Rebecca Asher is – depending on your point of view – either a whinger who doesn’t understand how life works, or a modern woman who has discovered she’s been sold a pup.
As a journalist, she seems to have got published a feminist book that many of us have effectively written in blogs, talked about in playgroups or NCT get togethers but have not got the time or energy to write down on paper. She’s called it “Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality“.
Very clever. I’d say shattered is just how most new mums feel.
The essential question is:
I’ve been educated as well as any man, secured a high flying job as well as any man, earned my own money, built a social life, but – now I’ve married a man and had a baby and my life revolves around their needs- was this all a lie? Are we really any further on than the 1950s?
And the honest answer is: it’s a bit more complicated than that.
I know exactly where she’s coming from. There’s no easy answer. Misogynists on the comments forums at the Guardian say that “you want to have your cake and eat it“, or “you should’ve thought of that before having a baby”.
Comments also call her spoiled, that it’s all a sense of entitlement that’s been frustrated and not a legitimate complaint. Often there’s a comment from someone saying something like I hold down two jobs, I’ve got four children and you don’t catch me being all self-pitying.
Or, I did all this twenty years ago and it’s tough but you do it… To be honest, I dislike those replies more than the misogynistic ones. After all, they seem stuck in the view that things have to be the way they are, defeatist rather than simply offensive…
There is no real feminist answer to this problem.
Feminism focuses on work, treatment of women and sexual politics (including the avoidance of children) but this element of the majority of women’s lives is controversial for feminists.
Instead we have conflicting values at play here. Let me show you why.
I want to work.
Work helps me feel a sense of self-worth, justifies the education that previous generations of female campaigners fought for me to be able to have, enables me to use my mind and skills putting something useful into the world, and have income to spend to make the money go around.
I want to raise my son.
I went through a lot to have him here safely, he is the most precious thing in our lives, I don’t think anyone else can raise him as well as his father and I can, he’s lovely, funny, interesting, cuddly, and I want to be with him. I enjoy the camaraderie of early years motherhood (both online and in person) and, unlike Rebecca, I positively like the singing at toddler group (I’d better as I lead it!)
We have allowed the debate to become polarised, to become a choice.
Are we “real mums” who stay at home? The household lives off their partner’s single income while they raise the children, balance the budget, avoid disposable nappies, chocolate and sweets, do baby signing, eat organic vegetables from their own plot, make the easter bonnets for the school competition and act as taxi service, PA, life coach, chef etc. etc.?
Or are we “real women” who go out to work? We juggle career with home life responsibilities, earn our own money, build our careers and become the women we hope we can be, living as full, active members of the workforce. And so our children go to daycare, and other people help with collecting them when the work deadlines have to take precedence, and we come home to collect overtired children that have been learning bad behaviour from the others they’ve been left there with…
Neither satisfies.
Society constantly undervalues the roles involved in childrearing. Intelligent conversation, answering questions through exploration, reading together, learning tool use and acceptable behaviours… we have treated these as menial labour, partly because of an erroneous assumption that childcare involves a lot of gloriously free time (I learned otherwise – not all babies sleep in the day time), partly because looking after children ends up resulting in lots of genuinely menial work (more washing than you could ever imagine, feeding, napisaning the “real” nappies and tidying after toddlers).
In business, we are always told that the most important and valuable asset that a company has is its people. Then look at the pay of childcare professionals, up to and including qualified teachers, and tell me that the pay really matches the long term investment that we as a society are making in the next generation of workers…
Then look at attitudes towards mothers in the workplace.
Leave aside the idea that it is middle class women that have benefited from feminism at the expense of working class men.
Despite the skills learned through parenting: multi-tasking, time management, compassionate communication (as one Guardian commenter described it), persuasion (getting my son dressed and out the house is sometimes the most difficult negotiation I have in a day)… none of these things matter one jot because they were away from the office and were not meetings-based skills (if you chair the PTA, that counts).
