Recently, attention has focused on the gender pay gap that emerges when people have children, what has come to be labelled ‘the motherhood penalty’. A much-publicized 2016 report shows a gradual but continual rise in the average hourly pay gap, from virtually zero when men and women begin their working lives, to about 10 per cent when a woman first gives birth. By the time her first child turns 12, women are earning, on average, a third less each hour than men.123 In this chapter we look at the pressures mothers face today and consider why women are still more likely than men to give up work altogether, or return only part-time, once they become parents. We ask whether the apparent freedom mothers have to choose staying at home, returning to work part-time or full-time, is just an illusion – designed to put a liberal gloss on the reality of women’s lives.
Talk of a ‘motherhood penalty’ can make it seem as if sexist male bosses conspire to pay women with children less than men. This narrative of sexism and female disadvantage stands in opposition to reality: women who return to work immediately after maternity leave, even if that maternity leave lasts for a year, find no loss of pay at all. On a ‘like for like’ basis, they continue to earn the same as their male colleagues. Likewise, women who return to work part-time suffer no immediate penalty; indeed, women’s weekly earnings fall by proportionally less than the reduction in hours worked – that is, their hourly wages actually tend to increase.124 The economist Heather Joshi points out that today’s women graduates who postpone having children until the age of thirty and then return to work ‘will probably suffer no earnings loss at all for a first child’.125
The alarming ‘motherhood penalty’ emerges from a comparison of average hourly wages that takes no account of the jobs men and women do or the total number of hours they work. Women returning to employment after maternity leave, even if they come back part-time, initially earn the same each hour as their male colleagues. However, over time, women’s wages drop. As we noted in the previous chapter, part-time workers are slower to gain promotion and less likely to qualify for bonus payments. Women with young children are less likely to make a major career move. They are also less likely to work (or be seen to work) additional hours on top of the working day if they are responsible for picking up a child from school or nursery.
By the time her first child is 20, the average woman has been in paid work four years less than the average man, and has been in work of more than 20 hours per week for nine years less than a typical man.126 In other words, when people have children, more women than men cut back on the hours they spend in paid employment and this is reflected in their earnings. Gradually, over the course of a decade, the cumulative effect of women stopping work altogether or working fewer total hours, is that their average earnings fall. The gender pay gap is not so much a motherhood penalty as a time away from paid work penalty.
Of course, we need to ask why more women than men decide to take time out or work part-time once they have children. Debates about working mothers are emotive and polarized. On the one hand, women are presented as eager to get back to advancing their careers but held back in a hostile and sexist labour market. On the other hand, women are considered to have a ‘maternal instinct’ that overrides personal ambition the moment a baby arrives. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between. Some women may be replying to emails from the maternity ward and back at their office a few days after giving birth. Other women may be only too happy to swap meetings and sitting at a desk for play groups and breastfeeding. Most women try to find a way of combining work and raising children that suits them and their family.
Decisions about whether or not to continue working after having a baby are personal and complex. Often, they are not taken by women alone but in conjunction with partners and perhaps other family members. Choices are influenced by attitudes towards work as well as towards motherhood. Good quality and affordable child care makes returning to work easier, as does having a high-status, well-paid and enjoyable job. Work that is poorly paid and tedious can make staying at home a more attractive option, especially for women who grew up expecting to play this role. Often, compromises are involved. Part-time work, if only for a few years, is popular because it allows women to earn money, maintain a career and still be a ‘hands-on’ parent.
Feminists are often quick to point out that the rhetoric of ‘choice’ is misleading and what may appear to be an individual woman’s chosen life course is in fact the only option available to her. For example, a woman may choose to give up work after having a baby, but if her partner works exceptionally long hours and refuses to give up his job, and there is no suitable childcare or other help available, then she doesn’t really have much of a choice to make. Continuing to work would be nearly impossible. Similarly, a woman whose job involves considerable amounts of travel, or frequently working late into the evening, but whose child attends a nursery that shuts at five o’clock may say she has chosen to work part-time although her only other option was to leave work entirely.
