Do you feel guilty, or just sad?
Surveys revealing that working mothers feel guilty are two a penny and are discounted by us on the basis that a) women feel guilty all the time anyway, b) it’s a supremely pointless emotion in the face of what for most of us is a necessity and c) it implies we know we’re in the wrong, which we jolly well don’t. (BTW, we can hold all these thoughts in our head without any difficulty; it’s called multi-tasking.)
Much more interesting is the Discovery Channel’s survey of 2,000 employed mothers of under-fives, which revealed that 93 per cent of them would choose to work part-time or not at all. In other words, working full-
time doesn’t make them feel guilty; it makes them wish they didn’t have to.
SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT
At what point did it become the acceptable norm for women to leave small children, for the most part unwillingly, in order to service a mortgage?
There’s no sisterly disloyalty in admitting that somewhere along the line it all went a bit pear-shaped. Feminism opened the door to the world of work (a pleasure for some, and - let’s be honest - wage slavery for most), but it is brute economics which have shut and locked it behind us. And there’s nothing very liberating about that.
SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT
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