Guest post: As many of you probably know blue milk is written by a ‘working mother’. I work part-time outside the home and being a part-timer I feel like I can relate to some of the experiences of stay-at-home mothers (SAHMs) but I’m aware that I’m missing a lot of the subtleties of the experience, and probably some of the not so subtle differences too. When Shannon Breen showed me a copy of the piece she’d written about ‘mother work’ I thought it was a perfect opportunity to include the outlook of a real live SAHM here on blue milk. Thanks Shannon for agreeing to post an excerpt of your piece here.
Mother work has been recast into an indulgent luxury. ‘The only women who don’t work are women like you, Shannon, who have rich husbands to support them,’ a well-paid working mother tells me. Her implication is clear. Unlike the Prime Minister’s wife, I have chosen to be an ‘appendage’. Ashamed, I make excuses for my laziness. ‘My husband travels for work,’ I say. ‘We don’t have any family in Brisbane to help.’ But that doesn’t really wash. Haven’t I heard of quality child-care? Finally, I plead guilty to what psychologist Daphne de Marneffe calls ‘maternal desire’—the urge to be with my pre-school age children and look after them myself, (weak, pathetic creature that I am).
Later, I reflect on her accusation. I do volunteer work, and study part-time. Why do I have to justify looking after my children? In short, my choice not to avail myself of long-day child-care so I can add another (paid) job to my already busy life challenges the orthodoxy; distrust of long-day care is a heresy. Daphne de Marneffe writes in her 2005 book, Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life, ‘In the current climate, one reflexive reply to (a mother’s) emotional concerns is that they are the luxury of the few; for most, economic realities preclude such subtle objections.’ De Marneffe argues women’s feelings of unease about leaving their young children are not considered ‘reality’, and concludes, ‘…one sometimes gets the sense that economic reality is invoked to shut us up.’
South Australian academic Barbara Pocock identifies this cultural pressure for mothers to do the ‘double shift’ of paid and unpaid work in her 2002 book, Work/Life Collision: What work is doing to Australians and what to do about it. Interviewing women from around the country, Pocock finds that many mothers relish their work identities, and want more flexible workplaces so they can combine both roles. But she also says a mother’s unpaid work should be recognised. One mother, too embarrassed to say she’s at home with her kids, tells people she’s on maternity leave. Pocock writes, ‘The need to be “on maternity leave” —and still a worker with a workplace attachment—while a mother at home, is symptomatic of the increasing ‘non-person’ status that our community confers upon carers—despite sentimental valorisation of motherhood.’ Pocock goes on to argue that full-time mothers ‘work against the grain of society. The greater emphasis on work attachment in making of identity, effectively lowers the status of mothering even further—in the minds of mothers and their friends and community.’
Given the lack of respect for what mothers do at home, many women fear time out of the paid workforce will make them unemployable. After nearly separating from her husband because of the stress of working full-time with a toddler and a baby, Jacqui took two years off from paid work as an interior designer. She emails me:
I am working on my CV today using hubby’s as a template. Mine is pathetic compared to his. I’m constantly tempted to add things like, ‘gave birth, survived breastfeeding, didn’t kill any of them, stayed with husband, lost personality, stayed in workforce, had nervous breakdown, crash course in resentment etc.’ But no one cares!
Full-time work and motherhood
For me, being a working mother is extremely stressful, a lot of the time. I have a stressful job, but I find being a mother even more so…I know that some mums can cope with more ‘face-time’ with their kids than I can each and every week, in fact, they relish it. For me, that just doesn’t work. It makes me a worse mother. It makes me stressed. Something I’m happy to tell anyone who asks.
Scard, and her co-author of The Working Mothers Survival Guide, Channel 7 Sunrise presenter, Melissa Doyle, focus on the practicalities of returning to work. But by glossing over the emotion of leaving a small baby, their book takes on a glib tone. ‘Mel’ was back at work when her baby was 11 weeks old, but she starts work very early and is home by lunchtime. She advises using post-it notes to remember important tasks, and multi-tasking; she boasts of thinking of a ‘clanger’ of a question for the treasurer while brushing her teeth. She and Jo have ‘gorgeous men’ and acknowledge, ‘we couldn’t do what we do without our husbands.’ Their advice to single parents is a couple of website addresses. Mel’s profile on the Sunrise website tells us that in addition to being part of the ‘Sunrise family’, she has two children, ‘and they are her first priority’.
