This conversation feels particularly relevant to me as I'm pregnant with my first, due in the fall. My workplace (small nonprofit) just recently implemented a family leave policy, partly due to my and another female employee's advocacy. I sat with our 3 male board members and 1 male exec. director and tried to advocate for delineating between time off for a woman's health reasons/physical recovery from birth vs. any parent's time off for caring for and bonding with new child. My thoughts were quickly shot down in favor of an "everyone gets the same parental leave, of course" policy. I'm certainly glad to have the policy in place when there had previously been nothing, but it's frustrating to think about how much needs to happen during "parental leave" for me compared with a man at our company who recently also took leave and could spend that time simply caring for the new baby. I will be, no doubt, dealing with physical recovery for weeks during that period (and that's if everything happens without major complications), in addition to getting to know a new baby, not to mention being the primary provider of nutrition for the baby if I'm able to breastfeed. Oh and my husband's big tech company gives him more paid time off than I'm getting, for which he needed to do zero advocacy or negotiation; he simply gets it. To stop this from becoming a rant, I'll just say that equal treatment is indeed falling short here, and failing to recognize the obviously different needs of women and their partners when it comes to giving birth. Any parental leave in America is progress (sad to say), but some of it feels like two steps forward, one step back. It doesn't sit right with me and I'm sure I'll have even more feelings about it once I've actually given birth and taken that time off.
Wife and I are in the same position: my work at a big tech company automatically entitles me to minimum six weeks fully paid leave for any new child, plus another four weeks paid full time but working half time. My wife, on the other hand, has to take vacation time, because she works for a small firm, and there’s a lot of pressure on her to return as soon as she can, again because it’s a tiny firm.
Turned out to be not so bad in retrospect: since we took it together we had a lot of quality time and my wife was really ready to quit resting and get moving by about three weeks. But we often wished that she could have had those four weeks half time to ease into things.
Oooof. I hope all goes well with your firstborn's labor/delivery/postpartum. This reminds me of when a family member (a woman & mother!) tried to compare women getting maternity leave with anyone else getting generic paid time off. "Why should they get more??" Made my blood boil.
"How do you make the endlessly repeated work visible?": I am NOT a chart-and-quantify person, although this breastfeeding graph and $11,460 figure do communicate helpfully about how much women give in infants' months and how much infants' flourishing requires someone to give. Even precise record keeping and billable minutes misses a lot, though, because what the woman is giving is also her availability, I'm-here-when-you-need-me, and not just the actual minutes of nursing. I think vocabulary of gift is truer for what we give family and friends than cost-counting. Even so, one wants to point out just how much is given, to help the recipient see what a big gift this is. Inviting others to share the work helps make it visible (one reason among many for assigning kids chores): they might not have known how much labor the thing takes unless they do it. Pointing it out, complimenting and admiring it in others is right (your neighbor's flowerboxes, the cake somebody brought, the cards they sent), and can make your own care work visible too. Gratitude, in prayers or to persons, can reveal that endlessly repeated work. The currency of supply-chain language now may assist recognition of how much lots of people in lots of places already have done to provide many things in our day we take for granted. I do have mixed feeling about this as "work" and even about the making visible. I think caring for loved ones should count as work (so not quite this by Jon Malesic, "Parenting is Not a “Job,”"), but too much a concession to the market to name a price for what is beyond price. Then, self-regardingly I want my work to be visible, though I am some persuaded that I shouldn't (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/invisible-labor-invisible-hands/).
"Gratitude, in prayers or to persons, can reveal that endlessly repeated work." My 3yo frequently asks to offer the prayer before meals, and every single time she prays, "Thank you for our house, thank you for our dinner, Amen" and at first I was annoyed, and then I realized, yes, gratitude for those things is appropriate, even three times a day - and thank you to my 3yo for making that care/work visible to me.
What makes the work of others visible to me is when I do some of it. When I had my first, I felt like I was drowning (which I think is normal) and *so many* moms that I sorta knew swarmed me with "I'll come over and wash your dishes" and "Let me hold the baby while you take a shower -- and take a long shower. Run out the hot water tank." I knew that bringing meals to new moms was a thing, and I did some of that, but all these other things did not occur to me before I had the experience.
We can't all experience everything, but I think part of the approach to women's equality *as women* involves normalizing families. If more people had kids, if more college students babysat/nannied for extra cash (while not necessarily foregoing career-building internships and things), if more teenagers were sent to the new mom's house to wash the dishes or hold the baby so the new mom could take a shower, I think people would *get* that the particular needs of moms are *normal* and not some irritating exception that we have to make concessions for.
Relatedly, I would also encourage volunteer / part-time work that is care work, whether it's caring for children, elderly people, people with illnesses, homeless people, or whoever. Many adults (not all!) are able to put aside an evening a week or a few hours on Saturday to volunteer, and for teenagers, care work doesn't build a resume any less than park maintenance or working at a restaurant. I don't think everyone can make it work at every stage in their life, but I think a lot more people can than do. Experience (even if it's just dabbling) opens your eyes to other parts of the world more than just hearing/reading about it. People say that about traveling, and it's true of your elderly neighbor as well. Go pick some flowers and say hello.
When the first choice between appointing Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh to SCOTUS arose, I was slated to publish an article on the unlikelihood of high-achieving mothers like ACB achieving as she did absent an intentional community, like the one she in fact had, People of Praise. Of course, Kavanaugh was chosen instead that time, and all hell broke loose. By the time ACB was appointed, the publishers had lost interest in me for other reasons.
The problem with communities like People of Praise is that they're vulnerable to becoming abusive cults. Some women may be happy to take on a life of religiously inspired childcare gigs to help other women fulfill a career "equal to men" outside the home, but, given all the stories of abuse in religious communities, it's hard to have confidence that the women slated to do this kind of childcare work will be the ones truly inspired to do it, as opposed to the women who "get stuck" with it because they're relatively low-status and powerless in the community.
Some women with promising, well-paying careers delay childbearing until they can afford "intentional community levels" of hired help. But even for many high achievers, that won't be an option, and might not be best even if it is. I'm far from Jordan Peterson with his "lobster hierarchy!" attitude toward social roles, but I admit to remaining pessimistic that mothers achieving full social equality with men will ever become normal. Childless women? Yes, and in many ways that has already happened, at least among the elites. But mothers? I can't shake the sinking feeling it may be physically impossible.
For me, my community wasn't an official, intentional thing. It was just that at my church there are a lot of families and we all sorta know each other and I think there's a facebook group that not everybody is in.
