The Motherhood Manifesto (Page 4)

While Renee's story captures the essence of what millions of working American women face each morning, Kiki's daunting experience simply trying to find a job shows just how deeply rooted, and widely accepted, discrimination against mothers has become.

A single mother of two, Kiki moved to a one-stoplight Pennsylvania town in 1994. She was truly on her own. Her husband had left several years earlier, when her children were 2 and 4. Kiki hadn't known how she'd make it as a single parent until her mother, a petite powerhouse and survivor of a World War II Russian gulag, stepped in to help. But when Kiki's mother died, there was nothing to keep Kiki in the Long Island town where she'd been living. The rapid property-tax increases in Kiki's carefully landscaped neighborhood of gorgeous Colonial houses were quickly exceeding her economic reach as a single working mother. So Kiki left in search of a smaller town with a lower cost of living.

With this move, Kiki and the kids were alone in a new town that had just two supermarkets. Several diners served a variety of aromatically enticing pork, sauerkraut and dumpling dishes. It was just the change she wanted. Kiki was able to buy a Dutch Colonial house at the top of a small mountain in the Poconos with nearly two acres of land for a fraction of the price of her old house. It seemed ideal, until she started looking for a job to support her family.

On a hot, humid August day, at an interview for a legal secretary position in a one-story brick building, Kiki sat down in a hard wooden chair to face a middle-aged attorney ensconced behind a mahogany desk. His framed diplomas lined the walls, and legal books filled the shelves behind him. Kiki remembers the attorney clearly, even his height of 5'10" and the color of his light brown hair. The interaction was significant enough to remain seared in her mind a decade later. "The first question the attorney asked me when I came in for the interview was, Are you married? The second was, Do you have children?"

It was the eleventh job interview in which she'd been asked the very same questions. After answering eleven times that she wasn't married, and that she was the mother of two, Kiki began to understand why her job search was taking so long.

She decided to address the issue head-on this time. "I asked him how those questions were relevant to the job, and he said my hourly wage would be determined by my marital and motherhood status." What's that? "He said, If you don't have a husband and have children, then I pay less per hour because I have to pay benefits for the entire family." The attorney noted that a married woman's husband usually had health insurance to cover the kids, and since Kiki didn't have a husband, he "didn't want to get stuck with the bill for my children's health coverage."

The attorney insisted that this blatant discrimination was perfectly legal--and he was right. Pennsylvania, like scores of states, does not have employment laws that protect mothers.

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