Roar Like a Woman by Natalie Ritchie

Author:Natalie Ritchie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Natalie Ritchie
Published: 2017-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

Why?

Some people, especially men, may ask why we should tailor our economy to women. An employer may argue that he has a business to run. Yes, he does. But mothers have children to raise. Actually, employers who are fathers have children to raise, too, but they don’t usually raise them. They leave child-rearing to their wives.

Businesses may say they are not in the business of providing charity to women. But women are not in the business of providing charity to businesses, soaking up the unpaid domestic load so male employers and employees are free to work. And businesses do a very nice line in charity to men, by crafting them that pitch-perfect 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. day, with two whole days a week free, and an annual vacation thrown in. Businesses do this for a man, who meets neither his own nor his wife’s half-share of the parenting and domestic work, yet they won’t craft timetables for women, who meet both their own and their husbands’ half-share of that unpaid load.

An employer who is a father has an immense debt to his wife. Moreover, every employer has a debt to another woman in his life, his mother, who gave up the best part of 20 years to care for him. A male employer may say he has no economic imperative to cater to women, but his mother had no economic imperative to cater to him as a child. Nor does his wife have an economic imperative to give up her income to care for his children. On the contrary, both his mother and his wife had enormous economic disincentives to forego a career.

It is not just mothers who need mother-shaped jobs. Our children need them, too.

The Mommy Wars will always be with us while there are mothers who believe they must be with their children and mothers who believe they don’t have to be. There are masculinist factors we should delete from those wars, however, like man-shaped timetables and workspaces. No kid should be sitting out his childhood in a day care center from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. five days a week, and spending all but two to four weeks of his glorious vacations in summer camp, just because we tell his Mommy that she sucks unless she works Daddy’s hours, and because we won’t craft workplaces that lets kids drop by at times. We should not be saying, “Hey, kid, your Mommy is a woman, and women can’t come into the workplace unless they make like Daddy. She can either stay home all day and go nuts and you can go without all the great things her income could have bought you, like an iPad and drum lessons and season tickets to the game and a seaside holiday every year, or she can work from 9 to 5 like Daddy does, and you can never go home to your family except at nights and weekends and two to four weeks a year. Take your pick.”

Mommy may genuinely want a career, of course, but kids genuinely want their afternoons and vacations.

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