Friend, Crusader for American Mothers

In a well-appointed Hancock Park living room crowded with women, Ann Crittenden ticked off the facts:

The wage gap between mothers and others is bigger than the gender gap. A college-educated professional woman who chooses to stay home with her child stands to lose a million dollars in lifetime earnings. There are more economic disincentives to having a child in this country than incentives.

“The last part of the women’s movement, is to bring this out,” said Crittenden, sounding as if she were launching a grass-roots political movement from her chair by the hearth in the home of Katie Buckland, a special assistant to City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo.

Crittenden, a former economics reporter for the New York Times, is the author of last year’s “The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued.”

She was a guest of the California Women’s Law Center, which periodically holds intimate, salon-like “policy forums” designed to cultivate donors and stir consciousness.

Other guests have included guerrilla artist Robbie Conal, USC law professor and political pundit Susan Estrich and a panel of experts who discussed women and the LAPD.

The events are by invitation only (and guests must be willing to pay for the privilege; the law center asks for donations of $500 for four events).

If Crittenden wanted to be heard by some of the city’s most influential women, she was in the right place. Among the 40 or so women (and three men) who sipped wine and nibbled string beans from china plates were Loyola Marymount University law professor Sean Scott, screenwriter Meg Kasdan.

Crittenden began by telling her own story:

In 1982, when she became a mother, she was overwhelmed by the emotional, social and financial implications. First, she said, she returned to work following the “baby as appendectomy” model. But she was so besotted by her child that she decided to leave her job to stay home. She ventured out to the same elite cocktail parties, only this time she would introduce herself as a new mother, rather than a New York Times reporter.

“I shed status like skin off a reptile,” she said.

That experience, and her subsequent struggle to balance motherhood, financial dependence and work, drove this book, which took eight years to write.

Crittenden conducted hundreds of interviews and drew on the latest research in economics, history, child development and family law. She argues that though many American women are liberated, mothers are not. Mothers, she claims, are deprived of financial equality in marriage. And the work of stay-at-home mothers does not have formal economic value, even though it is important human capital that drives a nation’s economy.

She argues that the United States should become more like European countries such as France and Sweden, which compensate women who stay home to raise children. She advocates that women seek changes in the laws and workplace rules to reward mothers for their sacrifices.

Crittenden said when she set out to write her book, which has become a national bestseller, her dream was only that “someone will read it.” At lectures over the course of the past year, women would stand up and ask Crittenden: What do we do?

Don’t ask me, she would say. I’m a journalist, not an activist.

But after a year of criss-crossing the country, she has a different answer. “I have changed,” Crittenden said. “In the last few weeks women have popped up saying, ‘Let’s work on this. Let’s do a women’s movement.’”

At this salon, Crittenden sounded nearly like a politician. Her listeners--many with her book perched on their knees--craned forward, nodding in agreement. They spoke of “platforms,” “strategies” and how to get others involved.

Abby Liebman, one of the founders of the law center, gently challenged Crittenden on one point: class.

Though Crittenden mentions poor and working class women in her book, the focus is on women like herself--upper-middle-class mothers who gave up status-conferring careers to raise children. “My class analysis is that all married mothers are in the same boat,” Crittenden replied. “If we could get upper-middle-class white women on board, we would win. If changes affect all women, it would affect poor women as well.”

Not everyone embraced Crittenden’s ideas. “I feel a little uncomfortable tagging our contributions to an economic value,” said Scott, the Loyola Marymount law professor. “We seem to be playing the same old boys game again. We should be tagging it to children are valuable because they are valuable. They are not exclusively an economic good.”

Crittenden listened, but for the purposes of political action, disagreed. “We live in a capitalist society,” Crittenden said. Hard facts and numbers, she said, will be the only way mother’s work will ever be counted in economic terms.

Crittenden and Marjorie Sims, the law center’s executive director, met the next day with eight female legislators from the Women’s Caucus in Sacramento.

“We will talk about some of the issues raised in the book,” Sims said. “We will talk about what is possible legislatively on these issues.”

Some women left the event feeling inspired. Harley Jane Kozak, a Topanga Canyon mother of a 2-year-old and now pregnant with twins, said when she first heard Crittenden talking about her book on NPR she was so fascinated she nearly drove off the road. An actor who is accustomed to supporting herself, she is now dependent on her husband and is not entirely comfortable in her new role. “How can I find a way to become part of this grass-roots effort to improve the life of mothers?” she mused as she left the gathering. “I’m less at risk than these women who are economically challenged. That gives me the opportunity to do something on their behalf.”