Last week Hillary Clinton's granddaughter Charlotte started kindergarten. The Daily Mail published photos of Charlotte's dad Marc Mezvinsky and her nanny walking the toddler to kinder.
![Chelsea Clinton, Vice Chair, Clinton Foundation in 2015.](/web/20160920075619im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/h/q/1/4/4/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grj47m.png/1474348608737.jpg)
"It takes a village," says the headline.
No, actually it took a dad and a nanny. Which, given that we live in a world were both parents usually work, is pretty good, actually.
![Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky seem to have found a way to pursue careers while sharing parenting responsibilities.](/web/20160920075619im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/j/4/9/e/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.grj47m.png/1474348608737.jpg)
But this was not a story about how great it is to see a dad stepping up to take his child to school. It wasn't even a snide little piece questioning, "Why the nanny? Can't a father push a pram without female assistance?"
Oh no, this was all about mother-shaming Chelsea Clinton for being absent.
"Chelsea was unable to go with her daughter, who turns two this month, because she was campaigning for Hillary in North Carolina," tutted Mail Online reporter Chris Spargo.
And even more bizarrely, Spargo thought it was relevant to mention that Hillary Clinton didn't show up for grandmother duties.
"Hillary was also unable to join Charlotte or watch baby Aidan because she is recovering from pneumonia at her home in Chappaqua."
Donald Trump is on record admitting he had little to do with raising his own children, and we can only assume he does even less as a grandfather, and nobody bats an eyelid.
And just in case you're wondering, there was no mention of whether or not Bill Clinton was babysitting or why he didn't come along for Charlotte's first day.
Chicago TV station FOX 32 continued with the mother sledging by asking its audience: "Should Chelsea Clinton have been there for her daughter's first day? Or is it acceptable for one parent to drop the child off?"
But the station was actually asking: "Is it OK if a MOTHER isn't there for her child's first day of kinder?"
Because, as we all know, plenty of dads do not attend kinder or school drop off. My daughter has almost finished her second year of school and I have not yet even laid eyes on some of her friends' fathers.
In the same week that we mother- and grandmother-shamed the Clintons, a photo of a Megan Meier, a 35-week pregnant doctor working at a football game with three-year-old strapped on her back was celebrated as the ultimate in working motherhood.
"We often have to multitask in a pinch, and it's so much easier when people are understanding of this. We don't make excuses – we find solutions," Meier told ABC News.
Good on Meier for being able to work under these conditions, but this image is not what we should be celebrating or fighting for.
This is not what gender equality or progress looks like, because at the core of this image, and the viral response to it, is the belief that women must continue to be the primary carers for children AND do everything else that the blokes do.
In many workplaces women have to be twice as good to be considered half as competent as their male colleagues. So not only do women have to perform better and work harder than men just to earn their place in an organisation, they must be the primary carer of children and perform almost all parenting duties.
And, as we've seen with the response to Chelsea Clinton, if you're not performing all the parenting duties than your moral character will be questioned.
Chelsea Clinton and her partner Marc Mezvinsky seem to have worked out a way for them to both pursue their careers while sharing parenting responsibilities. But we don't care that their family unit seems to be working. We don't care that Charlotte got a kiss and a cuddle from a loving parent on her first day of kinder.
We care that a woman is not mother-first on every single occasion.
A woman must always be mother-first, yet, men are rarely expected to be father-first. They can prioritise being a politician, an entrepreneur, an employee, an artist, a mate, even a footy fan, before they are a father. And nobody even notices, let alone makes a judgment about their character.
In fact, some public figures are just fine with this inequality and don't see any need to challenge it.
As former Prime Minister John Howard remarked: "It is a fact of society that the caring role, whatever people may say about it and whatever the causes are, women play a significantly greater part of fulfilling the caring role in our communities, which inevitably place some limits on their capacity."
You could be helping your mother become the first female president of the United States, but, given that you're a woman, what we really care about is what you're not doing at home.
The roots of equality are not planted in boardrooms, but in lounge rooms and kitchens and nurseries. And it's not even about who does what in the home, but rather who we think SHOULD do it.
It has been, and continues to be, a battle for women to enter the public and corporate spheres of power. But as the response to Chelsea Clinton and Megan Meier last week reveals, that's actually the easy bit.
The bigger battle for women is to be released from the collective expectations of what they alone must do at home.
Kasey Edwards is the best-selling author of Thirty-Something And Over It. kaseyedwards.com
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