I'm aware of People of Praise but not super familiar with it so I won't comment on it specifically, but I do know that intentional groups can get weird, sometimes just in a weird way but other times in an abusive/cultish way like you say. But I don't think community necessarily needs to be religiously motivated (or that only religiously motivated communities can get weird). We can have neighbors and nearby families. That isn't *practically* possible for a lot of people, but it is *theoretically* possible, and I think it's generally good if society moves in this direction.
I see intentional communities as coming from a good place -- recognizing the normal human need for community -- even if they do go off the rails sometimes. But there exist societies where community is normal, and when community is *normal* then it doesn't have to be an intentional *thing* and then it's less likely to go off the rails.
To your final point, though, I generally agree. The professional world as it is was built for men because when it was built, women weren't really participating in it. I think real equality for women requires a very big cultural shift. Children take away from your *ability to be productive* in just about every profession, and that's just a fact regardless of what culture you're in. I don't think you can get around that. BUT -- Children take away from your *status/society value/etc* *only* in cultures (like ours) that see your value as coming primarily from productivity. Children *do not take away from your status/societal value* if your culture recognizes as valuable things beyond productivity. (Does that make sense?)
I don't see a lot of potential for mothers to be fully equal in our society as it is, but only with that cultural shift. And I think that normalizing family life could be an important piece of furthering that shift.
I get what you're saying with, "Children take away from your *ability to be productive* in just about every profession, and that's just a fact regardless of what culture you're in. I don't think you can get around that. BUT -- Children take away from your *status/society value/etc* *only* in cultures (like ours) that see your value as coming primarily from productivity. Children *do not take away from your status/societal value* if your culture recognizes as valuable things beyond productivity."
But losing productivity in "just about every profession" is not the same thing as losing total individual productivity. Childcare is productive work, even if you're not paid for it. It's just not *recognized* as productive work — by most people — unless you're paid for it. Oddly enough, economists are some of the best at recognizing that unpaid work within the household is "productive". But economists' brains are weird: many of them are truly bad at seeing that there are bourgeois (even "free market"!) notions of "productivity" that are more about status than, y'know, literally about productivity. I know because I'm married to one :-)
In one sense, I'm lucky I'm married to an economist, because I'm not sure I'd even be alive right now without a spouse who recognized my "pathetic attempts at mothering" (my words, not his) actually are worth something as a cost savings, even though I'm not the "working mom" I was raised to be. In another sense, it's maddening that his tidy economic brain is too focused on reality to really "get" the unrealistic social stigma surrounding unpaid domestic labor!
I love that last paragraph! Same here, though married to a chemist. :) Just last night, we were discussing how his new job has him commuting almost an hour each way to a different site than originally anticipated. It's a bother but not the end of the world for us. I gently reminded him of how crushing and stressful those extra two hours of commuting would be if he were a single dad, or the working mom. I am gladly able to stay home with our toddlers, so it doesn't affect them or their schedules...... but brining up alternative scenarios certainly made him think!
I read the comment to my husband, since it concerned him, and he got quite a chuckle out of the last paragraph. We had a short, pleasant conversation on the power social reality has even when it's at odds with "real reality".
yeah! What I want to say here is: your husband is right but our culture/society doesn't see that, and I think when our society begins to see that is when we'll begin to see real equality for women.
> "BUT -- Children take away from your *status/society value/etc* *only* in cultures (like ours) that see your value as coming primarily from productivity."
So, I had a weird/crazy idea some months ago, and I'm going to put it out here... What if male status by-default is related to success/competence... (which is often quantified by or equated with financial success in our society) ...but what if as-a-default, (default for humanity at large + thru history) female status is related to a woman's children? (or maybe, before she has children, "who her husband is"... and then her children.)
One weird attempt to provide evidence: What if those annoying mothers of grown children who ceaselessly brag about their faraway-kids' accomplishments... are faint, warped windows into natural expectations of status? Like, the kids went off and became successful, and the mom is engaging in a socially-clumsy attempt to "collect" the status that she normally would? But since they're not close to their roots, metaphorically "building up the village" ...they're not Old-Testament-style "in the city gates" helping mediate disputes... there's no natural way for people to see, "Oh hey, these 20-somethings / 30-somethings are wise, level-headed, responsible human beings--yay, mom!"
see amy anderson's comment below about her co-workers donating PTO as an example of non-religious community support (and I'm sorry it wasn't available for her!)
I think your caution is well-advised. I have some experience with a similar community, and I left because I saw cult-like warning signs. The leadership has since changed, and I think things have improved, but mothers in need of support are, I believe, particularly vulnerable to such groups.
This fits my personality, but I am big on charts: a chart of the meal plan, a cleaning checklist, a next-12-weeks calendar printout on the fridge at all times - it shows the work centrally in the kitchen. It doesn't show the work to make those charts though....
I also track my breastfeeding and pumping for the first year (mostly to try to even out the "overachiever boob" and the "slacker boob"), but I am really, really resistant to these efforts to quantify the time cost and financial cost of breastfeeding, partially because it implies that other methods of feeding babies *don't* take time! Which is not true - *someone* has to take time to feed the baby, and in my experience the time spent making the bottle, giving the bottle, cleaning the bottle, managing formula supplies, etc. takes much MORE time in the aggregate than lift-up-shirt, eat, done (I have been breastfeeding almost continually for seven years, and like most things moms and babies get better with practice).
In my personal view, it is primarily (not exclusively) the mother who should be feeding the baby, because the baby needs that maternal connection and caregiving throughout the day, and the connection is beneficial for moms, too. So there is a certain amount of non-negotiable "time spent feeding baby" that is inherent to babies, and cannot be modified or optimized, and it is one of the great privileges of motherhood to do it mostly oneself rather than having it done by someone else.
An honest accounting of the cost of breastfeeding would be the opportunity cost - the cost of breastfeeding vs. the cost of feeding a baby some other way - not just the gross time and money spent.
I find these accountings miss the fact that... babies are people, and people need to eat. Why not also just count up the time feeding yourself rather than working? If I look at the time I spend making only breakfast, lunch and dinner for myself (not counting time spent making it for my children), it is also an absurdly large amount of time. Very inefficient! Very costly! But it is an "acceptable" cost because everyone takes it for granted that adults need to eat.
I am an attorney who bills in 6-minute increments and makes more money if I bill more hours, so I am in one of the few jobs where I could, in reality, directly replace any activity with time spent working just like in the economic hypotheticals, and believe me, I have considered eating only Soylent and protein bars because eating takes too long sometimes - but outside of tech bro and surgical resident culture, very few people would consider that a reasonable solution because we take much more seriously the needs of adult people than the needs of baby people. (Although we fall short in considering the needs of adults too, as Leah and this community have often identified).