Time and again it seems that women are more likely than men to prioritize children over work. Anne Marie Slaughter, the first woman Director of Policy Planning at the US State Department, became one of the most high-profile women to leave her job in order to spend more time with her teenage children. Slaughter chronicled her decision in a widely read article entitled: Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.127 Like many feminist commentators, Slaughter pointed to the practical obstacles and social pressures that combine to ensure women put motherhood first.
To explore what shapes the decisions women make, we need to dig deeper than current debates about whether women can ‘have it all’. As always, the legacy of history continues to have important repercussions. The movement of economic production out of the home with the industrial revolution meant that men took on the role of breadwinner while women were pushed into taking sole responsibility for domestic life. As a consequence, women became primarily defined as wives and mothers. Their relegation to the home, where their labour carried no financial value, made them economically dependent upon men. Although a proportion of working-class women needed to earn money too, the default position of housewife meant their labour was poorly paid and insecure.
Frederick Engels, writing in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in 1884, located women’s oppression in the institution of the family. He argued that the role women were forced to play in the home prevented them from fully participating in public life. In the 1960s and into the early 1970s, feminists such as Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer argued that a combination of formal legislation and informal practices meant women were still oppressed because they were unable to participate in all aspects of society in the same way as men. Lack of access to contraception, abortion and childcare placed real limitations on women’s capacity to engage fully in the workplace or public life more broadly.
In her 1974 book Housewife, Ann Oakley describes ‘gender differentiation between the roles of female and male’ as ‘the axis of the modern family’s structure’.128 This division does not occur because of natural instinct or simply because of children’s socialization. Social and cultural practices that stem from outside the family have an impact too. As we have already noted, in the years following both the First and Second World War there were concerted efforts led by government and backed by trade unions to get women out of work and into the home. One consequence was that support for children’s day nurseries was withdrawn.
Women who wanted to work faced poor job prospects and low pay. This meant that male employment was most important for a family’s financial security and, if women worked outside of the home, it was their work not the man’s that had to fit around the needs of children. In the 1970s, at the time of the UK’s Equal Pay Act, nurseries that would take babies and stay open long enough to allow women to work were rare. Nurseries at this time were described as, ‘little more than an appendage of the social security system, an inadequate net to catch those women the state considers to be incompetent at one of their prime tasks under capitalism: child rearing’.129 Mothers wanting to work were forced to depend on informal arrangements with family and friends. In this context, equal pay legislation was destined to be of limited success and the political demand for childcare became a radical challenge to women’s continued oppression.
Many things have changed for women over the past half century but the pace of change has not been even in all areas of life. Writing in 1978, the Irish journalist Mary Kenny confidently declared, ‘By the age of twenty-three, most women are married and have children. Ninety-five per cent of all women in the world eventually marry and have children.’130 This is far from the case today. However, the title of Kenny’s book is revealing: ‘How to run a home and bring up a family without giving up your job – essential reading for every working mother.’ Women were marrying and primarily responsible for the children – but they were increasingly working too. In Britain in 1978, 750,000 women with children under 5 worked, but perhaps because of the difficulties in combining work and family life, more than two-thirds of women who worked were employed part-time.131 In 1980, the proportion of women returning to some form of work when their baby was 8 months old reached 24 per cent of all working mothers.132
In a lecture delivered in 1982, the then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher claimed, ‘The battle for women’s rights has largely been won.’133 However, the subsequent economic downturn meant her words were premature and the number of women in employment fell in the mid-1980s with Thatcher herself calling on women to return to the home. In reality, many women with children had never left the home and those that had still bore the brunt of housework and childcare. The sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term ‘the second shift’ to describe the hours women spent looking after home and children in addition to their paid employment.
Today there are far more ‘working mothers’ but many, it seems, are still ‘running a home and bringing up a family’ too. Whether through tradition, convenience or choice, it’s mum rather than dad who is far more likely to be phoned up, first by nursery and later by school, when their child is sick. It is still the mother’s job that is often considered more flexible when the child needs to stay at home. Whether or not the burden of this second shift pushes women to ‘choose’ to work part-time or give up entirely depends upon the willingness of her partner to share responsibility for housework and childcare or being able to pay for childminders and babysitters to ease the load – as well as her own personal preferences.
