The Reason Why Women Work

by Richard Cohen
The Washington Post
THE MOMENT BUILT slowly. It came only after her daughter had thrown up in the car and the ride itself had not gone well, and when we arrived her older boy had played the phonograph at top volume and the other kids unwrapped a gift and shredded the wrapping paper over the living room rug, and then the older girl, sulking, disappeared for a time - gone, just gone - and the infant was given to me to hold while I ate my lunch with one free hand. It was then that the moment came.
She took the infant from me - this little thing, five weeks old with red hair like the other three kids - and she lifted her sweater and nursed the child. The other children were begging for attention, all of them snowbound, the older one, the boy, six years old and with the energy of a cooped fox, demanding to be heard, to be seen, to have his very presence acknowledged. It was then that I popped the question.
It is time to pause. Time to do what they do in the movies - a flashback. The lady's name is Kate Cavanaugh. She is 35 years old, red haired, the mother of four and the wife of John Cavanaugh, the congressman from the area around Omaha, NE. When her husband was first elected, Kate Cavanaugh was asked by an Omaha weekly paper to write a column about the glamorous life in Washington caviar at the Iranian Embassy, balls at the White House, opening nights at the Kennedy Center. She consented, but a funny thing happened when she sat down to write. She had almost nothing glamorous to report. Instead, she was writing about the Washington supermarkets and the time a raccoon got stuck in her chimney, and what it feels like to turn 35. It's not that she never goes to the White House - she does - it's just that she doesn't go if she can't find a baby sitter. Nancy Kissinger did not have these problems.
Anyway, she called and she said that she had read about my having lunch with Art Buchwald, the famous and witty columnist who is seeking a new steady restaurant to replace the Sans Souci and she wanted to duplicate it It would be lunch at her house, and the fare would be peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and would I do it? Yes, I would do it I mean, I was charmed. She knew the column, and now she wanted the columnist to lunch. Of course I would come.
But on the day of the lunch my car was snowed in and so she had to come for me. She arrived with a car full of kids, all of them in the back, the infant in a portable crib, and about half a mile out, the eldest of the three girls threw up. She looked pale and car sick and mortified - after all, she is five - but she was comforted by her younger sister, another red-haired thing, perfect like on a cereal box.
When we got to the house, the older boy turned on the phonograph as loud as it would go, and the other kids wanted milk, and Kate Cavanaugh complied. She walked around the kitchen with the infant on her hip or in her arms or sometimes she just handed it to me - here. I was this columnist - she clearly did not understand that - and not some participant, but I had this infant - God, what a cute kid - this infant with the lyrical Irish name of Machaela, and I sat at the table and tried to eat salad with one hand.
Kate Cavanaugh sat opposite me. All around the whole thing was coming apart - children going on little search-and-destroy missions in the kitchen. I watched and I listened and asked if she ever wanted to scream, and she said, "What do you mean 'want' - I do." I asked her if this ever gets to her and she said it does, and then I asked her why in the world she does it - mothering, housewifery. She just stared at me. She looked at me as if I had asked her something offensive, something shocking or something so stupid she could not begin to understand what I meant. It was nothing like that, of course. She knew what I meant, knew probably that I and lots of others have this bias, look down on full-time, all-the-time mothers, uphold the wonderful value of "work," work-work, salaried work, out-of-home work like the type Jackie Kennedy does and Ms. Magazine wrote about - work for reasons other than money.
This is important now. You have to work for fulfillment, for the psychic pleasure of the thing, for self-satisfaction. This is what terrific people do, terrific women, of course, but terrific men, too. One of the things you kept reading about Nelson Rockefeller was that he worked even though he didn't have to. This made him wonderful, a touch better than people who work because they have to. You get the feeling that if he had not worked, if he had just read books and just been wonderful to people, no one would have written his obituary - Nelson Rockefeller, reader of books and nice guy. Just the sound of it makes you want to laugh.
Kate Cavanaugh, the columnist, was nursing her baby when she answered my question - at least I think that's when she said it. "It's my job," she said simply. "I'm a mother."
Sometime later, Kate Cavanaugh found the time to write her column. I wrote three or four, and found some time to spend with my son. It's not as much as I want but I can't help it it's my job.
I'm a columnist.
THE WASHINGTON POST
March 1, 1979