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.

I agree @Offred and I would go one step further and say that even in cases where there is no abuse, no coercive control, the vast majority of mothers do not have free choice - eg they are likely to be the lower earners and therefore it's not a balanced decision about whose career takes a hit. This is a vicious cycle.
Agree with the PP who says we would have to give up some things to men (eg half of maternity leave) if we are to achieve equality. Some women just don't want / feel able to do that / cannot afford it due to SPL not being paid properly and their husbands/partners earning more.
We also do not have a choice about physically bearing the children so we do need to have better support around that time.

@SinkGirl exactly - men don't want their career to take that hit. But they are able to use their "economic leverage" to force this situation as they generally are the higher earner. If the woman is, it's much easier to argue that he should do his fair share!

I agree @thegrumpysquirrel.

I think though that the concept of ‘work’ needs to be revisited as individual labour is increasingly becoming irrelevant to the economy.

The important period for attachment is 0-3. Is it so radical to suggest that we mandate 3 years off for both men and women?

Agree completely offred

The rabid pro life stance in the USA has very little to do with actually loving life. People who value life make sure thatcthe humans that already exist have safe, dignified lives. It’s more about punishing women - no you can’t end a pregnancy because LIFE but no, there’s no support for you once the child is born. Utter madness.

You see it fairly often on here - men keeping women barefoot and pregnant as a means of control. It’s a frightening idea.

But what does utopia look like?

I suppose a rethink so that women’s rights around reproduction are sacrosanct. Better education from school age about coercive control. Better support to leave violent men. Abortion access to be improved. Support services fully funded.

Employment - the framework that you can only succeed if you have a behind the scenes facilitator is prevalent now. You can’t hit the top if you’re leaving at 4 to pick up the kids, and if you look at almost all successful (work based success) people they have a sahp or a nanny. And the sahp is usually the woman, so men’s careers thrive while women’s stagnate. More flexible working, more awareness that men are hugely facilitated in work would help.

Better parental leave, better nursery provision, Scandinavian style.

And yes, acknowledging we will all work longer and that a few years out of the workforce shouldn’t kill a career.

However none of these things will happen because men will not allow themselves to be inconvenienced one little bit. Not by child rearing, not by moving over at work. Right now women bear the dual burden of being expected to have a career AND do all the child rearing AND the domestic work. Men have it made, and I doubt they’ll just budge up and sort it.

As offred states, not all mothers chose to have DC, and not all SAHMs or mothers in PT employment chose that.

Infertility is horrible, but that some women who wanted DC can’t doesn’t negate the significant inequality mothers face at work, in addition to the issues (sexism etc) facing women with no DC.

Utopia?

Far fewer abusive or “just” selfish/sexist men. Women rejecting these men.

Good maternity and parental leave rights, and pay. Including contractual pay for fathers taking shared parental leave equivalent to contractual maternity pay.

Subsidies for childcare.

Housing measures, especially for London, where most jobs are and there is anecdotal evidence that many mums SAH because of housing and childcare costs.

More senior women who are mothers at work. Measures by employers to tackle discrimination and bias against women / mothers, especially in well paid occupations where women leave after becoming mothers, eg law, finance.

Fathers doing a fair share of parenting and domestic work, including the “mental load”, and evening pick ups/parenting (ie leaving work early).

Many, many more SAH and PT fathers.

"However none of these things will happen because men will not allow themselves to be inconvenienced one little bit. Not by child rearing, not by moving over at work. Right now women bear the dual burden of being expected to have a career AND do all the child rearing AND the domestic work. Men have it made, and I doubt they’ll just budge up and sort it."

Yes. So structural changes have to be made both via (1) regulation / government incentives and (2) culturally - eg the examples of France / Scandinavia given up thread and raising girls to expect better / aim for higher paid careers like STEM

To achieve many more SAH and PT fathers you need more true equality in relationships as well as in the workplace... and you need a change in many men's attitudes towards what the choice of having a family means! It should not mean nothing changes for them except more pats on the back.

