Morning coffee for me, I will put the kettle on
I wrote a long post about sexual violence and deleted it, as it was too depressing and I am struggling with it all. It is too depressing.
So I am going to respond to ftw instead. Bearing in mind it is pre-caffeine, so it might not make sense. I don’t think being a SAHM is not a feminist choice, because materialist feminists in the early twentieth century fought long and hard on women’s issues, including family allowances, antenatal care, maternity provision and access to contraception and family planning. So, there is nothing anti-feminist about being a mother, and wanting to spend one’s time being a mother.
The feminist issues come around the protections you have in that role. While earlier materialist feminists argued for state protection of mothers, these arguments were less prominent in the later twentieth century, where the issues were around greater access to equality in the workplace, self-sufficiency and so on. The problem, if you like, is that the workplace assumes a worker without family commitments, or with appropriate support systems, whilst society more generally does not recognise the unpaid labour of these (oftentimes female) support systems. Because the labour is unpaid and unregulated, the home worker is vulnerable.
On the other hand, even though women are more in the workplace, ‘mothering’ has got more intensive from the moment of (ideally planned) conception onwards. So women who work are doing this intensive mothering thing, whilst trying to be the traditional unencumbered worker, and it is exhausting. The rhetoric of work-life balance puts it on the individual’s shoulders, rather than assuming state or societal responsibility to change it.
So, yes, totally understand wanting to be a SAHM, but with protections in place. But personally, my ideal would be part-time work, with both paid and unpaid labour valued.
Yep, I am the pub bore, sorry🤦🏻♀️. Coffee is there if anyone wants it 