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| Feminism and Parenting |
Intro ...
Inspired by the launch of Anne Summers' new book - The End of Equality, this month's topic is "Equality and Having Babies"
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Quotes ...
"Overall, as a society we are not doing nearly enough to help women do what most say they want: the ability to combine being mothers with having jobs. Our official fertility rate - number of births per woman - is currently just 1.65 for urban Australian women. That's below the 2.1 rate needed to reproduce the population. Thirty years ago women were having an average of 3.6 children each. Today around 25 per cent of women will end up not having children at all" - Anne Summers "And there's no contradiction between feminism, which means women should have all that they are entitled to, all that they can do, all the opportunities that they can take advantage of they should have. That includes parenting." - Anne Roiphe
"What is still not acknowledged, by economists or the society, is that most human capital is created by mothers and other early teachers and caregivers. Mothers are the most valuable producers in the entire economy. Yet what they do is not even considered work at all. The penalties on American mothers are now so high that many women decide not to have kids at all. Childlessness among educated American women is now higher than it has been since the turn of the 20th century. Motherhood is now the single greatest risk factor for poverty among American women. That is not by women's choice it's the choice of employers, of government, of unequal marriage laws and judges. In no other county is motherhood such a threat to a woman's financial well-being" - Ann Crittenden
"The guys who are running Australia - in government and industry - have no personal understanding of what it's like for the majority of people. They earn a lot more but also a very large number of them lead very traditional lives. Their wives might have had careers but now are full-time wives. You have to ask yourself why it is that these people who are in such positions of power live lives so at odds with the rest of us." - Anne Summers
"Parenting really does force people -- often against their conscious wills -- back into the traditional grooves." - Susan Maushart
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Articles ...
An excellent article - The End of Equality is a forceful epitaph to a cause Summers has championed for decades. It argues that the notion of equal opportunity has been going backwards, critics silenced, government agencies charged with advocating women's issues have been scrapped, cut back or denied funding while - as far as jobs go - the glass ceiling has now become a closed door. Attitudes to working mothers are of particular concern and Summers argues that this comes from the very top. Perhaps the current phenomenon, popularly known as a "baby strike", shouldn't surprise. Australia's birth rate is the lowest in history. But while government and industry fret and lecture about the consequences of an ageing, childless society, young women are balking, forced to make a choice between freedoms and careers their mothers' generation won and the sometimes ambiguous societal status of motherhood today. http://bulletin.ninemsn.com.au/bulletin/EdDesk.nsf/All/607194891406263FCA256 DB3001245D5
"If ever he bothered to ask them I believe John Howard would be shocked at what Australian women have to say about their lives today. Rather than the white-picket paradise he envisages for them, women want to make their own way in the world, to not be dependent on men who may turn out to be unreliable or simply not the one. They want good jobs, often careers, and they want their own houses and other material goods. All this before they even begin to think about having babies. In other words, the notion of equality is firmly implanted in the psyches of Australian women and they are not going to easily let go of it." - Anne Summers http://www.wel.org.au/announce/denoon/03lecture2.htm
"I had always been an optimist when it comes to women's equality. I always assumed things would keep getting better and better, that women would get the jobs they wanted (especially given the increased levels of education most women enjoy today), would get paid equally with men, would get the promotions they deserved, would get the leave they are legally entitled to when they were pregnant and their jobs protected so they could return." - Anne Summers http://www.couriermail.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,7858060%255E2719 7,00.html
The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued The Price of Motherhood, a widely acclaimed bestseller, argues that although women have been liberated, mothers have not. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, and the latest research in economics, family law, sociology, history, and child development, this provocative book shows how mothers are uniquely disadvantaged economically. Unlike most other nations, the United States systematically refuses to value or support unpaid caring labor. As a result, mothers, children, and society as a whole pay an enormous price. Crittenden makes a forceful argument that the anachronistic, dependent status of mothers and other caregivers is the finished business of the woman's movement. "I discovered, to my surprise, that mothers are clearly more willing to spend family income on children than fathers are. This is a powerful finding that cuts across all cultures. It is also universally true that the more education a woman has, the more time she is likely to devote to her children. This means that "women's liberation" is the best thing that has ever happened to children. The people who argue that mothers should subordinate their own interests and autonomy "for the sake of the kids" have it exactly backwards." http://www.anncrittenden.com/about.htm
