Has anyone read 'I Don't Know How She Does It' or 'The Rise and Fall of a Yummy Mummy'?

[litgirl]

Hello!
I was just hoping for a few opinions really! I'm an English Lit student currently writing my thesis on Women's writing, and the opinions around chick-lit, and mummy and baby novels. I am discussing these two novels to illustrate how the characters react against the yummy-mummy myth presented in the media. I would love to hear any opinions you may have about either book, or chick-lit in general, and if you think these novels present mums realistically.

Thank you so much,
Katie xxx

I think sometimes MN is geared at high flyers who've gone back full time when their babies are small

but there are a large number of us wanting to be at home when the children are young but still would like something a bit better paid and better fun! than classroom assistant/childminder/shelf stacker when the kids finally start school and find it's bloody impossible to get

thats what I mean about Anna's advice being really useful for a lot of women

(and I don't want to sit on the board of Tesco's, just do something more interesting than stack their shelves or work their tills!!

AH well, thankfully the UK are a bit more sophisticated on the equality front that in France!

Prof was American

Hmm. I don't know Cristina, when I went to university I wasn't really thinking of career - just the chance to get away from home, drink, regular shagging and my own place away from my parents. The degree was really just the means to have that fun.

Well then, Caligula, it doesn't sound like you'd have been that mature either to think about children and how they'd fit in with your working life afterwards.

SSD - I think to be honest there are very very few jobs that are available for term time only work.

I'm not saying that many jobs could not be suitable contenders, but there just doesn't seem to be the will from employers to take on the hassle of employing fill-in staff to cover holiday times.

I did have someone working for me until recently who was on a 3 day a week term time only contract and it actually worked reasonably well - but there was a lot of pushing required by me for HR to accept it was doable!

That's very rare Anna. Lots of professors are female for a start.
But on the question of "jobs in the middle" thinking about people who I know who do this, part time but good work. My dentist works 3 days a week. 3 of the Gps, male and female at our group practice work 2 or 3 days a week. There are lawyers and accountants who work part time. Presumably there are some jobs that are hard to do part time however. More women under 40 are millionaires than men presumably because a lot have set up their own business and sold it or run it which enables you to sort out your own hours although I'd suspect most of them end up working more than full time and loving it.

"The clear reason for Kate Reddy's problems was that her husband was not pulling his weight and that she had turned all the "support" she should be receiving into the problem not the solution - none of her husband, nanny or cleaner were actually assisting her or relieving her of any responsibility, while she was assuming all the responsibility of being major bread-winner and major child care provider. Of course something has to give in that scenario - but most people don't put themselves in that scenario."

Interesting Anchovy. I had pretty much the same thought when I read IDKHSDI. However, the book did recall for me the early days of combining motherhood and career, wallowing in guilt and chaos, before I acquired a little of that essential solid pragmatism necessary for survival. Bloody good job I'd got through that stage before reading it, otherwise Allison Pearson may have unwittingly rendered me an awful disservice by making me assume it was impossible.

Well that's what I'm saying. I didn't actually decide on a career until I had one iyswim. I got a few jobs and then found I had a CV, quite by accident.

Could have done with some proper career advice.

Anna - I guess that misogynists exist just about everywhere - that doesn;t mean we should just accept their claptrap does it?

Xenia - where I grew up (outside the UK), quite a lot of mothers worked full-time as the childcare provision was unusually excellent, as was career progress for women. So a lot of my school friends had two working parents, a working-mother role model and saw what was involved. All my female school friends went on to excellent universities, across Europe.

But many, many of them have decided against a dual-career family. They lived through that stress as children and don't want to impose that upon their children, their partners or themselves.

soapbox, I agree

P.S. can I work for you

Xenia - in the UK, doctors, dentists and other medical and paramedical practitioners can work part time because they are employed by the communist-style NHS (which I quite like, even though I'm anything but left wing). In many other countries, medical practitioners are self-employed and must work full-time (and will have little or no maternity leave at all) to maintain their business.

Ditto lawyers, many of whom are in systems where they are self-employed. I have friends here in France who were talking to clients from the labour ward and back in court three days after the birth.

So advice on what career path to follow in order to combine interesting work with motherhood is very dependent on the system you live in.

Anna, you talk about sacrificing motherhood on the alter of a professional career as being "The price of sucess". And you are right in a way, but that is only because the 'market' currently accepts that price.

