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

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.