Belated? Well, a lot of us are slightly late with birthdays, anniversaries, that sort of thing, are we not? I’m sure my Mum won’t mind, as she’s not with us any more, God rest her soul.
But anyway, I can’t think of a better way of celebrating mothers than by linking to this post by Michael Bérubé.
Remember to give your mom $138,095 today to tell her just how much you value her.
For the unpaid labour that is. Bérubé also links to a piece reporting on a study published in the American Journal of Sociology (and before we hear from the usual suspects, it’s the most prestigious US sociology rag and publishes almost solely empirical work using quantitative and experimental methods. You couldn’t sneak a French philosopher past the referees if you tried.) Reading this, I couldn’t help reflecting on how much screaming when we heard from business and their cheerleaders, from the PM down, at the outrage that Labor might want to introduce a statutory right to request flexible hours and an extra years’ unpaid parental leave.
Many women will hit the glass ceiling, but many more will crash into the maternal wall.Here’s a Mother’s Day card from a study just published by Shelley Correll in the American Journal of Sociology. Correll performed an experiment to see if there was a motherhood penalty in the job market. She and her colleagues at Cornell University created an ideal job applicant with a successful track record, an uninterrupted work history, a boffo resume, the whole deal.
Then they tucked a little telltale factoid into some of the resumes with a tip-off about mom-ness. It described her as an officer in a parent-teacher association. And — zap — she was mommified.
Moms were seen as less competent and committed. Moms were half as likely to be hired as childless women or men with or without kids. Moms were offered $11,000 less in starting pay than non-moms. And, just for good measure, they were also judged more harshly for tardiness.
“Just the mention of the PTA had that effect,� says Correll. “Imagine the effect of a two-year absence from the workforce or part-time work.�
Lest I be accused of “politicising” Mothers’ Day, let me point out that its origins were political before it was turned into a day of commodified sentimentality. Mothers Day’ was originally Mothers’ Day for Peace, called for by 19th century feminist activist Julia Ward Howe. Here’s her proclamation, written in 1870:
Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!Say firmly:
“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.
Here’s to you, Julia.
And here’s to all those strong women whom we we their daughters and sons should honour by fighting for rights and not just sentimentality.
Among the greatest exploiters of mothers today are those great galumping lardarses of sons and daughters who refuse to budge from the family home and treat dear Mumsie as a live-in slave. What is with young people today?
These days budging from the family home is a lot tougher than it used to be, I gather.
“What is with young people today?”
Oh, I don’t know, a casualised labour market, HECS debt and compulsory super contributions I suppose.
My thoughts exactly Anthony. Given that parents are pretty much the most significant influence on our personal domestic habits, particularly with respect to a gendered division of labour, some comment about sowing and reaping might be in order as well… that is, if the stereotype of the stay-at-home twenty-something holds at all, which I suspect it doesn’t.
See, that’s the thing. How come these 20- and 30-something stay-at-homes, many of whom have full-time reasonably well-paying jobs, act as if their parents are “the most significant influence on [their] personal domestic habits.”? WTF! Since when has that ever been true?
And why is getting your laundry done and meals cooked for nix, plus low rent, enough to both allow yourself to intrude on your parents’ privacy, lives and free time, as well as live safe, unadventurous, second-hand parasitic lives?
“Just the mention of the PTA had that effect,â€? says Correll. “Imagine the effect of a two-year absence from the workforce or part-time work”
But this is exactly what opponents of paid maternity leave say! The problem is not that the employers are being irrational – that could be fixed easily as most businesses are pretty good judges of where a dollar comes from – but that from their individual POV they’re being all too rational. They don’t want to bear the risk of the cost of an absence so they’ll force all moms to bear it by not employing or promoting them.
Simply denouncing this as “unfair” (which of course it is) does not solve the problem – markets are not about fairness.
The point is that the absence would be much better paid for by other taxpayers than by an individual employer.
Philly, it is a well established idea in developmental psychology that our parents are among the most significant influences on us, and given that our parents are also most likely to be the ones responsible for the housework in our early lives, the decisions they make are particularly important in this aspect of our lives. That is beside the point however, because I believe that you are trading in stereotypes and ignoring the significant economic reasons, mentioned by Anthony, why family structures have changed.
Tell me, have you yourself been the victim of such “great galumping lardarses” of which you speak? If so, I hope that you find the strength to send them on their way, rather than uttering embittered injunctions against people whose lives you do not know anything about. Personally, I have never encountered such a person, and those of my peers who do live with their parents are not at all like the people you are describing. They seem to have maintained good, friendly relationships with their parents and have largely taken responsibility for their own affairs.
I know one Adam. Thirty-four years old, lives with the parents, who do the laundry, provide the meals etc. In fact when the parents went overseas recently, the freezer was first stocked full of frozen home cooked meals and the laundry was left to accumulate until the parents’ return. This person has a PhD by the way.
But yeah, not exactly representative.
Maybe it’s a Gen X thing, Laura? Just kidding!
The thing is, I’m not convinced that bad faith on the part of the son or daughter is the right explanation for the ‘trend’, which is what Philly implies. These culturally unacceptable symbioses are not so very simple as that. The funny thing is, personally, I felt it was bad faith to continue living at home and when I turned 21 I left. But I can’t extend my own feelings to others. Actually, I get the sense that my parents may have been happier if I’d hung around a little longer.
Agreed, as a stay-at-home father!
But Mother’s Day is irredeemably commercialied.
Labour Day, which we just celebrated in Qld, should be broadened. With less emphasis on unions/labor politicians, and more on all workers, including ‘home duties’, people injured doing work, volunteers and contractors.
“The point is that the absence would be much better paid for by other taxpayers than by an individual employer.”
