Once upon a time in a former life, a senior female (and feminist!) colleague told me during a mentoring session that if I wanted to succeed in my career that I shouldn’t have children.
Somewhat taken aback, I was searching for a response when she continued, as if by way of explanation for this extraordinary edict, ‘children need time, and if you want to be successful in this job, you will need to spend a lot of time on it.’ By a lot of time, she meant evenings and weekends as well as nine-to-five, five days a week. She herself did not have children, and was famously devoted to her work, in a way that I admired but had not particularly sought to emulate.
At that point in my life, I had not particularly decided one way or another whether I wanted to have children (time was still on my side). My main reaction to this piece of friendly ‘advice’ - and that is the spirit in which it was offered - was that I didn’t particularly appreciate being told how to live my life. No matter how high-powered, a job is still a job, no matter how much you love it. At the time, however, I let it pass, and thought to myself that if I did have children I would, as Tim Gunn might say, ‘make it work’. Or rather, we would make it work, as parenting would not just be my sole responsibility.
Fast forward a few years to me sitting in a public lecture on discrimination cases with Robert Walker, a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom (or, to give him his full title, the Right Hon the Lord Walker of Gestingthorpe). In the question-and-answer section at the end of his fascinating talk, a prominent member of the law school asked what Walker thought about the ‘problem’ of too many female law graduates. Knuckles audibly dragging on the ground, the academic in question complained that over 50% of law graduates were women, but that, once they got jobs, they would end up getting pregnant and leaving the profession. What was a law school to do about this drain on resources? Fortunately for everyone, Walker was not of the same ilk as his questioner, and gave the excellent answer that the ‘problem’ was not the proportion of female graduates, but that firms were not sufficiently flexible and family-friendly nor instituting policies that meant they retained their female staff.
A few posts ago, I wrote about pro-natalism and the problematic assumption that all women really should have children and that, if they didn’t, that they were somehow lesser members of society. In this post, I want to consider the related problem: is it possible to balance to have children and a successful career?
In my earlier post, I said that it was perfectly possible for mothers to be successful. As well as Helen Clark and Julia Gillard, there is room for a Sonja Davies, a Hillary Clinton, a Sarah Palin, and a - dare I say it? - Margaret Thatcher. In addition to Mother Teresa, the less fortunate have been helped by Eleanor Roosevelt, and Clara McBride Hale. Nobel Peace Prize laureates who are also mothers include Tawakkol Karman, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Wangari Muta Maathai. Novelists Margaret Atwood, Anne Enright and Toni Morrison have children, as do scientists Ada E. Yonath, Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Marie Curie and business women Anita Roddick and Sharon Osbourne. US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is another to add to a much longer list than I have room for here. In even those fields of achievement where physical prowess is important, there are examples of successful mothers: tennis players Kim Clijsters and Evonne Goolagong Cawley, swimmer Lisa Curry, and netballer Irene Van Dyk.
Are these women then superwomen? Certainly many of them have the financial capability to hire nannies and nurses to help them care for their children, if they so desire. Many also have more flexible professions than those with 9-to-5 jobs, which allows them to arrange their lives so they can spend as much time as they can with their children, although many are also devoted to their jobs. Some have become involved in various kinds of activism to give themselves, their children and their communities better lives. But it’s no denying that women in their roles as mothers also face substantial barriers if they are to be successful in their chosen fields, as these articles demonstrate in the fields of science and business.
Success might also depend on how much you want to rock the boat once you achieve it. US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton came under much more sexist scrutiny in 2008 than her rival vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin (and you can bet that Clinton’s one child versus Palin’s five played a hefty role in that), for example.
The conflicting impulse concerning successful women - is it better to be childless and driven or have children and learn to juggle - reminds me of the historical debate concerning the position of women after the Reformation. Wait! Don’t stop reading! I promise you, there is a connection. Feminist critics and historians have debated whether pre-Reformation Catholicism gave women more opportunities - an avenue for literacy and power through the convent and a female goddess (albeit one with her wings somewhat clipped compared to the ancient goddesses of Isis, Ishtar, and the like) - or whether post-Reformation Protestantism did, via a more central place for mothers who were not held to the Virgin Mary’s impossible standards of maternal chastity, and access to literacy through vernacular bibles and prayerbooks. Both schools of thought have pros and cons. It seems to me, however, a little like arguing over who has the best prison cell. One might have a less lumpy mattress, and the other a bigger window, but you’re incarcerated either way.
I have so far assumed that success is measured in external and ambitious terms, citing world-leaders, famous sportswomen, famous writers, scientists and philanthropists. But success is relative. I don’t know how successful I would have been in my previous career if I had chosen to sacrifice everything to it (including future children). And the ‘suggestion’ that I shouldn’t have children wasn’t even a major factor in my decision to leave that profession. I do know that it was making me unhappy, and no amount of conventional success, if indeed I achieved it, was worth that. And I do believe that happiness and success are linked. My ambitions may be more modest now, but - I hope - I am in a better position to succeed at them, by making conscious efforts to change a situation with which I wasn’t happy.
Perhaps part of the problem is that the mainstream definition of success is monolithic and gendered, which is why there is a tendency to think that ‘successful’ women are precisely successful because they do not have children. It is certainly why my former mentor and that legal academic thought that women having children was a ‘problem’ that needed to be avoided or solved. In human rights terms, this is known as a ‘deficit model’, in which a woman - or a person of colour, or a disabled person - is the one with the problem. A more enlightened and empowering way of examining the issue is through the ‘social model’: how does the way society works disadvantage - or, indeed, disable - women, people of colour, and people with disabilities? In the case of mothers particularly, women are disadvantaged through workplaces or careers that are not flexible enough to cope with their family responsibilities, and through childcare options that are expensive, of variable quality and/or difficult to reach.
Perhaps the real issue is whether we want to have a successful society, in which mothers along with everyone else are able to achieve to their fullest potential. That doesn’t mean halting the birthrate, but addressing the institutions that perpetuate discrimination and changing the way societies rather than individuals work.
That looks like success to me.
