The Hand That Rocks the Cradle Rocks the Boat

Some thoughts on International Women's Day from a family perspective

I was 25 and a young mother when the United Nations recognized 1975 as International Women's Year and began celebrating March 8 as International Women’s Day. Having grown up as an only child of older parents in a traditional working class family, I embraced the refreshing idea of women’s equality. I proudly wore a t-shirt with the words: “The hand that rocks the cradle rocks the boat,” although I didn’t then realize the full ramifications of that phrase.

I understood at the time that becoming a mother was increasing my desire to create change in the world, although I didn’t know where that would lead me. I had already realized that, as the feminist movement espoused, the personal is political. I had already challenged a few assumptions about how life was supposed to work – including rejecting both the style in which I’d been parented and the institution of school as an effective vehicle for education.

However, I had some reservations about what “equality” and “liberation” actually meant. For one thing, as a budding unschooling advocate, I was concerned that if they were centred around women pursuing careers, children would be seen to be in the way.

My deschooling had begun when I was in teachers’ college. I acted on my new perspective when I quit teaching after just four months, disgusted by the coercive and condescending way children were treated and genuinely surprised at the evidence that most of them didn’t want to be there. Eager to observe how children really learned (which hadn’t been a major part of the teachers’ college curriculum), I spent some time working at a daycare centre. But there, too, the kids received little respect. And their caregivers received just as little.

Although daycare centres were not that prevalent in the early 1970s, they were assumed to be crucial if women were to be equal partners in society. But I was astonished at how undervalued and underpaid the entirely female staff was, especially for work that was so stressful and so important…and at what uninspiring places the centres were.

I am a questioner by nature, and that experience inspired a lot of questions, many still unanswered: Why was our society apparently undervaluing this work? Was it because women were doing it? Or did we value the care of the next generation so little? Isn’t a mother’s nurturing role crucial to children’s development? Or can just anybody – or any robot, perhaps – provide the necessary healthy attachment? Why do we think parenting is a part-time role? What is “liberated” about paying other women a minimal wage to look after our children so that we can have high paying careers? Does one have to have a paid job in order to be a feminist? Why do women have to embrace the male model in order to challenge patriarchy? Is there another way that doesn’t build on the status quo? Why does children’s choice, autonomy, and agency come second to that of their mothers? Why do we treat children the way women don’t want to be treated so that women can be “liberated”?

Dismantling patriarchy is crucial to creating a whole, healthy society but we can’t accomplish that by ignoring the rights of another group of people, in this case children.

One of the questions I asked 50 years ago – the one about paying for childcare in order to have a career and retain the feminist label – is still on my mind on this International Women’s Day. These days, some feminists are working to solve that conundrum through the use of tax credits, Universal Basic Income, or other methods of financially rewarding caregiving parents; others believe higher quality childcare, workplace reform, and better pay for childcare workers is the solution.

But there is, as I mused so many years ago, a third way. What if we rejected and even overturned the male model of success that feminism adopted in creating equal opportunity for women? If we reject the idea that success is only about money, we can forge new attitudes toward what’s important in life. Challenging the notion that feminism relates only to equal opportunity within the workplace and can only be obtained by a full-time paying career is controversial, but I think that we must challenge the tradition that well-being is based totally on economics. In fact, at a time that the rich minority is getting richer (often by destroying our environment) while the majority struggles financially, it has become clear that we desperately need to find a new system with new societal priorities.

Australian academic, author, and social commentator Susan Maushart asserts that motherhood needs to be at the center of human society, from which all social and economic life should spin. Society needs to “acknowledge that bearing and raising children is not some pesky, peripheral activity we engage in, but the whole point,” she says. Warehousing kids in daycare or school so mothers can get on with what they see as their real lives is not part of that vision, but we need to find ways to ensure economic security for women of all classes, and extend the vision to include fathers as well.

It has been said that feminism is the radical notion that women are people. Even more radical, I would suggest, is the notion that was printed on a t-shirt my young daughters once shared: “Kids are people too.”

Happy Women’s Day.