Given her six-figure salary and glamorous job, Mel’s ‘just an ordinary mum’ shtick is annoying. But the simplistic advice regarding negotiating the ‘work/life balance’ with an employer is most galling. ‘Be clear with your employer about what new family responsibilities you now have and what that might mean for your work life,’ Scard and Doyle advise. ‘Make it clear that you won’t be staying back late as often but that you will be prepared to do work from home if it’s needed.’ Phew. That should help you negotiate hours at the factory, then.
Women like Scard and Doyle have an absolute right to return to work whenever they can ‘manage’ it. My concern with their book, and advice from celebrity mums generally, is that it gives the impression that working with a ‘new’ baby is a matter of making a list, getting your husband on side, and hiring a cleaner and a nanny. Women with careers may be able to afford to do this, but women who really do work ‘because they have to’ often don’t have the resources to make doing both jobs bearable. Even if paying someone else to do the domestic chores makes the physical load lighter, the emotional load can’t be outsourced. Though they downplay it, Doyle and Scard acknowledge the emotional ‘tug of war’ of combining full-time work and mothering. They insist the stress is worthwhile. I wonder: would a woman forced to use substandard child-care so she could clean Doyle’s house agree?
It’s not news that even mothers who go back to work happily find the ‘juggle’ difficult. Pocock argues inflexible workplaces, combined with an ‘idealised’ view of what mothers should do, makes women feel they must ‘do it all’: the ‘New Momism’ in the Australian context. And then there’s the problem of what fathers aren’t doing. Despite at least a decade of conversations about ‘work/life balance’, many Australian men still don’t do their share of domestic labour. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures released for National Families Week in May 2008 found mothers working in full-time paid employment still spent twice as much time caring for children and doing housework as their male partners. The ABS reported almost identical figures in 1992. In 2008, mothers choose part-time work (60% of women with children under 15 years of age work part-time), but men have continued to work long hours. The Australian Institute of Family Studies reports the average father works 47 hours a week; a quarter of fathers work 55 hours a week or more. Of these dads, 61% say they would like to work fewer hours.
Unless men change their work practices and attitude, women will continue to deal with the stress of the double shift. Jacqui, mother of two, says:
While many women, like Kate, choose part-time work, it can often lead to even more stress than working full-time. In the first national survey of ‘work-life outcomes’ conducted in 2007 by Professor Barbara Pocock and her colleagues at the University of South Australia’s Centre for Work + Life, women with children working 16 to 34 hours a week reported less satisfaction than mothers working full-time.
Bindi, aid worker, mother of two children
‘I haven’t given much thought to feminism. Feminism to me means being free in your thoughts and words and having the opportunity to give whatever it is you want a go. And I think most women would be happy with having a fella, who is your friend and doesn’t expect you to be his slave, (ie. does some of the chores too.)’
Kate, paramedic, mother of two children
Conservative commentators such as Angela Shanahan and Janet Albrechtsen have suggested the cultural pressure on mothers to return to paid work is the fault of feminism. There’s no doubt the early second-wave feminists claimed the family was a potential source of oppression, and that women had a right to equality in the workplace. They’re still right on both counts. If they made a mistake, it was in underestimating the joy, satisfaction and (to use a 70s phrase) ‘self-actualisation’ many women achieve through mothering. Today, the fight for equality in the workplace has overshadowed the right to ‘choose’ mother work. But they needn’t be mutually exclusive. Melbourne academic Marty Grace argues for a ‘third wave’ feminist movement to ‘recognise that caring for children is valuable, not only because it is precious, important and worth doing, but because it takes up time.’
So how do the 1970s feminists view today’s unprecedented level of female workplace participation, and the child-care sector that supports it? In November 2007, ABC TV’s Difference of Opinion brought together a panel of child-care advocates, and Chief Executive of ABC Learning Centres, Eddy Groves, to discuss whether federal government subsidies had eroded the community sector and quality care. Interestingly, the women instrumental in setting up child-care in the 1970s and 80s see real deficiencies in the sector today. Professor Deborah Brennan from the University of NSW, author of The Politics of Australian Child Care, told the program that government rebates were useful, but having just returned from Europe, she found it ‘scandalous’ that Australia still did not provide paid maternity and parental leave ‘for parents to spend that first year with their own babies’.
On the international evidence, for-profit care is ‘poorer quality’ than not-for-profit care, according to Professor Brennan, but university researchers have been barred from conducting independent studies in ABC Learning centres. She called on Eddy Groves to let researchers test his website’s claim:
My view is that if hundreds of millions of dollars are going to corporate child-care, if those subsidies are big enough to make you, Eddy, the richest young man in Australia last year, then I think that research by independent university-based or other independent scholars ought to be a condition of receipt of funding.
