There is an interesting discussion happening in the comments thread over at this post on Bitch PhD about Linda Hirshman’s ‘Get to Work’ book from a few years ago. Hirshman, you might recall caused quite a stir for mothers when she urged stay-at-home mothers to return to the workplace for the sake of feminist action, marital equality, and their own sense of life fulfillment. Her arguments have some merit – change in the pursuit of equality won’t happen on its own and it won’t happen without feminist women reaching positions of power in workplaces, an outcome which takes long-term commitment – but Hirshman’s arguments were blunt about motherhood, something she saw largely as a mind-numbing pursuit wasting the talents of educated women.
Hirshman is right to question the ultimate power of ‘choice feminism’, it hasn’t always delivered, but there are a few flaws with Hirshman’s world view too and they’re captured rather well in that comments thread, even though the original post isn’t exactly about the Get to Work Manifesto. Like others in the comments thread I’m much more resolved about the impact of motherhood on my career now than I was four years ago when I first took a year off to have a baby. I no longer see my career as a continuous unbroken trajectory, but rather as something which will be ramped up and slowed down at various points to accommodate my family interests, and who knows what else over time.
In fact about six months ago my job suddenly improved greatly – I started working in a new team, overseeing a new area, and my job got a lot more interesting and promising. But by then I was also pregnant with a much wanted second baby. I loved my job but I wanted to be with my baby more in his first year. I trust that when I return to work next year I’ll be able to gear my career up again. I might not pick up exactly where I left off but I know (with relief) from last time that the doors don’t close completely just because I slowed down for a year.
Certainly there are many obstacles for mothers in combining careers and child-rearing but Hirshman was wrong to think that droves of mothers leave the workplace to have babies and are never to return again. And she was also very wrong to think that motherhood represented any kind of betrayal of feminism.
I agree with you that motherhood isn’t a betrayal of feminism, and I really, really wish that Hirshman hadn’t gone down that path at all, because I think there’s one point she made that has been lost in the conversation at BitchPhD and in others I’ve heard. It may be specific to the US, given our ridiculous health care and disability funding situation – I don’t know what retirement funding is like for you or for women in Western Europe. I was really struck by her discussion of the impact of time lost from funding retirement savings. When women stop out from work in their 20s and 30s, they stop funding their retirement savings at the most crucial time, thus creating dependence on their partners not just during the time they have young children but also later in life.
Hirshman is dead wrong when she holds women, and women alone, accountable for this – she seems to assume that this is the one and only system available and that we’re stuck with it forever – but it is the system we have now. I know very few women who have paid attention to the long-term consequences of stopping out of the workforce during their youth.
Superannuation (ie. retirement funds) is a problem for women in Australia too – most women of my mother’s generation don’t have much super to speak of, but we do have a publicly funded pension to fall back on.
I think it’s backwards to see a workplace (and social systems like healthcare and retirement) that make it impossible to take any time out for childrearing and then try to argue that it’s the childrearing that have to go. It shouldn’t be a big deal to take a year off here and there, or to work part-time for a while, not just for children but to care for ageing parents or disabled partners or siblings too (or for that matter, to go volunteer in another country, or surfing or whatever).
I find the working mom/stay-at-home mom debate specious and over-sensationalised. For me the point is, as you say, that a career needn’t be a “long unbroken trajectory”. My mother-in-law went back to work in her fifties, started her own business and became a leader in her industry. A career does not have to happen at 25, 30, or 40.
What I find here in Germany, where the maternity benefits are good but the school hours are short and the after-care horribly expensive and over-subscribed, is that almost every mother works somehow. Part-time, freelance, work from home, two days a week, you name it, we do it. Although a part-time job does not a career make, women are keeping their oars in so that when the time comes to return fulltime, they are ready to do so.
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Oh I find this stuff so challenging. My whole conception of feminism changed so much after having a child. I have no desire (currently) to have any kind of career and feel absolutely no guilt about this. I simply cannot relate to the argument that feminism means that I am obliged to do anything that is not in my or my child’s best interest. And yet I certainly saw things very differently pre-Lily…
I guess Cristy the problem is that what’s in your and my best interests right now, being mostly or totally at home and out of the workforce, isn’t necessarily what’s best for us long term. We (all) tend to make decisions right now based on what we want right now (whether it’s to be at home with kids or to earn our own money or whatever) and we can’t possibly know what will happen in thirty years to our relationships, pensions, or workplaces.
When people talk about the financial sacrifice of staying home with kids (and they’re invariably talking about choosing to stay at home, as opposed to being unemployed or unemployable or unable to find childcare) they tend to focus on the immediate loss of income and ignore the longer burden that is shouldered largely by women. Given the divorce rate, it seems pretty unreasonable to assume that all those stay at home mothers will be retiring to be supported by their husband’s super. So I have some sympathy for discussions about how, in the current circumstances, women who choose to stay home with children are taking a financial risk, but I have no patience for those discussions if they assume that the current way our societies operate is unchangeable.
YAA Adding this to my bookmarks. Thank You