I used to bring in a stack of Mealsquares at the beginning of the week at one job. It’s easier to take time and pleasure in cooking when it’s not just for me.
I had one semester where I was super busy and also more or less kept on top of everything. Someone asked me what I did, and I had my time blocked out including AMPLE time to prepare food, eat, and clean up. In certain ways, babies are easier to feed because you don't have to serve different food every day or pay attention to balancing vegetables and protein and everything, plus preparation is generally easier. I mean, you considered eating only Soylent and protein bars; isn't that kind of the adult version of formula?
"It doesn't show the work to make those charts though...." I am laughing because I, too, am a chart and excel spreadsheet person for our family, so I get it. :)
Yes, babies are people and people need to eat! I was nodding along and thinking, "If we don't take time to prepare food then we would all just drink Soylent all the time and ugh, how gross and depressing would that be . . . " and then you mentioned Soylent and I laughed out loud :-D I'm an engineer who is also very familiar with the idea of the billable hour, so we clearly think very much alike!
"...and in my experience the time spent making the bottle, giving the bottle, cleaning the bottle, managing formula supplies, etc. takes much MORE time in the aggregate than lift-up-shirt, eat, done (I have been breastfeeding almost continually for seven years, and like most things moms and babies get better with practice)."
Right. That's your experience. Others may have different experience.
The hospital where I delivered my first offers everyone a free lactation consult. The lactation consultant was rendered literally speechless for a while upon seeing my hyperextensible nipples. I didn't know they were hyperextensible at the time, just "weird".
I've known women who could (with care) nurse hands-free with the right nursing sling. For others, it's always a two-hand, back-crunching job, and always going to be a two-hand, back-crunching job. For some, blinding migraines from hormones released during letdown render them incoherent.
When everything works right, nursing is a beautiful thing. But we're absurdly contingent souls in ridiculous meat-puppet bodies, with no guarantee everything is working right, or can be made (even with all the technology at our disposal!) to work right. In an earlier era, I'd either have to have been waited on by others hand-and-foot to nurse my babies or hired a wet nurse — or probably watched my babies slowly starve to death due to my "incompetence" — that is, if I didn't fall asleep while nursing and smother them with my lax breast tissue first:
totally agree! For six weeks after my first was born, breastfeeding took at least three hands, and with two of my babies I've used formula too. But breastfeeding is lately presented as uniquely demanding of women's *time*, and I don't think that's true.
That nursing isn't equally time-consuming for everyone, and that it may be no more time-consuming than other forms of caregiving, is true.
But I think for many of us, it *feels* uniquely time-consuming, especially if we aren't one of the lucky ones who can "multitask" during it. The middle-class notion of "work ethic" just doesn't have much to say about waiting on a gland to secrete its stuff. Sure, "sweat equity" is part of the work ethic, and milk glands may be modified sweat glands, but with ordinary sweat, you expect to "get more" by "working harder", and that's not how nursing works.
I cop to a kind of blinding, furious envy at discovering some "experienced mamas" could use a nursing sling to get housework done while nursing — especially "housework that just takes one hand!", like vacuuming (allegedly). While it's possible more women could learn to do this with the right equipment and training, it's physically out of reach for some.
I mostly agree with the experts who say that there is no such thing as multitasking, just rapid task-switching, resulting in less focus on any given task. But the *culture* of "multitasking" is strong, *especially*, I think, for mothers. And "getting nothing else done 'cuz you're waiting on a gland" creates massive cognitive dissonance with this culture. So massive it could probably trigger migraines all by itself, even with no nursing hormones to "help" (though they do).
"Where have you seen "equal" treatment fall short of equity?" This phrase succinctly summarizes the issues I had surrounding my first maternity leave, in a way I've never been able to put words around. For context, my employer at the time had a policy of paying 2/3 salary for 6 weeks through disability insurance following birth. Therefore, if you didn't give birth any time you took through FMLA was unpaid, so functionally speaking, no paternity leave. However, a very close coworker of mine had two children, both of whom had complicated births and spent several weeks each in the NICU. Both times people donated PTO hours to him so that he could be with his wife and children in the hospital without loss of income, as well as provided other support to his family (a Meal Train, etc.) I was a very new employee when his first child was born, I had a few years experience with the second, and I remember being so proud that that's how we responded to that scenario. Fast forward a few years and now I have just given birth to two children who are in the NICU. I used the disability insurance to get 2/3 pay, I did not get PTO donated to me because I was eligible for that benefit instead, and when I asked for an extension of leave (my twins were born 6 weeks early and 3 weeks before I intended to go on leave so I asked for a 3 week extension in order to keep my scheduled return date) it was denied and I was told if I went beyond protected FMLA leave my job would be at risk. I remember thinking that the ethos surrounding our support for him seemed to be, "Look at us help this family in a difficult time! We're going above and beyond! We're an employer that cares for employees!" But for me, the ethos was, "There's a policy in place that covers you, if the support that policy provides is inadequate, we're not going to make up the difference."
In terms of equality vs equity, that was never the goal of the PTO donations (stated or otherwise) and I don't know exactly how much PTO was donated to him so I have no idea if dollar wise it was more or less than 6 weeks at 2/3 pay. I do know how surprised and hurt I was to realize that the ethos of support was not extended to me. Plus there's the (in this case unspoken) idea that a father should be able to be present in the weeks after birth if his child is premature or otherwise hospitalized, but if the birth is relatively normal and the baby is healthy, his presence is probably superfluous.
Final note - Leah your language around "if women carry heavier burdens as parents, admitting them gives employers an excuse to prefer men" hits the nail on the head. But if I were to pitch paid leave to my current employer, my pitch would be that ANYONE who experiences an FMLA qualifying event would be eligible for 6 weeks paid leave. I admit I prefer this framing because it prevents paid leave from being perceived as only needed by women of childbearing age, when in reality anyone of any age might need it to care for or mourn a family member. But do you think this framing neglects the unique needs and expectations of caregiving that are placed on women? (Asking seriously, if I ever get a chance to make this pitch I would want it to be vetted beforehand!)
Thank you for sharing your story, Amy - and I agree with you totally on that final note! Shouldn't we be working for a world where anyone who may need 15 minute breaks throughout the day for self- or other-care can do so, not just nursing mothers?
How about a world where all caregiving is recognized as valuable, whether for offspring, family or friends? And where workplaces graciously accommodate it as a societal obligation?
I think a lot of the beauty of the world we want to create (and I do truly believe most of this community has a similar vision of that world where care is celebrated), is lost or obscured when we say 'this category gets X, and we must specify exactly what each category receives'. Instead we could build common cause with the disability and chronic illness communities and stand in solidarity with caregivers of all stripes.
