Posts tagged childcare
Reply turned post: What is ‘work’?
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I left this rather long comment on Catherine Redfern’s post on The F-Word, which was about the Conservatives’ proposed tax break for married couples but quickly turned into a bit of commentary on whether the ideal of one parent at home with the children is harmful to women. In the post, Catherine included a poster from a 1947 magazine encouraging women to “try to free yourself for work” to help the economy and wondered if, with the idolisation of motherhood, the reverse would soon be true — posters extolling us to stay at home where we belong.
While I understand and agree with Catherine’s dislike of the tax break for married couples, which, as she rightly says, would be largely irrelevant and, even worse, ignores the diversity and complexity of modern families, I do take issue with the idea that one parent (usually the mother) being at home with the children is undesirable, unattainable or even unnecessary. Is it, as it stands, an unfair and flawed system that puts women at a disadvantage? Yes. But I don’t think the answer is simply making working outside the home unavoidable and staying at home some kind of insult to the sisterhood (not that this is what Catherine insinuated; this is what many stay-at-home mothers have told me it feels like).
It’s such a complex issue and one that I’ve been thinking about a lot as I’ve been reading this fascinating analysis of the value of ‘women’s work’ in economic journalist Ann Crittenden’s 2001 book The Price of Motherhood: Why the most important job in the world is still the least valued. I’m only halfway through and it has already challenged and altered the way I’d been approaching the solution for the modern mother’s dilemma of combining work and family. I still have lots more reading and thinking to do on the subject but I’m seeing things from a slightly different angle for the first time in ages and it is wholly refreshing. I’ll be doing a review of the book once I’m finished with it.
My comment on The F-Word post is below [altered slightly for clarity].
I have to say, it can be a bit tiresome hearing all about how incredibly privileged and wealthy those who stay home, even part of the time, must be — I stay home with my children and work a part-time job from home (as do many of the working and middle class women in my area who can’t afford full-time child care but must work to some extent, though not many are able to do their jobs from home and instead work nights or weekends) and while there are undoubtedly some privileges in that, they certainly aren’t economic. My caring labour is worth absolutely nothing in economic or social terms because what I do is supposed to be a ‘labour of love,’ not worthy of compensation. There’s an awful lot of talk about how important raising children is and how motherhood is so great, blah blah blah, but talk is cheap when actions belie the opposite.
When I do re-enter the ‘proper’ workforce my skills will be considered outdated, unpolished and worth even less than they were before. I will earn much less over my lifetime than a man, a woman without children and those mothers who returned to work when their paid maternity leaves (if they got one) were up. I’ll be more at risk for poverty when I’m retirement age as my pension will have suffered greatly in the years when I was ‘not contributing’. While I might be privileged in staying home with my children now, I am paying a ‘mummy tax’ that will have a knock-on effect for the rest of my life. Again, that’s not to say I’ve got it rough because lord knows I’ve got it easy compared to so many women working their fingers to the bone night and day, but merely to point out that even those of us ‘privileged’ enough to stay at home are paying for it one way or another.
One can’t put raising children or managing a household on one’s CV as it is seen as irrelevant. And it will continue to be seen as irrelevant, even undesirable, as long as only labour that falls outside of the domestic sphere is treated as “real” work. Women who stay at home ARE working. It’s just that our contributions to society aren’t counted in economic terms, even though they are great.
Saying that a child would be better off with one-to-one or small group care (which doesn’t have to be a parent) isn’t judgmental, it’s a pretty indisputable fact. That so many families are forced to put their children into cheap, large-group care where they aren’t given the individual attention they deserve (even though the care may be adequate for its purposes) is not acceptable or at least desirable. If women are expected to be proficient consumers and workers as well as primary caregivers, we need much better caring systems, heavily subsidised by the state, and with much better-paid and trained workers, along with more flexible working options for both parents. Don’t forget that one of the demands of the second wave movement was free 24/7 child care. We seem to have let that one fall by the wayside, leaving individual mothers in the lurch to fight that battle on their own.