We are not the society we were in the time of the baby boomers. Unlike our parents who are retired (and therefore able to help with the childcare? But having done it once, why would they want to again?) we expect to work into our late sixties, to have minimal pensions, live into our eighties.
But we know that the penalty of taking time out of our labour market for childrearing impacts for the long-term. So why allow 50% of the population to have their careers permanently scarred because of their gender and not their talents?
And just as our careers have to last longer, the need to be carers for partners or parents kicks in too. The vast majority doing this at present are women – but that is generational. What are today’s mums of young children going to say if it is them that this burden falls to again – because they’ve already lost out on career development through childrearing?
One woman commenting in the Guardian comments said she resented mothers expecting to pick up their career where they left off because they should accept the penalty for having had a baby and “working at 75% for 10 years” but a father was better than a bachelor because he has to work to support the family. I’m horrified that another woman would say that.
I’m all for a right to request flexible working for all, including part-time working, but this commenter’s attitude shows there needs to be social pressure not only on companies but also with co-workers to ensure that working parents are not being made to feel guilty that they need to use leave, and work their conditioned hours so that they can spend time with their children rather than always the pressure to stay longer, and quantity of work appearing to be valued over quality.
And don’t think this is just a middle class issue – how many mothers working per hour in jobs that just about fit in with available childcare or school hours can’t get promotion because of not being able to take on the more awkward hours?
And if you drop out of the labour market, how will you get back in?
We need proper, high quality childcare available term time and holiday, recognising both the needs of the child in terms of care and learning, and of the parent in terms of a happy place to let their children develop which also allows them to work.
In the workplace, the first issue is one of recognising employees as humans not just resources. Everyone has a life outside work – it ought to be a prerequisite! But while being a champion skydiver is something to be respected and time allowed, accept that parents ought to put children first, or carers their care-ee first. Be clear that this is understood and they’ll be grateful for the flexibility and more dedicated and loyal as a result. Normalising shared parenting - say, meaning that each parent has four days in their office each rather than five and three, now that would really help.
Finally, no one tells prospective parents what hell awaits them: birth, post partem life, colic, sleep deprivation, sore nipples, breasts as public property, being constantly covered in someone else’s bodily fluids…
This new job, at least in the first few months, one that is not limited in terms of office hours. So the men complaining that they’ve gone to work all day and why should they be handed a screaming bundle on returning home miss the point – the parent out to work may have worked nine hours but so has the parent looking after the child, and that evening caring time should be shared.
But it gets easier. And after a year or so, they’re a delight. When they go to nursery, you realise you’re sharing your house not just with an extension of you but an individual with thoughts, feelings, options, preferences, ideas and a whole life ahead of them which is theirs, not yours. And with wrap around childcare you can even work! Now, what to do about school journeys and school holidays…
But let’s challenge the perception that life isn’t fair and women should just accept it. We do the next generation a disservice if we can’t persuade fathers that their role is with their children in person, not just as the wallet in the workplace, and employers that letting employees be themselves will help their wellbeing and their productivity.
Related posts:
Feminism is a form of social-political class-warfare. It’s passive-aggressive nature means that it never has socially or economically sustainable answers to anything in itself. Feminists might have answers, but no more, and no better an answer to a social issue that any other human being have.
The most common theme or characteristic answer that the feminist outlook produces to any social issue a transfer of resources from strangers to function at all. The outcome isn’t more freedom of action and independance, but greater structural dependance on others – particularly strangers such as social services and the taxpayer.
To call any disagreement with a feminist mysogeny is extreme. No-one living and breathing has the right to be absolute and infallable. It is especially narrow-minded to believe that feminist may claim to be the voice of any and all women. How dispiriting it is to think that one’s voice is that of anyone else’s, requiring one otherwise to have to be mute.
Thanks Joe. I do appreciate you taking the time to comment. So, where do I start?
