Motherhood and equality, what does Eutopia look like?

[Bumpitybumper]

I accept that I'm incredibly slow to the party, but a few threads and specific posts that I've read have really highlighted to me that motherhood lies at the heart of feminism. Whilst I wouldn't say the battle has been completely won for women prechildren, statistics around earnings and education do look promising, however it seems all of this drops off a cliff once kids arrive. I think this is related to lots of factors, some of which are within women's control (eg choosing to be a SAHM) and some not (eg not being able to afford the childcare required to work).

In this context I have been pondering what equality looks like in a post children world. Personally I think it would involve society viewing an individual's career as a lifespan with expected peaks and troughs. It is madness that the peak decades for building your career are also the decades when women are fertile. I think there should be a greater acceptance that when someone has kids it is natural and normal to want to spend time with them and this probably will not be compatible with working long hours and doing lots of travel for work. This should all be a standard expectation of men and women with young families so things like flexible working should be encouraged and time spent at home should be viewed as a pause on a career, not a termination of a career. The big pay off for such an approach would be that as kids grow and parents are able to refocus on their careers, nobody would be too heavily penalised for gaps in CVs or a few years on the career slow track. This would make it much easier for women and men to close any gaps that may have opened up. It also doesn't ignore the reality that parents with young kids simply do not have the flexibility and time that childfree employees have to devote to their career without effectively never seeing their children which is unacceptable to many.

Is my view of equality post children Eutopia in line with what others think? I can see a shed load of challenges to making mine work, but it doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility.

My eutopia would be to fit a high paid career around school hours.

I think if you asked most childless (not childfree, that is people who don't want children) women they would give up their "flexibilty and time" to have children. You made the conscious decision to have children. I made no decision to not have them. That was made for me. We are all fighting a war but different battles. I know I am fighting to not have people think I am rolling in money and spend my time having brunch and sleeping in. I am fighting to not always have to work holidays because people think not having children means you don't have a family. Women need to stick together regardless of their reproductive status.

IvyFluids Good point. It is such a difficult landscape to navigate. I entirely see your point about not having to work more than your share of holidays, however from a parent's perspective covering childcare for these times can be extremely difficult and for some I do honestly believe it can be impossible. We need a solution for women (and men) that doesn't ignore this reality otherwise hoards of people (usually women) will be forced to drop out of the workforce.

Parents of young children do normally need more flexibility than a person with no children or older children. I hope this statement isn't too controversial and accept adults with other caring responsibilities are in a similar position.

It is a choice to have children, but it's a choice the majority make and I believe people should be assisted as much as possible during this difficult stage of life just because it's the decent thing to do and has longer term benefits for society. Watching people struggle and doing nothing to assist on the basis that they are in that situation through choice just seems wrong. I know that's not what you're saying but just a general point about the whole 'children are a choice' brigade.

I agree with that. I think also that because mothering is so fundamental to human society, it becomes either contentious or dismissed as trivial. We could remove the contentious aspect if we could all try to assume that no one is SAHMing or WOHMing at anyone but rather doing what works for them and their family at that time. If we start from this point and help each other how we can from either side, imagine how strong a community there could be.

Can I gently remind that not all women with children have chosen to have them or to be at home with them. Forcing pregnancy, controlling access to contraception/abortion, controlling access to work through the imposition of children are all ways that abusive men control women. This is more common than people think IMO and you wouldn’t necessarily know about it because everyone assumes (sexistly) that a woman is naturally inclined to see having children as the ultimate achievement of her womanhood. Plenty of people will not admit to what they see as a shameful origin of their children in part because of the above and in part because to acknowledge the circumstances may make the shape of their lives unbearable.

Surely that means we should be even more inclined to help each other precisely because we don't know the circumstances? Rather than framing motherhood as a choice, look at what is happening now and do what we can inasmuch as we feel able?

Even research into unintended pregnancy doesn’t acknowledge the concept of abuse being a factor despite handwringing about ‘teenage pregnancy’ and this group of women/girls suffering the highest rates of abuse.

What's 'Eutopia'?

Yes I agree re motherhood as a choice. I really disagree with the framing of motherhood as a choice FULL STOP. It is such a pervasive attitude applied to women it makes me sensitive! The idea that abusive men use pregnancy and children to control women is really almost entirely limited to specialist domestic violence services and is not seen generally in society.

That's really scary, Offred. Why is that do you think? I really hate the idea of women and girls being pregnant against their will.

The sexist narrative that stems from it involves many things like ‘all women are desperate breeders’ ‘all men have to desperately avoid women who want to trick them into babies’ and a narrative where the focus is entirely on suspicion about women’s adherence to hormonal contraception and men re contraception being limited to ‘trusting’ women to take it.

I find it frightening that so many men truly believe that their entire role in contraception, even in ONS is ‘she looks trustworthy and has said she’s on the pill’ and how this then feeds into ‘she trapped me’ as a way to abandon responsibility for a resulting child.

I do think sex education and education about contraception is a big factor but this is made a lot of whilst misogynistic attitudes and the resulting abusive interactions are entirely absent from any aspect of debate, research or discussion that is not within specific ‘women’s abuse services’.

Pregnancy as a choice (as an absolute) really means ‘women choose this so they have to take the consequences’ IMO.

There is a reason why things that women’s aid and rape crisis know have not translated into general society IMO.

