Woman on Instagram makes a joke about being a SAHM

[toylandslide]

Some dude says she should be working and paying for someone else to look after their children.

Why is this even seen as reasonable opinion?

Well some may argue that it's a patriarchal concept for women to take on the sole responsibility for staying home with children or assigning things as "women's labour" where there isn't actually stopping men from doing those tasks. IMO the progressive idea would be us pushing for both parents to be able to request flexible working to reduce their hours and split childcare responsibilities so neither is losing their financial independence.
I still don't know who people want this "value" to come from and in what form it would take. Do they want the state to pay people to be SAHMs? I think that the person valuing someone's unpaid labour should be the persons or people benefitting from it (in most cases people's husbands) by paying them for it 🤷🏻‍♀️

If it was men who had traditionally SAH with children, you can bet your boots the state would be paying them for it. This would just be a given and companies would adapt. Also, if most childcare workers traditionally were men, it would be a high status job with pay to match.

This makes me very grateful that my dh does not have this view. I’m a SAHP and it’s been the very best years of my life. Now my children are heading to school and I wish I could get that time back with them.

What makes you say that? Is this alternative reality one where men were also denied their own bank accounts, access to credit, employment etc? If so, why would you think they would be valued for their domestic labour?

Yes - it's interesting because if you outsourced all the "work" of a typical mum someone costed it at around £200,000 a year (nanny, night nanny, housekeeper, cleaner etc).

Most Dads don't earn £200k a year - so in pure economic terms the mums are providing more work for the family, yet we completely and utterly devalue it because it's historically been "women's work". It's so depressing

Do they want the state to pay people to be SAHMs?

Yes, I think so. The problem is that there’s no evidence that children of SAHP turn out better than children of WAHP, so there’s no societal benefit.

Sure, you can say that the state should do it anyway because feminism! But I’d sooner see that money channelled into improving the appalling state of pretty much all of our public services and sorting out child poverty before we start using it to make a public statement about the value of SAHPs (many of whom have a really healthy household income to begin with). .

The only reason the govt have declared this free 30 hours childcare policy is because, following Brexit, they no longer have enough people to do MW or casual work. They know there are some mums who can't afford to work, due to the cost of childcare. But if they seriously think 30 free hours a week is going to make those mums suddenly rush out and get crap jobs they hate, just so they can put their kids in a nursery with some other poor low paid woman with an NVQ 2 or whatever, they have another thing coming.

It's the same with this push to get the 'economically inactive' over 50s into work. Yeah right. I'm sure they're all going to rush out and get 0 hour contracts in hospitality, or pick fruit or whatever.

If the govt could look at society through a child's eyes, they would pay up to support children to be with their mums for longer. But they don't. They want their £ of flesh out of women, so our children just have to bear the brunt through spending long days being looked after by even lower paid women, whether they like it or not. The whole system is miserable.

Fair enough if you have a highly paid job. If you go by MN though, the bulk of 'middle Britain' these days just seem to be like hamsters in wheels, while babies are separated from their mums for far longer than is ideal. And some women have even managed to convince themselves this is feminism.

I think you’re making a mistake if you imagine men like this support women with careers.

They don’t hate SAHMs. They hate women.

It’s a very western thing to evaluate a person’s worth or value on a monetary scale.

That said, men can be ignorant fools the world over, so 🤷🏻‍♀️

I don’t know, maybe British feminists are a more enlightened bunch, but American feminism has a long history of denigrating stay-at-home moms. Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique) called them “walking corpses” and said being a housewife was a job best suited to “feeble-minded girls.” Elizabeth Wutzel (Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women) said, "Let's please be serious grown-ups: real feminists don't depend on men. Real feminists earn a living, have money and means of their own." Moving on to the French for a moment, Simone de Beauvoir thought society should be structured so women weren’t “authorized” to be stay-at-home moms.

Let’s not “no true Scotsman” feminism and act like the movement has never been hostile or dismissive towards stay-at-home moms.

It's nobody business how this stranger lives her life. Its just jealously and either way social media is fake fake fake

I think about this often. My take away is veering towards bigger picture at times: feminist gains aren't there for stay at home mums, but they are there when we go back to work (in terms of equality and opportunity), so SAHMs are the blind spot, but it's temporary for most, as most mums return to work in time.

@kumqats agree so much that we don't look through the child's eyes. @YankSplaining I do think this is what the movement has hinged on, like you I don't think feminism can mean all things to all people.

That's because it's so chronically underpaid for the level of responsibility it entails. Working in a supermarket earns you more money. If the government want more people to work in Early Years then they need to put their money where their mouth is, not spend it on ridiculous and pointless advertising campaigns.

Well said.

Healthy bonding, parenting, child attachment and development and mental wellbeing are not valued in our society. Not until your child hits Primary school and starts being punched by the maladjusted child. When a class of 30 is dominated for 7 years by 8 or 9 insecurely attached, mentally unstable violent children who had no reliable loving caregiver or a parent spending time in babyhood, the importance of parents being available during babyhood becomes very clear.

In 'Invisible Women' Caroline Criado-Perez talks about how the work done by SAHP is not valued and is excluded from the GDP. It seems this now extends to feminists doing the same.

Feminism isn't about us all being ungendered and acting in exactly the same way. Feminism is about us valuing 'women's work' as much as men's work. Otherwise, fuck it, I'm not interested in feminism any more, and have no idea why feminists are getting het up about people being transgender, since gender will no longer matter.

I grew up at a time when families could (and were generally expected to) live on one wage. That seems to be a thing of the past, and women still are doing the majority of childcare and housework, whilst working jobs many of them don't want to do.

This is not what I dreamed of. The feminism I want would value the stay at home role, and ensure that the parent who chose to do that role got paid too, rather than farming out the payment to an external source. So it doesn't matter who does it, man or woman, but it is seen as just as valuable a contribution as 'going out to work'. the only reason childcare and housework is NOT seen as valuable is because it has traditionally been the woman who does it. Why, as a feminsit, would anyone accept that valuation?

THAT is true equality, not deciding that certain societal roles are crap, simply because they have largely been done by women in the past.

Well said @ChristmasFluff

Could you define what is women's work and what is men's work?
What do you think about the idea of the parent who is working paying the sahp as they are surely the person benefitting from their unpaid labour?

Instagram comments are terrifying in that they offer a window into the worlds ignorance and hate, they certainly explain how people like Andrew Tate and Donald Trump become powerful, other than that, please step away from the entire cesspit.