I think this is both something many people need *and* not trivial for many kinds of work to accommodate (e.g. teaching in a conventional school with periods, rather than homeschooling or in a one-room schoolhouse).
But how much better the world would be if it was oriented around that flexibility! For instance, in Finland kids get 15 minute play breaks every 45 minutes in elementary school. Such a better system for both teachers and students!
In many workplaces, allowing breaks is difficult because of a choice to short-staff (to increase profit), rather than a true difficulty in making accommodations. That's true for nurses in hospitals, servers in restaurants, folks working in warehouses, etc.
Slackless staffing definitely makes this impossible (and causes a lot of other problems, too). But in that Finland example, they do all get that break at the same time, rather than the whole class taking little 15m breaks when they need them individually.
Flipped classrooms would make individual breaks more plausible (if kids are self-pacing video or book instruction, and then using teacher time to ask for help).
That's a good point about flipped classrooms. After many years of teaching in public, Catholic, hybrid, and homeschools, I am convinced it is usually the most effective way to teach as well.
This is something we're wrestling with - we're looking to hire a full-time nanny next year. I believe that breaks/flexible time/graceful accommodations are just as important for my nanny as for me. But how? We want to give her a real lunch break and any other breaks she might need, but it's going to take some significant inconvenience and real costs in my and my husband's schedules.
Rita, we had a part-time (not live in) nanny for six years so I have some experience in this. Not sure if Substack lets you see people's emails but if you'd like to connect on this let me know!
Mothers who work for the federal government can take their accumulated sick leave after birth and then start their 12 weeks parental leave, which I think is a good way of balancing birth recovery while keeping bonding leave gender neutral (and hopefully less likely to prompt discrimination). My husband’s previous employer offered 8 weeks paid for the “primary parent” and 2 weeks paid for the the “secondary parent,” which I think was an effort to make allowances for birth recovery without having to have their male employees be out for 2 months or making their policy gender specific. I thought that was a bad way of doing it because it seemed to reinforce that fathers were “secondary” parents.
Plus, two weeks is still pretty stingy for the supporting parent, both with my c-section and my second delivery, I was not back to full capacity that fast! I needed a lot of help.
That policy had a lot of room for improvement - when my husband left, he told them in his exit interview that a big reason was that his new job offered 12 weeks parental leave and I guess they must have heard that a lot because now all parents get 12 weeks
Oh goodness does this resonate! I’m a brand new subscriber, just catching up here, but that nursing chart brought back a memory from ten years ago, when I was nursing premature twins and created a chart to show my partner exactly how much time I was awake in the night. Charts are everywhere in the early days of twins, to keep track of which baby eats when, on which breast, who pooped, etc. My male partner has an MBA and the best way to make things real for him is to quantify. So when he tried to tell me how tired he was each morning and that he was up just as much as I was to change diapers and rock babies back to sleep and give the occasional bottle of pumped milk, I used the chart method to quantify both of our time up in the night. That settled that.
I want to note that there isn’t a way to quantify the impact giving birth and nursing have on bodies, too. From the immediate impact, including the incredible amount of calories I had to consume to nurse twins (I had two singletons before them and it felt like my nutritional needs were exponentially larger with twins-talk about time spent preparing food!) and the healing required from vaginal births or c-sections, to the long term impact some women have on pelvic bones and tissues-well, how on earth do we make visible these impacts? My twins are ten years old and I still have pelvic pain from the impact on my joints and ligaments.
I would also love to see more discussion about elder care here. I am in that sandwich generation where I’m caregiving at both ends of life. That too is work that needs to be made visible. The long conversations with parents about things that they are struggling with, the work of figuring out support systems when parents live hours away, and of course the labor, gift though it is, of caring for a dying parent over months of hospice. FMLA doesn’t begin to cover those hours and days. And dying is not a predictable, “let’s schedule your leave” kind of process.
I want to say thank you so much for this place for conversation and your wonderful writing. I’m so glad I found my way here.
I'm mostly commenting on the chart.... it tells a story. You can tell as time goes on that the baby and mother established a rough routine during the day. You can also tell that the baby eventually slept through the night (indicating maybe some sleep training?).
I'm nursing my eight month old, and I don't even track the left vs right boob thing. It's a combination of which one is fuller and which my kid prefers (he prefers one for eating and the other for nursing to sleep), the latter of which is an outcome of my hand dominance since I work while nursing him.
I don't think there is a "currency" that can measure care. It's an act of love. It's paid back in love, and in the things love brings--peace, joy, satisfaction, harmonious relationships.
That is NOT to say that it's wrong to quantify time spent at care-giving tasks, as a way of showing others something of what is involved, but it just can't fully account for the "costs" or, more significantly, the rewards of caring.
When my son was born, I chose to step back from my career to be an at-home mother. It was a personal choice, not one I think would work for every woman, but it's one I'm very glad I made, even though financially we have never recovered that lost income. I have no idea how many hours I spent nursing my baby. I didn't need to know. For the first few weeks, breastfeeding seemed like pure torture, but I was lucky enough to get through that and have no more difficulties, and then the time spent caring him was just a joy.
I loved being home with him as he grew older, too. Again, I'm very aware that this isn't a choice that every woman is able to make, or should have to make. I just know that the payoff was immeasurable. Our son is in his early 20's now, a fine man with good values, who loves teaching and is enjoying a challenging graduate program on the other side of the continent, but still calls home regularly and seems to enjoy talking to us. How could I possibly measure that in anything the world would recognize as a "currency"? We've never had enough money to take expensive vacations or to renovate our home, but we've had enough to get by on, and our family has been happy and content. I wouldn't exchange what we've had for any amount of money.
Always love sitting down with some metaphorical popcorn for the thoughtful comments. For the last two years, I have been considering becoming an IBCLC (slowly, over the next few years) as a flexible job when our children are older. So, these are all good thoughts to consider, and I'm thankful for your readers!
Honestly, the whole thrust of this "other feminism" seems constantly to repeat the deep error of the feminist movement--compare women to men so that women can be more like men. It ain't that way. Motherhood and womanhood is full of unseen, spread-out, sometimes thankless tasks that seem often if not always to add up to a big 0 when you try to quantify them. Suck it up and be a woman. Sounds like a lot of young professional whining women to me. I'm 70. Also over-educated by the way.
