Latham got it wrong: feminists are critical of social structure not kids

Two weeks ago former Labor leader and inveterate rabble rouser Mark Latham took curious aim at women in his own ideological ranks: "left wing feminists" whom he characterised as anti-mothering. Such women were defined as harboring destructive attitudes toward their own children (and children in general) and accused, in essence, of downplaying the moral gravitas of parenting.

There were elements of the article that were downright prejudiced: insulting a mother with depression (Lisa Pryor), pernicious stereotyping and the conflation of feminist critique with mental illness.

There have been several important critiques including an acerbic piece by Amy Gray in which she adopted the moniker "left wing feminist" and ran into satirical territory with aplomb; a witty dissection of the journalistic conventions behind column writing by Annabel Crabb, in which she defined Latham's piece as a kick-the-boots-in style of article with a desperate confessional contained within; and a more layered but no less caustic analysis by Liz Conor in which she highlights the hypocrisy of Latham's charge when it is, in fact, women who undertake the vast majority of child care.

Janice Read also drew attention to Latham's gratuitous stereotyping and the mis-use of his public persona to lambast an innocent woman (Lisa Pryor), whose article on her own strategies for coping with intensive study and two small children included the admission that she relies on a mix of anti-depressants and caffeine.

Notwithstanding Latham's ebullience for stay at home dads (otherwise known as SAHD's), as he acknowledges, only 2 percent of men adopt this role, which means that 98 per cent of men are not the primary carers of their children. And while Latham asserts that his male friends "envy" his life of cooking, caring, composting and column writing (who wouldn't?), research showsa far larger proportion of men who do participate in "parenting" leave the routine work of child care, domestic labour and its management to their wives.

Current estimates suggest a 70/30 split between women and men respectively with the great majority of childcare and domestic work assigned to women. Moreover, Australia still has a strong male breadwinner norm that obstructs gendered equity in both paid and upaid work.

Although greater parity emerges when women work full-time (which two thirds of women with dependent children do not), on closer inspection this is because women have reduced their own time in housework (though not childcare) rather than because men have increased theirs. In other words, as women work and earn more, there is a tendency to outsource some of the domestic drudgery or simply not to do it. However, contra Latham's assertions, current research shows that women who work spend more time with their children than their own mothers did a generation earlier.

For Latham, "left wing feminists" – a nebulous category of women that seems to encompass any woman who has a critique of both Tony Abbot and what Adrienne Rich called the "institution of motherhood" – are missing the crucial realisation that a career is not all it's cracked up to be. As Germaine Greer once admonished "I said to get a life not a career". It's just that for many women, as with men, meaningful paid work is part of this picture and the current structure of the workplace in Australia (as with the US and the UK) makes this combination very difficult for any person who is a primary carer to achieve; it just so happens that overwhelmingly such people are women.

Women are routinely told they "cannot have it all" – a loving partnership, a career or work and children – and, for many, this remains true. Research shows that the reason for this remains the critical asymmetry in parenting responsibilities and practices, a lack of flexibility in the workplace, that mothering, especially in the early years, is not easily "combined" with occupations that require primary commitment and/or long hours, and the fact that there are many "off ramps" for women but far fewer "on ramps" when it comes to their careers.

The issue for "left wing feminists, and some on the right too, is that this is a problem! The extant critique of motherhood is geared precisely to extending such opportunities to women, which requires a transformation of both the gendered division of domestic labour and the transformation of workplace culture.

As Crabb points out, Latham enjoys a lifetime pension for serving as party leader and enjoys a paid job writing columns. In other words, he has both the income and the flexibility (not to mention established profile and prestige) that most mothers do not have access to. This means that Latham has both a career and a satisfying family life and it is therefore disingenuous to assert that women's wish to achieve such for themselves is somehow greedy, selfish or deranged.

The crucial slippage is in assuming that wanting to work means not wanting to mother (or vice versa). Latham has both yet masquerades as a SAHD. He aligns himself with the majority of women who place care work at the centre of their lives while pitting "left wing feminists" against the community and, indeed, outside the moral order.

His conflation of feminist critique with mental illness smacks of nineteenth century patriarchy (when it was argued that if women attended university their wombs would shrink). It is important to remember that attacks on feminists, new women, suffragettes, intellectuals, activists and other obvious "public women" has a long history dating back to the 18^th century. Let's not forget that for suggesting women had not simply a right but a moral duty to realise themselves Mary Wollstonecraft was referred to as a "hyena in petticoats".

