To think that all those generations of women who battled for equality for women have actually achieved nothing!

[flixx]

All that has changed is that women are now expected to go out and work and well as still being souly responsible for the vast majority of domestic stuff and childcare.

Womens lives aren't better or easier, infact they are now so complicated that half of us are so stressed and knackered we don't even remember who we are anymore.

The role of a mother is less valued by society than it has ever been when we all know that it truely is THE hardest job ever.

New this evening and I've just read ALL the posts on this thread.

I work part time and my DP does too. We share housework, picking up etc. This works well partly because all four of our parents were not sexist, and because our rent is cheap. If rent/mortgage was expensive which it is for nearly everyone, I am sure that we would not be as happy. For me a council flat was aspirational.

Lots of posts are about staying at home or going to work. I always get semantically annoyed at the phrase stay at home 'cos surely mums/dads who are not in formal paid employment (and whose partners are), do go out and see something of the world.

But there's a more deeply feminist point to be raised, which is that whether a woman works or not, women have very rarely had a Room Of Their Own where they an shut the door and get on with whatever creativity they want.

Virginia Wolff argues (from a middle clas perspective of course) in her book A Room of One's Own that this lack of a space is the main reason why most famous writers and artists from the past are men.

That really struck a cord with me.

What else are we as women above and beyond our skills as mothers and in the workplace?

clealy you are a troll if enough people on mn say you are.
right?

stillstanding...thank you, i think you're really sweet too ( can we say that about each other..is it sexist? )

yep, too many people on here call me a troll...not sure why? i don't say anything particularly outrageous...i know i'm not liked/popular/whatever...not that i care, but it does effect me when people i've been chatting to quite nicely for a few days come on and call me a troll....yes i'm talking about you blueshoes!

dp - if you're still there? I don't like spending every day with my children. I have felt strongly enough about it and for long enough that I don't mind saying that to anyone now in RL even though it makes me sound like a bad mother. The fact is that a day with my children whilst having a few moments of utter joy is otherwise dull, relentless and full of chores. I love them to bits but I don't have the patience or interest in what they do that the people who I employ to look after them do. During the day they are at nursery where they have formed incredibly strong bonds with women who have dedicated their careers to nuturing and loving children and helping them to develop. They put careful thought into how to help the children learn and what activities to do with them. They enjoy doing this.

I have no problem with mothers who want to do all the caring themselves but I am not one of them. I am a doctor and would have wasted a lot of the countries resources spent on training me if I gave up work. My children benefit from spending time with other caring adults and the time I have with them after work and at weekends is immensely precious to both me and my husband.

There are not many societies where one person is expected to care for the children on their own. This is a recent western set up which has big problems built into it. Children should be bought up by a village. We pay our village nursery fees. SAHP find ways of making a community for their children too.

Wolfcubs - that is a very thought provoking post. At the moment neither I or Dh have a room of our own. We occasionally spend evenings in parallel - but I tend to mn - that's not very creative is it?

dp i suppose it is your head-sand-position and sweeping generalisations that are most risible

generally most people read threads and think hokey cokey not how i do it but fair enough,they dont usually make global statement to the effect you all deluded i am correct

oh and at last minute attributre another post comments to yourself. oh i was saying that (when you clearly werent)

anyway i dont know or care if you troll or not.live to post another day heh

Anne Veronica would overall be please with what she saw surely? The idea of putting children into childcare probably wouldn't phase her too much as she would have seen that in her life too. Perhaps the idea of wealthy women feeling they had to work would surprise her though.

newsmonger - "feminism is not about dictating to women that they must be like men or they're fools or inferior."

When has feminism ever said we should be like men? Why is doing something other than caring for children being like men? Does that mean that looking after children makes men like women?

It's all about having the freedom to do as you wish, make your own decisions regardless of gender. Saying that women 'should' do one thing rather than another, that women are being like men (not to mention unfeminine) negates everything that feminism stands for in my eyes, if they make certain choices.

I don't want anyone to tell me what I should do because I happen to have a womb.

daftpunk "i don't say anything particularly outrageous..." yes you do. Quite a few things actually. About what women should do. And about how not doing so makes us less feminine. And the best place for mothers is with their children. It's not new but it's still irritating and a little offensive.

