Choice and the media
Since the early days of the suffrage movement, economic independence from men has been recognised as an essential component of women's liberation. The basic demands of the women's movement for equal pay, public child-care and abortion on demand seek to achieve this goal.
The second wave of the women's movement in the 1970s coincided with a marked increase in women's work force participation. As women became more economically active, the strength of the movement led to many gains: equal pay, maternity leave, easier access to contraception and abortion services, child-care, affirmative action and anti-discrimination legislation, involvement of women in the labour movement, etc.
New jobs created during the Labor years of the '80s and early '90s were, by and large, part time and casual — women's jobs. They have now become disposable, and a weakened union movement hasn't put up much of a fight for them.
Now, as women's wages and jobs are eroded, the media jackals have embarked on an ideological offensive to soften up public opinion so that women's right to economic independence can be further undermined. This offensive — in which the main message is that women's paid work should not interfere with their main job of being a "super mum" — legitimises the increasing pauperisation of women.
Horror stories of nannies murdering children in their care are, for the moment, confined to overseas. The Australian version of guilt-tripping women who have paid work is to emphasise the primacy of children being cared for at home; it often involves profiling women who give up glamorous careers to this end.
Arch-conservative Bettina Arndt has taken a lead. Her latest heroine is law lecturer and "give up the career for the kids" propagandist Cathy Sherry. Arndt's full-page "interview" with Sherry in the June 20 Sydney Morning Herald went well beyond an examination of this privileged woman's choice to leave work and care full time for her preschool-aged children. It made serious allegations about the quality of regulated child-care services.
These are the services now suffering government funding cuts. The working women who use them don't, in the main, have law degrees or academic tenure to give up. They have jobs they want to keep because they like and/or need them, and they want their children to continue to receive quality child-care.
These women's choices, already too limited, are narrowing. They are being forced out of their jobs because quality child-care is becoming unaffordable.
A week after the Sherry story, the SMH ran a series of well-researched features by Adele Horin and others highlighting the crisis in child-care and the impact of the Howard government's cuts on families (parents, children and grandparents). The professional woman interviewed for the series, who was "choosing" to not return to work after the birth of her second child because it was not financially viable (and who commented that the Howard government's policies are aimed at keeping women at home), did not get nearly the same space as Sherry.
The media's role in selling the "back to the kitchen" anti-woman agenda of this government was made very clear in the editorial accompanying the child-care features. It concluded, "An increasing number of parents have to face the fact that rearing children and pursuing a career may be mutually exclusive options".
Sherry's personal choices about work and family are just that: personal choices. The women's movement has campaigned for generations for women to be able to make such choices.
Her polemics against public child-care, however, are not supportable, and should be challenged. They bolster the current media offensive against choice for all women.
By Margaret Gleeson