“The whole ‘retro wives’ fake trend is being sold as women choosing their home and family over career or (apparently) feminism. Yet even a cursory glance at the statistics, quotes and history show it is the lack of choice actually forcing women out of the workplace and not a desire to become one with pastel bakeware or Instagram filters.” – Amy Gray, Pesky Feminist.
The “retro wives” issue raised its head again on the weekend and with it, not surprisingly, a renewed debate on feminism and women who make the choice to stay at home to parent their children.
So who’s saying what? Below’s a wrap of some of the most interesting recent coverage.
Alexandra Carlton’s article in The Age (which weirdly disappeared from the site but turned up again in Fairfax’s Essential Baby section) revisited the issue of women swapping the boardroom for baking and all things domestic.
Carlton’s was a similar take to a controversial March cover story in New York Magazine by Lisa Millar which tracked the lives of three women who had left careers in favour of looking after children and husbands full-time, claiming it to be the new feminist choice.
At the time, local writer Amy Gray rebuked the article at The Drum , saying it contradicted modern commentary on women balancing work and life. But the biggest issue for Gray was that the article didn’t “tell us about women’s lives and the factors that determine the choices made”.
“Women still work longer hours than men in the home, pay for increasingly expensive childcare, are often without the support of flexible working conditions, and potentially miss out on career opportunities.”
Gray has taken up the battle again in response to Carlton’s weekend piece, this time on her blog Pesky Feminist, articulating the mood of other bloggers by suggesting that the article, like Millar’s before it, “is not entirely moored in fact or reality” catering instead to “the tiniest demographic of privilege”.
The reality, says Gray, is something altogether more nuanced and complicated, and not just a “vaudeville battle between ‘the’ feminists and ‘the’ retro wives”.
Read Amy Gray’s full article Retro Arguments and Division at Pesky Feminist here.
Over at blog Blue Milk (tagline Thinking + Mothering = Feminist) Andie Fox’s biggest issue with Carlton’s story is a quote from feminist and author Anne Summers’ new book The Misogyny Factor, in which she writes: “If women want to quilt and craft and sort out their linen cupboards on a weekly basis that is their business. But don’t claim it is a superior way to live,” she says. “How could it have come to this – and so quickly? Not even a generation after the women’s movement fought for the right for married women to keep their jobs, to have equal access to promotion, and to be paid the same as men, scores of women are walking away and saying, ‘We’d rather be Mummies.'”
A “working-outside-the-home mother” herself, Fox says some women want to stay at home with children and babies – “and feminists need to make peace with that”.
“Until then, as feminists, we are too often pandering to a neoliberal viewpoint that ultimately devalues care work and sees women acquiring legitimacy only through marketplace transactions.”
Read Andie Fox’s full article at Blue Milk here.
Dr Jennifer Wilson, a former academic and psychotherapist, and now independent scholar and author of the blog No Place for Sheep, also takes aim at Summers’ comments at website The Shake.
Wilson relates her own story of walking away from her career to stay at home with her family – which she “loved” – until she became a single mother and “life got more difficult than I could have ever imagined”.
“The reasons women work, don’t work, do a bit of both, are so profoundly complex that your [Summers] patronizing and derogatory description of ‘yummie mummies’ reflects only your own elite ideals, and not those of the majority of women who struggle on a daily basis to do their best for their children, their partners and themselves,” writes Wilson.
“It is equally offensive to claim life as a working mother is in some way superior to a choice to stay at home. It is rather excessive start to hand wringing and railing about some middle class women who choose to stay at home breaking feminism. They aren’t breaking feminism. They won’t break feminism. They are exercising choice and agency, and isn’t that what we always wanted for ourselves?”
Read Jennifer Wilson’s full article at The Shake here.
Over at Mamamia, writer Alys Gagnon takes a more personal, combative approach. Bottom line? “You actually have no idea what it is like to parent a child until you do it. I’m unequivocal in that view.”
Gagnon says women are free to make whatever choice suits and/or fulfils them, but they shouldn’t have to carry the burden of the future of feminism.
“Until you have your first newborn, you have absolutely no idea what to expect. Don’t burden me with carrying the weight of the future of feminism as well as making sure my child stays alive. And don’t tell me what the implications of my choices are, because actually you don’t know.”
Read Alys Gagnon’s full article at Mamamia here