The highly educated, politicized, erudite or articulate in each century since have been disparaged and one of the principal charges here is that such women do not reflect the interests of women at large. Here Latham, like his conservative anti-feminist predecessors, is right: women in the professions including academia, politics, the media, law and so forth are in a minority. Their life paths, prospects, choices and constraints differ from those in the majority. Those at the top of their game like managers, CEOs, research scientists, parliamentarians, prime ministers, presidents and Pulitzer prize winners, are far less likely to have children, and when they do to have only one.

But this is only part of the picture if we think in historical rather than simply contemporaneous terms. It is precisely such women who have been on the vanguard of social change and who have opened key doors for all women. As Alison MacKinnon wrote in her study of the first women university graduates in Australia Love and Freedom: "They have wielded influence proportionately greater than their numbers, symbolically challenging male supremacy and supplying a large proportion of the women who hold significant public office" (p. 133).

It is indeed the opening of these doors that has rendered work-family balance problematic in the first place since it is the entry of women into the public domain, and specifically into paid employment, that problematises liberal-capitalist conceptions of the ideal worker, which presupposes a wife at home.

Latham speaks to the still sharp sociological distinctions between women's life choices (and constraints). When he identifies a schism between those who prioritise career and those who do not, he is right. In the late 90s and early 2000s Professor Catherine Hakim conducted large-scale research in Britain and Europe demonstrating that in contemporary western countries where women had the benefits of contraception, equal opportunity legislation, the expansion of white collar and secondary earner jobs and an increasing emphasis on values and attitudes in shaping lifestyle, their preferences began to diverge markedly.

Hakim abbreviated these historic achievements as the "new scenario" and argued that this was the necessary foundation for women to make genuine choices. She found that in the "new scenario" a minority of women (between 10 and 20 percent) chose a home-centred lifestyle and typically had the highest number of children, the majority (between 60 and 80 percent) chose to combine family work with paid work, and a minority of work-centred women (between 10 and 20 percent) priorised their careers and often had no children (think Julia Gillard or Julie Bishop). In the current legislative and policy context work-centred women, contends Hakim, are able to achieve similar status and pay as men in their own class and occupational categories. It is the mothers that run into difficulties trying to "have it all".

Hakim, like Latham, is not particularly sympathetic to the adaptors (herself a childless work-centered woman), claiming them to be a noisy sectional interest group rather than representative of women at large. While Hakim is right that women's "lifestyle preferences" have "polarised" (or perhaps we could say differentiated), she seems to overlook the implications of her own findings with this assertion; indeed, the combiners/adapters across the western world constitute 60-80 percent of all women. Exclusive stay-at-home mothers are a minority as are exclusively career-focused women.

Most women are trying to "combine" mothering with paid work and many find this combination very difficult to achieve, especially while children are young – hence the preference for part-time work. It is precisely because most mothers centre their children and place paid work second that there are pronounced difficulties with combining roles. Quite simply the neo-liberal workplace, and indeed social order, isn't set up for the prioritisation of care and it is women as the primary carers of children who pay the price for this.

Where Hakim's work falls short is in the more nuanced sociological analysis that looks at constraints on preferences as well as their unchosen consequences. For example, many women do not understand the implications of their "choices" until later in their lives, most do not begin their marriages thinking they'll end, few contemplate the implications of the pay gap or what choosing part-time work means for their superannuation or long-term wealth. Often these "choices" are experienced as highly individual and idiosyncratic. It's only with the dispassionate eye of the sociologist that these come together to form recognised patterns of gender inequality.

Importantly, such "choices" impose on women a very serious "motherhood penalty" including lower rates of employment, lower wages, fewer assets and drastically reduced superannuation, a process that already begins with the uptake of maternity leave. With one third of all marriages (in Australia) ending in divorce and this figure predicted to rise to between 40-50 per cent in the coming decades, there is increasingly no safety net for large numbers of women who have devoted their lives to care.

Care is costly and under neo-liberal regimes, or what we nowadays call "advanced capitalism", it is the carers - not society as a whole - who bear the costs of this. While using the lens of personal experience "left wing feminists" articulate these concerns and problems. To mistake this as anti-child is wilful obfuscation in the same ideological realm as the shock jock.

When Latham psychologises these issues as simply about personal choice or an incapacity to enjoy children he subtracts the socio-economic context, which is certainly odd for a Labour politician! The difficulties women have combining paid work with (early) care are precisely centred around these structural issues. If the majority of mothers had a secure passive income stream in combination with a reliable, flexible, home-based, not to mention prestigious, job (such as writing columns for the Australian Financial Review), they too might be engaging in more gardening, revelling in their children's home-work activities and pontificating about the short-comings of others.