Currently the employer doesn’t pay: hence the term “unpaid maternity leave”. There are the transaction costs associated with filling a mat leave position, which makes me think that Labor’s proposal to allow a second year unpaid mat leave makes sense: if you’ve already granted one year, it might make sense to grant two. If it doesn’t, you just say so. And the same with returning to work part-time.
This goes to the heart of bosses being rational. There’s nothing new about giving workers the “right” to request part-time work or another year of parental leave. Workers currently can request anything they damn well want. The only new requirement under Labor’s plan is that instead of bosses saying “No”, they would have to say “No, because…”. It forces them to act rationally or, if they already are acting rationally, to articulate it (Rationality being defined by refernece to the needs of the business enterprise, of course)
Moving beyond Labor’s plan, a better model for paid mat leave might be workers compensation. Collectively, bosses gain by having women reproduce the next generation of workers, so ideally should be prepared to support it. But there’s a free rider problem. So the idea is to pool the risk: every boss pays a premium toward a paid mat leave scheme, regardless of the number of women they actually employ. Thus reproduction is financially supported but there’s no perverse incentive for individual bosses not to hire women of childbearing age.
Kim
What a heartbreaking and tragically dyspeptic take on motherhood. If it is canonical among modern-day sociologists not to distinguish between a mother’s love and a paid employee, it is high time we had a public debate on the continuation of publicly-funded sociology “research”
One day you’ll actually read a post, John.
Cornell University is a private institution, and the American Journal of Sociology is not publicly-funded.
I understand you’re enrolled at a university. You ought to be able to access Correll’s article via a database. Go and do that, read it, and see if the methodology stacks up. I’d be happy to argue the toss on this, as I’m sure would Kim, but your arguments from ignorance are just a waste of time.
I’d agree, dd, but that’s policy pie in the sky in a country like this, sadly.
Pacifists are entitled to their peculiar views but people who are not pacifists who seek to make use of pacifism to cloud the issues involved in specific wars are beyond contempt.
When the goal is;
those of us who are not pacifists must do so by overthrowing tyranny and demanding democratic norms be adhered to. We are unable to cop out and pretend. Tyranny will not vanish of its own accord anymore than slavery would in the USA (when the workers of the world and their mother’s earlier stood behind the stars and stripes).
Mothers from Iraq and Britain, to the US, Denmark and Australia are grieving for those blown up for attending University or the market places because they are the wrong sect or for those defending their right to schooling and shopping.
Kim is a classic pseudo-leftist; supporting the war in Afghanistan yet failing to support the progressive mothers of Iraq against the reactionary mothers!
Some mother’s are wishing their sons and daughters well as they take on and defeat the enemies of all humanity in Iraq, others are that enemy who are certainly cheering their progeny to martyrdom.
Working class mothers throughout the world are not going to succumb to pacifism, any more than they are prepared to pay more for electricity, petrol, water and food and to cut their family’s standard of living. They will back revolution and development. They want cheaper prices and demonstrate it every day as they seek the best buys they can get.
The issues that are starkly before western supporters of Middle Eastern progressives are the issues of protracted war and the requirement for bourgeois revolution. Those who are not pacifists yet promote such a concept 70 years after the likes of Belsen made it a bankrupt position for the vast bulk of us are a sad little joke. That they are mistaken for anything to do with a fighting left, a genuine left is a brief tragedy. Such nonsense in the face of the need to conduct a war cannot last long.
The starting point of anybody with the slightest idea that they are progressive ought to stand firm with those Iraqi masses who are being attacked by al Qaeda, Baathists, and Shia death squads – they are all racist thugs who need to be defeated if humanity is to progress at all.
patrickm, I am not a pacifist as I have said many times on this blog, and Howe’s manifesto is naive, but I’m interested in it as demonstrating that something that is now seen as a sentimental occasion was originally political, and testifying to her spirit and her guts even as I disagree with her. I have no intention of getting into a discussion of Iraq on this thread, as it has nothing to do with what I wanted to talk about.
Oh pseudo-Kim, ignore him. Patrickm’s the proverbial pest in the pub. I think the appropriate response in future should be along the lines of “yeah mate that’s really interesting. I’ve just got to pop over there and see someone.”
Dream on, Kim. His tendentiousness knows no bounds.
Watch and marvel as patrickm turns Is Missy Higgins a Lesbian into an Iraq stoush…
Oh no, it’s happening again!!1!!11!
Heh!
I suppose the Maoist line is also that I’m only a pseudo-Pirate Queen…
Adam, it is also a well established idea in developmental psychology that the separation-individuation process is essential for healthy psychic development in the journey from infantile dependency to full, self-actualising human adulthood.
Sure most Mums prefer children keep their room tidy, don’t overly body pierce or cake their faces in make-up young ages. But it is perfectly normal and healthy to do precisely those things even in the face of her opposite preference, and this is even more so the case for 20-30 year olds.
And, Adam, it is perfectly normal too for mothers to not want their offspring to leave home when they have needs that would be better met if their children stayed put. A similar process goes on, to return to where we started, when children stay at home and take advantage of the need of their mothers.
Perhaps it is mutual exploitation. But my sympathy lies with the mothers.
Oh god. There’s an awful pseudo-echo bouncing around this blog…
…and I am only pseudo Ilsa, Phantom Agent
I think this is from Flannery O’Connor, in her Letters, but the google-brain wouldn’t back me up, so I’m not sure…
“I have a mother. I had to have.
I love her whether she’s good or bad.
I love her whether she’s live or dead,
Whether she’s an angel or an old dope-head.”
I don’t see the correspondence between individuation and living at a different address. That’s a culturally specific reading of ’self-actualising human adulthood’, and it’s a culture whose time is passing in the face of profound economic changes. What you’re really asserting, Philly, is a dated normative conception of adulthood.