Despite Bill's clumsy way of putting it (I suspect that about 75% of the problem was the use of the word "barren,") as an issue I still think it is pretty fascinating to watch the modern feminist reaction to this.
As I noted in an earlier post, Julia Gillard seems to have expressed an attitude of "you can't have it all" as her reason for not having children. Isn't this a pretty dramatic, and quite conservatively aligned, change of attitude from the school of feminism that insists that society needs to be arranged so that women can do family and work at once?
Even though she supports Julia, if I were a female politician with children, I certainly can't see that I would be treating Tracee Hutchison as an ally. Maybe you can read Gillard as simply meaning that no one can easily be a mother and federal politician. (In her quote linked at my previous post, she made the point that male politicians only manage because they leave the mother at home to look after the kids. But even that overlooks the fact that some female politicians do manage by having a stay at home father.) Maybe Julia's comments are limited to her own assessment of her own abilities? (Well, I don't think that is right, but I am just looking at all possible spin you can place on it). But Tracee takes the argument to a whole new level:
Gillard's supposition that she couldn't have done babies and politics simultaneously — and done justice to both — should be given the respectful consideration it deserves...
Do you know the people who'll be thinking most about your comments, Senator Heffernan? Women who don't have children, that's who.
Clearly the senator, and many like him, have never considered that women without children probably spend more time thinking about the consequences of choices and the dynamics of society than people who spend their lives flying around the country on parliamentary salaries or up to their elbows in nappy buckets and vomit.
Conversations about nappy buckets and birth choices do not a society make.
Ask a woman with kids how much she thinks family dominates the structure of her life and she'll tell you it occupies most of her waking hours, even if she's juggling a career around it. She won't have given much thought to it, mind you; it's just how it is and she hasn't got time for musing anyway.
Um, doesn't this seem to be saying that it is obvious that women with children have no time to think deeply about anything, apart from what to cook for dinner tonight? What are those mothers doing as politicians then?
One suspect's that Tracee's reaction may be based on her very personal reaction to how other women, and men, react to her as (I assume?) a childless woman:
...ask a woman without kids how often she feels like an outsider looking in on a world she can't connect with and she will have some real insight into the way society functions. Particularly the way it reflects the status of women...
Sounds to me like she has lost a friend or two after they've gone off and joined the world of motherhood. (I could be wrong, of course, and misreading her completely.)
Tracee also seems to hate the way parties like to support families:
Despite John Howard's and Peter Costello's attempts to distance themselves from their wayward senator's latest spray, they are the culprits of turning the family values mantra into political paydirt and their imminent budget sweeteners to families will reinforce it.
Forget about the clever country we once aspired to be, we've become the conception country.
Somehow, I don't the Labor campaign is going to keep her happy either.
The year is fast approaching when the childless / never had children household outnumbers those with children Steve.
ReplyDeleteThen all that political support for "families" will be very very hot.
The first objections I heard to carers leave, maternity leave, and so on, all those "soft" but very costly benefits given to only some workers, was 15 years ago. That was when these things were all glowy new and no one questioned them, and no one considered that the time would come that one third of women in a given generation would never have children.
Give it another 15 years and the parties still pouring money all over "families" could find themselves up against it.
BTW - being a mother and a full time employee is not a walk in the park, and it's unrelenting. Most don't earn salaries that allow them the luxury of hired help either. The successful women you are thinking of invariably have hired help, or many varieties.