The future of feminism is childcare Focus on the work-motherhood conflict

The great insoluble conflict of modern womanhood — what if you want to work and raise a family — might be going away, a little, thanks to the rapidly declining birthrate. But until all human infants are grown in mechanical wombs, it won’t go away completely. Each woman discovers the problem upon the birth of her first child, anew, alone, and with a sense of outrage that’s both unique to her and universal: despite our feminist expectations, this is still a problem? How can it be?

Two new books, Having it All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, by Corinne Low, and The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, by Leah Libresco Sargeant, attempt to offer solutions. Both represent a kind of progress from second- and third-wave feminisms, in that they acknowledge that women are essentially different from men and face different challenges. Both express that the attempt to make us “equal” has been male-normed, which has erased the most significant aspect of our biology — childbearing and childbirth — and has underrated the burden of care-work that falls mostly upon women.

It still feels risky, even after the vibe shift, to say that the potential to bear a child is somehow essential to a woman’s experience, both because good feminists traditionally deny it in order to promote a woman’s right not to bear children, and because of the new issues raised by transgender parents. Low, a Millennial steeped in progressive values, semi-apologises for being grounded in biology, offering the disclaimer that because her book “deals with data and thus averages, it will at times be cis and heteronormative”. Sargeant, a Catholic writer, celebrates biological reality, beginning her treatise with the observation that “women, more than men, are physically marked by relationships of care”.

These are opposing approaches to the female predicament, and they take women in different directions. Low is an economist, and she sets out to demonstrate with the tools of her trade that, first of all, women aren’t imagining the seriousness of the work-childcare conundrum. By every metric, we are still doing most of the domestic labour, at the same time as we’re being asked to put high “human-capital investments” (education, time, effort) into careers — and it simply isn’t possible. “I not only felt as though I didn’t have it all,” Low writes of early-motherhood. “I felt like I didn’t have anything.” 

Women also, she argues, bear other gendered burdens, such as discrimination and sexual harassment. The way out, she thinks, would be a world in which men did their share of the work and women faced no such structural barriers. Before this utopia arrives, she urges that women understand the personal economics of our choices, and then play hardball: “I am going to challenge you to rethink the parts of your life where you’re not getting the deals you deserve, and navigate to better ones.”

Low’s synthesis of the research on family life and decision-making regarding marriage and care-work of all kinds is genuinely fascinating. Affluent women entered the workforce, economists have found, not only because of cultural and technological factors like feminism, abortion, and the Pill, but because unilateral divorce laws made staying home to raise kids suddenly a much worse deal: if the job was no longer for life, you might be left with nothing. Women measurably responded to such incentives, research shows. Reform of divorce laws began in the Sixties, and between 1955 and 1985, women’s participation in the labour force increased from 35% to 55%, with married women’s participation doubling. 

Low has done original research to back up the economic-incentive theory, discovering that among controlled, otherwise similar couples who either own or rent homes, the home-owners are more likely to enact traditional gender roles, with the man working and earning more, and the woman specialising in the domestic. The home provides the woman with collateral in case something goes wrong, Low speculates, thus lowering the decision-cost of staying home. 

Once Low moves into the prescriptive, her argument falters. She believes that women can use the principles of economics to maximise a personal “profit” or “utility” function by making different decisions, and uses her personal story, threaded throughout the book, as an example. Low played hardball by divorcing an unhelpful husband and moving with their child to a more affordable city, closer to her work, and now she’s much happier. Caring and love, she explains, are two ways that women get “bad deals”. She’s careful to say that these choices might be right for some people, but she argues they’re primitive desires, based on evolutionary conditioning to carry forward our genes. We’re supposed to decide if they’re what we really value, or not, and then act accordingly. 

Low writes that she tells young women who find it painful to return to work while still breast-feeding that “millions of years of evolutionary selection infused in their DNA in every cell of their body” is fighting their decision so their feelings make sense. But, she says, “gently, I would add that it’s okay to … accept our feelings and then go to work anyway”.

This is neither a solution to the age-old conundrum, nor having it all; it’s merely allowing women to choose a side. And it seems to elide the very problem the author promises to address: we don’t want to choose. What Low is really offering is the same old self-actualisation rhetoric, dressed up with economics and psuedo-science. Feelings don’t come from DNA. Low may have overridden hers in the pursuit of self-optimisation, but this is hardly recommended. Her young son’s geographical distance from his father doesn’t seem to factor in her profit-maximisation calculus. Nor does she mention how her decision affected the child from her husband’s first marriage, for whom she was the primary caregiver. (Incidentally, she left men behind entirely, too, switching to dating women, who make much better partners, utility-wise.) Is this really what happiness looks like? 

Sargeant takes the opposite position. In an atmospheric and discursive book, she explores the possibilities of the female body: its comparative weakness; its unpredictability and changeability via menstruation and reproduction; its fuzzy boundaries through gestation and the shedding of maternal cells into the bodies of her children. The modern world perceives such vulnerability, connectedness, and variation as anomalous, a departure from a standard of how things should be. But this is a misconception, Sargeant counters: they’re not just the female norm, but the human one. 

Increasingly, our society is not set up for human beings, she writes. We have embraced a machine age and machine standards, and are required to be more and more like machines ourselves. The optimised work of the Amazon employee, the maternal-leave policies that rip lactating women from their babies, the jobs that reach into our off-hours and even into our sleep with constant connectivity — these realities make no allowance for human bodies or human frailty. Bureaucracies of health care and state benefits limit the ways we can care for each other. And we do our part, embracing materialist individualism and autonomy as the highest goals.   

Such points are made in a suggestive, loosely laced style. In the multiple sections of the chapter “The Lie of the Lonely Individual,” we first read about a man who is ashamed to ask his community for help during a weather emergency. Next, a contrarian-feminist argues that abortion rights degrade women’s full humanity, because we’re considered to need this form of severing to be full citizens. Then comes a passage on the way children upend and complicate life, and a brief meditation on the value of servitude to wash-and-repeat domestic tasks such as chopping broccoli. Autonomy, Sargeant thinks, is a fiction. The fuzzy argument doesn’t quite prove anything, but rings true nonetheless.

Instead, the book calls us “not to accommodate dependence as a brute, unpleasant fact, but to knit dependence deeply into our understanding of what it means to be a human being”. Rather than throwing off ties of love and care as an unfair burden on women, we should view them as “the foundation for the authentic self”. It’s our vulnerabilities that allow us to “extend ourselves in love and receive love in return”.

The two feminists present mirror-image futures to strive for. In Low’s vision, women must achieve true equality along male-coded lines, which seems possible only by erasing gender for both sexes and denying the facts of human biology (child-work will never be gender-neutral). In Sargeant’s, we should go female-coded and build a more humane future — but it won’t be getting women out of care-work any time soon, and might in fact demand a greater embrace of it. (Her chapter on how men fit into the dependency matrix is one of her best.) 

To decide which is the better path, we might look at the two writers’ conceptions of fulfilment. In Low’s paradigm, what we’re looking for is a maximised “potential joy in life” that’s something like “your personal video game score at the end of your life”. We’re supposed to judge this by the criterion of personal happiness (always difficult to define), and to be making decisions that maximise this future score. She gives us opaque instructions such as: “try to get clear on separating what you truly want and value from the predetermined, socially reinforced ideas of what we’re supposed to want.” 

In Sergeant’s vision, fulfillment comes from self-sacrifice and involves chopping a lot of broccoli, which sounds more realistic. Both agree that society as it is currently set up has a problem. The persistence of the female conundrum over time suggests that in this respect, they’re both right. 

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