Anti-breeder op/ed: Mothers are to blame!

Here's a gem from Sunday's (admittedly hand-wringing left-wing national Sunday paper) The Observer. It's published in the UK, it's mainstream, and a sister paper to the great Guardian.

Yes Rachel Cooke touches on some GREAT points, and then frustratingly veers off to safer ground... still it's worth a read and it had me punching the air and slapping the coffee table in recognition a few times. Enjoy.

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Mothers are to blame for this child-obsessed society of ours

A new report suggests the shine of the super-mum is wearing off. Unfortunately the super-indulged child is taking her place.


A couple of weeks ago, I took a trip on a bus. When I got on it, near my home, it was empty, and I managed to get a seat. Twenty minutes later, though, it was standing room only, at which point my conscience got the better of me. Seeing that a group of pensioners was about to board, I stood up, in order that one of them might take my place. It was then that something appalling happened. The woman standing next to me - about 30, mobile phone in one hand, impressively expensive-looking handbag in the other - flashed me a smile. 'Thank you!' she said. And then, turning to the small child beside her: 'There you go, sweetheart!'

Oh my God. Was this really happening? Yes, it was. For 15 minutes I watched, open-mouthed as a seven-year-old in pink sneakers sat merrily in my seat, swinging her legs to the tune she was humming under her breath, while all about her adults, many of them very frail adults, and one of them her own no doubt weary mother, uncomplainingly hung on for dear life as their morning ride ploughed round another too-tight city corner.

I thought of Sneaker Girl as I read about the Cambridge university report, published last week, which seems to suggest that support for gender equality is falling. According to the research by its author, Jacqueline Scott, in 1994, 51.8 per cent of British men and 50.7 per cent of women agreed with the proposition that 'a family does not suffer if a women is in full-time employment'; by 2002, however, the figures had fallen to 42.2 per cent of men and 46.5 per cent of women.

Thanks to Sneaker Girl, I was not surprised by these figures. Thanks to her, too, I was not taken in by the likes of the Fawcett Society, which fell back on patronising old instincts and cliché when it announced that the survey shows how 'attempts to shoehorn women into workplaces made by men for men have failed'. Does it really? This survey does not herald a return to traditionalism; the same research boasts another set of figures - ones not so widely quoted in the scare stories - which show that, since 1987, the proportion of those who believe 'it is the husband's job to earn income and the wife's to look after the children' has almost halved. Neither has it much to do with Jacqueline Scott's suggestion that the 'shine of the super-mum' is wearing off; only a few glossy magazine editors believed in her in the first place.

No, this is about children. In a world in which a child is always deemed the most important person in the room (or bus), in which their desires must always be satisfied, their grievances negotiated in high UN style and their putative skills nurtured like so many hot-house seedlings, there is simply no time for the adults around them to leave the house - and since work generally involves leaving the house, someone is going to have to stay indoors. Sure, that this someone is more likely to be female than male might be due to good old-fashioned sexism.

But this is not to say there isn't an element of choice in this. Mothers! No one is forcing you to make sure that, by the time your child is nine years old, he will be incapable of amusing himself for more than five seconds.

As a childless woman of 39, I'm not really entitled to have opinions about these things; this much is often made clear to me. I don't understand. But I'm afraid I do. When women have children, they divide into two: those who try to carry on much as they did before, and those who change so much as to be unrecognisable. The first group throws the second into pretty stark relief.

When a woman tells me she is just not willing to sacrifice her children on the altar of work, I have only to think of friends who have kept working, and whose children seem to be happy and functioning, to feel not only suspicious of her motives, but insulted on the part of those she is implicitly criticising (and who may not have the luxury of choice). I think of my own mother, who always worked. The fact that she had a job never bothered me; it was the fact - and this really was due to sexism - that she had a job she hated that I disliked. I didn't want her to be thwarted.

Then I wonder when we started fetishising children. Perhaps, in the beginning, it was guilt. We worked, therefore we compensated. Some women started having children later, and were thus more grateful at their arrival. But it's gone way beyond such things now. Beyond reason, and beyond good manners. When I was small, my parents often told me to go off and amuse myself. These days, say 'Be quiet, I'm reading' to a child and it's tantamount to abuse. Once, children were discouraged from interrupting adults. Now, adults leap on their chat in the way I imagine George Henry Lewes used to leap on George Eliot whenever she emerged from her study, manuscript in hand.

You're mid-anecdote with your dear, long-lost girlfriend, when little Balthazar comes up and says something like: 'You know that dog? Where does he live? Does he live on television?' and thereafter, even if you announced you were dating a cabinet minister or about to join a lesbian order of nuns in Kuala Lumpur, it wouldn't make any difference: conversationally speaking, you're chopped liver. (The one gambit that would return you to centre stage, of course, would be to announce you were pregnant, but it's tricky to lie about that one, isn't it?)

Professor Scott's research is telling us something, but what that something is has precious little to do with whether most women are capable of, need or want, careers. What constitutes 'family life', exactly, and what do we mean when we say it is 'suffering'? One person's ideal family life is another's claustrophobia. When Jacqueline Scott says that 'the idea of women juggling high-powered careers while also baking cookies and reading bedtime stories is ... unrealisable', what is her point? A bedtime story takes five minutes; the rest is hardly necessary to a woman's or a child's happiness.

In all the maddeningly futile coverage of this survey I've read, no one has bothered to flip this thing on its head and point out that workplace discrimination and a child-obsessed society are entirely different things. So allow me. One hurts women, and society and, being historical, is unchosen. We must wipe it out. The other, alas, is entirely chosen, the result of a middle-class competitiveness that considers Mandarin classes just another notch on the Ikea yardstick of aspiration.

As for the misleading headlines on reports of this survey ('Two into one don't go'; 'Families suffer if mother works'), they are just more evidence that, sometimes, we write the stories we want to read. Perception is not fact. There is no evidence that families suffer if women work. But what do I know? I don't have children - and I can't speak Mandarin either.

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"The death of creativity is a pram in the hallway"
- Cyril Connolly