Even if independent researchers haven’t been able to assess quality, child-care workers themselves have a clear view. In April 2006, The Australia Institute published a survey of child-care workers, Child Care Quality in Australia. Roughly three-quarters of child-care workers in corporate centres said they did not have enough time to develop individual relationships with children. Corporate staff were also more likely to respond with comments like these from a child-care worker in NSW: ‘Care is adequate, but the child’s development is secondary to keeping up appearances…the director is primarily a money collector and whip cracker.’
This message may not be getting to the policy makers. In April this year, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd gave a speech to the conservative Sydney Institute’s annual dinner. He spoke of the-then forthcoming 2020 Summit, and his own idea for the future, a ‘one stop shop’ for parents of children from birth to five years. Without the detail, the Parent and Child Centres are hard to envisage. But the Prime Minister made one assertion that should ring alarm bells. ‘Some or all of the services offered in these centres could be supplied by the private sector, and would be subject to competition between providers, helping to drive quality up and prices down,’ he said.
Unfortunately, ABC Learning has shown the private sector does not ensure increased quality, or lower prices.
The Prime Minister’s other notable comment was about the Schools Summit that preceded 2020. He said it was ‘sobering’ to hear these comments from high school students:
How long a mother stays at home, when she returns to work, how many hours she does each week, and how she manages all her other commitments are individual decisions each woman makes to suit herself and her family. Every parent tries to make the right decision, given the circumstances. My personal hope is that the work mothers do will regain some respect in the current ‘Get to Work’ climate. But the last words of this essay go to a working mother.
‘My children learnt to flinch at the word “meeting”,’ Julie Rigg laughs over the phone. I’ve rung Julie, an ABC broadcaster, because she was a founding member of the Women’s Media Action Group in the early 1970s. Deborah Brennan credits the Action Group with having a huge influence in establishing community based child-care, through protests and successful government lobbying. Julie takes me through the history, the ups and downs. By the time the ABC in Sydney got on-site child-care, her own children were grown. It was clearly a passion for her, and I’m in awe of her achievement: working mothers really did have to fight to make it happen.
So how long did she stay at home with her babies?
‘Five months with my youngest. There was a real fear that if you stayed out of the system someone would argue that women shouldn’t work. It was a highly politicised time,’ Julie says. ‘A woman’s right to work felt very tenuous.’
There’s silence as I write this down. And then she says, ‘It’s now one of my biggest regrets.’
I’m surprised. Why?
‘I felt very stressed all those years. I was a single parent at the time I joined the ABC,’ Julie says. ‘I felt very stressed, and I think five months is better than six weeks, but I think you miss too much. I was working too hard, and I wasn’t having enough enjoyable time with my kids.
‘Whenever I see friends of mine having children, and I have a few honorary grandchildren, it’s the one thing I tell them. Take as much bloody time as you can get your hands on.
I like your last comment…you don’t get that time back and it’s a special time. I am a stay-at-home mom and I don’t regret my choice to stay home with my two girls. I had my first a few months after I graduated college so I never had the chance to put my degree to use, but what is important to me is raising my children. My husband always tells me that when they start kindergarten that he would support me in any career choice I make, but until then they are in my full care and I wouldn’t have it any other way. The early childhood years are the most important and I never understood why women are so anxious to get back to work when they have the most important job to tend to; raising their children.
Thanks for such an informative post…
Kalisha
This is quite a piece!
One of the issues raised here that resonates for me is how the social dismissal of care work leads to an individual not being entirely sure how she feels about it. I wonder if there’s a relationship between the actual social condemnation of care work (which I believe there is, given the evident social disgust for at-home mothers, the fact that daycare is such poorly paid work, and the fact that caring is acceptably outsourced to people we don’t allow to do more “desirable” work – legal and illegal immigrants, in the US) and the mixed feelings some mothers have about their mothering work. I love being home with D right now, but certainly know of people who find the work too “boring” to tolerate. Caring is such a flexible activity – you can do it a hundred different ways – that it’s hard not to see how social disgust towards carers has turned into disgust towards the self while performing mothering work.
kalisha/mommylounge – thanks for your comment. For ideas on why women are “so anxious to get back to work when they have the most important job to tend to” – you might want to read some of my other posts, particularly this one.
Emily – I think this is a great point you’ve raised.
Feminism, motherhood and all that lies in-between…
My brain has been consumed lately with the difficulty that I am having in finding an acceptable balance between mothering Lily and completing my PhD (with any degree of sanity left intact). Interestingly, several posts have popped up in the blogo ……..
