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.

But of course I've been accused before of arguing for the sake of arguing, anothernumberone . There aren't many jobs or careers that don't have a large element of repetitivity, quite a lot of it fairly tiresome, but which you tolerate in order to benefit from the good bits (if there are any!). There is a lot less tiresome repetitivity in grass cutting if it is just one of a varied number of tasks for which you are responsible rather than your full time job. The fact is, though, that rape in India and denigration of females is tied up with looking down on them for being responsible for the "drudge work" and making them do it, because they aren't worthy of anything else, rather than respecting them for doing the "adult work" and making them feel good about it. No wonder nobody wants to do it!

I don't think of the housework as drudge work. It is all just work to me. I have a finite amount of time and when I think about the best use of my time, it is more economically favorable for me to go out to work than stay home and be a housewife. It isn't that I can't be a good housewife but that I don't want to be a housewife.

By working I am securing for myself and my children a future. I have my own income, albeit not much after childcare costs but more importantly my own pension. Should DH drop dead or decide to run off (and who would blame him with 3 kids under 5 - only jking!) my DC are not going to be reliant on me fighting tooth and nail for adequate support to ensure their standard of living doesn't drop substantially.

I could do what you refer to as the drudge work but honestly I don't see it as such. In our home we call it housework and EVERYONE has to muck in and do it. When DH isn't there yes I hire someone in to help me get that work done because I am ONE person and can't do it all. I have to decide on what I outsource and what I do myself. It is far better IMO to outsource the housework and spend the time with my DC than the other way around.

Oh and cleaners in my town are on a nice wicket. $200 a week for a 2 bed 2 bath apartment (2 girls for 2 hours) is not bad money, especially when I supply the cleaning equipment.

But I would consider those aspects of my work the drudge, you know the menial, monotonous, repetitive crap. Aw jeez now I am just arguing for the sake of arguing. I do not specifically see anyone's else job as drudge just what I would not like to do, what would constitute drudge for me, I think that is how most people judge drudge ie the stuff you cannot be arsed with.

In other words, it's all work that anyone could do. It isn't a woman's sacred duty to stay at home and wait on her husband and childcare is not something men can't do. However, how the work is shared out is up for debate. Sometimes it just works out that one person specialises more in one bit than the other, or is interested more in one bit than another. The problems start where different types of work are attached to different amounts of power and control and this has nothing to do with the importance of the actual work to the family and everything to do with a man made economic system.

Space0, interesting reading but it does remind me of many pages back when someone said nothing prepared her for how her priorities changed when her first child arrived. When your whole life has been success at school, then at uni, then working mad hours to succeed in a competitive work environment, it's a huge shock to the system if you find that work suddenly looks like just a construct next to the much more present reality (in my postnatal world, anyway) of a baby's needs. I personally don't think this is old fashioned, it's challenging the idea that success is defined in "traditionally male" terms - income, promotion. It came as a huge surprise to me. Women I know didn't take a year of annual leave because they "needed" to or because they were lazy, or because they couldn't afford a nanny. For me it was giving the baby that continuity of a primary carer for as long as I could and because that suddenly felt like vastly more important work than making sure the CEO got the briefing. In the "male" view of capitalist success this is clearly nonsense - of course work is more important than home, anyone can feed a baby and change nappies - but why should we all have to subscribe to that? But our whole lives - including at expensive public schools - we are taught that success means doing well at work. I certainly wouldn't want to return to a world where all men had to work and all women had to stay home and scrub the floors, of course not, but it's not as simple as saying it's old fashioned for a woman to stay home and much more modern to get a nanny from 3-8 weeks or have dad stay home.

This is why I dropped more hours than DH even though I earned more and had the more senior role. Financially it made no sense, as you say, but in our reality it made perfect sense. He was more "tuned in" to the working world, so he worked more hours. If we both had to work FT to pay the bills then we would, but it's the pyramid of needs - once you are financially ok you can get on to the self actualisation bit, and my life pre-kids did not prepare me for what that would mean for me personally.

Success to me is about feeling happy, fulfilled, love. That's having it all! How you attain that might be different for each of us.

The longer I am around on this planet, the more fulfilment I get from helping others on their way. I loved having a baby/toddler and primary child. I love having a 10 year old and I love having my older DSSs, plus all the other DC whose lives I'm involved in. I would derive no feelings of success or fulfilment at all in a corporate environment.

I get a huge sense of achievement from both my family and my work.

I want both damnit .

