Huffington Post - Feminism and motherhood article

It's not really that they don't share in the income of the person working (although often it is controlled), it's more to do with the fact that the stay at home work isn't considered important because 'important jobs' are remunerated.

I'm not sure if you could successfully work out a way for stay at home parents to be remunerated

Usually it's done by looking at what it would cost to hire a cook, cleaner, nanny, chauffeur, gardener, to cover the tasks involved. That includes unsociable hours/on-call payments

You are viewing this as if a stay at home parent gets no monetary or other tangible benefits from the arrangement. I often see comments on MN that sahms are loking after "his children" rather than the couple's children.

never

Well quite. The definition of difficult changes with the gender doing it.

Read this finally.

Why is it feminism's job to educate everyone?

"Loosely the more 'difficult' the job the more status it has and the higher it is remunerated." That made me laugh. Cordelia Fine quotes quite a few historical examples of how job status goes up or down depending on whether the number of women who do it goes down or up.

EBearhug

Yes, I completely agree. 'Difficult' probably wasn't the right word.

Perhaps if more men were stay at home dads, the status would rise as a result. In fact it definitely would, if history is anything to go by.

Loosely the more 'difficult' the job the more status it has and the higher it is remunerated.

That is quite loose, though. There's evidence that if a particular job becomes less male-dominated, its status goes down. If women are pushed out (as has been the case to some extent in IT,) status will be retained or may rise. Salary does tend to go with higher status jobs, but it's not as simple as saying it's because of the difficulty.

I'm not sure if you could successfully work out a way for stay at home parents to be remunerated

Usually it's done by looking at what it would cost to hire a cook, cleaner, nanny, chauffeur, gardener, to cover the tasks involved. That includes unsociable hours/on-call payments.

If you strip it right back, the human race has to do certain things to ensure survival, and survival in circumstances as comfortable as possible.

So everyone has to do certain jobs to make that happen.

Loosely the more 'difficult' the job the more status it has and the higher it is remunerated.

So in order for those jobs to exist, you have to have an equal and opposite job. Which is so low status, it's not paid at all.

I'm not sure if you could successfully work out a way for stay at home parents to be remunerated, but if not, it should certainly have higher status.

I have late onset feminism

Ha! I laughed out loud at this - some people do seem to view my opinions as an affliction too, so it's very appropriate!

The elephant in the room around it all is that it was in general women who campaigned for parental rather than just maternity leave, not men, who are still, largely speaking, not taking it up. They just don't want to. Of course men could make the time to raise their kids, of course they could go flexi or make the lunches (and some do) - but most of them know that they're onto a good thing. They get to go out of the house and work and have cups of tea with colleagues, they get to come home and be too tired to do any housework, and then they need some time off, away from the kids at the weekend to decompress. Meanwhile muggins is packing PE kit and shuffling to clubs, and picking up dirty socks, always thinking of the next task all her working hours - and the bloke, and society in general - still gets to have a go at her if she doesn't then leap into employment the moment she has 4 hours free while the kids are at school. Because as a SAHP, you apparently have all the time in the world, after you've been the nanny, PA, cleaner, night nurse, taxi and delivery driver.

It makes me SO ANGRY when I hear people have a go at SAHM - because it's bloody hard work, it's unpaid, and the only promotion is for the kids to get bigger and move out - at which point I imagine you look around and realise you've become completely institutionalised and don't actually know what to do with yourself other than look after other people.

It is possible in many jobs. A male colleague has a flexible working agreement that means he is free to do the school run at the end of the day.

Your son is right in some aspects - when most of my friends had babies, they would get good maternity pay (most got more than statutory,) while the men wouldn't have - economically, for most of them, there was no choice, and that situation probably won't change unless maternity and paternity pay is equal. And meanwhile, men's careers progress (men often benefit from having children, whereas women suffer the "mummy penalty, ") so for any subsequent children, it makes even more sense not to lose the larger salary, as it often will be by that point. Then childcare costs mean it may not be financially viable for the mother to return to work.

But most men are mostly thinking about how it's inconvenient to them if they don't have a SAHM for their children, and even if they acknowledge the issues, I see little evidence of them then thinking, "well I'm a manager - what can I do to improve this for others?" There are exceptions, but it's not commonplace. I don't think we'll get any system overhaul from them.

Surreyblah

I had this conversation with my son who is in his 20s.

He said something like 'the reason women stay at home, mum, is because it is just easier, it makes more sense'. Explaining that his working hours, business trips, expense account dinners, etc, made it sensible. He agreed that women should have the choice to do all that too, of course.

But when I said (radically!) why not just overhaul the entire system, so that working hours, business trips, and business dinners across the board everywhere, were completely re-designed on a more 'half share' basis to help prioritise childcare, he looked at me like I had taken leave of my senses.

So I just kept saying why? Why can't we? Why are working hours are 9 to 6, when school hours are 9 to 3.30? Why are business dinners so popular with men, when business lunches would do the trick just as well? Why not Skype instead of fly?

You could see him thinking noooo, but then not being able to say why.

It does really annoy me that men would simply be totally unable to adhere to this system, if women weren't at home raising the next generation.

