Motherhood and equality, what does Eutopia look like?

Companies don’t like part timers

I tried to get part time pre-children and was dismissed outright as it was only “allowed” where people had children. This needs to change. When a critical mass of men are also able and willing to be part time then the stigma will reduce.

I think some of these suggestions don’t adequately consider how girls feel about themselves within a patriarchal structure.

There are many narratives about women and girls and pregnancy and motherhood which are mainly written by men.

I think oppressed peoples of many kinds share amongst them a lack of conception of their future selves. This is in part why we have affirmative action things like women’s awards, all women shortlists, work programmes to incentivise, because as much as they are designed to actually open up opportunities, they also have the psychological effect of bringing people who have been alienated from themselves by oppression or negative/traumatic experiences back in touch with the idea that they have a future.

To achieve many more SAH and PT fathers you need more true equality in relationships as well as in the workplace... and you need a change in many men's attitudes towards what the choice of having a family means! It should not mean nothing changes for them except more pats on the back.

"However none of these things will happen because men will not allow themselves to be inconvenienced one little bit. Not by child rearing, not by moving over at work. Right now women bear the dual burden of being expected to have a career AND do all the child rearing AND the domestic work. Men have it made, and I doubt they’ll just budge up and sort it."

Yes. So structural changes have to be made both via (1) regulation / government incentives and (2) culturally - eg the examples of France / Scandinavia given up thread and raising girls to expect better / aim for higher paid careers like STEM

Many, many more SAH and PT fathers.

Fathers doing a fair share of parenting and domestic work, including the “mental load”, and evening pick ups/parenting (ie leaving work early).

As offred states, not all mothers chose to have DC, and not all SAHMs or mothers in PT employment chose that.

Infertility is horrible, but that some women who wanted DC can’t doesn’t negate the significant inequality mothers face at work, in addition to the issues (sexism etc) facing women with no DC.

Utopia?

Far fewer abusive or “just” selfish/sexist men. Women rejecting these men.

Good maternity and parental leave rights, and pay. Including contractual pay for fathers taking shared parental leave equivalent to contractual maternity pay.

Subsidies for childcare.

Housing measures, especially for London, where most jobs are and there is anecdotal evidence that many mums SAH because of housing and childcare costs.

More senior women who are mothers at work. Measures by employers to tackle discrimination and bias against women / mothers, especially in well paid occupations where women leave after becoming mothers, eg law, finance.

Agree completely offred

The rabid pro life stance in the USA has very little to do with actually loving life. People who value life make sure thatcthe humans that already exist have safe, dignified lives. It’s more about punishing women - no you can’t end a pregnancy because LIFE but no, there’s no support for you once the child is born. Utter madness.

You see it fairly often on here - men keeping women barefoot and pregnant as a means of control. It’s a frightening idea.

But what does utopia look like?

I suppose a rethink so that women’s rights around reproduction are sacrosanct. Better education from school age about coercive control. Better support to leave violent men. Abortion access to be improved. Support services fully funded.

Employment - the framework that you can only succeed if you have a behind the scenes facilitator is prevalent now. You can’t hit the top if you’re leaving at 4 to pick up the kids, and if you look at almost all successful (work based success) people they have a sahp or a nanny. And the sahp is usually the woman, so men’s careers thrive while women’s stagnate. More flexible working, more awareness that men are hugely facilitated in work would help.

Better parental leave, better nursery provision, Scandinavian style.

And yes, acknowledging we will all work longer and that a few years out of the workforce shouldn’t kill a career.

However none of these things will happen because men will not allow themselves to be inconvenienced one little bit. Not by child rearing, not by moving over at work. Right now women bear the dual burden of being expected to have a career AND do all the child rearing AND the domestic work. Men have it made, and I doubt they’ll just budge up and sort it.

I agree @thegrumpysquirrel.

I think though that the concept of ‘work’ needs to be revisited as individual labour is increasingly becoming irrelevant to the economy.

The important period for attachment is 0-3. Is it so radical to suggest that we mandate 3 years off for both men and women?

@SinkGirl exactly - men don't want their career to take that hit. But they are able to use their "economic leverage" to force this situation as they generally are the higher earner. If the woman is, it's much easier to argue that he should do his fair share!

I agree @Offred and I would go one step further and say that even in cases where there is no abuse, no coercive control, the vast majority of mothers do not have free choice - eg they are likely to be the lower earners and therefore it's not a balanced decision about whose career takes a hit. This is a vicious cycle.
Agree with the PP who says we would have to give up some things to men (eg half of maternity leave) if we are to achieve equality. Some women just don't want / feel able to do that / cannot afford it due to SPL not being paid properly and their husbands/partners earning more.
We also do not have a choice about physically bearing the children so we do need to have better support around that time.

It's a common abuse tactic to manipulate a woman into having a baby, say all the right things "it'll complete us, i'll take such care of you and baby, I love you to pieces, I couldn't cope if you didn't want a bad you with me" blah blah (been there!)
Then they ramp up the abuse once you're pregnant and they've got you dependent on them.

