Today I read a blog post on Plato and modern motherhood (thanks to Greg Restall for the pointer!), which got me thinking. It may have been me, but the blog post seems to give the impression that there is a real dilemma between being a mother and pursuing a busy career outside the house, e.g. as an academic. The dilemma seems to be: either you have a busy career, or you are a good mother by doing things that good mothers do like baking cupcakes (and that’s of course an exclusive disjunction, in case you were wondering). Regardless of whether the author of the post herself does indeed present this as a dilemma, I believe it is in effect widely perceived as a dilemma. Some of the most outspoken feminists of previous generations (e.g. Alice Walker) contributed to this perception by being extremely critical of motherhood as something incompatible with a woman’s true personal fulfillment.
But this is a false dilemma. It only arises on the basis of a somewhat old-fashioned idea of what it is to be a good mother (e.g. baking cupcakes), which makes it seem that it is incompatible with being a scientist or an academic or what have you. What is incompatible with a career is a particular historical construal of motherhood (admittedly, a very pervasive one), not motherhood as such. There are countless ways of being a good mother, and many of them do not exclude the possibility of a successful career. Good parenting is the hardest thing in the world, but it is inherently hard, not only in combination with a busy career.
Before I go on, let me just make two obvious and yet important observations. First, for the wide majority of women around the world, being a good mother entails working hard outside the house, otherwise the children would not have their basic material needs met. To a vast number of women, the idea of choosing between working and being a mother does not even present itself; it is a luxury problem. Second, being a fulltime homemaker who does not outsource childcare and domestic endeavors to others is one of the toughest jobs there is (on a par with being a miner or a log-chopper). For one thing, you just can’t call in sick.
But even beyond these two caveats, let us go back to the idea that there are countless ways of being a good mother. In fact, there are probably as many ways of being a good mother as there are women; while the basic needs of children are more or less homogeneous, the needs of mothers are pretty much unique to each woman. Sarah Hrdy has written extensively on how motherhood is all about balancing the needs of children and the needs of mothers, and thus not about the needs of children exclusively. Animal mothers make constant "trade-offs" to negotiate conflicts between their own needs and those of their offspring. Obviously, a mother who neglects her own needs will ultimately, in the long run, no longer be able to fulfill the needs of her offspring.
Importantly, however, a career outside the home in particular need not be perceived as a conflict between the child’s needs and the mother’s. It is only on a fairly narrow conception of motherhood that this must be the case. In practice, it is still true that current working conditions and career demands often make it very difficult to combine involved parenthood with a busy career (and here I switch to ‘parenthood’ deliberately, because this impacts men as much as impacts women). But obviously, working conditions can be changed; simple measures can already make a huge difference, such as childcare offered at the parent’s work environment. Lately, there have been a number (but still far too few!) of philosophy conferences offering childcare arrangements for participants, which seems like a brilliant idea.
It is also to a large extent a matter of how to be a good mother and to be a competent professional is conceptualized. When I lived in New York a few years ago, I knew a female philosopher who had just had a baby. She had to attend a colloquium at her own institution, and was going to bring the baby and a nanny so that she could breastfeed. However, she thought it was better for the baby and the nanny to stay outside of the building altogether; she said that bringing the baby inside, even if with a nanny, would be professional suicide. She was probably right, and that is precisely what is so depressing about it. This has got to change, on both sides of the coin.
I want to conclude with a picture that probably expresses better than words what I have been trying to say here, a picture of EU parliament member Licia Ronzulli taking part in a parliament’s session in Strasbourg with her young baby comfortably tucked in a sling wrapped around her. (Btw, her politics are probably not that good, she is a member of Silvio Berlusconi’s party…)
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