I am a feminist and a sahm

[CountryLifeMummy]

I had a discussion with a male friend who believes I can not be a feminist and a sahm.
Bit of background -
I live in the country with some animals. I have one child. I decided to come out of the workplace to be at home with my child before they started school. They are now at school but as a family we feel we like the lifestyle of a house in the country and animals. Because of our rural location school is a bit of a drive away. I am very busy from morning to evening with the animals / school run / housework / laundry etc. I do realise this is a luxury but we budget well and can afford to have one parent at home.
I love my role in my family and feel very satisfied as a feminist that I am doing what fulfills me on a day to day basis. My husband is happy for me too and there is no resentment. He has to leave early for work and I am happily responsible for ironing his clothes and making us all dinner. He makes dinner at the weekend and will help with house jobs then too.
So, I was discussing feminism with my friend who discribes himself as a feminist - supporter of the This Girl Can campaign and Wimens March etc. He is in a relationship with a career driven person and he is very career driven himself. We get along mostly and I applaud his feminist views, usually.
He said to me that actually, how can I call myself a feminist if I stay at home living out a dated social stereotype serving a man and having no career and therefore no self worth.
I am confused but this and I didn't answer him as I didn't want to argue. By believe is that feminism is the radical notion that Men and Women are equal (actually I believe in full equal rights including children as well). Surly if I am happy in my life and my "work" then that's all that matters? Or do I need to have paid employment to really be a feminist?

Point taken!
But should then the non-working partner see the working one's job as a shared enterprise by eg having the boss round to dinner?

It's automatically a shared enterprise surely? If the SAHP didn't SAH then the working partner would have to considerably change their work life - they might not be able to work at all.

Hum - depends on income. And what about the situation where the domestic crap is outsourced anyway?

I do really struggle with the idea that the working partner is responsible for 50% of running and maintaining the household (where there are school-age children).

If there are just two of them working FT, it should be the default. And I think it should be the starting point if they don't both work FT - both adults should be contributing equally to the household, which includes bringing in money, but being the only wage-earner I don't think is as much as 50% contribution to the labour and admin of keeping a house particularly if there are children. Though it's terribly convenient for many men who are the only one working to think it is. I do think if you're the one who is not in paid work, you presumably have more time in the house to do a larger share of the housework and childcare tasks, though.

My DH and I both work and he does (much) more house work and (a little more) child care than I do. When the kids were little though I only worked part time. There was no reason for this at all, DH found house work and child care far more rewarding than I did and I thrive at work and always have.

We now often discuss why we made this odd choice but have realised that we didn't really make any choice, we just did what was expected. We were very young when we had our first child which I think played a part in it.

I'm not sure what you mean?

Sorry, my last post was to Aspasia.

It's all about choice! And there's something very sinister about being told you have no self worth because you have no job Not all work is paid...:like being a stay at home parent!

If he is not doing at least 50% of the work involved in running and maintaining a house and the people who live in it, he's not much of a feminist

Why should anyone working full time be expected to do 50% of this if there is a stay at home person?

You can't have it both ways- if being a "stay at home" is work why should the person who has been working out of the home be expected to pick up the sahm's share ?

Lass. that comment was about the OP's friend - he's married but doesn't have children and his wife works.

Why should anyone working full time be expected to do 50% of this if there is a stay at home person?

I agree to a certain extent. I have been a SAHM in the past and have had a maternity leave as well. I did more round the house than him because I was in the house more often. However my day was not planned around housework. If I went out for the day - which I often did - we split the chores when he got home. If I was I all day and had time around the children I did more.

When I work DH does far more housework than me.

I'm a Bad Feminist: I'm currently a SAHM, I changed my name when I got married, I shave, I wear high heels and makeup etc etc

But as pp have said, none of us make our choices in a vacuum, and I won't blame any woman for making a non-feminist choice that leads to a better outcome for them personally. And any man who looks askance at a woman's choices and suggests that they are a Bad Feminist can STFU to be honest

In India domestic work is often outsourced. It's still considered a woman's job to manage it though. Most domestic workers work around school hours and so you'll often find female professionals taking part time hours or salary cuts to ensure it all gets done appropriately. And they will often get the blame if it's not completed to the right standard.

Ugh, this really pisses me off, what a knob! I'm a SAHM and a feminist too, and I would say to any idiot who dared to mansplain feminism that I decide what gives me self worth, nobody else - and certainly not a man who has got his feminism so back to front that he is actually sexist

Being a SAHM gives me self worth, I love it!

I was just about to recommend All Mothers Work too.

Also Mothers At Home Matter, and Vanessa Olorenshaw's book the Politics of Mothering.

I do think we have to be cautious about believing that all choices are free. I don't think for a minute that the overwhelming majority of SAHPs being women is some sort of accident. It's just that when we take into account who is on the better career trajectory, who is capable of being the higher earner, if there are likely to be more children, influences from parents / friends / society: culturally, financially and socially it is women who are more likely to become the SAHP.

That doesn't mean that SAHPing is anti-feminist, but it does mean that the WOHP needs to recognise that the other person is facilitating their career often at some sacrifice of their own, and that the SAHP is still working. I've seen way too many men just believe that this is the natural way of things and that their wives "aren't working" when the reverse is true.

Women changing name upon marriage is one of the most accepted everyday sexist things which happen in my opinion. If it wasn't, as many men as women would change theirs. It's also completely sexist that most of the time when a woman doesn't change her name but goes on to have children, they automatically get their father's surname. If I ever have children, there is absolutely no way they'd not be getting mine.

