room for mothers to breastfeed, except for ones who have less than 50 employees. i want to bring in two women who have lived out these dilemmas. hannah pingry and her daughter, sheila pingre. i want to talk about the relationship between the kinds of policies we see and the social contract we which is very incomplete in how it responds to mothers and children and the fact that we don t have more mothers as politicians. it s a basic brute democratic fact of who we elect to represent us in state houses and in congress. sure, well i mean first of all, most people probably understand this, there aren t enough women in politics.
for breastfeeding for three and a half or whatever, although i might criticize them for doing it on the cover of time magazine. to me there s a difference between saying this is okay and saying this is the expectation. women aren t choosing this in a vacuum, right? there s a whole kind of social context, not an uncommon thing. where a movement that starts out as a movement for integration, in a way you could say the same thing in the civil rights movement. basically asking for kind of equality comes up against obstacles and after kind of banging its head into a brick wall, instead settles for a strategy, a validation of separatism. and you ve got a generation of women who came up against the limits of integration, when you ve come up against the glass ceiling at a certain point you start thinking, i can choose to stay home. i can choose to do something, value this other sphere where there aren t going to be the
in france? i imagine there are, because of the fact it is interwoven into family life that there are these public amenities? i think there s a lot more trust of day care. i asked people in day care what s your parenting philosophy. they thought it was a crazy question. everyone agrees on the basics in france, there aren t these different warring philosophies where you worry if you leave your child with someone they re going to feed them different vegetables than you believe in when i got pregnant, i feel i had to study to read all the books and decide which to follow. in france people read a couple of books, but you go with what else does. that s the benefit of being in france, it calms the whole conversation down. you don t have to worry that you picked the wrong philosophy. there s confidence in these institutions in part because they re extremely well-regulated. they re quite similar to the network of day care centers that the u.s. military runs. those are almost identical to