Counting on men to step up the plate and start doing an equal amount of childrearing and housework hasn’t worked so far and, short of an economic and social revolution, doesn’t look likely any time soon, no matter how many baby steps have been made. Men are also constrained by long-established economic pressures and gender stereotypes. I fear that placing all of our hopes for change on fathers’ ability to break though rigid societal structures is going to leave us, and our children, waiting in the wings for a very long time. We can and should work towards a more equitable division of household and caring labour, not to mention an overhaul of gender stereotypes, but it has proven to be a slow, arduous process. In the meantime and in concert with those efforts, we should be working to value (both societally and economically) women’s work as primary caregivers and essential parts of our communities. We should make it easier for women to work, yes, but we should also make it easier for them (or their partners) to stay at home when their children are young if that’s what they want. And there’s nothing ’1950s housewife’ (read: derisory) about that.
Book review: The Equality Illusion
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This is the first in a run of book reviews I hope to do in the coming months, seeing as I have a backlog of relatively new feminist non-fiction to read. First up is ‘The Equality Illusion’ by Kat Banyard, former campaigns officer for the Fawcett Society, an organisation that campaigns for social and economic justice for women in the UK.
Before I get to the review, I’d just like to make a somewhat-tangential aside about Ms. Banyard’s place of employment. While I know that there are sectors within which unpaid internships are the norm and that non-profits are one of the biggest culprits, I was pretty disheartened when I emailed the Fawcett Society a few months back to eagerly ask how I might assist them with some volunteering of some description. I didn’t mind if it was stuffing envelopes or whatever, I just wanted to get involved with an organisation I’ve always admired and would love to work for some day, when my return to paid employment outside the home is imminent. In reply to my query about volunteering on an occasional basis, I was sent details of an unpaid internship (what other kind is there?) instead. The kicker was that the job would’ve been perfect for me and I would have happily applied right then and there…if it actually paid any money. Travel expenses and £4/day for lunch isn’t going to pay the bills or the childcare though, that’s for sure. When I wrote back to say as much and again asked if there were any more occasional tasks or weekend events I could help with, I was told they “don’t really do that sort of thing.”
Now, the only reason I bring this up is because I think this is a good example of an organisation trying to do good work but putting restrictions on who can actually work for it. I mean, who else but the wealthy or those just out of university and living with their parents, sans any immediate financial responsibilities, could afford to work for three days a week for 3-6 months, completely unpaid? The assumption that those interested in feminist activism can do unpaid internships (especially by an organisation that campaigns for fair wages and equal pay for women!), just comes across as astoundingly arrogant and clueless to the realities most of us face. And the only reason I’m pointing this out is because some of my criticisms of this book are based around this general appearance of excluding some topics in favour of others that may be more sensationalist or controversial but less relevant to the majority of women’s everyday lives in the UK, ones that are affecting their livelihoods and personal lives in deeply-ingrained, meaningful ways. So with that grumble out of the way (and with it having no direct bearing on Banyard because she is not the sum of her employer’s policies, obviously), on to the review.
First off, I will say that my overall impression of the book as a tool to get the general public thinking about ways in which gender inequalities still exist is a fairly good one. If you ever heard someone say “We’ve/you’ve got equality now, what are you complaining about?” or use a term like “post-feminist world,” (has a more laughable phrase ever been uttered, aside from ‘post-racial’?) you could do worse to hand them ‘The Equality Illusion.’ For those unversed in gender issues, this is a good starting place. However, as Jess at The F-Word already pointed out in her review, Banyard is kind of preaching to the ‘yes, we all know this’ choir as far as how already-established feminists are likely to react to it.
The first chapter, on body image, does a pretty good job at dissecting the main issues — media representations of women, objectification, gender conformity, beauty standards and the beauty industry and how all of it is damaging to girls and women. The young women she interviews for this portion of the book indeed have heartbreaking tales of shattered self-esteem and distorted views of their bodies, but I couldn’t help but notice that she didn’t include much in the way of how we can combat these images in our daily lives, not just by taking on the huge structures perpetuating and capitalising on it, which is a huge task that no one is really sure how to undertake.
One of the most important ways we can help girls (and boys, for that matter) build healthy self-esteems and realistic body expectations is through involved parenting and leading by example. The messages sent by a constantly-dieting mother who is always (only half-jokingly) calling herself a pig can be far more harmful and seep into a child’s subconscious than a parade of billboards with conventionally attractive, airbrushed models on them. Talking to your children about the messages they receive and the images they see can be a very effective tool in keeping their expectations healthy, yet Banyard does little, if anything, to mention empowered parenting as a potentially massive part of the ‘solution,’ as it were.