This conversation feels particularly relevant to me as I'm pregnant with my first, due in the fall. My workplace (small nonprofit) just recently implemented a family leave policy, partly due to my and another female employee's advocacy. I sat with our 3 male board members and 1 male exec. director and tried to advocate for delineating between time off for a woman's health reasons/physical recovery from birth vs. any parent's time off for caring for and bonding with new child. My thoughts were quickly shot down in favor of an "everyone gets the same parental leave, of course" policy. I'm certainly glad to have the policy in place when there had previously been nothing, but it's frustrating to think about how much needs to happen during "parental leave" for me compared with a man at our company who recently also took leave and could spend that time simply caring for the new baby. I will be, no doubt, dealing with physical recovery for weeks during that period (and that's if everything happens without major complications), in addition to getting to know a new baby, not to mention being the primary provider of nutrition for the baby if I'm able to breastfeed. Oh and my husband's big tech company gives him more paid time off than I'm getting, for which he needed to do zero advocacy or negotiation; he simply gets it. To stop this from becoming a rant, I'll just say that equal treatment is indeed falling short here, and failing to recognize the obviously different needs of women and their partners when it comes to giving birth. Any parental leave in America is progress (sad to say), but some of it feels like two steps forward, one step back. It doesn't sit right with me and I'm sure I'll have even more feelings about it once I've actually given birth and taken that time off.
Wife and I are in the same position: my work at a big tech company automatically entitles me to minimum six weeks fully paid leave for any new child, plus another four weeks paid full time but working half time. My wife, on the other hand, has to take vacation time, because she works for a small firm, and there’s a lot of pressure on her to return as soon as she can, again because it’s a tiny firm.
Turned out to be not so bad in retrospect: since we took it together we had a lot of quality time and my wife was really ready to quit resting and get moving by about three weeks. But we often wished that she could have had those four weeks half time to ease into things.
Oooof. I hope all goes well with your firstborn's labor/delivery/postpartum. This reminds me of when a family member (a woman & mother!) tried to compare women getting maternity leave with anyone else getting generic paid time off. "Why should they get more??" Made my blood boil.
"How do you make the endlessly repeated work visible?": I am NOT a chart-and-quantify person, although this breastfeeding graph and $11,460 figure do communicate helpfully about how much women give in infants' months and how much infants' flourishing requires someone to give. Even precise record keeping and billable minutes misses a lot, though, because what the woman is giving is also her availability, I'm-here-when-you-need-me, and not just the actual minutes of nursing. I think vocabulary of gift is truer for what we give family and friends than cost-counting. Even so, one wants to point out just how much is given, to help the recipient see what a big gift this is. Inviting others to share the work helps make it visible (one reason among many for assigning kids chores): they might not have known how much labor the thing takes unless they do it. Pointing it out, complimenting and admiring it in others is right (your neighbor's flowerboxes, the cake somebody brought, the cards they sent), and can make your own care work visible too. Gratitude, in prayers or to persons, can reveal that endlessly repeated work. The currency of supply-chain language now may assist recognition of how much lots of people in lots of places already have done to provide many things in our day we take for granted. I do have mixed feeling about this as "work" and even about the making visible. I think caring for loved ones should count as work (so not quite this by Jon Malesic, "Parenting is Not a “Job,”"), but too much a concession to the market to name a price for what is beyond price. Then, self-regardingly I want my work to be visible, though I am some persuaded that I shouldn't (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/invisible-labor-invisible-hands/).
"Gratitude, in prayers or to persons, can reveal that endlessly repeated work." My 3yo frequently asks to offer the prayer before meals, and every single time she prays, "Thank you for our house, thank you for our dinner, Amen" and at first I was annoyed, and then I realized, yes, gratitude for those things is appropriate, even three times a day - and thank you to my 3yo for making that care/work visible to me.
I love this! Our 2.5yo favors her own version of the Divine Mercy prayer: "Jesus, I'm trusting you!" which we have to add to all mealtime prayers now.
What makes the work of others visible to me is when I do some of it. When I had my first, I felt like I was drowning (which I think is normal) and *so many* moms that I sorta knew swarmed me with "I'll come over and wash your dishes" and "Let me hold the baby while you take a shower -- and take a long shower. Run out the hot water tank." I knew that bringing meals to new moms was a thing, and I did some of that, but all these other things did not occur to me before I had the experience.
We can't all experience everything, but I think part of the approach to women's equality *as women* involves normalizing families. If more people had kids, if more college students babysat/nannied for extra cash (while not necessarily foregoing career-building internships and things), if more teenagers were sent to the new mom's house to wash the dishes or hold the baby so the new mom could take a shower, I think people would *get* that the particular needs of moms are *normal* and not some irritating exception that we have to make concessions for.
Relatedly, I would also encourage volunteer / part-time work that is care work, whether it's caring for children, elderly people, people with illnesses, homeless people, or whoever. Many adults (not all!) are able to put aside an evening a week or a few hours on Saturday to volunteer, and for teenagers, care work doesn't build a resume any less than park maintenance or working at a restaurant. I don't think everyone can make it work at every stage in their life, but I think a lot more people can than do. Experience (even if it's just dabbling) opens your eyes to other parts of the world more than just hearing/reading about it. People say that about traveling, and it's true of your elderly neighbor as well. Go pick some flowers and say hello.
When the first choice between appointing Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh to SCOTUS arose, I was slated to publish an article on the unlikelihood of high-achieving mothers like ACB achieving as she did absent an intentional community, like the one she in fact had, People of Praise. Of course, Kavanaugh was chosen instead that time, and all hell broke loose. By the time ACB was appointed, the publishers had lost interest in me for other reasons.
The problem with communities like People of Praise is that they're vulnerable to becoming abusive cults. Some women may be happy to take on a life of religiously inspired childcare gigs to help other women fulfill a career "equal to men" outside the home, but, given all the stories of abuse in religious communities, it's hard to have confidence that the women slated to do this kind of childcare work will be the ones truly inspired to do it, as opposed to the women who "get stuck" with it because they're relatively low-status and powerless in the community.
Some women with promising, well-paying careers delay childbearing until they can afford "intentional community levels" of hired help. But even for many high achievers, that won't be an option, and might not be best even if it is. I'm far from Jordan Peterson with his "lobster hierarchy!" attitude toward social roles, but I admit to remaining pessimistic that mothers achieving full social equality with men will ever become normal. Childless women? Yes, and in many ways that has already happened, at least among the elites. But mothers? I can't shake the sinking feeling it may be physically impossible.
For me, my community wasn't an official, intentional thing. It was just that at my church there are a lot of families and we all sorta know each other and I think there's a facebook group that not everybody is in.
I'm aware of People of Praise but not super familiar with it so I won't comment on it specifically, but I do know that intentional groups can get weird, sometimes just in a weird way but other times in an abusive/cultish way like you say. But I don't think community necessarily needs to be religiously motivated (or that only religiously motivated communities can get weird). We can have neighbors and nearby families. That isn't *practically* possible for a lot of people, but it is *theoretically* possible, and I think it's generally good if society moves in this direction.