If as a society we stopped accepting that women in this country do X, Y and Z, and that men do A,B & C, we can start getting to the heart of the problem, which - in her rather delicious way - is what Xenia comes back to again and again and again. IE: We only end up with all the balls to juggle because we accept that as the way of the world, rather like our parents accepted the man's right to do bugger all round the house and refuse to change nappies. All the time that we quietly accept that 'we' have to book the holidays, do the doctors trips, hire the cleaner, buy the xmas presents and so on, we are stuffed. I can't really see the men rising up and declaring that it was about time they shouldered more responsibility so we could take a break.

Those of us that want careers as well as kids are getting there really slowly with flexible working and stuff, but we will get there. And while I've no issue with those parents who decide that parental care is the only way to go with their kids, I just don't get why it shouldn't be the man who stays at home in half these cases. Likewise, if parents decide they both want to work, then for sure let them get criticised by the stay at homes, but at least let's get the balance right: I've yet to see any of my male colleagues get berated for neglecting their kids by coming to work.

It is truly depressing when vocations are sacrificed, but only we can change that. The way you raise your kids, the paper you read, the MP you vote for, and the vote you don't use: they all play a part. We're partly the problem too and need to recognise that.

Oh, and I blame Hugh effing Grant as well, in some obscure way I can't quite put my finger on.

I really don't think our children have been very stressed by us both working at all. They had two happy parents and the extra money meant eventually we could afford people to help do the cleaning etc. The hardest time I remember was whenever we had a baby or babies not sleeping at night and that's hard whether you work or not. My brother's toddler was up most of Friday night. That's the kind of thing that makes you feel stressed, more than whether you work or mind children all day. Looking after a toddler all day for me would have been much more stressful than going out to work.

Anyway there we are. At least in the West most women and men have good legal protection if they choose to work which women don't in many countries which is where we should really be directing our energies.

Xenia - most b-school profs I know are ghastly macho mysogynists. And there aren't that many women.

Great post squiffy.

Also so agree about Hugh Grant being to blame.

sq, yes, the only real battleground is in the home and women enabling men to do b ugger all. These women in effect are their own whipping boys and they should know better. Every time they do a job their husbands should be doing they are damaging their daughter's future in a sense.

SSD - it was unfortunately in a highly niche area of accountancy - so perhaps not

Anna - I suppose some people are more susceptible to stress than others!

My experience was the opposite - my mother stayed at home from the time she had children and I always thought of her life as a SAHM as a terrible waste of potential (I am being brutally honest here - and it is just my opinion of my mother's life - so please don't lambast me)! She spent many years lunching, reading progressively crappier books and watching crappy day time tv. A more vaccuous life I could not imagine!

I suppose my desire to keep my hand in at work during the baby years was to avoid living the life she did, although I did work a 3 day week for a couple of years and a 4 day week for a couple more. Now f/t but Fridays working from home but doing school run etc.

I completely agree that equality begins at home. And (as I have said before) I think that a great education gives women the self-confidence and negotiating skills to ride out that mega-battle (where there are no convenient anti-discrimination laws and HR officers to solve your problems for you).

Hugh Grant... may be actually a bigger problem than people thinkg. A lot of girls at 30 want to settle down and have babies and a lot of men their age won't commit as they don't have the time pressure and then commit at 40 to the 20 somethings. Men like HG have a lot to answer for.

Crikey, what a long thread!

We read IDKHSDI at book group actually, and felt perhaps it should be 'don't know (or care)WHY she does it!' We all just felt thankful that we could work part-time/ stay at home etc, which all of us did, some of us were solicitors, Drs etc, all part-time. Seemed that girl in the book didn't have to have a job like that, as she kept balancing up giving up job and down-sizing etc, so the job was a choice, not a necessity. Which is fine, but really, IMHO, having children is a priviledge, and a decision which should involve a little sacrifive to involve them in your life. Not suggesting for a mo that everyone should be SAHM, but certainly working part-time, career break etc should be done if possible. If you are not prepared to make a sacrifice for your kids, then perhaps you are not really ready to have kids. This was out thoughts anyway. And that it was a bit of a crap book, but we all finished it!!

Good post squiffy!

pmsl at the thought of poor old hugh grant being held responsible for the ills of the world. Please someone start a thread on it so we can discuss it in more detail...

wonder who made the sacrifice, i, though... could it possibly have been the female? How could I guess right? What a coincidence.