To think if I had paid £6k a year to have my daughters educated by this woman

[catgirl1976]

I'd want my money back

www.buzzfeed.com/patricksmith/head-teacher-tells-girls-you-cant-have-a-career-and-be-a-mum#.xfVk8JvGg

Glad she's stepping down.

I get telling girls there is a glass ceiling, but she's pretty much telling them to roll over and accept that.

I get telling girls that it's a valid choice to choose not to have children, but her message over all is appalling.

everything you say makes sense leedy although a lot of the time, women think they're marrying someone who will do their fair share and then that's not the case when kids arrive.

DP thought his exW would do her fair share when they married. Didn't turn out that way. It works both ways

" women think they're marrying someone who will do their fair share and then that's not the case when kids arrive."

Heh, we "rushed" into having children after a mere 13 years together, I was reasonably confident (though obviously could not know for sure). I was genuinely on the fence for a long time about having kids because I had the fear about slipping into a HIM BREADWINNER, ME EARN PIN MONEY AND CARE FOR HOME model so we talked about it a lot.

The last time I checked there is a shortage of jobs. Surely it's in everyone's interest that parents are supported to go out and work. Think about the taxes earned from me working. Those help pay for benefits paid to those who are not working. Now think of the income from taxes if I was able to achieve more at work because I had the proper car at home for our DC.

I think as a developed country women should be able to choose what they want to do while their children are young. After that staying home is either self funded or you go out to work at least during school hours. There is nothing wrong with low paid work and I've done it myself to know.

As for this attitude of the extreme wealthy only being able to afford a nanny I can but only ask you to watch that chip on your shoulder. I know parents who are going without so they can pay for their nanny. My friends who live in London had twins and spend GBP35k on their nanny. What was my friend supposed to do. Stop training to be a consultant? Both her and her DH graduated together and now he is a year head of her. As a couple they have decided to support her career. It really hurts to know my friend will go without dinner 3 nights a week because they can't afford to eat and pay their nanny. The Dont qualify for help because apparently they are wealthy! Not eating dinner is not my kind of healthy and how bad is it that we as a society don't support this mother who wants to continue working FT and be an A&E consultant.

I don't know why the cost of bling's
childcare arrangements is an argument for not aspiring to have a well paid job.

She would still need childcare in a low paid job. It's not as though being a SAHP is a choice available to everyone.

I don't see why employing people to do domestic work is wrong ( assuming one pays them and treats them accordingly) but expecting a wife/mother to do all those tasks for free is fine.

I can't actually see who loses out by the fact that I pay someone to do my ironing.

Our housekeeper is glad of the job, we pay her well and treat her well ( she has her own family so we're very flexible).

I don't have to iron. DH doesn't have to iron. The DC don't have to iron... Well obviously we do some but you get the gist.

The lady who ran our local dry cleaners (where we send our ironing) likes us so much that she practically begged to come to work for us as a cleaner when she retired and wanted a PT job to top up her pension. She's not exploited. Perhaps we are, slightly.

Where childcare needs to be very solid, domestic work can usually be done very flexibly.

Which suits a lot of workers.

Where have I said women shouldn't go out to work, or paying others for childcare is unacceptable? This is a thread about saying it as it is. We live in a capitalist society. Just as women can't pretend they can have it all, we can't hide behind the fact that domestic work is work and if one person isn't doing it, someone else has to and you can only improve your situation if the type of work you do is more financially lucrative than the type of work you don't do. But somebody has to end up at the bottom of the pile - somebody has to end up in the situation where working is to survive, not to have choices and not to improve your life in any way. The direction society is moving in is for an increasing number of people to be at the bottom of the pile, without choice and without time. It's less like choices and more like hamster wheels you can't get out of. How ridiculous to have to starve in order to go out to work as a consultant.

I very much agree that the constraints of housework/chores are very different (and far more flexible) than the constraints of childcare. Personally I prefer multiple dedicated services for most domestic tasks - quite different sorts of people/skills to iron or to clean windows - and it actually works out cheaper to employ lots of specialists who do a quick, efficient job than a generalist.

Childcare is so much harder to get right. And, unlike windows cleaning. three months without any is a disaster.

In the context of the quote from the headmistress (apparently not a feminist), the thread is about glass ceilings and girls being limited by biology.

There is a wider point to be made about pay for domestic work. However domestic work is as much a man's as a woman's responsibility, and people who break through the glass ceiling and have higher salaries are more able to pay somebody else a good salary.

Equally, assuming there is no choice not to work, the childcare years don't go on for ever. More money means more options to support teenagers and pay for extra curricular activities rather than leaving them at home to get on with things after school and during the holidays.

There are always choices to be made, but I'm not convinced that limiting aspirations makes things easier or that childcare is a woman's problem. These are the things that the headmistress seems to be concerned with.

bobo you are right.

It would probably be cheaper and more efficient to get people in to do set tasks, but that takes a lot of organising and you have to be in to let the workman in, show them what to do etc.

A housekeeper (or at least a good one) gets on with most of it without my intervention. DH is far more likely to set her specific tasks. I like to just leave her to it to be honest.

merry indeed teenagers do cost a lot!

