I was on a package holiday, cycling in Austria, and the group included two very pleasant English couples. We came to Mauthausen. The Nazi concentration camp there, and its terrible adjoining quarry, where thousands and thousands of people died horribly, can be visited, if you can bear it. There was a quick discussion between the two husbands and two wives. The wives made little moues of distress and became all helplessly feminine at the thought of going near such a place. The husbands began to puff up, manly and protective. The decision was reached that the big strong men would brave the visit to the camp, and the little wifeys would go shopping. And so they both did, each sex well content with the other.
Those couples were thriving, as far as I could see, on the traditional distinction between the public and the private spheres. He’ll mind the world out there: she’ll mind the home. I can see that it is in the interest of the human race as a species that this should sometimes be the case. Sometimes. When women are very pregnant, or when there are small children to be reared, the woman needs protection and support – not that many women don’t manage without it. But that fleeting time in the individual woman’s life has been extended to define womanhood altogether. Minding children for five or ten or fifteen years incorporates, in our system, the task of minding their fathers for fifty.
Which – if it suits both parties – is one way of spending your life. But there’s no particular reason why the idea of women in the home should be favored over other ideas about women. There is nothing more normal about being a housewife than not being. If you ask yourself in whose interest it is to promote the notion that women are homebodies and men are out in the world, you may reply that it is in men’s interests. They are made relatively free by this arrangement. And so it is a notion most powerfully propagated, and represented as “natural.” The Englishwomen at Mauthausen were formed and shaped by century upon century of propaganda about how they should behave so as to be what the world calls womanly. The conditioning is so strong that I felt for a moment “unnatural” myself, for feeling that I had to go to the quarry.
Inherited stereotypes make it hard to discuss the perceived conflict between women who do paid work outside the home and women who work unpaid within the home. I say perceived conflict, because, mostly, more has been made of it by people hostile to women than by women themselves. The overwhelming majority of women are in perfect agreement on the matter. They would like both. All things being equal, they would like, at different times in their lives, and in different proportions at different times, to bear and raise children and to do interesting and useful work outside the home and earn money.
Almost anyone who impedes women from one or another of these fulfilments is an ideologue. There are mothers, and promoters of motherhood, who make a huge fetish of that particular role, and denigrate the many other marvelous things a woman might do with her life. And there are some women – usually sickened by the world they see around them – who want nothing to do with any of it. If they could, they’d destroy the present world, motherhood and all. A detail of the Kilkenny incest case – that neighboring men, when they got out of the pub, rang the poor abused daughter and her mother with obscene proposals – is the kind of thing, repeated, that can make you a separatist.
Ireland has more mothers working full-time in the home than any other EC country. This is simply because there are fewer opportunities to work outside the home here than anywhere else. There are very many women who would work outside the home if they possibly could. They are full-time mothers, certainly, but how often is that their choice? And if one of the young women in Ireland who has no hope of a job, much less a career, chooses to have a baby, the choice is not the same as it would be if she’d thrown up a highly paid job as a hairdresser on a cruise ship, say, going around the world. Numbers, in other words, mean nothing. That a lot of women are full-time mothers but no woman has ever been, say, chief executive of a major bank, doesn’t make motherhood more “natural” to women than running a bank. But, of course, motherhood may be more desirable than anything else around.
Lots of women in societies like ours do decide, usually along with their partners, to get pregnant such-and-such a number of times, and have such-and-such a number of children, and to work full-time in the home for such-and-such an amount of time. They make a general plan about reproduction based on their resources and values. Having children is by far the most interesting thing they can do.
They choose. They make a choice. A choice that has the whole dignity of the human being behind it. The dignity of the choice should be kept separate from the issue of how undervalued the work of mothering is. For the world as it has been run so far does indeed undervalue work in the home. But the woman who freely chooses to do it has given it her value – has honored the work with her self. She should fight for improvements in pay and conditions, the same as in any job. But let it be clear that that is not the same as resenting the job in itself.
The note of resentment that often characterizes housewives’ descriptions of themselves comes from interiorizing the values of the world. They sense that work with children in the home is looked on with contempt. They feel that women who work outside the home are treated with more respect. They try to win respect for what they do, partly by stressing the alleged element of sacrifice in their work and partly by denigrating non-mothering women.
But it wasn’t women who designed a world where paid work is admired but unpaid work is not. It wasn’t women who designed a world in which childcare is unpaid. It isn’t women who ask the mothers of toddlers, “But what do you do all day?” The value system we have inherited is challenged by feminism. It is that value system that says that women and housework are relatively unimportant. Not feminism.
When it is firmly established that to choose to work full-time in the home is an important choice, and is a choice, then rearing your own children in your own home can be looked at for what it is. It is an extremely demanding job, but it is also an exceptionally varied, interesting, contenting, and comprehensive job. I have never seen a woman, no matter how successful, move around the workplace with the same fluent ownership of the space as women display in their homes.
I have never seen a woman in the workplace who is not sometimes or always alienated by the work she does. Minding the children of your own body is not alienating. When the situation is not distorted by something else – by poverty, by having no loving support, by having had no choice, by having nothing else to look forward to – then surely there is no better job.
All my sisters have had children. I haven’t. But as far as I know, there is no fight between us because we’ve had different lives. So easy is it, in fact, not just for us but for women in general to appreciate that circumstances and choices have led one to this destiny, another to that, that I mistrust most discussions about women’s roles. The problem is not between real women. It is between external views of what women are or should be.
And it is not being born female that is problematical. The problem is absence of opportunity and absence of financial independence. And absence of intellectual confidence. That last one is the one that can be tackled now, today. Fight: don’t whine.
Don’t fall into a role. When a woman says that she’s “only a housewife,” or when she complains that she hasn’t had a holiday for ten years because she has so many children – as if her fecundity had nothing to do with her – or when she decides that remembering the Holocaust in a concentration camp would injure her delicacy, she’s propping up the old roles.
But they’re not worth it. Men are not the strong ones, women are not the weak ones, and motherhood is not what makes women valuable. We need truthful, particular ways to describe human diversity.
The Irish Times, March 8, 1993