Much has changed for working mothers in recent years. Trade unions are more likely to be campaigning against the gender pay gap than reminding women their place is in the home. Nurseries and after-school clubs, although often expensive, have proliferated. However, even though our lives are very different today, history still leaves its imprint. Slaughter notes, ‘Men are still socialized to believe that their primary family obligation is to be the breadwinner; women, to believe that their primary family obligation is to be the caregiver.’134 Right from early childhood, we are told, role models, books and toys all help prepare girls for a life of domesticity where careers come second to the more important role of being a mother.
Such stereotypes were more rigidly policed in the past, but they undoubtedly still hold sway today. However, the tendency for increasing numbers of women to delay motherhood, or not have children at all, suggests the influence of such childhood conditioning is diminishing. Similarly, men’s attitudes towards housework and childcare are also beginning to change. The authors of The New Soft War on Women note, ‘Married fathers in two-earner couples have dramatically increased the amount of time they spend in both child care and house work over the past twenty-five years.’135 A study from the University of Warwick likewise claims that men no longer have such a strong perception that housework is the role of a woman. While women still do most around the home, researchers found, men are now doing more. Interestingly, they point to an emerging class divide with working-class men carrying out more household chores than high earners.136
As some of Hochschild’s Second Shift couples illustrate, money can, to a limited extent, substitute for time through the purchase of take-out food and domestic help. Today, women have more employment opportunities, men are beginning to take on a greater share of housework and childcare is more readily available. It should be more possible than ever before for women to combine work and motherhood. But the fact remains that some women who have money for childcare and partners willing to share the load do still choose to be more involved at home, perhaps seeing a domestic role as more central to their sense of identity than men.
Slaughter moves on from discussing the socialization of children and pinpoints ‘a maternal imperative felt so deeply that the “choice” is reflexive’.137 The notion that women are biologically programmed with a maternal instinct and hormonal drivers ready to kick in and circumvent our brains returns us to the realm of workplace ‘period policies’ discussed in Chapter Two. Whereas an older generation of feminists challenged the belief that women existed at the whims of their hormones and biology, today’s feminists breathe life back into this old idea.
The danger with propagating notions of a nebulous but overwhelming maternal instinct is that it becomes a pedestal women who want to be good mothers are compelled to climb aboard. Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men and the Rise of Women, writes, ‘I’ve seen so many friends nearly quit their jobs because they did not want to stop breast-feeding or deal with the stress of pumping breast milk at work. In that myopic, desperate moment of early motherhood, women demote their own ambition to the near moral equivalent of starving your baby.’138 The notion of a ‘maternal instinct’ suggests motherhood is the natural state for a woman and women who happily return to work full-time are denying their true nature. It also suggests that fathers who are not in possession of such an instinct can never come up to scratch.
For young women yet to confront the reality of juggling family and work, belief in a maternal instinct encourages them to begin preparing for their biological destiny. Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook and the author of Lean In notes, ‘Women are making room for kids they don’t have, years before they try and get pregnant … the men, meanwhile, are super aggressive and focused. They are in your office every day. “Can I do that? Can I lead this?” They don’t have to be talked into things.’139 In practice, this means that some women end up deprioritizing their careers before they have even begun to have children.
Just when there are few barriers to mothers working outside the home, it seems that new pressures come to the fore. When people married and had children at a younger age, becoming a mother was simply a routine part of life. Indeed, for many young women it marked the transition to adulthood. Today, thanks in part to improved access to contraception and abortion as well as to better education and employment opportunities, becoming a parent rarely ‘just happens’. For many people nowadays the decision to have a baby is taken consciously; children become part of an overall life plan (even if this plan is little more than an aspiration).
Women are having fewer children than in the past but the trend towards smaller families does not mean that home life necessarily takes up any less time. Betty Friedan, writing in The Feminine Mystique, commented on the tendency for housework to fill the time made available to it. Today, it is not housework but looking after children that expands to fill ever more time. Kenny noted in 1978 that, ‘As families get smaller they also get more intense.’ She continues, ‘The fact that women are having fewer children doesn’t necessarily mean – as I had once believed – that they expend less energy on motherhood; indeed, they probably expend more, since everyone takes child-bearing and child-raising so seriously now.’140
When having a baby ‘just happened’, children were simply part and parcel of an adult’s life. Children were expected to fit into the adult world, not the other way round. The job of socializing and disciplining children was undertaken not just by parents but by teachers, religious and community leaders, extended family members and neighbours. Ellie Lee, Director of the University of Kent’s Centre for Parenting Cultural Studies, notes that ‘the task that should properly be shared by all adults – that of shaping and developing the next generation – has come to be thought of and fetishized as “parenting”’.141 Today, the job of child rearing has become far more privatized; it is seen as solely the responsibility of the nuclear family. Yet at the same time as raising children has become the sole responsibility of parents, there is an increasing expectation that it will be carried out in a particular way.