I have similar complaints about the chapter on education. Overall it’s very good in presenting facts and providing a context in which we can see the gaping inequalities still present in today’s schools, but where are the interviews with parents? What do they think of gendered behaviour, gendered education, the arguments for and against biological and socially-conditioned differences in the way boys and girls think and perform? What are theirthoughts and concerns on how gendered education is effecting their kids and if they are counteracting that at home in any way? Speaking to the teachers and to the children themselves is all very well and good, but leaving parents out of the education equation just because they don’t actually attend school with their kids is trying to complete a 24-piece jigsaw puzzle with only 18 of the pieces.
I have similar complaints of the reproductive rights chapter, which deals, unsurprisingly, with teenage/young pregnancy and abortion but not much else. There is no mention of feminist issues relating to pregnancy or birth rights, or of the changing role and consequences of reproduction throughout a woman’s life. Again, the focus seems to be on young(ish) women and those who have chosen not to have children, at least for the time being.
From my corner of the feminist parenting blogosphere, there hasn’t been much hope that this book would be any different from most of the others in really dissecting some of the issues important to mothers, so I was pleasantly surprised to find the ‘Sexism in the City’ chapter to be dedicated almost solely to the injustices and inequalities that women face with regards to work and childcare and the division of domestic labour. The case study she uses to open the chapter is about one woman”s struggle to care for her children and earn enough money to support them. Banyard asks some good questions and raises relevant topics, such as:
Why do so many women have to work below their skill level because those are the only jobs that fit around their caring responsibilities? Why are cleaning and other forms of traditional ‘women’s work’ (like carers and caterers) paid so little — and in particular less than traditional ‘men’s work’ (like plumbers and decorators) that require equivalent levels of skill and effort? Because gender discrimination in the workplace is illegal and women make up nearly half the workforce it is easy to assume that all is now fair and equal. But the near equivalent numbers of women and men in the workplace is where any ‘equality’ ends: 30,000 women are sacked each year in the UK simply for being pregnant, women make up only 12 per cent of FTSE 100 company directors and women are paid on average 22.6 per cent less per hour than men.
She also writes:
When discussing women in the workplace a standard media refrain is to ask whether women can ‘have it all’, i.e. a family and a career. But women have always had to combine work and caring. For many, particularly those from working-class backgrounds, that question is redundant; if they don’t work their family doesn’t eat. The real question is why is it only women who have to choose between a family and maximising their career potential? And, in fact, why should anyone have to choose between these two things at all?
Banyard goes on to talk about discrimination against mothers at work, the belief that women’s careers are curtailed by their ‘choices’, not because the system is set up to favour those without caring responsibilities, and the concept of a ‘sticky floor’ that exists well below the ‘glass ceiling.’ She interviews a charity that supports working parents and talks to working mothers themselves, making a real effort to understand and explain the disparities they face. There were things she didn’t touch on, of course — issues relating specifically to mothering are about more than just combining work and family — but for a feminist book by (from what I gather is) a relatively young, childless woman, I thought it was pretty well done.
Finally, the chapters on violence against women and the sex industry were informative, compelling and passionate. It seems pretty obvious that these issues are the most important to Banyard, and many young feminists, and she/they are doing a great job of speaking out against them. However (didn’t you know that was coming?), I will say that while I am 100% supportive of feminist aims to help women exit prostitution and to combat the pervasive and often-unpleasant sex industry, I can’t help but feel that the intense focus on it can be a bit off-putting to the general public. As Rachel Cooke pointed out in her review in the Guardian:
Mostly, she is preoccupied with finding ways to help women exit prostitution, and while I’m all for that, too, there are 30 million women in Britain, of whom not even a quarter of 1% sell sex for a living. What about the rest of us?
That’s not to say that prostitutes or sex industry workers don’t deserve our help and attention, because they unreservedly do. But if a book about gender inequality is trying to reach out to large swathes of people in one country, many of whom probably don’t identify as feminist in the first place, it needs to be relatable to their lives. Focusing on the sex industry, or female genital mutilation or forced marriages in other parts of the world (for example) can be, rightly or wrongly, seen as directing focus away from the issues that women right here in the UK face, all around them, every day. Portrayals of Western feminists as young, childless, middle-class, white girls who want to save ‘those poor women’ (sex industry workers, African women, child brides, etc..) from themselves may be off base entirely, but the fact is that this is the image they (we) have been saddled with by some. If a book’s aim is to foster greater understanding and enthusiasm for gender issues within a Western framework and amongst the women who inhabit it, I have to wonder if narrowing the focus a little bit and not necessarily worrying about casting the net wide in an effort to be ideologically diverse would actually catch more fish, as it were.