I think you are mistaking some feminists with all feminists when talking about class warfare. Wikipedia defines feminism as “a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women’s rights. Much of feminism deals specifically with the problems women face in overcoming social barriers, but some feminists argue that gender equality implies a necessary liberation of both men and women from traditional cultural roles, and look at the problems men face as well. Feminists—that is, persons practicing feminism—may be persons of either sex.”
Yes, feminism doesn’t have all the answers – a point I make above. And as there is no clear position on motherhood, I’d say it’s clear I don’t feel it to be absolute or infallible. But some of the arguments against Rebecca Asher’s book on the Guardian website are mysogynist. It doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be allowed to speak – I’m with Voltaire on that one.
But as for feminists being the voice of any women, by definition that must be so if they themselves are women. All women? Nope, never said that.
Women are not a solid, amorphous block, but while recognising that women may well be running businesses as well as employed by others within them, I find it incredibly distressing that women are often their own worst enemies, and each other’s. As for economically unsustainable – I’d call risking overlooking the talents and skills of a huge chunk of the working age population solely on the basis that they have a womb and – for a few years – a physical need to provide care for the next generation, an economically unsustainable model for the long term. What would you call it?
I agree both of you. this blog its very interesting to all the women…Feminist is proud to announce a new, evolving section called Women & Peace, Power & Peace conference. They are committed to supporting a vision of true and lasting peace in the world and promoting the visionary people and organizations working towards that goal. .Girls & Young Women dedicated to raising healthy daughters/son and empowering girls and young women .,the future of feminism.
harold johson recently posted..Original Canon CLI-8 Four Color Pack
Great article,it’s a nice topic indeed.I think being a mother and career woman is such a difficult,but i really salute to them.It’s sad to say i haven’t read all those article and books mentioned there.I’ll look for it and read to get more informations.Thanks for this.Such an interesting article.
Pingback: bloggingportal.eu Blog & Support » Blog Archive » The Week in Bloggingportal: List version from Lisbon
Hi. I am Sandra, and I would like to say my opinion that what Rebecca Asher wrote was very self-centered. A mother’s life revolves around his husband and child, yes, but it is unfair to say that a married woman who has a baby is “shattered”. If you are dedicating your life to your family, your husband is doing it for you too. It is just wrong to always look at one aspect of a relationship, because relationships always involve a partner. Although it has been always part of the norm that a mother is “the keeper of the house”, in today’s world times are changing and men are doing their part to care for the family too, not only on the financial side.
HI Sandra, thanks for commenting.
Rebecca’s article forces us to look at the traditional roles and the expectations that we as women have of ourselves and the world.
You say “if you are dedicating your life to your family” and rightly point out that both staying at home and going out to work are ways of expressing this – but the issue for Rebecca, and for me I guess, is the role – why should it be the case that it is the woman that stays at home and takes the childcare lead?
Why should it automatically be assumed, given the full swoop of life, that one partner’s contribution to the family’s life will always be financially less over that whole period because their organs allow them to give birth? My husband and I earned pretty much the same prior to childbirth but we had to choose how we wanted to structure our lives as a family, and it was easier to go with the more traditional approach than fight for his right to spend more time as a SAH parent.
Add in to that that we both want the best for our child and to spend time with him and it seems very unfair that society and work expects only me to do so.
Finding out that this is still the case as a kind of default is shattering an illusion… and shattering physically because parenthood is a full-time job too.
I could be keeper of the house, but honestly, my tidying and cleaning are abysmal. I’d rather buy help in. I cook well though.
First of all, thank you for putting this post online because it is really a case of many women, well done Rebecca!
The 3 first month is the most difficult one as it’s really hard to get well organized with the new-born baby. Between family life, work (I work with anti wrinkles company) and personal care, sometimes 24hours seems too short.
Family/Friends support is the most important one in our active life. Time management is the secret for me.
Many thanks for this interesting post!
Well, to each his own, or in his case “her own” i guess. I just feel like being dedicated to the family is subjective and relative depending on the beliefs and customs that you are exposed to =)