Different Views on ‘Minority Mom’
I am very happy for Harry and Janis Kerker that their situation is such that Janis Kerker can remain at home full time with their two daughters (“New Minority Mom,” Dec. 3). I fully support the right of families to decide how they will raise their children.
But let us not forget that Janis Kerker chose not to return to work after the births of her children. The women that the Kerkers dismiss as materialistic and selfish, employed only in order to buy Jaguars, Jeeps and designer jeans, form a very small segment of women who work.
Your own findings reveal that two-thirds of women who work are the sole support of their families or are married to men who earn $15,000 a year or less. These women work outside the home to pay rent and feed their families, and do not have Janis Kerker’s option.
Moreover, if the Kerkers are repelled by what they see as the crass pursuit of goods all around them, what are we to make of Harry Kerker’s boast that while all his friends have Porsches, his family has a mother at home? Isn’t Janis Kerker then just another “luxury item” as the Kerker accountant remarked? Is this not the same old competition among men to see who is richer, except that the measure this time will not be expensive clothes, a vacation home or a boat, but a wife who works only inside the home, discharging family duties that men do not?
The Kerkers’ privileged station in society clouds the real issues that face most American families: day care that is scarce and expensive, work schedules that leave men and women little time for family responsibilities, and economic circumstances that allow many men and women no choices about day care and work schedules.
Instead, the problems of the family are cast in terms of women’s good or bad choices, in a world populated by privileged Anglos. This is apparent in Harry Kerker’s lament that “the whole city’s children are being raised by people from Mexico. They’re really children of gardeners and maids.”
It seems to me that the family issue is being used to reassert old prejudices about those who are not white, middle-class and male.
MURIEL C. McCLENDON
Los Angeles