I think some of these suggestions don’t adequately consider how girls feel about themselves within a patriarchal structure.

There are many narratives about women and girls and pregnancy and motherhood which are mainly written by men.

I think oppressed peoples of many kinds share amongst them a lack of conception of their future selves. This is in part why we have affirmative action things like women’s awards, all women shortlists, work programmes to incentivise, because as much as they are designed to actually open up opportunities, they also have the psychological effect of bringing people who have been alienated from themselves by oppression or negative/traumatic experiences back in touch with the idea that they have a future.

Companies don’t like part timers

I tried to get part time pre-children and was dismissed outright as it was only “allowed” where people had children. This needs to change. When a critical mass of men are also able and willing to be part time then the stigma will reduce.

The oppressed and the traumatised often live only in the past and present.

I live in a Scandinavian country. It’s still not perfect, but there are a lot of good things.

Parental leave lasts a year after the birth of a child. You only get the full year (paid) if you split the time (nine months is the maximum the mother can take).

If both parents are working, they can each take 10 days paid leave each year when their children are unwell.

Because fathers take part of the parental leave, they are more likely to be actively involved in childcare. When parents split, it often happens that residency is 50:50

The long stretches of parental leave and the need for flexibility around childcare have an interesting effect on workplaces. In comparison to the U.K., workplaces have to be more forgiving about unexpected absence. Personal experience suggests there is less infectious illness in nurseries and schools, though that is only my subjective experience.

Because of workplace flexibility, those without children also have more freedom. It’s not uncommon for people to take six months or a year off work to pursue other interests, such as travel or to work in a different environment.

And as for returning to work after 3 months- no thanks

Equality doesn’t mean pretending biology has no impact

Enough of us have suffered physically and mentally with pregnancy and childbirth. As a society we should honour that and allow our bodies, minds and newborns to fully recover from labour and birth. Which means men stepping back from work too to support around that time.

Also; Babel, having said on the other thread you are good on science but lacking on feminist analysis, I beg to differ re your post at 07.41 on this thread

Oops wrong smiley! Was meant to be

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.

This isn't true at all - courts start at 50/50 care during divorce, access to children by the non-resident parent, even if abusive, is common, maintenance is completely detached from care rights etc.

In the US, research shows that if a man makes any effort, they are more likely to get custody than the mother.

If you mean societally - then this is within men's power to change - they just need to step up and start taking care of their own children - packing lunches and PE kits, arranging dental appointments etc.

But that's a very NAMALT response to this thread.

I think that for the Eutopia, society needs to recognise that children bloody exist, that they need looking after, and that it's good for society for children to be well looked after. I think that 3 day weeks for both parents is preferable to one parent working a 5 day week, I think that for many jobs, flexibility is much more possible than is allowed right now. I think that large companies should have on-site creches, and that if a company requires its employees to work round the clock (eg shift work) then they have a responsibility to ensure that suitable childcare is available to those employees at a reasonable cost.

Totally agree @fascinated.

I have been to way too many women’s meetings where the ‘radical’ idea suggested is that women go back to work the day after birth and that babies are raised entirely in state nursery...

I always feel like they are positioning children as ‘the enemy’ rather than patriarchy in that kind of feminism.

I have also raised many times that this is an analysis of privilege. Privileged work lives, privileged experiences of pregnancy and birth etc

Most women would not relate their experiences of pregnancy and birth or work to those ideas.

