So ... I've been pretty boring lately. Dad visited from overseas, so there was a lot of family stuff going on every other evening — and between that and work I've barely had the time (nor energy) to do anything apart from read and knit. (Yes, knitting is in fashion here at the moment, and I'm such a fashion victim ...)
I finally finished reading "The Work/Life Collision" the other day. There were two passages from its final chapter I was thinking of quoting: one being a summary of the direction Australia is heading, and one on the changing culture of motherhood due to the increasing number of women in the workforce. In light of the policy announcement by the Labor party today, I thought the latter would probably be more appropriate:
Motherhood is undergoing a paradigm shift with new work patterns. In practice it is shifting away from a model that placed the woman/mother at the centre of the domestic sphere. Now, mothers sit on unstable terrain. What should they be? What are they? The fact that there are so many ways, now, to be a mother has made society uncertain about mothers, and a profound anxiety frequently attaches to the business of being a mother.
This anxiety is expressed through criticism (and self-criticism) of many forms of mothering and mother's decisions — even where these decisions are clearly household and community decisions, with partners, employers, government all ghosts at the table, effectively shaping outcomes. This critique and the "mother wars" it provokes, is visited upon women in many ways, on many issues. This is most obviously evident in competing discourses about mothers — whether "proper" mothers, welfare mothers, working mothers, at-home mothers, super mothers. The self sacrificing ideal of traditional motherhood has given away to a much more diverse set of possibilities in practice, but the cultural hangover of the intensive, self-sacrificial mother means that most of these possibilities are lived out by women amidst an epidemic of guilt, persistent adjustment and readjustment, and internal and external conflict.
Among other indicators, we can read the costs of these outcomes in divorce statistics. Many of these experiences are privately felt. But some find social expression in community conflict and controversy — over child care (to use, or not to use), over paid work (to do, or not to do), and over voluntary work in the community ("I'm doing yours"). An important component of a new Work/Care regime is liberation from the cultures of intensive mothering, greater expectations of fathers, and greater valuation of care itself.*
While the policy seems promising and I applaud its ideals, I rather detest the fact that it is being marketed as having women as its specific target. After all, women's happiness and comfort also affect that of the men we live and work with.
* Paragraphs are inserted by me for easier online reading and do not exist in the original text.
Posted by sniffles at July 19, 2004 10:00 PM