March 2007

Mother or Prime Minister?

"If Peter Costello genuinely thought about it, could he be the mother of three children, have been treasurer for more than a decade, and be next in line to be prime minister? Could John Howard have been a mother to his children, as opposed to a father, and be in the position he is in today? The frank answer is no." (Julia Gillard, quoted in an interview with Juanita Phillips, 'The Golden Girl of Politics,' Bulletin, January 19, 2007)

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Let's start by getting our teeth into a recent, contentious issue generated by Julia Gillard: a mother can not be Prime Minister. The statement was made in an interview with Juanita Phillips in the Bulletin (Jan. 19, 2007). The response was huge: both vitriolic and understanding. Single, professional women without the need to care for children took aim at working mothers. In Phillips' follow up article, she includes the following statement from one of her responders:

"We're fed up with working the extra hours when all the mothers leave at five on the dot, or just before an important deadline," says Emma, 43, an executive in the finance industry. "We're fed up with not being able to take holidays at Christmas because people with children have to have their 'family time' - as though single people don't have family. We're the ones who have to work back on the days the mothers don't come in because their kids are sick. The system doesn't work. Not just for the mothers - it doesn't work for those of us who have to pick up the slack either."

I can understand when women complain about the 'unfairness' in the workplace concerning workers who are also mothers, but only to a certain extent (interesting that she is not complaining about those dads we keep hearing about who are 'putting in' the hours at home). Of course, women without children in their care have lives beyond their work, lives they would like to have time to live. But, what happened to the idea of 'sisterhood,' of 'me' standing with 'you' against the incredibly potent, often silent, masculine-defined culture of work?

More importantly, why pick on the easy target, when clearly the issue is precisely with the hegemonic, masculine control of work-life ratio definition? Instead of challenging late-Capitalist modes of production (such as extraordinarily unbalanced work-leisure ratios which benefit the few and exploit the masses), it is far easier to agree with the status quo and imagine that our fellow hard workers (mothers especially - those with both full-time paid and unpaid jobs) are actually to blame.

It is thus not surprising that, in the same article, Phillips states that Gillard is right:

Having done the original interview with Gillard, I was a bit stunned by the overall reaction. To me - a mother of two, with a demanding full-time career - her comments seem self-evident and hardly controversial. Of course you could not be prime minister and be a mother to small children. Both jobs are so enormous and all-consuming that it is ludicrous to suggest they could be done simultaneously - it's logistically impossible. The oft-quoted example of Margaret Thatcher is a nonsense - her children were grown up by the time she became Britain's PM.

'Both jobs are so enormous and all-consuming that it is ludicrous to suggest they could be done simultaneously.' Well, of course it is. In relation to her own high-powered job, Phillips gives what I think for many of us, in such a privileged, socio-economic position, is a recognisable detailing of her daily life as a mother in the workforce (sleeplessness, fatigue, the burden of household duties, the high cost of childcare, etc).

We could extend this argument to include many women in lowly paid jobs, some of whom do not have husbands to 'help' them in some capacity. In other words, this issue does not just concern women in high-powered positions. It is an issue that affects us all, married or not, professional or non-professional. But just because Gillard's comment is an adequate statement about the status quo in Western countries such as Australia, concerning the lives of working mothers (paid or not), doesn't mean it is necessarily and eternally so, in the sense of a natural state of being. Societal structure is changeable; it is malleable. And this is what I want to talk about here.

I am an academic and a writer. That is who I am. I am also a mother. I am not going to bore you with a story of how difficult it is or has been to do both. My research concerns the historical and cultural means by which women, whether mothers or not, have been silenced. By silenced, I don't simply mean refused access to speech or audibility. I mean that women have been prevented from playing little if any part in the construction of all aspects of the 'public' world. And we are now struggling, more so than before because of this silencing.

I could write about the problems women face in the workforce. I could refine that discussion by writing about the problems single, childless women face in public life. I could also write about women who insist that 'the glass ceiling' is a feminist myth (funny how only the great achievers claim this). I could also write about the problems mothers face in working, whether it be from home in fairly 'standard' jobs, albeit with great difficulty given the children, the housework, the cooking, the washing, etc., or in a demanding work-place job, even in public office. But I would be telling you something I am sure you already know, from whatever perspective. Women work. They also, often, mother. They struggle. They are torn between what we have come to expect them to do as mothers, and what we expect them to do as paid workers.