Again, I don’t want to insinuate that international problems or ones affecting a small, specific minority are not our problems or that we should be discouraging others from thinking about and acting upon them, but if Banyard truly wants to inspire ‘grassroots feminism’ (to which she devotes most of her last chapter), she would do well to remain focused on issues a bit closer to home and our hearts and remember that most of us — especially those living with children, or with disabilities, or financial hardships — can’t easily attend meetings and marches, or get online to check out all the latest blogs and conferences, or partake in unpaid internships.
Overall, this is a good ‘primer’ book but it’s approach is too broad and there’s not enough fire in the belly. We need less theoretical pontificating and more solid ideas for action. Because until we start organising the latter, the former is all we will ever do.
Cross-posted at Noble Savage
This is not a whisper
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A few weeks ago I discussed women’s bodies in the workplace and how our biological and social needs were never truly integrated, even when we were finally ‘allowed’ to work. I said:
The problem is this — nearly all of the business world was built around the male biological and social imperative. It was understood that a working man was either single and carefree or with a wife at home who took care of his house, his children and all domestic tasks, aside from the more ‘manly’ chores like grass-cutting, wood-chopping and car repairs. The male worker had no need for flexible hours that fit in around school or shopping hours. The male worker had no dramatic hormonal changes, pregnancies, breastfeeding or post-partum recovery to deal with.
I also said:
But one of the biggest problems remaining, in my view, is that women’s bodies have not been integrated and accepted into the workplace. Pregnancy and maternity leave are still career-killers.
…Some people would even begrudge a woman the right to pump milk at work, calling it an ‘extra break’ and complaining that she’s getting ’special treatment,’ which I think any mother who has ever breastfed or expressed knows is misguided. Trying to get as much milk as possible out of your breasts while hunched over an electronic pump in a storage closet, hoping no one walks in on you, is not a ‘break’. It’s just more work, though of the unpaid, ‘unimportant’ variety in capitalism’s eyes.
Finally, I concluded that:
Because industry and business were built upon male norms, the working environment reflects this attitude as well. We got on the ladder alright, but what we should’ve been after was an entirely different climbing apparatus, one in which we could move horizontally across a continuum we helped create, not forced to climb vertically up those rigid, historically-male rungs (in high heels, naturally) before hitting that infamous glass ceiling.
Essentially, I was arguing that we can’t ‘fix’ the current system or try to force our way into existing frameworks because those systems and frameworks don’t serve our needs or our lives, which is what author Hilary Mantel says in today’s Guardian as well. What both of us are trying to say, I believe, is that moulding ourselves to fit a system designed without our bodies, our wants or our priorities in mind can do us harm. It does do harm to women the world over, every day. Being forced to delay children until our 30s and 40s in order to establish successful careers is harmful. Being denied educational and professional opportunities if we choose to have children in our teens or 20s is harmful. All this analysis of feckless, fertile teen mums and desperate, over-achieving 40-somethings undergoing IVF sends one clear message and it is this:
You can’t win.
You can’t win because the perfect time to have a child, according to current advice, is in one’s mid-20s to early 30s. Unfortunately for us, that also happens to coincide with the prime years for establishing a career and moving up the ladder, or pursuing further education. Taking long ‘career breaks’ (because, as we know, having and raising children is not considered ‘real work’), even if short-term, harms our long-term financial and professional potential. Women who take career breaks at this time in their lives rarely end up in senior positions, earning as much and on the same par with similarly-aged male colleagues. If we want to have even a chance at joining their ranks we have two choices — don’t have children for another 10-15 years (or at all) or have children but get back to work quickly by placing them in care, the provision and management of which will be made preposterously difficult given the restrictions of the working environment.
