Training | 2009.11.22
Courage, mothers. While dads push buggies, the revolution still rolls on | Madeleine Bunting
\'Having it all\' can still prove messy and tough, but working life is easier for my generation of women than any before
What is it about working motherhood? The subject is like a suppurating sore, a nasty wound that keeps itching, we keep scratching at it, it never heals. In the last fortnight two mothers have taken to print, describing their private anguish and the conflicts – one as employee, the other as employer – with their understandings of motherhood. And their tales and dilemmas, poignantly depicted, have prompted hundreds of posts, front-page billing and even editorials.
Yet this shouldn\'t be a time to lament but to celebrate being a mother. The changes over the 14 years since I had my first child are truly extraordinary. When I first entered the workplace, there were very few women beyond the age of 30 and many of those were childless; I was back to full-time work 16 weeks after the birth of my first, now I see young women disappearing for a year and coming back to a job-share or part-time work. The changes have brought about a generation of mothers enjoying all kinds of work – fulltime or part-time, as they see fit – alongside their pleasure in their growing children. Contrary to the naysayers, we are having it all.
How did this ever happen, I sometimes muse when I think back to press conferences in the 90s on the UK\'s lamentable maternity leave policies, the worst in Europe. The Tories were tone-deaf on the issue, and initially New Labour was very nervous. Harriet Harman was an early campaigner on maternity leave, and Patricia Hewitt pushed through the right to request flexible working in 2003. Within a year, almost a million women had used that right. The number of part-time workers has continued to climb ever since.
These were considerable achievements because they gave some recognition to the biggest social change of our age – the dramatic shift of mothers into the workforce over the last 30 years. It was a change that spelt the end of the industrial model of segregating men and women; men to work and women in the home. A model that does not serve (and probably never served) either gender well. New Labour can count as one of its most significant achievements its efforts to ease the transition to a new model of shared work and care and give due recognition to the value of women having babies. Of course, Labour could go further, but it has succeeded in establishing a new consensus to which David Cameron\'s party is committed – and is even proposing further measures such as shared parental leave. There is more work to be done.
So why this fascination with the naysayers? Alexandra Shulman, in a very thoughtful article , confessed that she feared the revolution had gone too far. She concurred with Sir Alan Sugar\'s line that women\'s rights to leave and part-time work were so problematic for employers that they risked jeopardising their own employment chances. Others have voiced Shulman\'s reservations, using the recession to bolster their case: we can\'t afford this largesse to mothers.
A similar argument was once used about toilet breaks for those working assembly lines. (Dear, dear, biology does get in the way of employee efficiency.) More seriously, countless studies were done in the 90s to demonstrate the benefits of keeping a mother in the job after maternity leave – the investment in training saved, the value of her experience. The numbers got crunched, I promise you; we don\'t need to rerun old arguments. Yes, there are awful scenarios, but then there always are, however the system is structured; good policy is never built on exceptionalism.
The more important point I take from Shulman\'s piece (apart from the sad comment that her two days off at half term with her son was "stolen time" … stolen from whom?) is that self-doubt is a stubborn characteristic in women bidding to find space in male-dominated public life for their autobiographies.
But I haven\'t tackled the question that really intrigues me. Why is my colleague Gaby Hinsliff\'s piece on the front of the Observer – with beautiful pictures of her and lovely baby boy – and across several pages of the Review as well; what\'s the fascination in a story which, after all, is very familiar: mother discovers she "can\'t have it all" and abandons career (imagine if the story was ever the other way round); what glues us all to these narratives of ultimately triumphant maternal love?
I offer two suggestions, and both are about our anxieties. This is a subject that prompts a visceral tug. We all cherish memories or dreams of unconditional self-sacrificial maternal love. Industrialisation idealised the mother as the "angel of the hearth" who was expected to create the "haven in a heartless world". She was required to show the qualities made redundant in a competitive market economy – to be patient, gentle and loving. But if women go out to work, who will be motherly? The coverage of nurses requiring degrees stirs the same anxiety: will they be "too clever to care"?
Very perceptively, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, a US academic, pointed out that the workplace encourages exactly the opposite skill set – exacting, controlling, task-oriented, goal-focused – to that needed in family life. Girls were once brought up to be mothers and homemakers, but no longer; we need the stories of motherhood as a profound, life-changing shock, telling us that all the emotional kit is still there buried under the career-orientated carapace.
My second suggestion is that we have a nagging anxiety that the social and cultural mechanisms to create a family and raise a secure child are disintegrating. There is no affirmation for the kind of self-sacrifice – at the cost to personal ambition and fulfilment – the long-term commitment and sense of duty required in family life. And since all this has been regarded as primarily a woman\'s responsibility – it was her job to maintain of all the relationships required in family life, whether it\'s the husband, child or elderly aunt – the focus zeros in on motherhood. The statistics are horrific: one in five of children are now born into a household with no father in the UK. Two out of three children will see their parents divorce, and half of those warring couples turn to the courts to resolve bitter legal wrangles. This is a disaster.
I wrote above that my generation of women now has it all. If that sounded smug, it is anything but; there are plenty of messy compromises along the way, whether of unfulfilled ambition or occasionally complaining children. And I also concede we defined "it" too narrowly. Stable families and lasting relationships badly need also to be part of the equation. Pressing on with the continued change of working patterns to share care could play a part in achieving that.
But take heart: the revolution in the expectations of what it is to be a mother and father rolls magnificently on. We are pulling down two centuries of stultifying gender identities. Every time I see a dad pushing a buggy, children hanging on to the handlebars, biscuit crumbs down his coat, pockets stuffed with toys, there is silent applause in my head. I never had fathering like that, I\'m glad my children and many of their contemporaries do: the labour of nurture is too life-enhancing and transformational to be the reserve of women.
Madeleine Bunting is author of Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]work-mothers-gender-motherhood