And going beyond the teen years, tertiary education, internships etc. Yikes.

It was her views on what she thinks feminism is about that highlighted her ignorance. On those grounds I'd certainly not want to pay her £6k a term.

Not that I know where teachers at our primary school stand re their beliefs though.

What is feminism about? Is it just about sharing workloads fairly? Or not looking down on some types of work compared to others (in which case why do some feminists talk about "drudge work"?)? Or about having choices? Or about shifting the balance of power (but not by increasing the power of those left holding the baby and looking out for the elderly relatives?)? What did the headmistress say she thought feminism was about? I think I missed that bit of the article and was only aware she said she wasn't a feminist.

That's the sort of planning I think we should be having the conversation about leedy

Yes roundabout I think what you are talking about is communism though. There can be no doubt that it absolutely had far reaching egalitarian ideals.

I think looking to empower all women and take the centre of power away from its traditional resting spot of men is universally good for all women even in spite of the inequalities you are identifying.

A series of articles in a paper, here in Ireland, on India can help focus the mind on what historically, although current in India, devalued roles of women can lead to:

Trigger this is absolutely awful about women who are totally devalued and the prevalence of rape in this culture

While you have made some interesting points about issues with capitalism and a race to the bottom you seem to forget that when women had no choices they were entirely vulnerable to their fathers and husbands and given the lack of value that was often associated with this they were routinely abused on this basis and had no way out.

I personally found the article really old fashioned. It also assumes that all women need to take 1 year breaks for every child they have - some like my sister admittedly do, but 'high flying' women usually get perks to help them work for longer. All of the women my age in my family with high flying jobs (Senior BBC journalist, Senior Policy Analyst, Finance Analyst) worked from home after 3-8 weeks and their companies bent over backwards to help them with this. They shared maternity leave with their partners. The policy and finance analysts got stipends on top of their salaries for nannies after the year because their companies didn't want to lose them. The BBC journalist was 'working from home' after 3 weeks!

Now I'm not in any kind of high flying job but even I expect to share my maternity leave (when it happens!!) with my husband, work from home from time to time etc. I wouldn't go part time because it doesn't make sense - I earn more than my husband. So if someone does need to do that it would be him and we agreed that as he's more of a homebody than I am it probably makes sense. It doesn't mean I'd love my children any less or that I wouldn't make time for them, it just means that in our family mummy would go out to work and daddy would be the one at home. Not a big deal.

'women think they're marrying someone who will do their fair share and then that's not the case when kids arrive' - anecdotal, but amongs my friends, if husband does not pull his weight with kids and home, he didn't do it before kids either. It just didn't bother the wife that much then. They rarely have a total personality transplant after kids.

But anothernumberone I'm not talking about communism. I'm merely commenting on the status quo. If I were to comment on communism, it would be to comment that it loved industrial scale nurseries and crèches so that all its good communist workers could go out to work. It certainly didn't encourage SAHMs. Mother was the mother country, not the family unit.

I'm also asking questions, not trying to give answers, as I don't know the best answer to stamping out endemic lack of respect and abuses of power, because women are not immune from indulging in such behaviours when they get the chance, either. Yes, my personal opinion is that it is far better for women and men to have the option to have a career, a job just for the money or to genuinely and freely choose to stay at home, rather than to be forced into roles that don't suit, but the reality is that we still have a long way to go and nobody has yet worked out how to achieve it! Calling some work drudge work, however, is no way to tempt men to try it.

roundabout the thing about drudge work is that it often is really just 'being an adult' work. Cooking, cleaning, ironing, sorting finances, arranging activities, buying presents ad infinitum. Before men and women have children, unless one party in the relationship has infantisied the other, which happens a lot, then both parties to the relationship engage in it. The problem is when children arrive then in a lot of relationships a tacit arrangement starts, because the woman is on maternity leave she takes over a lot of these roles for her partner as well as the children. So drudge work is actually a fair term and actually childcare does not fit into the term drudge work for me because actually that is fun.

But some people genuinely think cooking is enjoyable, and party organising, present buying, sorting out finances and activity sorting. Some people are even obsessive cleaners (if Channel 4 is anything to go by ). My dh appears to enjoy ironing! Some people even get paid to do "drudge work" (I understand financial advisers and accountants can even do quite well out of sorting out peoples' finances...), and I suspect they would be no less offended to be called a drudge than a servant! Is nappy changing, nose wiping and fevered brow wiping really more fun than the rest of the "adult" work? Why devalue something by describing it as drudge work? It's kind of asking people to abuse your goodwill, lack respect and abuse their power over you to call it drudge work, isn't it?

roundsbout has anyone ever accused you of arguing for the sake of arguing before of course some people like aspects of what I consider to be drudge work but for them it is not drudge is it? It is only drudge if you do not like it. I consider lots of being a grown up work 'drudge' because it is repetitive, for example I consider cutting the grass drudge because it just grows again and is relentless against my fight to keep it short. Not liking it is hardly devaluing it now is it.