Each of these ‘choices’, of course, has negative consequences. Risking infertility or having to pay someone else most of your salary to care for your child in the first years of its life are not ideal options, though they are the ones we have to live with in the here and now. Without truly flexible academic and professional accommodation and without access to affordable, quality childcare and meaningful, fairly-waged part-time work, we are getting nowhere. Giving dads a bit more paternity leave or giving mums a bit more money for their leave, while a nice gesture, is pointless in the end. It’s an adhesive, cartoon-faced bandage for a gaping, bleeding shotgun wound of a problem. No matter how many smiley-faced plasters we stick on it, the wound will ooze and fester without first extracting all of the detritus and cleaning it up. Putting superficial fixes on a wound of this size only masks the rotting infection underneath.
Eventually, the infection will spread and what little good the bandages did will be for nothing. We will be pushed out of the workplace again, unable to operate within the male-structured system, or continue to rely on luck and technology to have children later in life. The poor, the working class and even much of the middle class (i.e. most women), for whom talk of career breaks and IVF isn’t even relevant or possible, will continue to have children at their reproductive peak and be punished for it by being priced out of decent housing, higher education and training, and quality childcare. They will also continue to have the blame for perceived societal breakdown lain at their feet, convenient scapegoats for a system that set them (and all of us, including our children) up to fail.
I am not being dramatic at all when I say we need radical, revolutionary change. Asking the men behind the curtain very nicely and calmly if we can have this or that concession, only to see if taken away again with budget cuts that deem “women’s issues” unimportant in comparison with military spending or lining bankers’ pockets has proven ineffective. The overwhelmingly white, male, middle-class parliamentarians will pay lip service to equality and fairness, sure. They’re not stupid and know they need our votes. I’m sure many of them do know the system is unfair and would like to change it. But when push comes to shove, people protect themselves, their own families and their own jobs and interests first, we know that. We all know who is doing the shoving and who will be shoved. An increasingly hostile, ‘anti-PC’ segment of the public who feel threatened by challenges to their long-standing privileges also contributes to this climate of intolerance, narrow-mindedness and unwillingness to change on any substantial level.
No one is giving anything to us. Wringing our hands and writing moving essays or angry blog posts is not enough. As far as I’m concerned, it’s time for battle and we need more soldiers. I’ve had enough. And though I understand completely that not everyone feels so passionately about it, or thinks we can actually change anything, or even has the desire to, I can’t help but feel completely, helplessly angry when I know that if we really could get a million women to rise, we’d finally be noticed. If, like our sisters of the first and second waves have done before us, we sat down, refused to move, refused to accept the status quo or meek little promises of incremental change, we would be an undeniable force to be reckoned with. We are 52 per cent of the population. We vote. We live here. We matter. And I, for one, am tired of playing it down and carefully explaining and ‘being reasonable’ and keeping my voice down.
I’m fucking angry and I want you to be too.
The chicken or the egg: Paternity leave and gender roles
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So as you probably didn’t hear (because I’ve not seen it covered anywhere within the feminist blogosphere – sigh – and only given marginal press within mainstream media), Labour announced a couple days ago quite radical changes to the maternity and paternity leave laws, which will apply to children due on or after 3 April 2011 (provided they win the next general election).
Right now in the UK, a woman who gives birth to or adopts a child while in paid employment* is entitled to nine months’ paid maternity leave (most of which is on the Statutory Maternity Pay (SMP) of £123.06 per week; only the first six weeks is paid at 90% of one’s regular salary) and then three further months unpaid, with her partner being eligible for two weeks’ paid paternity leave, also paid at the SMP rate. Some employers pay more on top of that but many don’t so it can be assumed that this is what the majority of employees who take maternity or paternity leave will earn.
The proposed changes would give a woman the option of returning to work after six months, transferring the remaining three months of paid leave over to her partner. Her partner would then have the option of taking a further three months’ leave from his or her** job, unpaid. The total leave would still amount to 12 months (9 paid, 3 unpaid) but would be more easily split between them. In theory, this would give female breadwinners and those who would like to return to work after six months the ability to go back sooner without having to put their babies into non-familial care. It would also give men who earn less than their partners or who want to be more involved in their child’s care in the first year an opportunity to stay at home for 3-6 months without losing their jobs.
That’s the bare-bones of it and how it’s laid out on paper. However, whether and how it is taken up in practise is another matter entirely. Let’s run this through a reality check.