Bobo that sounds fantastic. I feel like I have that and work though. I do not work in a corporate environment, I teach which is an extremely rewarding thing to do. When you see the aha moment when a student finally gets a handle on a difficult concept it is incredibly rewarding. I also have plenty of time during school holidays with my children - 15 weeks per year. I also work from home one day per week which gives a huge amount of time to prepare and correct without the interruption of an education environment but also allows me to see my children a few times during that day too and I do the drop off, DH does the others before heading on to work. I derive success and fulfilment from both my role as a mother and as a lecturer. Don't get me wrong it is extremely busy and full on during term time but that is the compromise I guess and as keeps getting repeated over and over on this thread, there are always compromises.

I SO wish I could express myself succinctly. Massive crosspost with roundabout's spot-on last post.

Really interesting thread.

I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing for this teacher to make pupils aware of challenges they may have to face in the future...what is peculiar is the way she presented it as a fait accompli, something that has no chance of ever changing. She seems to have based her thoughts on the restrictions she faced as a professional woman, in a career that started 30/40 years ago, rather than acknowledging that, but also noting how much things have changed since then, and what her pupils could do to progress things further for themselves in the future...so suggesting that there is still a fight but it is one that can be won.

As others have said, the male/woman working issue is a societal one before a biological one...what she is ignoring is that, as other posters have said above, the people currently in charge of perpetuating these stereotypes (CEOs, MPs, TV producers and writers, Daily Mail journalists) will be retiring soon, and these girls will have the opportunity, as they progress in their careers to choose what becomes the new normal.

Therefore if I were the headteacher I think the best thing she could have said is to encourage the girls to break those conventions, e.g. 'Do what's best for you, and don't judge other women for their choices.' Don't judge your mothers. Don't judge your boss for what she had to do to attain her career. Don't judge your schoolfriends when you get together for a reunion 20 years from now for what they have, or haven't done.

Or, simultaneously. 'DO judge any man who sees child rearing as a solely male role.' Don't marry men who automatically assume that you will give up your career. Don't marry anyone without discussing this first!!! Don't praise your male colleagues for leaving work early to attend a Christmas play or pick up a child, and bitch about female colleagues for doing the same thing. Ask your male colleagues, brothers, friends as many questions about their children as you do to your female acquaintances.

Societal pressure doesn't just come from 'external' sources, TV adverts, papers, laws passed, etc. It comes from the people we know in real life.

Good points silver I do wonder how long we have been waiting though for people to be brought up not to just fall into gender roles automatically. The children who were brought up in the 70's by feminist mothers are father's and mothers themselves now. They are my peers. Many, many of them still fall into gender roles and I hear constant complaints about men who are somehow incapable of cooking their own dinner when their partner goes out, or look after the kids or put the washing machine on. I do wonder if the generation after just rebels against the previous by doing the opposite.

Many good points silver. Can I add its not just the men you have married that causes issues? It's their workplace culture.

My DHs old boss, Scandinavian, was very keen to facilitate my DH arranging meetings to allow him to partake in childcare responsibilities. DH is very keen also.

However all this has changed with new boss, South European, who doesn't care that I work and rely on DH for aspects of childcare. He isn't accommodating at all. The men have to fight too for acceptance of this and sometimes they don't win.

We wondered if it was to do with childcare culture in different parts of Europe?

good points.

But I think it's easy to forget how much things have changed since the 70s/80s. Watch early 80s TV and much of it is appallingly sexist. (The Good life has aged fabulously, but Tom and Barbara were streets ahead of their time.) Even in the 80s some women were not allowed to wear trousers to work. My mum was a FT teacher, but at home my dad and brother never cooked or cleaned. That was mainly mum's job, with some help from me.

It's funny but also profoundly depressing how both my family and friends seem to see DH as a peculiar mix of demigod and downtrodden under-the-thumb simpleton for doing some childcare and housework, and treating my need to rest and my work commitments as equally important as his own.

I also agree about work. There is a clash of cultures. Some of the old guard with 30 year marriages to SAHWs just can't understand DH using leave to look after a sick child. They seem to be genuinely mystified, it doesn't quite compute. My Scandanavian boss, in contrast, is far too enlightened to treat men and women differently in the workplace. Interestingly he sees the mother-child bond as of primary importance, and his own relationship to his children as secondary to that, but there seems to be no tension between that and him treating employees equally and doing his bit at home. Just thinking aloud here, but maybe it's something about him not being full of ego and having heaps of respect for his wife.

I wonder how much we rely on the personality of the boss to get flexible working? It shouldn't be so. if I was able to shift my work start time to fifteen mins later I wouldn't have childcare issues. I'm allowed on some days as a one off! It doesn't affect the job at all! But no, the start time is inflexible. Mad!