Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (31 page)

To be honest about how mothering does not necessarily come naturally to all women is not to downgrade the bonds of family life and the happiness they bring. Home is the centre of a life well lived. Yet the insistence that this haven must be created and protected by women because of our unique aptitudes rests on a shaky assumption. A mother does have a special physical relationship to a baby during pregnancy and birth, but it’s fatally easy to overstate the ongoing difference this will necessarily make to her parenting. For some women, the very exhaustion of pregnancy and childbirth makes the early days of parenting harder for them than for their partners. For some women, hormonal imbalances or the pressures of childcare cause depressions that take months to lift. For many men, the entry of children into family life is just as real a joy as it is for many women.

The fact that women are still, by and large, the keepers of the hearth, is not just about nature, but also about nurture. Girls are still training themselves in the work done at home from an early age, with their dolls and dolls’ houses, their little pushchairs and their toy cookers. Women still find that they will be judged harshly if they do not create a good home for their families.
Despite the movement of many men into the home, there has recently arisen a tendency to emphasise the femininity of domestic work. I wouldn’t judge any woman for wanting to spend time at home, cooking or doing housework or looking after her children. I know myself that the times I have spent purely in family life have been among the happiest hours of my life. But I have always assumed this would be true of my partner, too, and I have been surprised by the way that we have recently seen a resurgence in much of the media and in certain social circles of an almost 1950s image of a perfect stay-at-home mother who wants to create her domestic haven single-handedly. With her Cath Kidston aprons and home-made Christmas decorations, her cupcakes and her languorous Sunday lunches, this idealised mother is recreating the look of a world in which women had no choice but to embrace domesticity. Some young women who have fallen for this image wholeheartedly say that they feel this old-fashioned domestic ideal amounts to a new movement among younger women. Jazz D Holly, a woman in her twenties who has joined the Women’s Institute and spends time baking cupcakes, told the
Guardian
, ‘For my generation, girls in their 20s, all my friends, it’s a cultural shift, almost a movement: many people are fascinated by retro ideas.’
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This investment in an almost kitsch domesticity runs alongside a new glorification of the image of the perfect wife, who enables the powerful man next to her to consolidate his status through her physical beauty or her domestic perfection, or, ideally, both. This glorified wife crosses all social groups, from the WAG whose glossy sexiness is as necessary for a successful sportsman as the latest model of a fast car, to the charming, smiling politician’s wife who enhances her husband’s power without trespassing in his realm. While the 1990s saw ‘first wives’ such as Hillary Clinton and Cherie Booth, who never made any secret of their desires to carry on their high-powered careers next to their husbands, the twenty-first century swoons
over the reassuring first wives Sarah Brown and Michelle Obama, who have decided to give up paid work. They call themselves ‘mom-in-chief’ and receive admiration not for their incisive intelligence and active careers, but for their toned arms and great clothes. They have learned to smile sweetly when their husbands call them ‘good-looking’ or ‘spectacular’. Perhaps they once felt anger at having to fill the role of the angel in the house. Indeed, we know from Barack Obama’s memoirs that Michelle Obama was, at one point, furious. By the time their second child was born, he wrote, ‘my wife’s anger toward me seemed barely contained. “You only think about yourself,” she would tell me. “I never thought I’d have to raise a family alone.”’
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But her anger disappeared, her career was put on hold, and the powerful man was enabled to carry on in his pursuit of power by the shining presence of his acquiescent wife.

I wouldn’t judge any woman for deciding to spend time with her family. But the reception given to those wives in the media is highly revealing of our current expectations of women. The culture of domestic goddesses and yummy mummies is often presented as ironic and playful, not least by its leaders – the cooking guru Nigella Lawson often refers to her sense of irony. But, nevertheless, the recreation of this ideal of a devoted woman who, in Nigella’s own words, doesn’t ‘want to feel like a post-modern, post-feminist, overstretched woman but, rather, a domestic goddess, trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in our languorous wake,’
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has created an image that can put greater stress on those women who try to live up to it. ‘I never thought,’ one mother said wryly to me at our regular school bake sale, ‘that I’d see so many professional women competing over baking fairy cakes. Is this the new feminism?’ I looked down at my own handiwork, the cupcakes decorated with icing hearts, and saw what she meant. It is as though we are fetishising the accessories of old-fashioned motherhood to prove that at heart we are all still perfect mothers, whatever we get up to in the world beyond the home.

The narrative of biological determinism fits this new wife culture very well, and by suggesting to us that nurturing and domestic work comes more naturally to women than to men, it obscures the fact that nurturing behaviour is learned and reinforced for women in our culture, and that in fact men can and do learn this too when the situation is right. When men do take on the care of their children, they often find, just as women do, that their priorities and their abilities are changed. As one journalist, Rafael Behr, put it on returning from paternity leave: ‘When I first went back to work I felt agoraphobia for the first time. My reassuringly narrowed horizons were forced back open. The idea that you are expected, after a few hearty pats on the back, to get on with business as usual struck me as grotesque. I sat in meetings struggling to care. I now live in fear of missing some minuscule step my daughter might have taken down the road of infant development, a newly articulate gurgle or a very prolific poo. Fathering is addictive like that.’
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Fathering is addictive, just like mothering; people learn to care by caring.