I know you're not a troll, I've seen you around before. But you don't have to be a troll to say inflammatory things.

ormirian; i don't always have the time to think things through before i post, i'm busy dashing around, i have 4 kid's! ...so maybe my posts arn't always brilliant.

but look, i don't think i've said anything wrong, i admire women that are successful in their line of work, i don't envy them, but i admire them..it takes alot to make it when you have children. if you want to work, then great..if you check my posts thats what i said.

i'm sorry if my personal views got mixed in with it all,i have been lucky that my husband earns enough for me to stay at home. i did apologise twice yesterday for that.

and fwiw, if i was a single mother, or had a partner on a low income..i would be out there working to give my kids a better life..i'd have 4 jobs if i had to.

That's OK. That's what MN is for

I may not have read all the posts properly but I got the gist I think.

We each do what seems best to us. I just get bristly when people seem to suggest that I should be doing it anyother way.

As often , I agree with policywonk, despite the fact that (I think) she works at home looking after kids (?) and I work out of the house and pay someone to look after mine while I'm working.

Care is a productive and necessary activity. There might be individual moral and emotional judgements about what is best in your family, but that is a private decision. Making a sensible social decision about how best to provide necessary care is something else and IMHO both home provision and out of home provision need supporting.

My main concern about women who adopt homeworking and care as a life choice is their financial dependence on their husbands/partners or an inadequately funded and ill-supported welfare system. I have no objection to the principle of state funding care. The difficulty is what happens to those women when the kids leave home and/or the husband leaves them: these are the exact and frequent situations when the cracks in the homemaker ideology begin to show.

I did some research recently with people in middle-age. I can't begin to explain the seriousness with which older women left with no pension, no education, no employment prospects, no husband, no house and no kids on the horizon any more, would look me in the eyes and say 'don't make the choices I made'. Over and over again. Divorced women who don't have jobs or are on very low incomes with no pension provision in later life are destined for a lonely, destitute old age.

HoHoHo Thanks for noticing my Room of One's Own comment.

I read recently that with femisnism you can never for a moment think 'Okay we're done, phew that was hard, lets sit back and relax,' or things shoot backwards far quicker than they were brought forwards.

I get annoyed by things like the topless cover of trashy newspapers in my local Borders bookshop doorway. I don't know if these things will make my son or daughter sexist or not, but I would love it if every mumsnetter took time to turn these over and generally get a bit more of that fun 70's civil disobedience feminism going. Like when people grafitti'd on sexist posters

'If this woman was a car she would get her bum pinched'

'No, if this woman were a car she would kick you in the balls!'

In 1907 women weren't just housewives, teachers or on the stage...

In the long 19th century, working class women worked in all manner of jobs in mills, factories, domestic service, laundries, farms, mines, shops and continued to do so...

It is a myth that women were all housewives or teachers.... These might have been the only career options for genteel middle class girls, but working class women have ALWAYS worked...

My great-grandmother had a dress shop before and after the 1WW and was very successful in business. Her husband, my greatgrandfather, was an architect.

Yes it's a myth women never worked. My grandmother's husband feel to his death when my mother, the first child was about 9 months old. My grandmother had to work or they would have all starved. My father's family however they had become a bit better off so my grandfather who was born in 1880 he help two unmarried sisters all theor lives - paid them an allowance, bought them a house etc. Difference between most people - working class and a very few like him who were middle class. But even there another of his sisters ran a haberdashery shop she owned until it went out of business in the great crash 1929... recessionary times we are probably moving into again on a scale not seen since the 1920s/30s.

I think we tend to find children with non sexist parents find it easier in adult life to effect good relationships with men where tasks are fairly divided. My parents obviously expected us all to go to good universities and have proper careers. My mother supported my father for 13 years when he was a medical school and getting established in the 1950s. We just would not as a famaily, whether men or women, tolerate men who expect women to clean up after them. No sexist ethos and to be fair my daughters' boyfriends aren'e sexist either but I'm surrounded because of the different cultures in which I live in this bit of London by women who serve men, who are trained almost from birth to serve men and those girls are in effect indoctrinated and often their marriages are arranged too.

