The family ties that bind
Updated
There's nothing wrong with desiring family or considering the formation of it as integral to your life happiness. But should family be women's most important life goal, asks Clementine Ford.
The question of What Women Want appears about as frequently as studies into who does more housework.
The answer to the latter is always women, and the results are invariably presented as a perpetual loop of surprise. Perhaps if we spent less time pretending to be shocked by the reality that women still perform the majority of the world's unpaid labour and more time insisting that that burden be equally shared, we could rid ourselves of that question once and for all.
The question of what women want has puzzled philosophers and hackneyed comedians since man first encountered the enigma of a woman's brain. It's a little known fact that speech developed among homo sapiens just so women could find the words to say, 'If you don't know what the problem is, I'm not telling you' and men could respond by asking, 'Is it PMS?'
Forgive this feminist a little retrosexist humour. It's International Women's Day after all.
And occasionally we need to tell ourselves little jokes to cope with the kinds of revelations that make us hunch our shoulders slightly, give a little grimace and spend a few minutes wondering whether the problem is everyone else or just us. I experienced such a moment on Wednesday when I read new polling figures from Roy Morgan Research.
The data collator polled women 14 years and over to try to pinpoint the life goals of Australian women in 2013. What they found was that at 41.9 per cent, a plurality of Australian women cited 'family' as their most important life goal. This was ahead of security, prosperity, excitement or the notion of an important life.
Generation Y women topped the list as the demographic for the goal of family, which isn't too unusual given it's the demographic smack bang in the middle of the child-bearing years. An important life was desired the least (although it's probable that many women who prioritise family would equate the two).
The figures are disconcerting for two reasons, and neither of them have anything to do with a betrayal of feminist values. There's nothing wrong with desiring family or considering the formation of it as integral to your life happiness. Certainly, wanting nothing more than to have children and a familial environment in which to raise them is as admirable a pursuit as any other.
But firstly, 'family' is generally considered to be something that happens around men rather than a life goal that they pursue. Men are enabled by social values to pursue the 'important' lives, the exciting lives, the prosperous lives women are evidently eschewing, because it's understood that for men these choices aren't incompatible with having a family. We have yet to mull over the troubling issue of whether or not men can 'have it all', because it's assumed that this is a problem reserved for women.
Women are still expected to do the bare bones of the parenting, and to account for who's looking after their children whenever they indulge in either work or pleasure. Children, and the act of having them, is still seen as something that elevates women into personhood.
Their childless lives are precursors to their real purpose - having babies, and discovering what it is Their Bodies Were Meant To Do. Expressing a desire to not have children is met by some with shock and occasionally even anger. Women who become mothers are rewarded in the sense that they've fulfilled society's expectations of womanhood. And yet mothers also face an exclusion in parts of society, and suffer the indignity of being assumed to have lost an essential part of their autonomous identities as women. If you remove the emotional ties to parenting, it's a bleak prospect. So from a social perspective, the fact that 'family' for women is seen as an end goal is a worrying insight into the lack of intertwining options that women perceive are available to them.
But secondly, the cost of raising children is still significantly high enough for women that encouraging them to view it as a goal - something they pursue and achieve, rather than something created and managed around them - has potentially damaging consequences. Unfortunately for women, the financial burden of caring for children still falls overwhelmingly to them.
This isn't to denigrate the financial contribution of fathers; the sacrifices men make in satisfying the expectation they'll provide for their families financially at the expense of emotional input have been significant. Liberating men and validating the emotional role they play in the lives of their family is one of the benefits that will come from changing the expectations of women's domestic responsibilities.
Mothers suffer a financial loss different to that of fathers simply supporting their brood. They're often out of the workforce for a period of time, making it more and more difficult to re-enter. Statistically, mothers who return to work part-time after their first child are less likely to return at all after their second, at least while their kids are young. And by the time children are old enough to make a return to work easier, women have lost the traction they might have gained prior to having children. Leaving aside the gender pay gap that affects most women working in salaried positions, their prospects for retirement are bleak. Women's superannuation, already estimated to be about half that at retirement age as men's, is damaged further by being out of the workforce for long periods of time.
And those are just the women in comfortable nuclear families of average to above average income. Single mothers, especially those reliant on welfare due to poverty and/or circumstances, face incredible discrimination. The Federal Government's recent decision to move single parent welfare payments to Newstart (thus forcing the single parent recipients, most of whom are women, even further into poverty) will have devastating effects. Withdrawing support from some of society's most vulnerable will do nothing more than create a new class of disadvantaged and disenfranchised women in Australia, and have significant flow-on effects for their children.
This isn't an attack on families. It's not an attack on women who prioritise child rearing or value their status as mothers. It's nothing more than a reflection of the facts - that parenting carries more of a social and financial burden for women than it does men. And yet, we still position it as a goal to aspire to rather than something that can happen concurrently with more advantageous pursuits instead of competitively. I very much doubt that a similar survey presented to men would yield the same results, because our society makes it so easy for men to view family as something that complements them rather than defines them.
Until we truly reach a state of equality - which among other things means equality in parenting, domestic chores and all similar forms of unpaid labour - the act of having children is something that has significant financial disadvantages for women.
By all means, women should make family central to their lives if that's their choice. But it's dangerous to view it as a life goal, as an act that will secure happiness at the expense of the pursuits that will secure freedom, independence and autonomy. For women, making children and family the number one goal in their lives as opposed to complementary addition makes no financial sense. As far as goals go, it's a bit like sending a perfect kick right through the centre of the wrong posts.
Clementine Ford is a freelance writer, broadcaster and public speaker based in Melbourne. Follow her on twitter: @clementine_ford. View her full profile here.
Topics: community-and-society, family, family-and-children, women
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