What I really need to write about is the failure of a certain form of feminism.

The feminist revolution most of us are familiar with, and indeed the only form of feminism most of us know about, is that Anglo-American, 1970s form of political action from thinkers and activists who claim that women are as equal in skills and capabilities as men.

Our foremothers managed to ensure that we got an education, got employed, and they battled for equal pay (still an ongoing battle in this country). And, in truth, they were right. This was the revolution we had to have. Women needed to be valued for their minds and not simply their bodies and their abilities to clean, cook and nurture. They also needed to be recognised as skilled labourers, quite capable of hauling bricks, changing spark-plugs, unblocking plumbing, and such like.

Subsequently, we have proven ourselves to be capable of socio-economic, cultural and political success. Underlying all of this is the idea that if women just had the same educational possibilities as men (i.e. the same training), then they too could perform what had traditionally (for centuries, no less) been considered male-only employment. Once women got out of the home, so to speak, and earned their own money, their liberation would be immanent.

But, this is not what has happened. Yes, we have jobs and money of our own. And perhaps when we are young, single and child-free, though we face many biases as women (such as being young, female, single and child-free, meaning we may one day soon get married and have children - the employer's nightmare), feminism may seem like an anachronistic swear-word at best, or the domain of those 'ugly lesbian' women (as many men and women still like to cast this crucial political movement), at worst. But, as a woman, if you should choose to have a child (whether you are married or not), you are suddenly faced with the so-called choices of the following:

1. career-suicide, where, if you choose to stay home with your children, you are no longer a viable 'player' in the world of paid work, corporate or otherwise;
   
   
2. career stagnation, whereupon you may one day wish to return to your employment without the skills that became requirements while you raised your children, thus meaning you face even more training to return to the level at which you left;
   
   
3. part-time work and the added diminishment of earning power; or even
   
   
4. career-peer embarrassment, where you choose to stay at home while your female peers decide to go on with 'the juggle'.

You may choose to go back to work full-time, which means extraordinary child-care costs, soaring guilt, fatigue at having to do a large amount of the housework and childcare (outside of work hours, because you are, after all, naturally nurturing and self-sacrificing).

'You,' are a 'mother,' and whether you work in paid employment or not, you have ingested the cultural assumptions of what 'mother' is and does in Australian society. And, still in 2007, 'she' is primarily required to look after the domestic, psychological and physical well-being of her children and her husband. 'Father' is still, in 2007, believe it or not, understood (self-consciously, for most men in Australia) the bread-winner.

We do hear the odd story here and there about 'stay-at-home' dads and those men who 'help out' around the house, but the fact that these are newsworthy or notable accounts speaks volumes. We give these men a round of applause and a 'thank-you for helping.' Why? Because there is this unspoken belief that if you have a vagina and a womb you clean, cook, parent and self-sacrifice naturally.

In short, most women in Australia do the bulk of unpaid domestic and care work. Not only that, we (and I include myself here) quite often feel guilty for making 'him' do his share of the load. Many of us would rather feel tired than guilty.

Julia Gillard

What Gillard's statement highlights is not the choices available to women (high-powered career versus motherhood, even poorly paid but often enjoyable work and social interaction versus unpaid, sometimes enjoyable motherhood), but the false-choice that women believe they have in Australia. The fact that we can only agree with Gillard is testimony to the fact that, despite over one hundred years of feminism, of women flouting male-defined conventions - conventions that privilege one gender over the other - to ensure the betterment of the lives of their 'daughters' (biological or symbolic), society has not changed structurally to accommodate over fifty percent of its citizens.

What this proves is that women don't just need an education and an income to ensure greater liberation. We need to be outspoken about society's structures, structures that continue to offer us only the false sense of choice. We need to insist on the redefinition of what 'mother' means. We need to insist that 'mother' does not nullify our existence as paid and paying citizens. But we also need to insist that as mothers, if we choose to be so, we can enjoy our children, our motherwork, and our otherwork.

Most of all, we need to insist that our society, if it is to take seriously its duty to the future, needs to redefine the workplace, not just superficially, but radically. Mothers and non-mothers - let's call them women - need to realise and exercise their power.

What we don't need is a politician telling us that mothers can't be Prime Minister.

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Julie Kelso e julieanne.kelso@uq.edu.au