I see intentional communities as coming from a good place -- recognizing the normal human need for community -- even if they do go off the rails sometimes. But there exist societies where community is normal, and when community is *normal* then it doesn't have to be an intentional *thing* and then it's less likely to go off the rails.
To your final point, though, I generally agree. The professional world as it is was built for men because when it was built, women weren't really participating in it. I think real equality for women requires a very big cultural shift. Children take away from your *ability to be productive* in just about every profession, and that's just a fact regardless of what culture you're in. I don't think you can get around that. BUT -- Children take away from your *status/society value/etc* *only* in cultures (like ours) that see your value as coming primarily from productivity. Children *do not take away from your status/societal value* if your culture recognizes as valuable things beyond productivity. (Does that make sense?)
I don't see a lot of potential for mothers to be fully equal in our society as it is, but only with that cultural shift. And I think that normalizing family life could be an important piece of furthering that shift.
I get what you're saying with, "Children take away from your *ability to be productive* in just about every profession, and that's just a fact regardless of what culture you're in. I don't think you can get around that. BUT -- Children take away from your *status/society value/etc* *only* in cultures (like ours) that see your value as coming primarily from productivity. Children *do not take away from your status/societal value* if your culture recognizes as valuable things beyond productivity."
But losing productivity in "just about every profession" is not the same thing as losing total individual productivity. Childcare is productive work, even if you're not paid for it. It's just not *recognized* as productive work — by most people — unless you're paid for it. Oddly enough, economists are some of the best at recognizing that unpaid work within the household is "productive". But economists' brains are weird: many of them are truly bad at seeing that there are bourgeois (even "free market"!) notions of "productivity" that are more about status than, y'know, literally about productivity. I know because I'm married to one :-)
In one sense, I'm lucky I'm married to an economist, because I'm not sure I'd even be alive right now without a spouse who recognized my "pathetic attempts at mothering" (my words, not his) actually are worth something as a cost savings, even though I'm not the "working mom" I was raised to be. In another sense, it's maddening that his tidy economic brain is too focused on reality to really "get" the unrealistic social stigma surrounding unpaid domestic labor!
I love that last paragraph! Same here, though married to a chemist. :) Just last night, we were discussing how his new job has him commuting almost an hour each way to a different site than originally anticipated. It's a bother but not the end of the world for us. I gently reminded him of how crushing and stressful those extra two hours of commuting would be if he were a single dad, or the working mom. I am gladly able to stay home with our toddlers, so it doesn't affect them or their schedules...... but brining up alternative scenarios certainly made him think!
I read the comment to my husband, since it concerned him, and he got quite a chuckle out of the last paragraph. We had a short, pleasant conversation on the power social reality has even when it's at odds with "real reality".
yeah! What I want to say here is: your husband is right but our culture/society doesn't see that, and I think when our society begins to see that is when we'll begin to see real equality for women.
> "BUT -- Children take away from your *status/society value/etc* *only* in cultures (like ours) that see your value as coming primarily from productivity."
So, I had a weird/crazy idea some months ago, and I'm going to put it out here... What if male status by-default is related to success/competence... (which is often quantified by or equated with financial success in our society) ...but what if as-a-default, (default for humanity at large + thru history) female status is related to a woman's children? (or maybe, before she has children, "who her husband is"... and then her children.)
One weird attempt to provide evidence: What if those annoying mothers of grown children who ceaselessly brag about their faraway-kids' accomplishments... are faint, warped windows into natural expectations of status? Like, the kids went off and became successful, and the mom is engaging in a socially-clumsy attempt to "collect" the status that she normally would? But since they're not close to their roots, metaphorically "building up the village" ...they're not Old-Testament-style "in the city gates" helping mediate disputes... there's no natural way for people to see, "Oh hey, these 20-somethings / 30-somethings are wise, level-headed, responsible human beings--yay, mom!"
see amy anderson's comment below about her co-workers donating PTO as an example of non-religious community support (and I'm sorry it wasn't available for her!)
I think your caution is well-advised. I have some experience with a similar community, and I left because I saw cult-like warning signs. The leadership has since changed, and I think things have improved, but mothers in need of support are, I believe, particularly vulnerable to such groups.
This fits my personality, but I am big on charts: a chart of the meal plan, a cleaning checklist, a next-12-weeks calendar printout on the fridge at all times - it shows the work centrally in the kitchen. It doesn't show the work to make those charts though....
I also track my breastfeeding and pumping for the first year (mostly to try to even out the "overachiever boob" and the "slacker boob"), but I am really, really resistant to these efforts to quantify the time cost and financial cost of breastfeeding, partially because it implies that other methods of feeding babies *don't* take time! Which is not true - *someone* has to take time to feed the baby, and in my experience the time spent making the bottle, giving the bottle, cleaning the bottle, managing formula supplies, etc. takes much MORE time in the aggregate than lift-up-shirt, eat, done (I have been breastfeeding almost continually for seven years, and like most things moms and babies get better with practice).
In my personal view, it is primarily (not exclusively) the mother who should be feeding the baby, because the baby needs that maternal connection and caregiving throughout the day, and the connection is beneficial for moms, too. So there is a certain amount of non-negotiable "time spent feeding baby" that is inherent to babies, and cannot be modified or optimized, and it is one of the great privileges of motherhood to do it mostly oneself rather than having it done by someone else.
An honest accounting of the cost of breastfeeding would be the opportunity cost - the cost of breastfeeding vs. the cost of feeding a baby some other way - not just the gross time and money spent.
I find these accountings miss the fact that... babies are people, and people need to eat. Why not also just count up the time feeding yourself rather than working? If I look at the time I spend making only breakfast, lunch and dinner for myself (not counting time spent making it for my children), it is also an absurdly large amount of time. Very inefficient! Very costly! But it is an "acceptable" cost because everyone takes it for granted that adults need to eat.
I am an attorney who bills in 6-minute increments and makes more money if I bill more hours, so I am in one of the few jobs where I could, in reality, directly replace any activity with time spent working just like in the economic hypotheticals, and believe me, I have considered eating only Soylent and protein bars because eating takes too long sometimes - but outside of tech bro and surgical resident culture, very few people would consider that a reasonable solution because we take much more seriously the needs of adult people than the needs of baby people. (Although we fall short in considering the needs of adults too, as Leah and this community have often identified).
I used to bring in a stack of Mealsquares at the beginning of the week at one job. It’s easier to take time and pleasure in cooking when it’s not just for me.
