Guardian article on SAHMs

[branflake81]

here

I am baffled by this on MN because a lot of the time people are saying they don't have a choice.

Some mums can't afford to stop working because they need two incomes to pay the mortgage etc.

Some mums can't afford to work because they don't get paid enough to cover childcare.

Where does one stop and the other start? Are the "workers" the ones with grandparent childcare or kids at school, or are they just on above-average pay? Is being a SAHM forced on you by lack of earning power outside the home, or a luxury of having a high-earning partner? The Guardian article doesn't seem to explore this.

I thought the Guardian article made some interesting points until it got swamped by the friends of the journalists' case histories.

The point about servants for example was worth making. Because there have always been women who didn't work. For years it was hard for women to work. They battled to enter the professions. But motherhood wasn't the reason why middle class women didn't work and they didn't look after their children in a particularly hands on way. The Edwardian wife of a lawyer, for example, had servants including a nanny and her sons would have gone to boarding school.

There was a period in the 20th century when one income supported a middle class family so long as the wife did the jobs that servants previously did. And it's been an emotionally very charged and powerful period. But historically it wasn't the norm.

I agree with Prufrock - I had a career for 10 years before I had children, then I had 10 years as a SAHM, during the last 5 years of my time at home I did voluntary work, which led to a new full time career, which I've been doing for around 8 years now.

It's quite likely our children will have more than one career change, so if I'm a role model to my children, it's as a model of flexibility and of using skills I've developed to move in a different direction.

Are most of you unaware that up until 1975 women were paid less than men for doing identical jobs and it was perfectly legal? Men's wages were often referred to as a 'family wage', and the idea was that men were supporting wives and children on their wages, whereas any woman in paid employment would only be supporting herself and should be looking for a man to support her anyway.
I expect some people are fuckwitted enough to think that this was a good state of affairs - never mind that it didn;t work too well for many people at the time (lots of women had to take on all sorts of extra jobs that fitted round school hours), the disgusting discrimination is entirely unsupportable.
The single biggest problem for societies in the developed world is this one: if women are human rather than domestic appliances whose purpose is to do all the shitwork, maintenance and caring in return for a roof over their heads, how is the shitwork to get done?

The other very MN thing is the career first followed by children and a period of not working. I hate the tetm "stay at home mum". It sounds as if the woman is under house arrest.

It's always struck me that one of the most unusual (statistically speaking) things about Xenia is that she is an educated woman who had children in her early 20s.

Sorry, I know it's a bit bad form to discuss other posters like that. But it's interesting how many women have divided work and children into discrete life stages.

The shitwork (good old feminist term there MadameZ) is done by importing women from non developed countries.

As late as the 1960's many local authorities still insisted that women employees resigned on marriage - even before they had children....

Blithedance you comment about the anomaly about some mothers not being able to afford to stop working whereas some mothers can't afford to work. You ask where one stops and the other starts.

Well the only people who can afford to stay at home are those who are independently wealthy, or who have partners who can support them or who are on benefits.

I can't afford to give up work - to some extent that is a result of various lifestyle choices I have made - but some of it is not.

The ones who can't afford to give up work are those with free childcare, or who earn lots and can afford the childcare.

So how can anyone in this day and age afford to buy a house on a family income of £20k - I can't believe that's possible. Are houses one of the things that people can cut out? Or buying them at least?

blithedance - I agree.

But women in poor families have always worked to some extent: Avon or other catalogue companies, cleaning, mobile hairdressing, stuffing envelopes or sticking together cheap toys etc etc, and they certainly have to now when low incomes are so low compared to housing costs. It';s just that a lot of the (for a company/employer) work women do is unsecure, piecework, badly paid and with no kind of career progression or employment rights (and a lot of it is what you might call 'grey economy': cash-in-hand etc). SO it's not seen as proper work, of course. THis isn't because they are greedy or materialistic, it's so they can afford food, and heating, and new clothes for the DC when they outgrow their old ones.
Nothing is more irritating to the underpaid than hearing smug middleclass fuckwits posturing about how they've 'made such sacrifices' to sit at home prodding their DC with educational toys and sneering at other mothers' dress sense outside playgroup ie given up all but one holiday a year and have to shop at Sainsburys instead of Waitrose.

at Madamez.

