Women should lead and direct the women's movement

It does feel like a combination of downtroddeness, obliviousness to our situation and some sort of notion that equality has been achieved.

I can't quite believe it either.
Thoroughly depressing. Black people, other disenfranchised groups would not stand for it.
I think it shows how downtrodden women really are.

What everyone is forgetting is that if women had an equal stake in society there would be no need for a mother's interest group . THey could lobby, or make up laws in their favour, just like men do. A mother's group can only be there to redress the imbalances of power created by a patriarchal society. It simply cannot be headed by a man.

How can a non-mother be the best person to represent mothers?

If it was a job like being an accountant or a teacher I would definitely say, let's have the best candidate regardless of their sex.

However this person is supposed to represent mothers - surely a mother is the best person for the job?

One only has to look at that weird statement about the inflated role of fathers in order to see that this guy isn't the best person to represent mothers.

I can't quite believe that women don't see how important it is for us to at least have a bit of power and influence when it comes to our own concerns. That is what equality is about.

This 'best person for the job' stuff is disingenuous.

bereavement: miscarriage, or losing a child late-term and having to go through the labour

birth: birth trauma, care for other children while you're in labour, post partum care (getting other children to school while you recover if there's no man around, or you have a H who can't take time off work

what about help for mothers who have a nasty ex, who (to quote HB) believes he carried out 50% of the childcare because he read the kids a story twice a week. Louis de Bernieres did this. He told the papers he deserved a 50% stake in the children's custody, because he'd carried out 50% of the childcare, but then it transpired that he was hardly ever there. His own friends^ admitted he was always on the road promoting his books. IN his mind, he was doing 50% of the childcare

what about battered wives? If a woman is not a mother she can leave a partner easily. If she is a mother, she is often tangled up financially with her partner and in many cases cannot leave. The fact she is a mother limits her options considerably

What about all the mothers who are abandoned by the father, like a recent case on MN, where the H wanted to leave the family because he wanted to do more clubbing. Fathers are free to abandon families wantonly.

what about campaigns by actual groups of mothers being appropriated and redirected by rogue organizations who pretend they're acting in the interest of mothers

I could go on, but you get the point

Think I might start my own group....
The REAL Mothers Union (TM)

I think the statement by MUcom shows how far removed an organization can get from the needs of the members it's supposed to represent when it allows a member of the dominant group to lead it.

The reason organizations such as this are required in the first place is because women/mothers do not have enough power to lobby and legislate. They are effectively invisible and powerless. A group like this can ease the burden of that invisibility in a man's world. It does not makes sense for a man (who is part of the problem) to lead the group because he cannot comprehend the difficulties.

because in order to believe a member of the dominant group is the best person for the job in an organization that has been set up to support a disenfranchised and minority group you either have to believe that the member of the dominant group has some inherent ability that makes him better than the thousands of mothers who could do the job, when in fact he has no personal experience of walking in their shoes, and they do. Are women as a group really that incompetent? Do you believe they couldn'T run their own group?

As we have seen, the group relies on lies, such as "mothers are no longer the primary carers" in order to further the aims and goals of the dominant group.

I think MUcom's aims would be better suited to represent Father's for Justice

A mother has so many problems that fathers do not have. Apart from the obvious ones HB pointed out on the previous page, apart from the invisibility of their work, (meaning that fathers believe they're carrying out more childcare than they actually are) there are biological issues: conception, breastfeeding, who is going to look after your other kids when you go into labour (a BIG one IMO) , logistical help, poverty, dependance on the state or a man for sustenance because you can't work full time...

There are umpteen issues that mothers face that men have no awareness of... as we have seen....

Why is that point erroneous?

no, we're not missing that erroneous point

Are people not missing the point that this man was probably the best person they could find for the job and so they hired him. I seriously doubt they went out of their way to have a man as CEO.

What would be helpful (to me at least) would be a MNer who was a current member of the Mothers Union to explain how it runs now.Because while I do agree that the Mothers Union isn't the most appropriate name now,the organisation you are all arguing against bears no relation to the organisation that my Mum and grandmother belonged to.(My knowledge runs to 2002,when my Mum died.)
I don't believe an organisation predominantly made up of women,with a history of involvement in issues affecting women worldwide,loses its effectivity just because it starts to accept as members at grassroots level a small proportion of men,and one or two men higher up.The CEO is a man,the worldwide president is a woman.I also think,and this makes me angry,that if in an organisation run by women for 135 years,the womens' voices can be co-opted and overtaken by men the minute men are allowed to join,then we should be ashamed.But I do not believe
e that this is what has happened in the MU.