What we've managed in the UK is to give girls opportunities they didn't used to have.

On a room of your own - very important, yes. One reason I work is I wanted a big house. I think it's about 5000 sq feet which is fairly large so we have space. I like the fact I have a room of my own to work in etc or just retreat to and it's not the kitchen.

If 100% of women in the UK chose to be housewives and not to work we would lose gains we've made, without a doubt. No one could question that on this thread therefore every woman who chooses to stay home and give up her career and perhaps never really get back to it is shooting other women in the back and damaging her daughters. However much women like to be touchy feeling nice nice to each other over these "choices" there is a political element to this you just can't ignore. Every woman at home, every woman whether home or not who accepts sexist things in her marriage is damaging other women.

I totally agree with Flixx's views at the start of this discussion. Women do end up running themselves ragged trying to do it all, career, kids, the home. Most men still feel they can just concentrate on their work and that their women should look after the kids and the home too. For the role of women to improve needs a shift in the upbringing, education and values of men so that they fully expect to do their fair share of the work involved in bringing up children and domestic duties and without feeling it is somehow 'unmanly.'
I don't think this type of discussion is navel-gazing. It goes to the heart of how our society runs and nothing changes if issues are simply ignored.

..and on the time issue I was reading about some famous writer married to a female writer who couldn't get on with writing because she had to serve the needs of some egotistical man and of course women enable that if they allow it to happen. They are often their own worst enemy. I sometimes say to the chidlren - I need two hours without you. I don't think that's wrong. We need balance in our lives not to be some kind of really dull martyr. Another female sculpture was writing that she used to work in Italy one week and then home the other week so she had that time off although her child was saying that was not great for them but then giving children what they want all the time isn't always what is best for them. We don't need to have an aim to give in to children all the time as long as they feel loved and are well brought up.

On woman's hour last week a granny, mother and university age daughter were interviewed. The poor mother had to listen to her daughter go on about wish her mother had been there at school events as she grew up etc. (My 3 at university wouldn't have the same view - I think I never really missed a sports day etc but this teenager obviously was trying to get at her mother on the radio.,..) anyway her mother quite rightly said but look at her - she's a well adjusted happy student so really nothing wrong was done at all. The fact a child might want to get its own way each day or grow up in a mansion or sleep in its parent's bed until it's 12 or whatever doesn't mean that's what a child needs.

very few men would happily stay at home everyday bringing up children...that's the reality.

"The poor mother had to listen to her daughter go on about wish her mother had been there at school events as she grew up etc." I'm afraid I have a totally different take on this. Even a FT working mother myself, the girl must have grown up feeling that she came 2nd.

CapricaSix - "even" middle-class women worked in business, you know. The real issue for women was being unable to enter the professions, because they couldn't get a university education.

I am a SAHM through choice and that is the key. I would not critise women who work for many reasons but mostly because i register that I am making a choice that suits me, my personality and my kids. I also plan to get back to work when they are both at school. I think it is indeed very dubious ground for SAHMs to critise working women because our modern choices are hard won, and in each case there are many factors unique to that family.

I may not win many friends with this next point but I believe an unspoken truth in all this is that many woman feel much more emotional about their children than is acknowledge in the usual work/housewife debate, and dare I say it, than men. I realise that you dont wnat to start pandering to the sterotypes of emotional women but I find always this is where I always part company with Xenia when I read her posts. It is not in most cases a purely logical choice. I was hugely startled by how I felt when my first child was born having never been particularly maternal. Weighing into the balance about going back to work was not just the logistical issues but the fact I would be miserable leaving her, irrationally, distractingly miserable. I am staying at home because it is easier for me than the emotional stress of leaving them all day on top of a busy job (which incidently loved and do miss, and will go back to).

It also turns out that the usual niggles aside I enjoy this bit (and I can even say that even after being holed up in the house for 5 days with 2 small children with impetigo omg). I would say to Xenia what makes you happy and what makes me happy are two different sets of things and I am hugely glad there are women out there flying the flag for our sex in terms of achievement, but dont go lecturing me on my equally valid reasons to chose to stay home. Neither of us would be happy if we swapped situations and so both of us are right to have made the choice we have.