moved so far in people's consciousness.

A fair amount of it had to do with class anger. People felt like these women had a choice. They didn't have to work. And yet, the feminist message is, you should have a choice. You should be able to work and pursue your career and raise your children and advance your brain. And that choice should be available to all women, not just the Zoe Bairds.

Ruth Conniff is Political Editor of The Progressive magazine.