"Each partner concentrates on doing that thing that he or she is just a tiny bit more able or more inclined or more culturally encouraged to do "just for now". For example, feeding the baby. It's an art form. For most these days, it starts with breastfeeding, which obviously is not going to be shared. Mum takes over when baby starts to diversify his diet because well, this is just something she's done all along. When it's Dad's turn to cook and feed supper, he finds it's really tricky. The kid doesn't like what he's provided. He eats all the banana, throws the spaghetti on the floor and puts the custard in his ear. Dad has a steep learning curve. He's bad at this. It takes too long and leads to too much frustration. So they agree usually tacitly for the sake of familial harmony that this will be her thing. Personally, I enjoy being a single parent, and I think on the whole I'm good at it. But then I have many unusual qualifications for the job: a good income, a profession that is meaningful to me, many supportive friends and a temperament that is well suited to solo life. Having said that, I think people idealize single motherhood sometimes, out of a real depth of ignorance of what it entails. Doing everything on your own is not empowering. It is exhausting. Sometimes I think I don't need a husband, but I would love to have a chauffeur, a live-in handyman and a receptionist! " An interview with Susan Maushart on gender equality in relationships and parenting. http://www.indiebride.com/interviews/maushart/
I think the day will come when we will see the late 20th to early 21st century as a very bizarre little blip in human history: a time where, for a while, we tried hard to convince ourselves that equality meant equivalence. Of course, it does not. We will never succeed in reorganizing the workplace to welcome (rather than tolerate) mothers until we acknowledge that bearing and raising children is not some pesky, peripheral activity we engage in, but THE WHOLE POINT. Because motherhood is a "good thing" it must be seen to be an unmitigated wonder. I think we are also very uncomfortable with the expression of negative emotion generally by women. We would much rather label a woman as "sick" or "depressed" than confront her anger or sense of injustice. We also have a thing about mother-blaming-a legacy of psychoanalysis that has begun to be rehabilitated, at long last. The fear, a well founded one I might add, of being blamed for all of society's ills is enough to make anybody put on a fake smile. http://www.mothersandmore.org/Advocacy/MaushartForum.shtml
"They're my pride and joy" is a decades-old expression used by mothers to describe their children. Shattering the stereotype of the childless woman, here are 25 stories from a diverse group of women who choose not to bear children, and whose "pride and joy" comes from their own contributions and accomplishments. http://www.singlesrights.com/speakersbureau/topical_files/speakers/terri.htm
Andrew Denton's interview with Naomi Wolf. "And none of them (pregnancy guide books) were honest about the kind of really difficult conversations that men and women have to have ideally before the baby is born but certainly after the baby is born about whose expectations are they, about who washes the bottles, who does the laundry, who is staying home from work, who is going to work. The women I interviewed post-partum with loving, supportive husbands or partners were in a state of profound resentment because these conversations had not taken place and they were finding they had the lion's share of the work. " http://www.abc.net.au/enoughrope/stories/s842734.htm
The fact that the workplace remains dreadfully family unfriendly; that many working mothers are guilt-stricken and expect to be discriminated against by employers when their dual roles conflict; that many young women erroneously think they can postpone having children well into the second decade of their busy careers; and that an increasing number of young, fertile women are choosing not to have children at all, leads to some big questions for feminism. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/04/22/1050777253817.html
"Recently the New York Times Magazine published an extensive article describing a group of women who have decided to step away from careers to raise their young children under the title The Opt Out Revolution. The article, while evocative of an important decision that many women face, described only one small faction of society. The "opt out revolution" described in the article comes from an inherent position of privilege. It is neither a phenomenon nor a trend, because it affects a limited number of women with sufficient economic resources that they can make rational choices. When my daughter was born I was a working class teenager. I wanted a different life than the one on offer so I went to college, graduate school, and then started a career. These choices were not perceived as socially acceptable - neither having a child nor choosing to focus on a career fit a set of external ideals. " - article by Bee Lavender. http://www.hipmama.com/node/view/357
See www.amazon.com for The Mother Trip: Hip Mama's Guide to Staying Sane in the Chaos of Motherhood - a guide book dedicated to the non-nuclear family.
Feminist Mothers at Home website - http://feministmothersathome.com/
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ARTICLE RESEARCHED AND COLLATED FOR THE DECEMBER 2003 NEWSLETTER
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