With regard to men being involved in feminism,is the general opinion that John Stuart Mill should have kept his ideas to himself? Or does what he did count as support rather than anything else?

Ok,rant over. I would share my views on Edinburgh gerbil owners,but I think I may have hypothermia,it is freezing at this computer....

Too right. I've been getting really angry about it.

I do think the Glaswegian hamster owners' liberation movement has been dominated by Edinburgh gerbil owners for too long....

What an interesting thread.

I am on the side of groups for special interest/minority groups being run by people who have experience of it.

Gay women run gay womens groups
Jewish grandparent runs jewish grandparent group
Glaswegian hamster owners club run by glaswegian hamster owner
etc etc etc

And if you're talking about an oppressed group, even more so. People who have not "walked in the shoes" are not appropriate to direct things. Support, yes. Direct/run, no, I don't think so.

wow, really? amazing

'Because in order for them to be able to say that, they simply have to either not recognise what we do, or ignore it as not really being that important.'

LOL

principal

Any organisation who can say that mothers aren't the principle carers of children anymore, is anti-mother. Because in order for them to be able to say that, they simply have to either not recognise what we do, or ignore it as not really being that important. It's like those surveys which show that men have 15 hours a week more leisure time than women, but they think they are doing 50% of the housework, when a proper analysis reveals that they are doing only 20% - so much more than their fathers, that they wildly over-estimate how much it is and imagine they're doing the same amount as the women they live with. And it simply doesn't occur to them to imagine what it is their wife is doing while they spend 2 hours on the computer

In every women's institution where men are allowed power, the women's voices get co-opted by men who then make the debate about them, instead of the women. It sounds like that's what happened in the MU. I hope that Christian women re-claim their organisation for themselves.

agree with HerBeatitude and Beachcomber. No way are mothers not the principle childcarers.

ITA with HerBeatitude.

I say bullshit too to ""At the time of founding (1875) mothers were the principle parent in terms of bringing up children. This is no longer the case."

If mothers the world over stopped doing what they do for a day, the majority of children would not be cared for that day. I seriously challenge anyone who thinks it is sensible to argue otherwise. The majority of fathers could stop doing what they generally do for a day and it would make precious little difference to children's care.

I see the union's baseline is "Christian care for families" - the more I look into this organisation, the more I am bristling at it having the name 'Mother's Union'.

And furthermore, women would be smashing through the glass ceiling if men did an equal share of childcare.

"At the time of founding (1875) mothers were the principle parent in terms of bringing up children. This is no longer the case."

I call bullshit on this.

For a start, 1 in 4 families in this country is run by a lone parent and in 90% of those families, that parent is a mother, not a father.

Of the other 75%, I'd like to know the proporitions of mothers vs fathers who:

Take paternity/ maternity leave
Take part time work in order to balance child-care responsibilities
Visit/ interview the nursery/ childminder/ nanny
Take time off work when the children are ill
Take responsiblity for going to parents' evenings, class assemblies, sports days, school plays etc., even when that means takign time off work
Fail to apply for better paid/ more responsible/ higher status jobs because to do so would interfere with family commitments
Make the lunch sandwiches for the kids
Sort out the PE kits
Book the music lessons
Take them to sports and social clubs
Organise the other extra curricular activities
Arrange playdates and sleepovers
Organise birthday parties
Take the kids out to buy their clothes
Cook the kids' dinners and clear up with them afterwards
Plan the kids food shopping and buy it / order it online
Organise the kids' bedrooms and help them organise and tidy them themselves
Make the kids' beds
Do the kids' laundry
End up with a worse pension in old age because they prioritised childcare instead of work

I'm willing to bet that the majority of those tasks (and those are just the basic ones I can think of, I'm sure other people could add loads to that list) are mostly done by mostly mothers, not fathers. The contention of the MU, that it is no longer the case that mothers are the principle parent in terms of bringing up children, sounds as complacent and meaningless as "we're all middle-class now". If only that were true - childcare would actually be valued if most fathers did as much of it as most mothers do.

Mary Sumner was my great great something or other. Family of big job Christians. Always found the idea of the MU a bit claustrophobic and narrow TBH.

MUComs - is it really true to say mothers are no longer the principle parent in terms of bringing up children? Parenting is a lot more shared now, I agree, but there is still nothing like the same number of SAHDs as SAHMs; the majority of working mums do so in a less well-paid job, often working fewer hours, and take more of the responsibility for day-to-day care than the dads.
Surely by denying this different experience you are in danger of missing the fact that mothers are disadvantaged by it.