India Knight at it again

[EdgarAllenSnow]

here she goes

although she seems to be quoting the other lady, Elisabeth Badinter, i think she doesn't weight this piece particularly evenly... despite her conclusion being 'whatever does it for you is what you should do' for their mothering choices, the picture painted of breastfeeding cloth-nappy using own-puree food making types (such as, haha, myself) is not a pretty one.

Personally the above 3 options save me countless amounts of money every year (ok, about £2k - 1k booby milk, £500 nappies £500 using cheap veg/ home cooking rather than 80p per jar baby food - so not countless) Feminism has nothing to do with it.

"This new wave of fashionable earth motherhood, she says, is not compatible with feminism or with women having careers because it is so incredibly timeconsuming that it leads to women giving up work and staying at home."

2 words: Maternity Leave.

and doing 1 load of nappies evey three days is hardly time consuming, nor indeed, do i have to do it. My husband can do that, and prepare food..he can't BF, but that's fine, because I find it liberating - I want to do it...

me too lenin - I didn't get what India's point was

i think she was sounding off against things she doesn't like, and is made to feel inadequate by, by hiding behind someone elses words.

but what is it that she doesn't like?

What a strange article. FWIW, I took a relatively short maternity leave, but still exclusively bf to 6 months, continued bfing to 23 months, have never bought a disposable nappy, and DS has never had a jar of food. Doing a load of washing, and not using salt in our food wasn't exactly time consuming, and bfing doesn't stop you doing anything else at the same time.

And am definatly a feminist

MN down = emergency! You could end up doing housework if it went on too long...

Worse than that, Edgar, I ended up making my own puree.

That breastfeeding (beyond initial months) is seen as an 'earthmother trend' is depressing. It's not a 'trend', it's the normal activity of a mammal that's given birth!

I worked (and progressed in a career) from the time DC1 was 6 weeks old. I also breast fed (DC1 had occasional FF supplements, the other two did not), baby wore (and made sure care givers did likewise) used cloth nappies etc. Having a career and the "earthmother" (how I hate that term!) lifestyle are not incompatible. In fact, BFing helped with the working mother guilt.

I am not working now, mainly because 3 DC under 6 and one of them with possible SN means I am more needed at home. Plus, I was working for about 10p an hour after childcare. And schools are just about the least childfriendly places to work ever I think - one year my H used up ALL his AL on sick kids!

ffs. it is not like women are traipsing down to the river to beat the nappies against a rock. how hard it is to shove some nappies in a washing machine?

only read the first paragraph but it was enough!

I thought it was quite a good article, with one major problem. Why should it be assumed that if as a family you decide on a greener lifestyle it should automatically be a burden on women? We used cloth nappies, and dh did all the washing (he's always been a bit possessive about the washing though). I did the whole Annabel Karmel ice-cube thing, but once made up (and lets face it those early purees are not exactly difficult or time consuming to make) they were just as convenient as jars. Now I would do BLW which seems to be even easier, and avoids the mush thing completely. I think that there are aspects of mothering that can be very time consuming, but the three picked don't seem particularly burdensome (at least not in balance to how burdensome having a baby is full stop really) to me.

I went back to work at 6mths for ds and three for dd (it was harder to persuade our nanny to use cloth nappies, so we moved to those decomposable ones). I'd say I was a feminist, a career woman and slightly green. It does help having a fully engaged father to share parenting with though (I do find the total sidelining of fathers in these debates irritating).

Fucking ridiculous.
Sloppy attention seeking.

Actually, I thought there was a good major point in the article - that we need to be very wary of domestic goddess/traditional family values stuff being peddled as a cure-all, or universally desirable. Because the 'happy families and cupcakes' world depended purely and simply on female slavery. Women are not better at floor-scrubbing because they don't have willies.
Remember that feminism came about because the Traditional Family set up was nice for men and for children but shit for women.

Yes, SolidGoldBrass, but as nooka says there is - in this supposedly enlightened day and age - no reason why men couldn't be the ones making the cupcakes, organic puree, washing the cloth nappies and all that.

But of course India Knight (and the French writer she quotes) don't suggest that as a possibility.

I am so sick of reading articles bemoaning the "work/home life" dilemma in some form or another, but presenting it as purely a female issue. Why are there no articles written about fathers "struggling to have it all"? This just perpetuates the idea that looking after the children/household is the woman's problem and so obviously it's her career that will be affected.

It sometimes seems to me that being a good mother(defined by the media and the person on the street) seems to be including all kinds of things which are domestic slavery, but all nicely wrapped up in a veneer of cupcakes and bunting.

And interestingly most men do not seem to involve themselves in washing nappies or making organic purees, nor do they seem to think these things define them as a father.

Breastfeeding is not domestic slavery however, and has not curtailed my career in anyway

Dh did at least 50% of the nappy washing and close to 100% of the cooking when ds was little.

But I know there are (my friend for one, who is very odd "traditional") women who find this deeply unattractive in a man.

What minipie said. My dh does the earth mother stuff around here. My brothers are also perfectly competent earth fathers.

Besides, it's not the case that the shared parental leave has never been tried anywhere on the planet. It has been in place for a long time in Sweden. And though it is sometimes labelled a failure there because take-up has not been as great as expected (like the UK governments reducing teenage pregnancy rates by 25% has been labelled a failure because it didn't reach the target figure ), that absolutely does not mean there has been no take-up. All the young Swedish fathers I know have taken it up.

And Swedish mothers still manage to have the best breastfeeding rates in the world, so it hardly seems incompatible with breastfeeding.

My own feeling is that there is more of a home cooking and home baking culture in Sweden- but that is absolutely not because Swedish women are tied to the stove. It's because Swedish men can cook.

Besides, can anyone explain to me why it takes longer to feed baby a spud off your own plate than to heat a separate jar of baby food? I fed my babies home-cooked food precisely because I was lazy.

I've read the Badinter book and I completely understand India Knight's article. The only point I disagree on is the pressure on women to stay at home, and the unfeasibility of the domestic goddess harmony scenario. Some women like taking care of their homes and families to a very high standard - they think it makes better use of their skills than some random job.