Far from feeling that they have done something unnatural, men tend to find increased happiness when they step up their contribution to domestic work. In Australia, two social policy researchers at the University of New South Wales found that fathers were more satisfied when they spent more time at home. ‘The more fathers reported that they do more than their fair share of looking after the children, the
more
satisfaction they reported with their work–family balance. There was no variation by age of the child. … This suggests that allowing men opportunity to spend more time with children, through easier access to (for example) part time work, could be a welcome policy change.’
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Another study found that men’s involvement in infant care positively correlated with their satisfaction with family life and adjustment to fatherhood; and that ‘when men do almost as much child care as their wives their psychological well-being soars’.
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The genuine, positive happiness men can find in family work does mean that despite the backlash visible in some areas of our culture, men are taking steps into doing more domestic work. The amount of time spent by men with young children on childcare activities has increased eight-fold since the 1970s, and in one recent survey seven out of ten fathers said they would like to spend more time with their children.
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We can all see that change around us, from increasing numbers of men at the school gates to increasing numbers of men asking for flexible working patterns. Men often make these changes in the teeth of cultural and workplace opposition and a loss of status and pay; for instance, employers are more likely to turn down requests for flexible working from men than from women.
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One analysis by the Equal Opportunities Commission found that one in five working men wanted to change their working patterns in order to spend more time with their children, but felt prevented from doing so due to workplace obstacles.
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Whatever changes have been made in men’s lives, this is still far from the revolution; men still do by far the majority of paid work and women by far the majority of unpaid work. A necessary first step for challenging this unequal situation would be to equalise rights to spend time with one’s children. At the moment, government policy locks fathers out of childcare by giving them the most unequal parental leave rights in Europe, with just two weeks’ paternity leave compared to a potential fifty-two weeks for women. So even if a mother and father go into parenthood with the same ideas about childcare and the same aptitudes for it, once the mother has spent months at home with her child, while the father has to work his usual long hours outside the home, it is almost inevitable that she will feel she is more keyed into her child’s needs, and is far more likely than the father to have discovered an identity beyond her working self. We need not mystify this shift in priorities by putting it down to the oxytocin surge or the way a woman’s brain is wired. The difference
in the time a mother currently spends with her child and the expectations laid upon her by everyone around her are bound to reinforce and exaggerate the difference between her behaviour and her partner’s. The fact that parental leave rights in the UK have been made so unequal has disadvantaged women in the workplace as well as disadvantaging men in the home. This imbalance means that employers still assume that women will be less committed to work than men – and in our current situation they are often right to make this assumption. That creates a circle in which expectations of women’s lesser attachment to paid work is perpetuated. It means that employers can continue to rely on many male workers who can shuffle off their responsibilities at home and force themselves into the all-hours commitment upon which so many workplaces rely.

Until we give men the same rights to care for their children that women have, we will never reach equality both at work and at home. Yet when such a reform is suggested in the UK, the language of biological determinism is immediately marshalled against it. ‘They are up against the realities of human nature,’ is how one typical commentator in the
Daily Mail
put it.
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Or, as another writer put it in the
Sunday Times:
‘It flies in the face of human nature and it’s deeply unfair on men. What if men don’t want to spend their time changing nappies and nurturing their feminine side? Actually, there’s no “if” about it: they don’t … modern men just aren’t interested in the paternity leave which the government is preparing statutorily to impose on business. They are much happier working long hours, avoiding childcare as much as possible and generally being men.’
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It is tragic that a narrative about men’s biological inability to care has infected this debate, so that instead of looking clearly at the inequality of their situations once they become parents, we talk about men’s natural lack of empathy. This means that the urgency regarding the need for changes in government policy and employment practice has lessened. The new fashion for biological determinism
does not encourage us to look at the current situation clearly and seek to change it. On the contrary, it wraps an aura of inevitability around current inequality, giving it the status of enduring archetype rather than a social situation that could be changed.

Arguments against the continuing assumption that women should embrace the role of the nurturing wife while men should concentrate their energy on paid work are often answered by recourse to the same rhetoric of individual choice that is also trotted out to defend the hypersexual culture. In reaction to any criticism of continuing inequalities, traditionalists mutter, ‘I thought feminism was meant to be all about choice.’ Feminism is all about choice, but at the moment the language of choice is used almost always in relation to those women and those men who choose to follow traditional patterns of behaviour. ‘If given
the choice
between staying at home with the newborn bairn or pottering off to work, the modern British dad comes to the same conclusion as his forebears have since caveman days, [my italics]’ says one male commentator in the
Daily Mail
.
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‘As a mother of three, I
chose
to stay at home instead of hanging on to a well-paid job, [my italics]’ writes a female commentator in the same newspaper.
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When we hear these automatic responses about choices, we have to remember the situations in which those choices are made. Given our unequal society, it is much too early to make the assumption that the choices we see today are free. Although the imbalance of caring work and paid work can be put down to free choice, individuals are affected in these choices by the expectations and relationships around them. In so many ways women and men are not developing as parents in the same situation. If men were expected to take at least six months at home with the birth of each baby, and were frowned on if they worked full-time before their child was twelve, and were judged by other fathers if they didn’t bring cakes to the school cake sale, and never
opened a newspaper without finding that the decision to work and be a father was under question; if they had to hassle and negotiate for every hour they spent away from their newborn baby, if the childcare costs were seen as coming out of their salary not their wife’s, if their partner was not prepared to take up all the slack; if they lived, in other words, in the same world that women do, then their choices might look different.