I also live in a Scandinavian country. Here (Sweden) you have the right to up to 120 days a year to care for a sick child (we’ve only used 4-5 this year but it’s great to have the option.)
You get 480 paid days per child of parental leave. Paid more if you split it equally. You can stretch it out and get paid only 1 day a week for the first year so you can spend longer at home with them. Father DO take more parental leave - still not perfect but better than the Uk.
Fathers are expected to take those sick child days along with mothers. Dh and I split them 50:50. We split everything. We are equal partners.
Subsidised high quality childcare - 150 quid equivalent for the first child a month then lower for subsequent or for lower income. Quality is excellent, teaching in preschool is seen as a lifetime career. Men are well represented.
Children are not narrowly gender stereotyped - the weather is fucking awful here so they all wear outdoor gear and you can’t really tell the girls from the boys. That also feeds into the gender equality.
Men here seem to be happier to take parental leave. I see lots of men taking the childcare on. It’s not perfect but far fewer men here just let the wife do everything - there is generally more equal parenting.

There are VERY few sahp of either sex. All the ones I know are expats. The expectation is you both work, both contribute etc. The thread of equality runs much deeper here.

A huge yes to the pp who says that legislation is the start of social change. When they first introduced the equal parental leave here takeup wasn’t great. So they introduced a bonus for splitting equally and ‘use it or lose it’ days for both partners. That’s driven increased uptake.

The key here is positive legislation AND a more equal society with less gender stereotyping. Those early lessons in equality for preschoolers do filter through.

Here is not utopia - but it’s making positive strides.

I’m learning offred

The older I get the more I think the scales fall from your eyes. Male privilege and the lengths they will go to to defend it is at the root of this.

Dh is a good man, an equal parent, and all that. And we’ve still struggled to thrash out an equal way of working and parenting because our companies are so mired in this idea that a successful man has a wife at home. For us the pressure is external. For women fighting internally within the family unit too or against abuse I can’t begin to imagine how hard it is.

My company have done everything they can to make it hard for me to work flexibly, despite it being their own fucking policy!

That and the experience of two pregnancies has really shown me how entrenched misogyny is. I wasn’t prepared for how much pregnancy birth and young kids would affect me physically and mentally. Now I know, I see how that interacts with the corporate world and society and their expectations to keep women down and im really fucking angry about it.

Motherhood may be a choice for individual women but for humanity at large it's not a choice. No babies, no humans. It annoys me the onus for motherhood is all put on women.

I would also argue that contraception has exacerbated this "choice" argument as it is often portrayed that contraception is infallible and provides women the ability to choose. Where the reality is that contraceptive failures happen a lot and there are many unplanned children out there.

In my utopia work patterns would change to 6 days working days over a week, but the you could only work 4 of them.
That would encourage more shared care.

Definitely more flexibility at work - for everyone, not just parents. There are plenty of reasons why a person might want to work from home, or do compressed hours or flexi-time. And while not all jobs can accomodate those things, there are plenty that can, but don't. Why is this? I know in the case of where I used to work, it was because the CEO didn't trust the staff not to abuse it - the same staff who were referred to as a 'family' and expected to go above and beyond constantly.

As others have said, we as a society are stuck trying to fit ourselves into a working model that was designed in the industrial revolution - we don't send children up chimneys or under cotton looms any more, so why aren't we trying to move beyond that model in other ways as well?

And society needs to reduce the stigma around SAHDs. We went back to the town where I grew up some months ago, and dh was laughed at in the street because he was pushing the pushchair . He's not bothered but plenty of men would be.

Also, when a parent does stay at home for a couple of years, there should be more support for getting back into the workplace - perhaps loans available for retraining? Encouragement for companies to have returnships?

And finally, more subsidised childcare, and for childcare to be a more respected career option. It's an important, skilled job, and should be recognised as such.

Oh yes contraception...

There is a woeful lack of good, low side effect methods that are reliable. Recent trials on male contraceptives were halted because the side effects were deemed unacceptable- the very same type of side effects that women are expected to put up with. I’m sure that shocks none of us.

We are expected to shoulder the burden of hormonal contraception over decades while men blithely get in with it. Then they debate about their choice in abortion or whether they should pay for offspring or not.

As though they had no choice in having sex. The level of responsibility for the woman is when they have sex (which may or May not be consensual) the level of responsibility for men is whenever they feel like abandoning their children.

So as well as contraception I want to make child maintenance compulsory. And enforceable