Since becoming a mother, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about stay-at-home mums.
What a job. It is hard graft – round-the-clock physical, mental and emotional labour. Stay-at-home parenting is mostly undertaken by women, but does that mean that it’s our “natural nurturing role”, as the Tory MP George Eustice said recently? He argues that the government is prioritising childcare policy at the expense of incentivising women to stay at home. “Fathers, of course, have a very strong paternal desire to spend time with their children, but you can’t get away from the way we are biologically wired – and the maternal instinct is a strong one,” he said. “It is generally the case that mothers in particular will want, if they can, to spend that time with their young children.”
Many of us would disagree with the idea that women are biologically programmed to perform all of the work of stay-at-home parenting, or that men don’t want to be central to their children’s lives. It feels terribly convenient, doesn’t it?
Yet our ideas of fatherhood are shifting. Both the Fatherhood Institute and Dr Anna Machin, one of the UK’s leading evolutionary anthropologists and author of The Life of Dad, have deplored the comments for the outdated, ignorant and insulting drivel they are. Machin in particular pointed out how unsupported men are when they want to be present parents in their children’s lives.
Not all dads. Some use “weaponised incompetence” when it comes to childcare. Often both halves of a heterosexual couple will engage in the delusion that the father is useless, so the mother has to do everything. The woman, therefore, becomes “the expert in the baby”. And so she never lets him learn, or he never bothers, and he never becomes the dad he could be.
Why do I mention this? Because, in this way, society has been performing a sort of weaponised incompetence when it comes to childcare policy for decades now: “it’s easier if you do it.” Society hasn’t been supporting women to stay at home, but it has been expecting it.
It isn’t easier. Women often feel they have no choice. Hence the need for affordable childcare. Of course, if a woman chooses to be a stay-at-home mother, then that choice should be supported. Some women can’t wait to get back to the office, but some are heartbroken to be putting their babies in full-time nursery and would rather stay home, but can’t.
Stay-at-home mums are often left out of these discussions because their existence is inconvenient to both sides. Women who actively want to be stay-at-home mums are uncomfortable for some feminists to contemplate because they have traditionally been so lionised.
And the stay-at-home mum is threatening to the other side of the debate because capitalism relies on free domestic labour. She can be encouraged and deified as long as she doesn’t consider what she is doing as work worthy of financial recompense. The minute she does that, she becomes dangerous.
What is Eustice suggesting we do about stay-at-home mums, I wonder? Because if he believes that we should be like Finland, where the government subsidises parents who would prefer to care for their young children at home, then we are probably in agreement. That all may sound a bit too modern to his ears: after all, it includes dads. Though the policy has been criticised as one designed to keep women at home, really what it offers is choice.
Another aspect is class. Stay-at-home mums are considered desirable as long as they are not a “drain” on society. The ideal of the stay-at-home mum is rooted in middle-class values – supported by her husband, aesthetically pleasing, smiling and functional. Never angry or poor or mentally unwell.
I say this as a woman who was raised by a middle-class, stay-at-home mother on benefits, who is a feminist, who made her daughter a feminist, one grateful that her mother was there each day when she came home from school, who could never be a stay-at-home mother herself without going mad, but who has opted to work part-time so she can care for her son. Complicated, but not unfathomable. None of this is, as long as we all value the work that women do and support their choices.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