[…] mothers (flexible hours, sick leave, ability to pump breastmilk at work). If I choose to stay home, I want my work in the home to be valued and don’t want to be seen as lazy or contributing less to […]
I am not sure who started pitting moms working outside of the home against those who work in the home full time, but I wish they hadn’t. Let’s get back to the adage, “It takes a village to raise a child” and work together, not against one another. I happen to be a stay-at-home mom by choice( I was a teacher for over 10 years prior to motherhood, and in my case, figured if I spent so much time teaching other kids, I most definitely wanted to spend that time with my own). But that happens to be my passion, not every mother’s passion.
I have one other point: Society likes to label “working mom” to mean a mother who gets paid to work outside the home. Did you ever stop to think, then, that “working moms” include daycare providers, housekeepers, and food service workers, which, of course, describe what “stay-at-home” moms do at home everyday? Just food for thought…
[…] Best Posts: Motherhood/ Feminisim Published September 1, 2008 Uncategorized Choice Reflections on ‘mother work’ by a stay-at-home mother […]
I always assumed that I would stay at home with my kids until they were in school. But I found that I needed to go back to work before I went insane. I lasted just over 12 months with my eldest and 18 months with the next. It didn’t make it any easier to leave them and I had nightmares about what could happen in childcare for a week beforehand, but I had to do it for me. I really wanted to be one of those mums who can spend all day with the kids but I find I become very stressed that way. I still do the majority of child rearing and housework on top of working part-time, but find I am less stressed than when I was home full-time.
I have been very fortunate that my ABC Centre pre-existed as community daycare and most of the carers stayed on. The Centre Manager is top knotch, and knows every child in the place. My children both formed strong attachments to their carers.
I loved this post – beautiful writing and carefully expressed and non-judgemental ideas; thanks for taking the time to write it.
What strikes me in these discussions (as they play out in public and between individual women) is the way in which the motivation of ‘I want to’* (which I think underlies reasons like “I would go mad with boredom if I didn’t) is acceptable for combining paid work and mothering but not for staying at home (“I would go mad from the stress if I did”). Either way, women are having to justify their choices in ways men don’t have to – and mostly choose not to.
* acknowledging there are loads of women who have to
For ideas on why women are “so anxious to get back to work when they have the most important job to tend to” – you might want to read some of my other posts,…
Here’s one of mine.
(What happened to Valium for the Soul / Blue Bolt? Come back Bluebolt! I miss you!)
[…] Shannon Breen, guest posting on blue milk unpacks the stigma that surrounds stay-at-home mothers. Real Mummy notes that mother work comes without sick leave entitlements. blue milk reviews Mama PhD and discovers that sexism is alive and well in academia and squeezing the life out of academic mothers, while two peas, no pod reviews her life and understands what that squeezing sensation is about. eglantine’s cake enchants with a fascinating investigation of her feminism, her motherhood and the intersection of the two. blue milk profiles a thought-provoking contribution to her series on feminist mothers with a pro-feminist father. Ramping It Up decides her feminism helps her to be a more optimistic mother and carer for her daughter with a disability. Garden Variety outwits the Disney Princesses, while Bad Mummy Syndrome explores the limits of female life in public spaces with an account of prams and public toilets. […]
Interesting. I feel very lucky to have discovered all you insightful mothering feminist blogs so early. My babies are still under 12 months so I haven’t felt pressure to return to work. I’m intending to stay home until they are at least three (sanity and finances allowing). I’ve not internalised any of this social devaluing yet – and now I’m en garde!
I’m one of those who tried to be a SAHM, but I literally was going insane. I work full-time and rush home to pick up my son from daycare. I, honestly, have become more patient, loving and connected by taking the time I need away. Kudos to those who can stay home, but I am not one of them.
The non-judgemental tone of your post is really rare. Most people I know combined some stay-at-home motherhood and some work at different times. The stark opposites of SAHM and working mum just didn’t really match any of our experiences. I suspect it would be easier on parents generally if they had mother, a decent employee, a decent student is too much. It all ends up being done badly (going psycho as one of your quotes so aptly puts it).
I can’t imagine how that would be achieved, really. But part of the relief of going back to full time work is having the luxury of eight hours a day to spend concentrating on doing one thing well. It’s like a gift. The other thing about work is that most of the useful skills I have come from being a parent and juggling competing demands. It has made me the deadline queen. Workplaces should recognise the skill set that being a stay at home mother gives.
[…] mothers (flexible hours, sick leave, ability to pump breastmilk at work). If I choose to stay home, I want my work in the home to be valued and don’t want to be seen as lazy or contributing less to […]