Well said!

Not read all posts so apologies if this has already been said. But what I find interesting in the article is the issue of enjoyment. The woman quoted in the last para says that she "adores" being at home with her children, and I can see that if that is the case then one might be prepared to make all kinds of financial sacrifices to do it.

However, what of the woman who does not adore being at home 24/7 with children? I am currently on mat leave after my second child and very much looking forward to going back to work part-time. Of course I love my kids and love spending time with them, but I do it better and we all enjoy it more when it is not my only occupation. I don't think for a second that my office job is more important than looking after children but it does offer me social and intellectual stimulation that I have not found it possible to replicate at home.

As with most families I don't have a choice in the matter financially (I am the main earner). I often find myself using this argument as the first line of defence when asked about my decision to work, because it seems more socially acceptable to cite economic factors than one's enjoyment of working- which is a "selfish" reason, and therefore not very on-message for a mother. It's a sop to the working mother's guilt. But I think, on a broader scale, the categorisation of mothers into those who can/ cannot afford to SAH obscures the very real fact that some of us like WOH very much and would be unhappier people without it. If there is a true divide between mothers, IMO, it's between those who are happy with their situation (be that WOH, SAH, whatever) and those who are unable to get where they want to be for financial or other reasons.

I know, Madamez. The things people feel proud of themselves for sacrificing. All that "we drive an old car and go camping for our holidays and I accept hand me downs for the children's clothes." Big deal.

The benefit system has changed everything. Because before that, working class women often had to leave their childen while they went to work for middle class women, often being nannies. Still happens all over the world.

Well I suppose child tax credits and childcare tax breaks have blurred the boundary a bit as to affordability of childcare.

What interested me was mums from both sides of the "divide" saying they didn't have a choice, as if they'd prefer to be doing something else. And possibly there is not much in it. To paraphrase Dickens -

Take home pay £500, cost of childcare £510 = forced into SAHM drudgery boredom and career suicide

Take home pay £510, cost of childcare £490 = forced to work all hours and neglect children just to pay the bills

A lot depends on the job of course. Some women accept a rubbish amount of pay once childcare is paid for because they believe that in the long run, it will pay off.

pendulum: "If there is a true divide between mothers, IMO, it's between those who are happy with their situation (be that WOH, SAH, whatever) and those who are unable to get where they want to be for financial or other reasons."

Agree. The greatest luxury is the choice to follow your heart, whether it be WOHM, ft or pt, or SAHM.

I am a SAHM because I felt it was the best thing for my children. My mother stayed at home and I loved her being there.

However, I'm not naturally very good with children, and I do wonder sometimes exactly how vital to my sons' lives it is that I'm there all day, shoving washing into the machine grumpily and rushing them through their homework.

Maybe they would be better off being cared for by someone who loved caring for children so much, they decided to make it their vocation? How vital is it to my children that it's me who makes their bed, etc?

This felt like a Deep Point when I thought of it a minute ago, but doesn't seem very ground-breaking written-down. Bugger.

I think the fact that it's mothers is confusing the debate. The divide is about employment not about motherhood. Some people work and some people don't. You'll notice that men who work are more likely to hang out with men who also work. They don't talk about themselves as work from home dads. And unemployed men are more like to know unemployed men. They don't call themselves stay at home dads.

yes blithedance that's kinda my point too

it makes a refreshing change to hear a woman saying "I'm at home because I adore being with my children all the time" OR "I WOH because I enjoy it" instead of all the scrabbling for the moral highground to justify our choices.

One of the things that has most struck me about the almost exclusively female company I have been keeping while on mat leave is the spirit of ostentatious martyrdom.