The fact that having children is considered a deliberate choice means that parents are under pressure to raise their children in the ‘correct’ way; that is, in a manner determined by an army of professionals offering advice and guidance on what is best for the child. Lee explains: ‘bringing up children is seen as far too difficult and important to be left to parents’.142 As a result, parents spend more time and effort raising their children despite being considered the least qualified person in their child’s life.
The word ‘parent’ is today used less as a noun and more as a verb; rather than simply being a parent, people do ‘parenting’. Despite there being a long history to publications and organizations offering parental advice, Lee argues that ‘“parenting” has acquired specific connotations more recently’ with ‘an explicit focus on the parent and their behaviour that emerges as the general, distinctive attribute of the contemporary term “parenting” and the determinism it brings with it’.143 Today, clear expectations as to how parenting should be done properly come from psychologists, parenting experts, health professionals, teachers, parenting charities and campaign groups, neuroscientists and government ministers.
Parents are encouraged to worry about the mental and physical health of their babies not just from before birth but even from before conception. In the UK, the NHS advises prospective parents: ‘Preconception care is an opportunity for you and your partner to improve your health before you start trying for a baby. A healthcare professional can help you to assess your health, fitness and lifestyle, to identify areas that you may want to improve.’144 Although the NHS guidance is careful to include ‘you and your partner’, the pressure to seek out and follow advice falls disproportionately upon women who get pregnant, give birth and are expected to breastfeed their babies exclusively for at least six months.
At their very first appointment with a midwife, British women are presented with an extensive list of foods to avoid or consume in moderation. The list is as specific as it is long with advice on exactly how much caffeine is acceptable, how many cups of herbal tea to drink each day and what types of cheese to avoid.145 The message to pregnant women is clear: you are no longer a rational adult able to exercise common sense. Instead, for the sake of your future baby, submission to the rules is required. As pregnant women want what’s best for their babies, they relinquish autonomy over their own lives.
Rules are strictest around smoking and drinking alcohol. There are proposals to submit pregnant women who are persistent smokers to carbon monoxide testing with shopping vouchers as a reward for abstinence.146 Although this is not yet a routine feature of antenatal care, the fact it can be proposed at all shows the extent to which medical professionals hold the individual rights and personal freedoms of the living adult woman in lower regard than the life of the foetus. Likewise, there is no evidence to suggest that moderate alcohol consumption, having a couple of glasses of wine a couple of times a week, is detrimental to the developing foetus. Yet because health professionals operate a precautionary principle and don’t trust women to apply common sense and follow nuanced guidance, women are advised to abstain from alcohol altogether for the duration of their pregnancy. This made-up ‘rule’ then gets policed by people, such as bar-tenders, who have no relationship to the pregnant woman yet still feel entitled to tell her what to do on behalf of the unborn child.
Practically, the impact of following such rules to the letter is that women cannot relax and socialize with friends and colleagues as equals without having attention drawn to their ‘special’ status as a mother-to-be. It is not sexist bosses, outdated laws or religious conventions that prevent pregnant women playing a full part in society but a view of women as nothing other than the carrier of a future baby. Rather than this being seen as an imposition, many women consider the sacrifices they are expected to make when pregnant as important and worthwhile; they accept the idea that putting the needs of the child first, even before it is born, is of paramount importance. As Katie Roiphe puts it, ‘Doing something unhealthy, or creating an unhealthy environment for a child, is currently so taboo that we are tyrannized by the fear of it: we are almost unable to think in other terms.’147
Women, and to an increasing extent men, find their lives change when they have children. Of course, having children demands sacrifices are made – this has always been the case. Impromptu nights out, holidays and taking jobs in another country might not be curtailed but certainly require more planning. This comes as little surprise to most parents. What’s new today is that adults who have been quite capable of conducting their own lives find, upon becoming parents that they are subject to guidance on what to eat, drink and wear, how to exercise, socialize and run their lives. It is assumed that the child, even before birth, has interests distinct from those of the parents and professionals are needed to ensure the child’s needs are met. For some women, perhaps distant from their own mothers and anxious to do everything ‘correctly’, this instruction might be welcomed. For others, it is a fact of life, to be taken on board or smiled at in public and ignored at home.