I had one semester where I was super busy and also more or less kept on top of everything. Someone asked me what I did, and I had my time blocked out including AMPLE time to prepare food, eat, and clean up. In certain ways, babies are easier to feed because you don't have to serve different food every day or pay attention to balancing vegetables and protein and everything, plus preparation is generally easier. I mean, you considered eating only Soylent and protein bars; isn't that kind of the adult version of formula?
"It doesn't show the work to make those charts though...." I am laughing because I, too, am a chart and excel spreadsheet person for our family, so I get it. :)
Yes, babies are people and people need to eat! I was nodding along and thinking, "If we don't take time to prepare food then we would all just drink Soylent all the time and ugh, how gross and depressing would that be . . . " and then you mentioned Soylent and I laughed out loud :-D I'm an engineer who is also very familiar with the idea of the billable hour, so we clearly think very much alike!
"...and in my experience the time spent making the bottle, giving the bottle, cleaning the bottle, managing formula supplies, etc. takes much MORE time in the aggregate than lift-up-shirt, eat, done (I have been breastfeeding almost continually for seven years, and like most things moms and babies get better with practice)."
Right. That's your experience. Others may have different experience.
The hospital where I delivered my first offers everyone a free lactation consult. The lactation consultant was rendered literally speechless for a while upon seeing my hyperextensible nipples. I didn't know they were hyperextensible at the time, just "weird".
I've known women who could (with care) nurse hands-free with the right nursing sling. For others, it's always a two-hand, back-crunching job, and always going to be a two-hand, back-crunching job. For some, blinding migraines from hormones released during letdown render them incoherent.
When everything works right, nursing is a beautiful thing. But we're absurdly contingent souls in ridiculous meat-puppet bodies, with no guarantee everything is working right, or can be made (even with all the technology at our disposal!) to work right. In an earlier era, I'd either have to have been waited on by others hand-and-foot to nurse my babies or hired a wet nurse — or probably watched my babies slowly starve to death due to my "incompetence" — that is, if I didn't fall asleep while nursing and smother them with my lax breast tissue first:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/baby-formula-breastfeeding-history/629889/
totally agree! For six weeks after my first was born, breastfeeding took at least three hands, and with two of my babies I've used formula too. But breastfeeding is lately presented as uniquely demanding of women's *time*, and I don't think that's true.
That nursing isn't equally time-consuming for everyone, and that it may be no more time-consuming than other forms of caregiving, is true.
But I think for many of us, it *feels* uniquely time-consuming, especially if we aren't one of the lucky ones who can "multitask" during it. The middle-class notion of "work ethic" just doesn't have much to say about waiting on a gland to secrete its stuff. Sure, "sweat equity" is part of the work ethic, and milk glands may be modified sweat glands, but with ordinary sweat, you expect to "get more" by "working harder", and that's not how nursing works.
I cop to a kind of blinding, furious envy at discovering some "experienced mamas" could use a nursing sling to get housework done while nursing — especially "housework that just takes one hand!", like vacuuming (allegedly). While it's possible more women could learn to do this with the right equipment and training, it's physically out of reach for some.
I mostly agree with the experts who say that there is no such thing as multitasking, just rapid task-switching, resulting in less focus on any given task. But the *culture* of "multitasking" is strong, *especially*, I think, for mothers. And "getting nothing else done 'cuz you're waiting on a gland" creates massive cognitive dissonance with this culture. So massive it could probably trigger migraines all by itself, even with no nursing hormones to "help" (though they do).
"Where have you seen "equal" treatment fall short of equity?" This phrase succinctly summarizes the issues I had surrounding my first maternity leave, in a way I've never been able to put words around. For context, my employer at the time had a policy of paying 2/3 salary for 6 weeks through disability insurance following birth. Therefore, if you didn't give birth any time you took through FMLA was unpaid, so functionally speaking, no paternity leave. However, a very close coworker of mine had two children, both of whom had complicated births and spent several weeks each in the NICU. Both times people donated PTO hours to him so that he could be with his wife and children in the hospital without loss of income, as well as provided other support to his family (a Meal Train, etc.) I was a very new employee when his first child was born, I had a few years experience with the second, and I remember being so proud that that's how we responded to that scenario. Fast forward a few years and now I have just given birth to two children who are in the NICU. I used the disability insurance to get 2/3 pay, I did not get PTO donated to me because I was eligible for that benefit instead, and when I asked for an extension of leave (my twins were born 6 weeks early and 3 weeks before I intended to go on leave so I asked for a 3 week extension in order to keep my scheduled return date) it was denied and I was told if I went beyond protected FMLA leave my job would be at risk. I remember thinking that the ethos surrounding our support for him seemed to be, "Look at us help this family in a difficult time! We're going above and beyond! We're an employer that cares for employees!" But for me, the ethos was, "There's a policy in place that covers you, if the support that policy provides is inadequate, we're not going to make up the difference."
In terms of equality vs equity, that was never the goal of the PTO donations (stated or otherwise) and I don't know exactly how much PTO was donated to him so I have no idea if dollar wise it was more or less than 6 weeks at 2/3 pay. I do know how surprised and hurt I was to realize that the ethos of support was not extended to me. Plus there's the (in this case unspoken) idea that a father should be able to be present in the weeks after birth if his child is premature or otherwise hospitalized, but if the birth is relatively normal and the baby is healthy, his presence is probably superfluous.
Final note - Leah your language around "if women carry heavier burdens as parents, admitting them gives employers an excuse to prefer men" hits the nail on the head. But if I were to pitch paid leave to my current employer, my pitch would be that ANYONE who experiences an FMLA qualifying event would be eligible for 6 weeks paid leave. I admit I prefer this framing because it prevents paid leave from being perceived as only needed by women of childbearing age, when in reality anyone of any age might need it to care for or mourn a family member. But do you think this framing neglects the unique needs and expectations of caregiving that are placed on women? (Asking seriously, if I ever get a chance to make this pitch I would want it to be vetted beforehand!)
Thank you for sharing your story, Amy - and I agree with you totally on that final note! Shouldn't we be working for a world where anyone who may need 15 minute breaks throughout the day for self- or other-care can do so, not just nursing mothers?
How about a world where all caregiving is recognized as valuable, whether for offspring, family or friends? And where workplaces graciously accommodate it as a societal obligation?
I think a lot of the beauty of the world we want to create (and I do truly believe most of this community has a similar vision of that world where care is celebrated), is lost or obscured when we say 'this category gets X, and we must specify exactly what each category receives'. Instead we could build common cause with the disability and chronic illness communities and stand in solidarity with caregivers of all stripes.
