Columnist Ellen Goodman provides humor, insight
Ellen Goodman wanted to give her daughter the best possible start in life. So, joked the nationally syndicated columnist, she waited until her child was 6 weeks old before returning to work.
“After about the 18th time of someone stopping me in the hall and saying ‘And who takes care of your child?’ I said ‘I just leave her home with the refrigerator door open and it all works out,’” Goodman, 62, told a full house in the Serra Grand Ballroom at the Monterey Conference Center during Community Hospital’s annual joint meeting of Community Hospital Foundation and the Auxiliary in January. “Now 50 percent of women with children are in the workforce. Women are no longer the second worker in the family. Families need two incomes to survive.”
It’s a shift, Goodman said, that has had an impact on every profession, and healthcare in particular. “Half of all medical school students are female. But have we made changes for family life, or have we just allowed the woman to fit into a male pattern (of work) that doesn’t allow for family?”
Goodman said women have transformed from the 1950s Super Mom to the 1980s Super Woman — a woman with 2.3 children who goes to work at her $100,000 a year job in a $2,000 Armani suit after feeding her children a nutritious breakfast, then comes home and takes a 6-mile run, prepares a gourmet meal, and has a meaningful relationship with her husband — to the new millennium Good Mother.
“The Good Mother is the highpowered professional who chucks it all to be with the kids,” according to Goodman.
But while there has been tremendous social change, Goodman said, both men and women now find themselves in a professional and personal quandary.
“Women have had great access to that part of a man’s world and traditionally male values (success, achievement, competition). But they haven’t furthered the traditional women’s values (caregiving, understanding, kindness). Our society has become lopsided. Women want equality, but not necessarily on male terms.”
2004 Board of Trustees: (back row, l-r) Stephen M. Dart, Roy Lorenz, William G. Doolittle, Ian Arnof; (middle row, l-r) David H. Watts, Jay Hudson, Davis Factor, Jr., Beverly C. Hamilton; (front row, l-r) The Hon. Leon E. Panetta, George E. Miller, Jr., M.D., Geraldine C. Taplin, M.D., Lucille Reno, Steven J. Packer, M.D., President/CEO.
Men, meanwhile, find themselves trying to balance strength and sensitivity. “They want to be strong, but not silent,” Goodman said. “They end up somewhere between Colin Powell and Bruce Springsteen.”
We need to find a balance, Goodman suggested. “We’ve been using one leg to kick down doors and to move forward in transforming society for women and men. But we’re still dragging that second leg of social change behind us. Women still earn 70 cents for every dollar a man makes. And we’ve still had trouble convincing men of the intrinsic joy of housework.
“We need to keep the best of the traditional and get the best of the non-traditional. It’s time for us to deal with the next stage of this movement.”
In other annual meeting news, Ian Arnof, Stephen M. Dart, and Geraldine C. Taplin, M.D., were named to the Community Hospital Foundation Board of Trustees, replacing outgoing members Mae C. Johnson, Hisashi Kajikuri, M.D., and Clayton C. Larson. Board members Gen. Michael Carns and Leon Panetta were elected to second terms. 