For those who want to run their lives and raise their families in a way that goes against the norm, the weight of interference, leading to children being removed or threatened with removal from the family home, is truly appalling. Rebecca Schiller, author of Why Human Rights in Childbirth Matter, details the experiences of women who, through choice or circumstance, through a missed antenatal appointment or the decision to have a home birth, have not followed the approved route for childbirth. She explains, ‘It is perhaps unsurprising that a society increasingly dictatorial about pregnant women’s behaviour, that fetishizes parenting and points the finger of blame all-too-frequently at the mother, is punishing women in this way.’148
The pressure – often self-inflicted – to be a textbook parent does not disappear when a baby is born: it intensifies. The importance placed on ‘bonding’ and the mantra that ‘breast is best’ lead women to interpret failure as potentially disastrous for their child’s future life chances. Jess Phillips explains: ‘For some reason, we all sign up to the idea that women are doing something sacred in a baby’s first year that no one else could manage.’ She takes the breastfeeding obsessives to task: ‘I know all the statistics about how natural birth is safer and how breast is best, but up and down the country new moms are weeping over the heads of their newborns because they can’t get the hang of breastfeeding and have for some reason been led to believe by some crappy meme on Facebook that if they give them baby formula they will basically be feeding them crack.’149
As children grow up, demands on mothers don’t lessen but change in response to new anxieties. Parents today are expected – and in turn take it upon themselves – to be ever-vigilant about where their children are and what they are doing. As a consequence, the days when children stayed home alone, played out in the street and walked to and from school unaccompanied have largely vanished and many parents instead end up shepherding their children from school to a series of clubs and structured activities. Sharon Hays, author of The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, notes that ‘modern American mothers do much more than simply feed, change and shelter the child until age six’. This ‘more’, notes Charlotte Faircloth, ‘involves devoting large amounts of time, energy, and material resources to the child’.150
Mothers are not just held responsible for their children’s physical safety and educational development but for their mental health too. Parenting expert Steve Biddulph claims, ‘Affluent, time-poor British parents are responsible for a youth mental-health epidemic.’ He advises mothers not to be hung up about their looks, to limit their child’s ‘screen time’ (both perhaps easier said than done) and not to go clothes shopping with their daughters. Such advice conflicts with many mothers’ instincts yet, as no parent wants to risk the mental health of their child, it is often welcomed – even when not always acted upon. Frank Furedi, writing in Paranoid Parenting, explores how the belief that everything a parent does has an impact on their child’s life makes raising children an almost impossibly fraught task.
I asked Dr Jan Macvarish, author of Neuroparenting, The Expert Invasion of Family Life, why parenting has become such an all-consuming endeavour. Macvarish says that ‘Raising children used to be something people just got on with but now, almost everyone thinks about parenting as a conscious act that has particular outcomes and needs to be carried out to a certain standard. The idea that parenting is something you can get wrong has become widely accepted and because of this, raising children has become something of an ordeal.’151
Macvarish argues that one reason for this shift lies in our collective concerns about the future: ‘At a time when we don’t seem to be in control of the future, the very fact of having another biological generation come into being through the child becomes a site of considerable anxiety. Children carry the weight of our insecurities; they have become a repository for every social problem.’ She suggests, ‘Parents have become charged with making this transition to the future happen in a positive way that solves the problems we face now. So much is loaded onto the shoulders of parents today that wasn’t attributable to them in the past.’ Macvarish explains, ‘When social problems are talked about today all discussion coalesces around the idea that the early years are formative. There is no longer any sense of people being part of broader society or of the possibility of bringing about structural social change. Instead, social problems are located in individuals and parents are supposed to solve these problems. Parenting has become both the cause and the solution to all problems.’
