The place: A Brooklyn-bound F train at the West 4th Street station.
The time: 5 p.m. on a typical Thursday.
The players: A young couple, possibly from Spain, the woman carrying an adorable 2-year-old girl in a sling. With them, the woman’s mother, or probably mother-in-law.
They get on the train and cluster around one of the center poles. They stand.
Mother-in-law to woman: “The one drawback of women’s liberation is that now, in the subway, no one gets up for you.”
Woman: [Unintelligible.]
[End scene.]
Okay, it’s not much of a drama, but it left me wondering: Was this woman’s observation accurate?
To me, it rang false on two levels. For one, contrary to their mass-media image, New Yorkers tend to be very polite. It’s quite common to see people offer up their subway seats to all kinds of people—the elderly, children, tired-looking folks, and so on. What I’m saying is, we’re not dicks.
And from personal experience, I know that I get offered a seat all the time when I’m carrying Sasha in the Ergo. It’s very nice of people to do this, and I often feel bad refusing. When she’s in the Ergo, it’s often easier just to stand—the distribution of weight is better, and besides, I’m still young and healthy. I can stand, and Sasha can look at the world from adult-eye level.
But maybe this phenomenon is more common among New York dads than moms? As Chris wrote in his immortal treatise, “I, Hot Chick,” being an obvious father in New York attracts a lot of attention, and it’s possible that our greater visibility means we get offered courtesies that women with kids—being more numerous and therefore less, well, special—don’t.
Now, I’ve heard that some women have been reading DadWagon, and not just women related to us writers by marriage or blood. I’d love to hear from them: Does carrying a kid around get you extra-nice treatment, too, or is it just by dint of our newness and rarity that we dads get to sit down on the F train?
I’m in Toronto and I find it’s fairly uneven. When I was hugely pregnant most offered a seat but every once in a while someone would sit there right in front of the belly and try desperately to avoid “noticing” that I was pregnant. Also, I know that both myself and my brother-in-law have experienced being with a three year old on the subway (no stroller) and no one would give their seat to the child.
For the most part there are enough people who will give up their seats if it looks like you need it but there are definitely those days where you just stand their, mentally shaking your head. More common are the people who don’t hold doors for strollers, or treat stroller pushing moms like they don’t deserve to leave the house never mind use public transit. I don’t think it’s a ‘women’s lib’ thing, I think it’s just that there are more people now who are either completely oblivious or lacking in basic courtesy. Fortunately this is still not the majority of people.
Out here in the cornfield I live in we don’t have these sub-ways you speak of, but I did a lot of city bus riding before I had the kid (and inevitably purchased my first ever car, a predictable station wagon). When I was pregnant I was hugely pregnant in the way that would actually make people gasp/laugh at me when I walked by. So I don’t know if all the fuss made about giving up bus seats or helping me with my groceries was something given to all pregnant women or just women like me, who looked like they HAD to be in active labor already, at 6 months. Since the kid I still like to hit up public transportation when possible, but I live in a small town so 13 months into this parenthood thing I’ve never encountered a lack of seats on the bus. Plus I live in WISCONSIN, where people may be secretly or not so secretly intolerant of races and religions and sexualities, they are ridiculously nice in the every day and so the public is constantly offering its assistance to pretty much anybody, male or female, and particularly parents and small folks.
All of this is to say, I’m one of those lady readers you are calling out to, and I apparently have nothing to add to the discussion. Sigh.
(OH! Except whenever my partner is seen out and about with the baby without me, people go out of their way to tell him he’s a good father. Like, “Wow! You are totally holding that child while running an errand. YOU ARE SUCH A GOOD FATHER.” It drives me nuts how much stroking he gets. Because it’s sexist, but also because I am a jealous bitch.)
I was raised properly and by Southerners. We always give up our seat to mothers and fathers with babies and small kids, those older than us, and those who look infirm. However, I recently encountered the OPPOSITE problem. A father of three kids about ages 8-14 who did NOTHING to offer their seats to an elderly passenger. She was great though. She went up to the oldest kid and shooed him and told him, “it’s always the right thing to offer your seat to grandmothers.” The father however, was pissy about it but she would not relent. He backed down. She did not. Good for her.
Then that also begs the question: If there’s a Mom w/ a baby, A person with a walker, a blind person, and an elderly person all vying for the same seat, who gets priority?
not the mom with the baby, unless disabled also plays into it. I’m happy to stand.
I can’t say with certainty if the left-to-right ordering is meant to suggest priority but, assuming it is, pregnant women over here apparently get relatively short shrift: http://images.travelpod.com/users/carsonsontour2/1.1263123252.1_bangkok-subway-mrt.jpg
As for practice, in my experience, I am often the only one who gives up my seat for pregnant women or parents with kids, or old people for that matter. Because that’s what we New Yorkers do.
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I am currently huge with my second child (my second NYC pregnancy), and I can tell you that it’s almost always women who give up their seat for me in the subway. I can count on one hand the number of men that have given up their seat to me in both my pregnancies.
That’s on the A train. With one exception, I’ve never been offered a seat on the 1 train. Go figure.
My favorite day was the day when I, the pregnant mama, was the only one willing to give up my seat for a guy on crutches.
I’ve been offered a seat on the subway when I’ve had the kid in the soft carrier almost every time I have felt as if I needed it, and usually by a young man (meaning, he looks like he’s a city high school student). I was not regularly offered a seat when I was pregnant, and I found that generally, people didn’t give me much breathing room, in the subway or out on the street. I used to walk with my arms positioned over my belly with my elbows out to maintain a comfortable space and not get sideswiped by determined pedestrians in a rush to get somewhere. This might have been due to the fact that I barely looked pregnant when I was pregnant.
Different city, different mass transit – I’m in San Francisco.
When I was pregnant, in the last months, I got about a sixty percent “take a seat” rate. (Less on the 38 Geary, which goes through the Richmond. Less on BART. More in the Mission.)
But here’s the thing with a baby – it’s comfortable to stand with an ergo but I always hoped someone would give me a seat, not because *I* needed to sit, but if the bus stops suddenly I really, really don’t want to go flying through the air to land on my baby.