I think this is both something many people need *and* not trivial for many kinds of work to accommodate (e.g. teaching in a conventional school with periods, rather than homeschooling or in a one-room schoolhouse).
But how much better the world would be if it was oriented around that flexibility! For instance, in Finland kids get 15 minute play breaks every 45 minutes in elementary school. Such a better system for both teachers and students!
In many workplaces, allowing breaks is difficult because of a choice to short-staff (to increase profit), rather than a true difficulty in making accommodations. That's true for nurses in hospitals, servers in restaurants, folks working in warehouses, etc.
Slackless staffing definitely makes this impossible (and causes a lot of other problems, too). But in that Finland example, they do all get that break at the same time, rather than the whole class taking little 15m breaks when they need them individually.
Flipped classrooms would make individual breaks more plausible (if kids are self-pacing video or book instruction, and then using teacher time to ask for help).
That's a good point about flipped classrooms. After many years of teaching in public, Catholic, hybrid, and homeschools, I am convinced it is usually the most effective way to teach as well.
This is something we're wrestling with - we're looking to hire a full-time nanny next year. I believe that breaks/flexible time/graceful accommodations are just as important for my nanny as for me. But how? We want to give her a real lunch break and any other breaks she might need, but it's going to take some significant inconvenience and real costs in my and my husband's schedules.
Hand in Hand has a ton of great resources for you! You can also join a chapter near you: https://domesticemployers.org/
Rita, we had a part-time (not live in) nanny for six years so I have some experience in this. Not sure if Substack lets you see people's emails but if you'd like to connect on this let me know!
Mothers who work for the federal government can take their accumulated sick leave after birth and then start their 12 weeks parental leave, which I think is a good way of balancing birth recovery while keeping bonding leave gender neutral (and hopefully less likely to prompt discrimination). My husband’s previous employer offered 8 weeks paid for the “primary parent” and 2 weeks paid for the the “secondary parent,” which I think was an effort to make allowances for birth recovery without having to have their male employees be out for 2 months or making their policy gender specific. I thought that was a bad way of doing it because it seemed to reinforce that fathers were “secondary” parents.
Plus, two weeks is still pretty stingy for the supporting parent, both with my c-section and my second delivery, I was not back to full capacity that fast! I needed a lot of help.
That policy had a lot of room for improvement - when my husband left, he told them in his exit interview that a big reason was that his new job offered 12 weeks parental leave and I guess they must have heard that a lot because now all parents get 12 weeks
Oh goodness does this resonate! I’m a brand new subscriber, just catching up here, but that nursing chart brought back a memory from ten years ago, when I was nursing premature twins and created a chart to show my partner exactly how much time I was awake in the night. Charts are everywhere in the early days of twins, to keep track of which baby eats when, on which breast, who pooped, etc. My male partner has an MBA and the best way to make things real for him is to quantify. So when he tried to tell me how tired he was each morning and that he was up just as much as I was to change diapers and rock babies back to sleep and give the occasional bottle of pumped milk, I used the chart method to quantify both of our time up in the night. That settled that.
I want to note that there isn’t a way to quantify the impact giving birth and nursing have on bodies, too. From the immediate impact, including the incredible amount of calories I had to consume to nurse twins (I had two singletons before them and it felt like my nutritional needs were exponentially larger with twins-talk about time spent preparing food!) and the healing required from vaginal births or c-sections, to the long term impact some women have on pelvic bones and tissues-well, how on earth do we make visible these impacts? My twins are ten years old and I still have pelvic pain from the impact on my joints and ligaments.
I would also love to see more discussion about elder care here. I am in that sandwich generation where I’m caregiving at both ends of life. That too is work that needs to be made visible. The long conversations with parents about things that they are struggling with, the work of figuring out support systems when parents live hours away, and of course the labor, gift though it is, of caring for a dying parent over months of hospice. FMLA doesn’t begin to cover those hours and days. And dying is not a predictable, “let’s schedule your leave” kind of process.
I want to say thank you so much for this place for conversation and your wonderful writing. I’m so glad I found my way here.
I'm mostly commenting on the chart.... it tells a story. You can tell as time goes on that the baby and mother established a rough routine during the day. You can also tell that the baby eventually slept through the night (indicating maybe some sleep training?).
I'm nursing my eight month old, and I don't even track the left vs right boob thing. It's a combination of which one is fuller and which my kid prefers (he prefers one for eating and the other for nursing to sleep), the latter of which is an outcome of my hand dominance since I work while nursing him.
I don't think there is a "currency" that can measure care. It's an act of love. It's paid back in love, and in the things love brings--peace, joy, satisfaction, harmonious relationships.
That is NOT to say that it's wrong to quantify time spent at care-giving tasks, as a way of showing others something of what is involved, but it just can't fully account for the "costs" or, more significantly, the rewards of caring.
When my son was born, I chose to step back from my career to be an at-home mother. It was a personal choice, not one I think would work for every woman, but it's one I'm very glad I made, even though financially we have never recovered that lost income. I have no idea how many hours I spent nursing my baby. I didn't need to know. For the first few weeks, breastfeeding seemed like pure torture, but I was lucky enough to get through that and have no more difficulties, and then the time spent caring him was just a joy.
I loved being home with him as he grew older, too. Again, I'm very aware that this isn't a choice that every woman is able to make, or should have to make. I just know that the payoff was immeasurable. Our son is in his early 20's now, a fine man with good values, who loves teaching and is enjoying a challenging graduate program on the other side of the continent, but still calls home regularly and seems to enjoy talking to us. How could I possibly measure that in anything the world would recognize as a "currency"? We've never had enough money to take expensive vacations or to renovate our home, but we've had enough to get by on, and our family has been happy and content. I wouldn't exchange what we've had for any amount of money.
How do you make visible the small, endlessly repeated work of caring for friends, family, and home? What makes the work of others visible to you?
Does in need to be visible? If it does, where, and to whom? Those are the questions, I think, and the answers will differ depending on circumstances.
I don't need to make the work visible, it's visible as it is, because it's clear I'm doing the work. I'm not an invisible woman!
Always love sitting down with some metaphorical popcorn for the thoughtful comments. For the last two years, I have been considering becoming an IBCLC (slowly, over the next few years) as a flexible job when our children are older. So, these are all good thoughts to consider, and I'm thankful for your readers!
Honestly, the whole thrust of this "other feminism" seems constantly to repeat the deep error of the feminist movement--compare women to men so that women can be more like men. It ain't that way. Motherhood and womanhood is full of unseen, spread-out, sometimes thankless tasks that seem often if not always to add up to a big 0 when you try to quantify them. Suck it up and be a woman. Sounds like a lot of young professional whining women to me. I'm 70. Also over-educated by the way.