A focus on parenting rather than political solutions to social problems allows campaigners to distance themselves from politics and defer instead to seemingly neutral experts. The latest science of parenting involves a focus on babies’ brains; something Macvarish has labelled ‘neuroparenting’. She writes that brain claims suggest the correct scientific approach to raising children has now been determined and is beyond doubt: ‘The basis for this final achievement of certainty regarding child rearing is said to be discoveries made through neuroscience about the development of the human brain, in particular, during infancy.’152 Most mothers will be familiar with claims about the significance of what they do in pregnancy and the first few years of their child’s life such as the importance of breast milk or playing babies classical music. Macvarish argues, ‘The rhetoric of babies’ brains is deployed to challenge the fundamental rights and responsibilities which have shaped British family life for the past 100 years or more, in particular, the general presumption that parents know best when it comes to caring for babies and getting toddlers to school age.’153 The pressure is on parents to create the perfect environment for their child by seeking out and following expert parenting advice. The ‘good’ mother is the one who is most dedicated to this cause.
The working mother, on the other hand, seems to be selfishly putting her own needs above those of her child. Steve Biddulph makes this point clearly when he blames the mental health crisis in teenage girls on mothers who are too busy working to spend time with their daughters, urging ‘career success comes at great cost’.154 It seems as if whatever mothers do today they are in the wrong. If they work full-time, they risk damaging their child emotionally. If they dedicate themselves to full-time parenting, they are criticized for being a ‘helicopter mother’ and denying their children independence. Simply loving and looking after your children is no longer enough.
This intensification of parenthood, and in particular the focus on the role of the mother, makes the decision to combine having children with working full-time more difficult. Jennie Bristow explains that it has become ‘morally unacceptable’ for ‘women to devote themselves to their work more than, or as much as, to their children – by going back to work less than six months after their baby’s birth, working longish hours or a five-day week, attending international conferences rather than Nativity plays’.155 No matter how good or cheap nurseries might be, no matter how much time dads spend with children or doing housework, the intense pressure and effort required to be the perfect mother makes the idea of leaving work altogether, or working only part-time, appear not just attractive but actually necessary – irrespective of whatever a woman’s ambitions might once have been.
In a previous era, feminists fought for women to be recognized as independent and autonomous beings distinct from first their fathers, then their husbands. Later, they recognized the danger of swapping obedience to men for sublimation to the child. In 1970, Germaine Greer wrote in The Female Eunuch, ‘Childbearing was never intended by biology as a compensation for neglecting all other forms of fulfilment and achievement. It was never intended to be as time consuming and self-conscious a process as it is.’156 Yet almost 50 years later many women find their identity has indeed become subsumed within that of their child.
Katie Roiphe describes the trend for women with interesting adult lives to represent themselves on Facebook with a photo of their child. ‘These photos signal a larger and more ominous self-effacement, a narrowing of worlds,’ she argues, ‘yet this style of self-effacement, this voluntary loss of self, comes naturally.’ Judith Warner, writing in Perfect Madness, Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, labels the new ‘problem with no name’ as the ‘Mummy Mystique’. She explains, ‘We have taken it upon ourselves as supermothers to be everything to our children that society refuses to be: not just loving nurturers but educators, entertainers, guardians of environmental purity, protectors of a stable and prosperous future.’157 As a result, she argues, ‘Too many of us allow ourselves to be defined by motherhood.’ Women who readily define themselves by motherhood are more likely to feel guilty about working full-time and prioritizing their own needs; they are more likely to leave work altogether for a few years or return part-time.
One solution to combining intensive motherhood with employment is ‘flexible working’ – allowing people to work at different times of the day, from different locations or only during school term times. Flexible working sounds great but rarely seems to live up to the hype. Particularly for women in low-skilled, low-paid jobs, flexibility can be a way of selling insecurity. ‘Zero-hours contracts’, where employees do not know from one week to the next when or even if they will be working have, rightly, been criticized. Dressing such contracts up as a way for people to combine work and children is little help to people who need a regular source of income. Likewise, the entitlement British women now have to take a full year’s maternity leave may not be best for their careers. As Vicky Pryce notes, ‘Generous maternity pay and leave arrangements seem to widen the experience gap between men and women because it means women take longer out of the labour market.’158
Flexibility can also mean an expectation for employees to be permanently ‘on-call’ and replying to work phone calls and emails. Rosin points out that women who work flexibly, ‘work all the time’, she explains, ‘work and play and kids and sleep are all jumbled up in the same twenty-four-hour period’.159 Unfortunately, as work is currently organized, particularly the higher up the career ladder individuals go, it neither coincides neatly with the school day nor lends itself to flexibility. Being a partner in a law firm, the editor of a newspaper or the creative director of an advertising agency requires a level of dedication, commitment and availability that flexibility rarely permits.
