Australian writers Jane Caro and Catherine Fox, like me, believe that the path to feminism for many women will be through motherhood. You’ll think you have so much equality until you have a baby.. and then you suddenly find yourself doing all the night parenting alone (while your partner in love and equality sleeps soundly through the night), struggling to resurrect, sustain or let go of your career, and turning to other mothers for support only to find that we’ve all been pitted against each other in the Great Mummy Wars.
Caro and Fox’s book argues that the pervasive idea that women will never be able to effectively combine work or interests outside the home with marriage, a social life and parenting is a furphy. Both women, but particularly Fox (who is deputy editor of a magazine that always reminds me of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman), have loads of corporate credibility, which should make their call to feminism more palatable for those young women beginning to wonder about the illusion of equality yet still reluctant to embrace radical feminism.
Caro and Fox are interviewed here about their book, and their book is reviewed here by Emily Maguire (I still heart you Ms Maguire), who finds the book to be strong apart from where it ventures too far from the authors’ own experiences. I haven’t yet read it myself so I can’t comment, I know, that restraint is so unlike me.
Hmmm, sounds like a good book. I’m going to have to check it out.
Me too.
[...] of parents telling the truth. Recently I mentioned the release of this book, The F Word – How We Learned to Swear By Feminism by Jane Caro and Catherine Fox. Here is an [...]
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