Unfortunately lots of women still become SAHM because it is still an expectation that if any parent SAH it should be the woman. So it's not that surprising that it is viewed as an unfeminist thing to do.

I was a SAHM for only a couple of years but have worked only part time ever since (dc 11 and 9). I've only really become a feminist since having dc, and although I am now happy to be part-time and have no desire to step back on the career ladder, I don't feel that I really approached that decision with my eyes fully open when planning to have dc. I just assumed if either of us took a career pause, it would be me, even though I was the higher earner at the time. I used to love my job, but once I had the dc I lost all ambition and motivation for it tbh.

I'm sure you don't need anyone to tell you to keep up to date with issues in your previous workplace and to ensure you have money available to you should the worst happen

I forgot who said this a few pages back - but for me it is the core of why I would not give up paid work and also why the WLM initially advocated for women to enter paid work. Of course, at the time, this was about creating paid work as an option for women and making sure it was a place where women were treated equally (it still isn't). But even though I could theoretically be supported by a man I choose not to because (i) I define myself through my career and (ii) in the event of breakups stay at home partners often get shat on from a great height. I heard a woman who had been shat on describe this once as "one man away from welfare". Plus, we don't make choices in vacuums. Women are still not treated equally in the workplace and men still do not see being a SAHD as a real life choice. It remains a gendered choice.

I disagree with your friend's assumption that self worth is contingent on paid employment.

However I do believe that, unfortunately, the 'cause' of feminism is hindered by the current situation in which lots of women are SAHPs and hardly any men are. And I guess you are contributing to that to a tiny extent.

But I do realise that it's completely unrealistic to expect everyone to make decisions for the greater good rather than their own personal happiness.

I'm a SAHM and a feminist. It was a choice I made and am happy with.
My child is one so at this stage I would argue that I am a better SAHP than DH could be, because of my female biology (still breastfeeding on demand).
Saying that either parent should be able to choose to stay at home is fine in the long run but I think we need to be more honest about sex roles in the first couple of years of a child's life.

@fruitlovingmonkey - Most of the breastfeeding mums who gave birth in my circle returned to work 3-12 weeks after birth and performed their 'sex roles' with a breast pump while their DP looked after the baby.

If he is not doing at least 50% of the work involved in running and maintaining a house and the people who live in it, he's not much of a feminist

Why should anyone working full time be expected to do 50% of this if there is a stay at home person?

Earning money is nearly always seen as separate. Earning money is as much part of running and maintaining a household as children rearing and laundry and cooking and vacuuming and so on - exact details, including pet care and gardening will depend on each individual household.

There are obviously restrictions on who can do what - it is unreasonable to expect someone who is out of the house from 8am to 7pm to do exactly the same amount of physical chores as a SAHP, because you do have to physically be there. But it is also unreasonable to expect the SAHP to do 100% of the work in the physical house, particularly once children are involved, which need 24x7 care - you can ignore the vacuuming for another day, but not a dirty nappy or feeding a child. And I think seeing paid work as entirely separate, rather than an essential contribution to the household means it's easier for some people (mostly men) to opt put of doing their fair share of the entire workload.

(Though I do say this from the position of it all being 100% down to me, and not having the option of sharing with someone else.)

Well put!

RunLogan I'm not talking about 'performing' sex roles, rather about human biology. Women lactate, men don't. In order for men to take over this part of parenting, women must do extra work (pumping). This needs to be considered.
I also think there is something misogynistic about taking a perfectly designed female function, packaging it up and selling a sanitised version of it back to us, at a profit. "Women, put away your tits and buy our pumps and bottles so that your partner can feel equally important!"

I forgot who said this a few pages back

That was me.

Women have always done paid work, there have always been women who have worked outside the home, they just tended to be invisible. What the WLM advocated for was women to be allowed to remain in the kinds of jobs that, even in my lifetime, a woman would be expected to give up when she had children, if not when she married.

I get that some women are defined by their career, but the vast majority of women aren't employed in jobs that could be called a career, they just have jobs. Because those jobs tend to be less well paid than their husband or partner's job or trade, and because childcare in this country is relatively expensive, they have little choice but to give up work for at least the primary years or to have to take on a second job in order to keep the family afloat (very often women where I live take on a part time job around their partner's hours to keep the family afloat anyway).

The OP is very lucky in that she is able to make this choice out of a selection of options and will probably be able to keep up with her previous career and be able to return to it. The vast majority of women don't have those choices, and this is where I can't agree with "feminism being all about choice". Choice sounds fabulous, until you recognise that most women don't have actual choices between an array of equal options, what they have is a Hobson's choice between the potential that they might be made supervisor one day, but might not be able to eat properly until then because of childcare costs, or staying at home with any children they have. If we say that feminism is about choice, what are we saying to those women?

While we live under Patriarchy, I think we just have to trust that women are doing the best they can with their own circumstances while encouraging them to think critically about those choices and where they come from and working to expand the range of options they have to choose from. Even the women who 'choose' to go back to work between 3-12 weeks and put themselves through expressing are making that choice because of circumstances or peer judgement or because they live in a regressive country that fails to provide women with adequate paid maternity leave.

I'm not 100% sure where this rant was meant to go, but the whole concept of choosey choice without understanding the background against which those choices are made seems a bit one dimensional to me.