Flexible working might allow some women to juggle the competing demands of work and family life. But it can only ever be a partial solution to the problems today’s feminists return to again and again: the gender pay gap and the underrepresentation of women in the most senior positions. At the moment, women are under pressure to be hands-on mothers whose first priority is always their children. At the same time, they are expected to dedicate themselves to their careers and seek out promotion opportunities at every turn. Doing both requires superhuman levels of organization and stamina. Yet while success is judged in terms of wages and job titles on the one hand, or having perfect children on the other, then there is no room for a broader discussion about what would make life better for everyone today.
Feminism tends to promote work as the key to women’s happiness and search for meaning in their lives. Writing in a preface to The Feminine Mystique, author Lionel Shriver notes that ‘Friedan may have placed excessive faith in the world of work to engender the creative fulfilment she envisions for her sisters’. This view of work reveals much about the type of people who become feminist campaigners. Shriver continues:
The jobs that involve innovation, imagination and exhilaration are available only to so many people. Not everyone can be an architect, a research physicist, or a filmmaker. Working the checkout till at Wal-Mart can be every bit as monotonous and soul-destroying as scrubbing the kitchen floor – maybe more so. Work is not always a privilege. For many women in the workforce today, a job is a fiscal necessity but hardly a source of joy.160
For many women, being a mother seems more meaningful and fulfilling than paid employment. Motherhood carries an identity and a status that yesteryear’s ‘housewife’ does not.
Although we can certainly question the extent to which women freely choose to leave work or cut their hours, to deny that women have any choices to make presents them as mere automatons acting out a pre-determined role over which they have little control. Indeed, the freedom women have to make such choices and to determine their own life course is surely feminism’s biggest victory. What’s needed is more freedom and choice to enable women and men to combine parenting and work more easily.
Combining a full-time job with intensive motherhood is exhausting. It can mean spending time at work expressing breast milk, evenings spent cramming in quality time with young children, and disturbed nights broken by a co-sleeping toddler. Ultimately, even for the most ruthless and best organized women, combining motherhood and work involves compromises. No one can be in two places at once, or, for that matter, expect to be paid for a job they don’t do. That some women then choose to work part-time or not apply for a promotion is entirely understandable. For some women this is a positive choice – they want to spend time with their children and welcome the opportunity to step off the career ladder.
Today’s feminism, fixated on the experiences of young professional women, cannot account for what has changed within families. There is awareness that life is different for women when they have children and this in part explains the obsession with the pay gap and the ‘motherhood penalty’. Yet many feminists struggle to explain what’s problematic with parents losing autonomy over their own lives when they have children because they are all too ready to see a celebration of breastfeeding, baby-carrying and an idealized version of motherhood as an aspiration to be juggled alongside the role of career-woman. The cry is often for men to do their fair share of parenting, or for employers to be more accommodating, rather than a broader discussion of the demands and expectations placed upon parents.
Feminism needs to let women off the hook and recognize that everyone makes different choices. Some women might want – or need – to get back to work days after giving birth. When the French Justice Minister Rachida Dati did just this in 2009, she became the subject of international consternation. Likewise, some women might want – or need – to leave work and become full-time mothers and they should be allowed to do so without feeling as if they are letting the side down by not ‘leaning in’.
Women’s freedom to make choices about their lives is to be celebrated. Rather than pushing mothers to get back to work or to stay at home, we should look at how best to support women in whatever decisions they choose to make. Part of this discussion needs to be recognition that neither work nor motherhood may be a source of a woman’s true fulfilment. By presenting work and home as binary choices, feminism removes the potential for public life and private relationships that go beyond motherhood and the workplace.