First, let’s look at the various combinations that could be employed with this new legislation. One reality is that some women won’t be able to afford being on the SMP rate at all (a more likely situation for single mums) and so will return to work even sooner than six months. This change does not help her at all, sadly. Another likely scenario for many people will be for the mother to stay at home for the full nine months until the unpaid portion of leave kicks in, which she may or may not take depending on the family’s circumstances. This may be due to personal choice, social conditioning/pressure or practical reasons (such as financial concerns or breastfeeding).
But a woman who takes her six months’ leave and then decides to return to work after this period of time (because she is the higher earner or because her income, though less than her partner’s, is needed, or simply because she wants to) now has the option of putting her 5-6 month-old baby into care or transferring the remainder of her leave entitlement over to her partner (if she has one). In families where it is financially possible for the father to take a 3-6 month financial hit after the mother already has as well, without any severe consequences, this is potentially great news. But in a family where unpaid or reduced-pay leave for the father (even for ‘only’ three months) is not an option, does it seem likely that the male partner will be willing or able to take over the childcare duties for those three months? Will he even want to? Or will it “make more sense” for the woman to stay at home for the three remaining ‘paid’ months, as she has done for the previous six, especially if she is paid less, is breastfeeding and/or already has a daily routine and support system in place?
Though I do think that there are certainly couples out there in which the woman either needs or wants to return to work after six months and the father would be willing, perhaps even eager, to be the sole care provider for his child for at least three months, I don’t think as many men will take it up as one might expect or hope. First, there is the social stigma to deal with. A man wanting to look after his baby in theory faces the reality of having to ask for the leave from his employer and then explain to his colleagues why he will be gone. For most men, caring for children is still widely viewed as ‘women’s work’ and taking on a role almost exclusively performed by women can be viewed as a threat to his status, both socially and professionally; if not by him then certainly by at least some of his peers.
A man who looks after his children is often viewed as a bumbling, inept ‘helper’ to the mother, doing her a favour or humouring her for the sake of the ‘easy life’. Fathers I’ve spoken to (including my own husband) have told me of the times they’ve taken their children out in public without the mother present and gotten comments about how great he is for “taking them off mum’s hands,” or “giving mum the day off” as if that’s the only reason he would be solely responsible for them — as a favour to his wife or partner. Heaven forbid he actually wants and is able to look after them by himself! Some dads even report being asked if they’re divorced and on a ‘weekend pass’ with their children.
The social conditioning that men (and all of us) have been subject to sends the strong message that fathers are the second-string, the back-up team, only needed when mum isn’t around for some (usually selfish) reason. Even then, fathers aren’t expected to perform as well at parenting as their female counterparts. I’ve heard many a story of other women rushing in to offer to make a cake for a single dad who is supposed to contribute to the school’s bake sale, or telling a stay-at-home dad that he doesn’t have to take part in the snack rota at playgroup because he “has his hands full already.” The message to men, from all sides, is that parenting is not really their area of expertise (or at least, combining parenting with household responsibilities isn’t) and that just keeping the children alive and fed and the house standing is all that is expected of them.
The second hurdle in encouraging men to take this option is financial. If a man is the higher earner (as is the case in the majority of partnerships), it will be much more difficult and sometimes even impossible for him to collect SMP wages instead of his normal salary. Of the small proportion of families who would be able to do this, few within that group would be able to function without any income at all on his part, if he were to take the final three months unpaid. It isn’t clear from the wording of the new legislation but I’ve read from other sources that if a couple wants the father to take his three months at SMP but cannot afford for him to take the final three months unpaid, they lose the option for the mother to take it, effectively shortening their total entitlement to just nine months instead of twelve. This is supposedly to encourage more fathers to take at least their three months at SMP.
Again, it sounds good in theory, giving a bit of incentive for men to take the paternity leave they are entitled to, but I remain doubtful that the incentives will be enough to overcome the social and financial hurdles that a lengthened paternity leave presents. Until the social stigma of men caring for children and performing domestic duties is broken and until women receive equal pay and opportunities at work, free from gender discrimination, paternity leave and maternity leave will remain quick fixes for a much wider, more complex problem that is endemic in our society.
**Paternity leave applies to female partners of women who give birth or adopt but for the sake of simplicity and because heterosexual relationships that produce children are more prevalent, I will be using ‘he’ to signify the partners of new mothers