Feminist revisionism
The anti-child-care propaganda emanating from politicians and "social commentators" ever since the Howard government launched its "back to the family" campaign in 1996 took a new twist a few weeks ago.
Until now, most of the assaults on the idea that good quality, accessible child-care services are beneficial for women, children and society have been fairly crude pro-family, anti-working-mother tirades in support of the government's child-care funding cuts.
Law lecturer Cathleen Sherry's more slippery approach in the Sydney Morning Herald on March 9 presents a new angle.
According to Sherry: "Child care has been perceived as the precondition for our liberation from the oppressive demands of full-time mothering and economic dependence on men ... In reality, however, the advent of widely available, although not always high-quality child care may contribute to women's further oppression."
She describes the hectic schedule of a working mother who must drop off and collect her children from child-care, and the emotional difficulties of leaving her child in the care of "strangers".
"So why are we pushing for more child care?", she asks. "The main reason is that men will not care for their own children ... men have not altered their working patterns to accommodate their wives' movement out of the home ... Women have won a right to a career, but only at the price of hectic lives ... we need to aspire not to more child care, but to more time for our husbands with our children."
Sherry is right to condemn the fact that most women still do a "double shift" and that (according to every survey in the last 10 years) most men still don't do their share of the housework and child-care. Until women are freed of primary responsibility for this unpaid work, economic independence from their husbands will not give them the time or the energy to pursue equality in education, politics and every other sphere of life.
However, by laying the principal blame for women's child-care problems on individual men, Sherry privatises the issue and obscures the real problem. She thereby distorts the feminist movement's aims, which are not simply for individual men to assume equal responsibility for child-care, but for society too to take responsibility for each new generation.
This aim recognises that, without fundamental social changes, even if the men in every household where both parents work did half the child-care, full-time working mothers would still lead "hectic lives". It also recognises that a growing number of women are sole parents for some or all of their lives as parents.
Feminism aims therefore for a society which acknowledges the amount and value of the work involved in caring for children by guaranteeing maternity and paternity leave on full pay; paid emergency time off for mothers and fathers; equal wages for women and good wages for all workers so that full-time parenting (by either parent) is a real choice at certain stages in people's lives; and career structures which do not penalise parents who decide to work part time.
The current government is not only slashing the funding (and therefore the quality and accessibility) of long-day, out of hours and occasional care services, but is also implementing workplace legislation which penalises women and men who want or have to take time off to care for children.
In that context, despite being dressed up in the fake feminist language of blaming men, Sherry's argument that women should not aspire to more child-care services serves as justification for Howard's anti-women's rights agenda.
Yes, individual women must continue to push individual men to take equal responsibility for child-care. But that is not an alternative to campaigning collectively for societal changes which make real choice and equality in parenting possible for all. Until those changes are won, more accessible and better quality child-care services are essential if women are to be able to choose motherhood without sacrificing their economic independence.
By Lisa Macdonald