( disclaimer. I have late onset feminism, otherwise that conversation would've been completely unnecessary with my son)

And the proportion of SAHDs remains tiny.

But I don't see why it SHOULD be womens work though.

Wages for Housework? I remember that, SomeDyke! In fact it's from unconscious regurgitation of that doctrine that my previous post comes.

I had forgotten about the actual label for the movement but I remembered the content and the arguments well enough to reproduce it all these years later.

Back in the ole days of feminism, I recall the Wages for Housework campaign:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wages_for_housework

Perhaps society would value it more if it was paid for (and computing hoiw much it should be paid, and exactly how much of the economy relies on unpaid work done by women.........it was always an eye-opener for me!).

Sometimes I just get depressed that we are still fighting for this, and that although women have progressed in many traditional careers, they still have to do the other stuff as well, and it's still devalued...........What were the last figures? And the gender pay gap and the unpaid domestic labour gap are linked:

www.res.org.uk/details/mediabrief/9108091/WOMEN-WAGES-AND-HOUSEWORK-How-closing-the-gender-pay-gap-splits-chores-more-even.html

Do you not think that devaluing women's role in caring is precisely why the work of caring is so poorly paid? Anything women do as part of their domestic role - cleaning, caring, cooking, child care - is badly paid (unless you're a chef). If these skills were given higher status the pay would rise.

The other thing I think deserves consideration is that paid work is seldom interesting, rewarding or done in pleasant circumstances. If you enjoy it - and I don't - home making is far more creative and congenial than unskilled work and the conditions tend to be far more comfortable. And for some women spending all their energy on and for their family is clearly very rewarding and their efforts are appreciated. I don't see getting women out of the domestic sphere and into uncongenial unskilled work as a feminist priority. I think it is more helpful to look at widening options, with easily accessible retraining, for example, and to insist that looking after children and frail relatives are important tasks that deserve recognition.

As for SAHF, they may be few but there are more all the time. My DH, for one. My DS2 plans to marry his GF and they have already worked out that for many reasons it makes sense if he is a SAHF. He can't wait. He's wanted to be a daddy since he was a child.

My feminism questions SAH because so very few men do it.

I'm uncomfortable with the idea that parenting, caring and domestic work is somehow naturally "womens work" and that "valuing" this could be part of the answer to inequality in earnings/representation of women in senior roles etc. I woud rather see more men doing it, and more women in paid work.

I get embarrassed about the state of my house. And my garden. Never crossed my mind to apologize for both my DCs having a full-time childminder or for having a cleaner. I think this is partly because my DM was so much in favour of me going back to work. She was the only one of her friendship group who worked after marriage. She always had a cleaner too.

After I had DS1 the community midwife was chatting about my return to work. When I mentioned my DM's support she told me I was the only patient she had whose DM thought their career mattered. Shocking.

I shall pop over to that thread for a read then - DS is too young to be diagnosed, but an OT says he has all the signs (and I agree - my brother is Dyspraxic, and seeing the similarities to him, and the differences to DS2 was what led me to take DS1 to the OT in the first place)

Hyperlexia interesting as well, because I had totally discounted dyslexia because DS1 is an avid reader, but I could still clearly see that he wasn't the same as other kids so something was up!

I have to agree - on everything said here - SAHM is very brave, and that those of us who just don't derive satisfaction from it shouldn't feel ashamed, and yet I do still feel the need to brazen out the fact that I employ a 3rd adult 3 times a week to make up for DP and I's home-making deficiencies (for which I am the only one society really blames)

Thanks so much for the link. I've posted hoping someone may know some treatment or strategies to help, as it's been a blight all my life.

Here it is. Think I killed it though.

DH and I were both hyperlexic too.

I've only been able to find people discussing dyspraxia in a thread about autism. Discovered I have a condition I didn't know existed: hyperlexia. I always joked that I had the opposite of dyslexia but I didn't know it was an actual thing.

Thread is called 'I hate having dyspraxia' or something like that.

Obviously, I'm coming at this from a sahm perspective, but I agree with MrsWonka. I used to think I wasn't ambitious but it wasn't that. It was just that I thought what I wanted to do didn't count and, as a result, spent years trying to force myself to be an academic. Now I am a sahm and so much happier that way. But equally I can completely get that for others, sahming would be hell on earth.

Thanks for the tip, ISaySteadyOn. I'll go take a look.

And thanks for the kind words, MrsWonkas. One of the things that kept me going was a little group of other mums. Two were SAHM, two worked part-time and one worked full-time. None of us judged the others, which was refreshing.

I have to admit that I consider SAHM very brave. I have more reason than most to be optimistic about marriage but the idea of putting yourself entirely at the mercy of someone else financially scares me to death. You see it in Relationships all the time. DH announces he's met someone else and all of a sudden a woman has to become self supporting after a decade or more out of the job market. Plenty of other examples.

But that's just the risk element. I make no judgment of women who enjoy being SAHM. I know women who love everything about home making and, from my perspective, that's lovely for them and I can see how rewarding they find it. It's only when they want me to do the same that I have a problem.

Prawn, I'm dyspraxic too! There's a small thread in chat about it.
And, as someone who does like attempting to be a homemaker, I completely agree with your last sentence.