I'd agree motherhood is central to most women's lives and therefore extends to be an important factor in feminism. A lot of other women's issues such as VAWG, the sex trade and porn, hyper femininity, syereotypes etc play a big part too though.

Patriarchy conveniently ignores childen. Work is set up out of the home, long hours, long commutes, it always assumes there's someone looking after the children so that people with families can spend a lot of time outside of the home working. As there is a strong bias towards males in the workplace the "person" looking after the children is usually the mother, and if there's paid childcare it's almost always a woman.

So when it comes to the workplace ideally it should just be understood that many employees come with children attached to them and should be structured around that eg working from home options, childcare vouchers paid by the company, more part time options eg to match school hours and holidays.

A radical feminist idea is to have all workplaces set up with a creche and a breastfeeding room.

In other countries eg France and Germany all childcare is free and it's really good quality in France children from 3 months old go to creche which is free and you can choose the hours. Mum's often return to work after 3 months.
Why can't this country manage something as basic as that?

Besides which, there’s a lot of variables.

I chose to have a baby - I didn’t choose to have twins which has made childcare impossible to afford if I went back to work. I didn’t choose to have a child with a disability that means I’ve never been able to leave him with someone else besides my DH

and I don’t believe that women are the reason that the adoption of shared parental leave is so low. In general, most men don’t want their career to take the hit that women already accept.

*re

And yy breastfeeding aside, what a baby needs rest attachment is a consistently responsive carer; nanny, mother, father, grandparent, foster carer whatever, it just needs to be someone consistent and responsive.

I agree that work should be looked at as a lifespan. I currently work part time but over the course of my working life it will only amount to a very short period but like you say, it's clashes with a key career point for me. Also I wish more employees would see the value of part-time workers and also consider job sharing for more senior roles. I think as long as you have adequate hand overs and good communication, there is no reason two people can't do one senior job well. It would allow women to still progress during the time their children are still young. I've heard so many times 'we need a full time manager, it can't be a part time position' etc... and think kind of attitude puts the breaks on career progression of part time women.

I think work itself would have to look quite different. More balanced around people’s lives. At the moment many of us still work in a model that was built for one man going to work, one woman at home keeping house supporting his career, and it’s changed a bit over the years (women get to stay at work after we get married/have babies now) but there’s only so far you can get with that system.

This is one of the issues with “equality” as a goal - if we campaign for equal access to patriarchal systems, what we get is a bit of accommodation retrofitted in (paid maternity leave, or time/space to express breastmilk) but no big substantial changes to the system itself. And then it’s “well, you chose to have babies, can’t expect to have babies and a smooth career path” while men have been expecting and getting just that for generations.

I don’t know what a fairer system would look like though. It would be so different that it’s hard to imagine from what we’re used to and what we’ve grown up with. Maybe we’d have to look back pre-industrial revolution, before factory jobs and large companies, and think more in those terms than the terms of the 1950s and 1960s.

Probably the majority of women choose to be pregnant but then end up losing control of their lives and choices once the child is there. This is why motherhood politicises. But there is still a significant minority of women whose choices about pregnancy are controlled by men and this issue is totally ignored.

The reality is simply that hormonal contraception for women exists. This does not mean that pregnancy is now a choice for women or that all women with children have chosen to have them and chosen to look after them.

I know only one woman with children who has both chosen to be pregnant and chosen her parenting responsibilities and this is because the man she has married respects her as a person and because she is far and away the highest earner and therefore has greater economic power.

Men remain the gatekeepers to ‘choices’ around children for everyone in the vast majority of the decisions.

I personally don’t think a baby needs it’s Mum exclusively. It does whilst breastfeeding.

Even the horrible ‘rape clause’ has had to acknowledge it by including ‘children conceived in coercive controlling relationships’

It still remains an open secret that men control women with pregnancy/childcare.

You can even see these attitudes in the religious right pro life attitude that seeks to restrict access to abortion ‘even for raped women’. This stems from the idea that the ultimate expression of womanhood (children) should be forced on women at least as much as it comes from feelings about when life begins IMO.

I think parenting needs to stop being owned by mums and subbed by dads. With few exceptions the Dad is on the bench.

BUT, and I think about this a lot. Motherhood is ironically where a woman’s greatest power over men lies. It’s the only place I can see where men suffer from inequality. Women ‘own’ children in our society and even with the best lawyer in the world men can do very little to get equality with the Mum. So in order for us to get overall equality in life, I think we need to accept the loss of our power in this area.

I have often thought that when having a baby, equality in both the home and in life could be achieved if we took leave for ourselves and not the baby. And the baby’s needs were catered for by the Dad as much as the Mum. I personally don’t think a baby needs it’s Mum exclusively. I think a baby needs a caring adult. So that could easily be the Dad. The Mum needs time off work to recover medically from the birth, much the same as any illness or injury. Beyond that, the baby could be cared for by either parent.

But women won’t like this proposal at all. So I’m not sure we can ever achieve full equality without letting go of this area of life that we currently own.

There is a reason why things that women’s aid and rape crisis know have not translated into general society IMO.

Pregnancy as a choice (as an absolute) really means ‘women choose this so they have to take the consequences’ IMO.