Specifically, mothers get more criticised for doing jobs which can be classed as dangerous or which take them away from home, or even for working at all!
I read this in The Guardian.
"'I loved her because she wanted to climb the highest peak. That's who she was'
When Alison Hargreaves died on K2 seven years ago, her husband, James Ballard, faced a barrage of comment about her fitness as a mother. He talks to Josie Barnard
Wednesday August 28, 2002
The Guardian
If a woman is brilliant in a profession that is dangerous and she becomes a mother, how old do her children have to be before it is acceptable for her to return to work? This is the question that James Ballard had to face after his wife, the mountaineer Alison Hargreaves, died while climbing K2 seven years ago, when their children were aged four and six.
In May 1995, Hargreaves became the first woman to make it to the summit of Everest alone, unsupported and without any artificial oxygen. She received almost universal praise. "One of the greatest climbs in history," declared the front page of the Times. But, just three months later, having successfully reached the summit of K2, Hargreaves died on the way down - and was criticised in the media for having "left" her two children.
The criticism did not start straight away. Ballard says that, at first, the response to the death of his wife and the six others who died with her on K2 was just shock. "But then I didn't respond emotionally, and the media wheeled out the psychologists who asked why I didn't break down. The next stage was everyone saying she shouldn't have left the children." Not that Ballard refutes the word "left". "She knew the risks attached to her profession, and so did I."
The chances of dying during an unassisted climb up mountains such as K2 and Everest are something around one in four. Indeed, Ballard was asked why he had let her go in the first place. "How could I have stopped her? I loved Alison because she wanted to climb the highest peak her skills would allow her to. That's who she was."
After her death, he received a number of letters from women whose children had grown up and left home, who regretted "wasting" so much of their lives and envied Hargreaves's personal ambition and achievement. "Everybody has the right to live their own lives," he says.
Now, though, Ballard is a single father, and bound by school hours and holidays. He still climbs, mainly in Scotland, where he lives. He has to juggle earning a living - through writing and photography - with his commitment to do his best by Tom, now 13, and Kate, 11. But he has kept his promise to Alison to raise his children as adventurously as they had planned to together: the three of them ski, go mountain-biking and travel together (they spent this summer in France, and winter in South America). In a way, he says, he is more cavalier as a parent than Alison was.
"We were in Pately Bridge in Yorkshire not long after Tom was born, and we fancied something to eat, so Alison went to get fish and chips while I went to the park with Tom," he recalls. "I was pushing him on the swing, and suddenly there was this hoo-ha behind me. Alison was running, bellowing at me to be careful - this is the woman who climbed the Eiger while she was six months pregnant with Tom and I'm getting an earful for pushing him too high on a swing in Pately Bridge."
The loss of a mother (sic) under any circumstances is extremely hard on her children. Like so many single-parent families which have suffered such an experience, James, Tom and Kate have become a tight unit as a result - "so close you couldn't slip a playing card between us". But Ballard works hard to remain emotionally open. If the children ask about going to a particular country with their mother when they were small, he tries to talk about the trip as matter-of-factly as he would if she were still alive. If the children ask what she would have thought about something, he will come up with as accurate an answer as possible.
"It's often the little things that give me the problems," he admits. "Like getting Kate the right conditioner and her hair cut at the right time to stop her getting split ends. But it's not rocket science. I can learn it."
The October after Hargreaves's death, the family went on a trip to K2, retracing her footsteps, and Ballard says it helped the children enormously to see their mother's resting place. "I mean, you couldn't have a much better cenotaph to someone than one of the highest mountains in the world."
The journey was filmed for a BBC documentary. Even though they were used to such expeditions (they had spent three months the previous year living as a family on a glacier on the Nepalese side of Everest), Ballard was criticised for endangering his children's lives. And then the news broke that there had been a marital rift at the time Hargreaves left to climb K2. The story came from an interview he didn't even know she had given in a specialist American magazine. "It's just one of those time bombs that life sends you," says Ballard now.
Would their marriage have lasted? Ballard says he has no way of knowing. What seems clear is that the kind of disagreement that can happen in any marriage was blown out of proportion by the circumstances in which it was made public. But Ballard says that the fact that Hargreaves died "doing something heroic rather than crossing the road on the way to the supermarket" has made her death easier to bear.
Still, he is disappointed by how little things have changed for women who want to succeed in their careers, not only dangerous ones. "I mean, there aren't even any female snooker players yet." He points to this year's Management Today survey of Britain's 50 most powerful women, which found that at least one third are childless, while almost all their male counterparts are fathers. "I just hope that there was a point to Alison's death and that, in the long term, what she achieved will help shift attitudes."
Meanwhile, he will continue to raise his children as best he can. Kate, when she was asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, once replied, "a horse-riding air hostess who climbs at weekends". And Tom has always wanted to be, simply, a climber. Ballard has not been inhibited by Hargreaves's death, ensuring instead that their children live full lives, which will enable them to assess risk for themselves. All the same, he says, watching them climb can be unnerving.
"Kate looks very like her mother and moves like her too, very graceful - it can be like watching water flowing down steps. They are both very adventurous, Tom in particular. Sometimes, I do wonder if a thunderbolt is going to come down to tell me I'm letting them go too far. Goodness knows how Alison would take it that they are climbing."
Does he have any regrets? He says that if he had somehow known Alison was going to die on K2, he would have gone with her so that the children would have had a few more months with their mother. But then he changes his mind. "Tom had just started nursery and Kate had started playgroup, and they needed that stability. It helped them a lot. So, no, I don't regret her going to K2. All I can be sure of is that she was as happy as she could have been at the moment she died. Three months after scaling Everest, she'd summited K2, and I imagine her head must have been full as she was looking round trying to take in this unbelievable view. She was where she had always wanted to be."
He's so right about women not working in high positions.
Please or to access all these features
Please
or
to access all these features
Other subjects
Should parents do dangerous jobs?
16 replies
Jbr · 01/09/2002 22:07
OP posts:
Please create an account
To comment on this thread you need to create a Mumsnet account.