I think parenting needs to stop being owned by mums and subbed by dads. With few exceptions the Dad is on the bench.

BUT, and I think about this a lot. Motherhood is ironically where a woman’s greatest power over men lies. It’s the only place I can see where men suffer from inequality. Women ‘own’ children in our society and even with the best lawyer in the world men can do very little to get equality with the Mum. So in order for us to get overall equality in life, I think we need to accept the loss of our power in this area.

I have often thought that when having a baby, equality in both the home and in life could be achieved if we took leave for ourselves and not the baby. And the baby’s needs were catered for by the Dad as much as the Mum. I personally don’t think a baby needs it’s Mum exclusively. I think a baby needs a caring adult. So that could easily be the Dad. The Mum needs time off work to recover medically from the birth, much the same as any illness or injury. Beyond that, the baby could be cared for by either parent.

But women won’t like this proposal at all. So I’m not sure we can ever achieve full equality without letting go of this area of life that we currently own.

You can even see these attitudes in the religious right pro life attitude that seeks to restrict access to abortion ‘even for raped women’. This stems from the idea that the ultimate expression of womanhood (children) should be forced on women at least as much as it comes from feelings about when life begins IMO.

Even the horrible ‘rape clause’ has had to acknowledge it by including ‘children conceived in coercive controlling relationships’

It still remains an open secret that men control women with pregnancy/childcare.

I personally don’t think a baby needs it’s Mum exclusively. It does whilst breastfeeding.

The reality is simply that hormonal contraception for women exists. This does not mean that pregnancy is now a choice for women or that all women with children have chosen to have them and chosen to look after them.

I know only one woman with children who has both chosen to be pregnant and chosen her parenting responsibilities and this is because the man she has married respects her as a person and because she is far and away the highest earner and therefore has greater economic power.

Men remain the gatekeepers to ‘choices’ around children for everyone in the vast majority of the decisions.

Probably the majority of women choose to be pregnant but then end up losing control of their lives and choices once the child is there. This is why motherhood politicises. But there is still a significant minority of women whose choices about pregnancy are controlled by men and this issue is totally ignored.

I think work itself would have to look quite different. More balanced around people’s lives. At the moment many of us still work in a model that was built for one man going to work, one woman at home keeping house supporting his career, and it’s changed a bit over the years (women get to stay at work after we get married/have babies now) but there’s only so far you can get with that system.

This is one of the issues with “equality” as a goal - if we campaign for equal access to patriarchal systems, what we get is a bit of accommodation retrofitted in (paid maternity leave, or time/space to express breastmilk) but no big substantial changes to the system itself. And then it’s “well, you chose to have babies, can’t expect to have babies and a smooth career path” while men have been expecting and getting just that for generations.

I don’t know what a fairer system would look like though. It would be so different that it’s hard to imagine from what we’re used to and what we’ve grown up with. Maybe we’d have to look back pre-industrial revolution, before factory jobs and large companies, and think more in those terms than the terms of the 1950s and 1960s.

I agree that work should be looked at as a lifespan. I currently work part time but over the course of my working life it will only amount to a very short period but like you say, it's clashes with a key career point for me. Also I wish more employees would see the value of part-time workers and also consider job sharing for more senior roles. I think as long as you have adequate hand overs and good communication, there is no reason two people can't do one senior job well. It would allow women to still progress during the time their children are still young. I've heard so many times 'we need a full time manager, it can't be a part time position' etc... and think kind of attitude puts the breaks on career progression of part time women.

And yy breastfeeding aside, what a baby needs rest attachment is a consistently responsive carer; nanny, mother, father, grandparent, foster carer whatever, it just needs to be someone consistent and responsive.

*re

Besides which, there’s a lot of variables.

I chose to have a baby - I didn’t choose to have twins which has made childcare impossible to afford if I went back to work. I didn’t choose to have a child with a disability that means I’ve never been able to leave him with someone else besides my DH

and I don’t believe that women are the reason that the adoption of shared parental leave is so low. In general, most men don’t want their career to take the hit that women already accept.

It's a common abuse tactic to manipulate a woman into having a baby, say all the right things "it'll complete us, i'll take such care of you and baby, I love you to pieces, I couldn't cope if you didn't want a bad you with me" blah blah (been there!)
Then they ramp up the abuse once you're pregnant and they've got you dependent on them.

I'd agree motherhood is central to most women's lives and therefore extends to be an important factor in feminism. A lot of other women's issues such as VAWG, the sex trade and porn, hyper femininity, syereotypes etc play a big part too though.

Patriarchy conveniently ignores childen. Work is set up out of the home, long hours, long commutes, it always assumes there's someone looking after the children so that people with families can spend a lot of time outside of the home working. As there is a strong bias towards males in the workplace the "person" looking after the children is usually the mother, and if there's paid childcare it's almost always a woman.

So when it comes to the workplace ideally it should just be understood that many employees come with children attached to them and should be structured around that eg working from home options, childcare vouchers paid by the company, more part time options eg to match school hours and holidays.

A radical feminist idea is to have all workplaces set up with a creche and a breastfeeding room.

In other countries eg France and Germany all childcare is free and it's really good quality in France children from 3 months old go to creche which is free and you can choose the hours. Mum's often return to work after 3 months.
Why can't this country manage something as basic as that?