This is what I was saying last election campaign:
This is the kind of comment that makes non-parents hate parents and all women hate Heffernan. This arrogance. You can’t know about community unless you’ve had children? Please. In my opinion you can’t know a hell of a lot about raising children until you’ve raised children. I certainly didn’t, in retrospect. But you can know a lot about community, and sacrifice, and hardship, and there are many ways to participate in community without having children. Besides how many politicians know that much about nappy buckets. I hasten a guess that when you’re working 70 hours a week outside the home you’re a workaholic who is thought of highly at work, and the workplace just wouldn’t function without you, but you know next to nothing about nappy buckets.
And this election campaign? Not all that much has changed in this regard, except that the woman Senator Bill Heffernan was referring to as ‘deliberately barren’ is now the country’s first female Prime Minister and is trying to win the position in her own right. The continual reference to ‘working families’ in election campaigns grates on my nerves terribly, I can only imagine how much it must infuriate those who aren’t being identified as the elixir of elections.
At the very least, people with kids need people without kids not to hate us. We really don’t need to burn through their goodwill like this.
blue milk 
And as if Julia doesn’t know what it is to be part of a working family! She didn’t grow up in a borg maturation chamber.
Just what I was thinking Penni. I certainly felt like a family member before I had my own reproducing thing going.
And I somehow don’t think that my entire life before giving birth was bereft of meaning, insight, community spirit or politics, either.
“Deliberately barren”?!
What a jackass! And here I was beginning to think that the sexism wouldn’t be that bad this time around.
Also? The 50s stereotype of two het parents, two kids, and a picket fence house? Not normal. It never was, and I pray for the day when people will wake up and realize that “family” doesn’t just mean het + kids.
Just to clarify, that ‘deliberately barren’ thing happened last election in 2007.
[…] is also a nice discussion of this over at Blue Milk, talking about how comments like this also hurt people who do have children.) This entry was […]
Thankyou, thankyou, bluemilk. Also thanks for the link to the lament from the childless voter article – it expresses perfectly how I feel about the snide attitude towards childless and childfree Australians. It’s a double whammy when you’re looked down on for not being partnered or having kids, when it’s something you’d quite like, thanks, it doesn’t just magically happen at age 25 for everyone.(although personally I think my taxes are much better spent on schools etc than many other things I have objections to – I don’t think that ‘i don’t have kids so I shouldn’t have to pay for kids’ services’ argument flies).
Whenever I hear the phrase ‘working families’, it really pisses me off. I think about all the productivity and community development I and other single friends put into this bloody country, only to be sneered at in the media for my ‘selfishness’ and lack of contribution to society by not getting married at age 22 and having 10 kids. Oh wait, then I would be sneered at for doing that. Hmm. I’m seeing a pattern here…
Well, I’ll pay for their schools with my taxes since they will pay for my nursing home with theirs. And also wipe my bum, probably. It’s like people without children are supposed to operate in a vacuum or something. It’s very weird.
Yes, and other adults paid for my school infrastructure etc when I was a kid…
‘it’s like people without children are supposed to operate in a vacuum or something. It’s very weird’
AGREED!!!
I am deliberately barren. And I am also deliberately part of parenting communities. Sure, not all the way – like you say, there’s plenty I can’t know. But I’m sure that’s not much more than a rich, white male who works long hours doesn’t know. And as backup emergency babysitter for several people, there’s a hell of a lot I CAN know.
So not only am I offended that these men think I am as unobservant and uncaring about other’s experiences as they are, I am upset about being shut out of those communities that are really important to me. Apparently, if I am deliberately barren, I must sit in bars and drink martinis and am not allowed to sit in parks in the sunshine and watch children play, etc.
Parents and non-parents are people. There is definitely a line between them, but it’s a premeable one. Your constituents aren’t binary automatons, Bill & co, stop assuming we are that simple.
[…] News with Nipples notices that the pollies only seem to notice “hardworking Australian families with children”: she points out that she doesn’t have children, and she votes. Feminist mother Blue Milk is over the working families trope too: she is not interested in burning through the goodwill of people without children. […]