After many years of labour a new feminism is born

Facing the current obsession with money and the cult of individualism,Victoria White calls for a new wave of Irish feminism which recognises the true value of motherhood

It's time feminism grew out of its adolescence. It's time that taking responsibility for others is not immediately seen as a threat to independence. And it's time that motherhood stopped being seen as an embarrassment to a feminist, but instead potentially the most valuable contribution she will ever make to society.

Don't get me wrong, feminism's desperate defence of women's independence is understandable - historically. For too long the prevailing wisdom was that women's only worth was in their usefulness to others. Today's thirty- and fortysomethings grew up on the inspiring tales of women freeing themselves from that grind of being useful - child-bearing, bum-wiping, potato-boiling and carpet-banging. The tales end with the woman's triumphant discovery of "Who she really is", a hybrid of the girl she was before she was submerged by children, and the independent adult she could still be.

Very little in those tales is truly relevant to most of the younger generation of Irish women. Their mothers-in-arms didn't just tell tales of release from the thrall of endless child-bearing - they delivered to their daughters the all-important tools to (largely) avoid unwanted conceptions. Today's Irish mothers of young children mostly chose to have them. And they chose when. Today, the average age of first-time mothers is 30.

But these women have not pushed the women's movement to maturity. They have not made it reflect the new reality of chosen motherhood. Instead, they have been content to subscribe to the great individualist ethos of the age. And commerce likes it.

Commerce likes women in the workplace, it likes women out at weekends with money in their pockets, and it doesn't even mind them having children as long as they do it with minimum fuss and then get back to make money to buy them all-terrain buggies.

So that's "Who you really are". Except it isn't who you are at all, because a mother's identity is a composite one which includes her children. As Penelope Leach puts it in her powerful political appeal that society stop sabotaging parenthood and the lives of young children, Children First (1995): "Becoming mothers disadvantages women in adult individual-fulfilment stakes because giving birth expands their experience of individuality to encompass the baby."

If that statement annoys you, ask why. Are you reacting to the description of motherhood, or to sexist value judgments telling you motherhood, and its inherent compromise of individuality, debases a woman?

Sadly, the women's movement has not risen above sexism when it comes to the value it places on motherhood. And unless motherhood, fatherhood and childhood are valued, there is no future for feminism and, indeed, no future any of us should really want to visit.

What's crucial to Leach's argument is that there can only be equality if the true nature of motherhood is acknowledged. She believes that fathers and mothers are equally important to their children, but - and surely this is blindingly obvious - she believes their roles are different. In the first year, the mother, who has carried the infant for nine months and breast-feeds, has a unique place in her child's life.

An eminent psychologist, Leach believes the one-to-one care of an adult who loves them is absolutely necessary to the welfare of infants. She is hugely critical of the prolonged use of crèches for babies, and while she agrees that other child-minding arrangements can, with luck, work out, she sees little reason why mothers shouldn't mind their own babies. Critically, she does not see a woman gaining equality if she gives up on this experience: "Their children and their feelings for their children, still exist; paying for daycare takes most of their earnings; finding time for loving them limits their availability for advancement and never having enough time for anything puts the mother/worker at the top of the stress table."

Read that quotation again. Is it not sickeningly true of most mothers of young children who are working full-time? Yet the sad fact is that in Ireland, the mother with infant children is the most likely to be working outside the home. Figures for 1999 showed 29.3 per cent of mothers with their youngest child aged two to four years in full-time employment, as opposed to 34 per cent of mothers whose youngest child was under two. The figure was much lower for mothers of older children.

What that means is that what's happening in Ireland is exactly the reverse of what would best promote women's (and children's) welfare. What women surely need to balance fulfilment as mothers and fulfilment as workers is to be able to take time out of the workforce when they have young babies and then find a way, with their partners, of combining work and parenthood.

No country in western Europe gives a woman less chance of doing that than Ireland; none more than Sweden. In Sweden, a parent may take 18 months paid leave from employment after the birth of each child, and both parents have the right to a six-hour day until their youngest child is eight years old. By juggling their hours, one parent can be home much of the day. The scheme also gives single parents a chance to parent young children, but still keep their self-respect, which is very, very difficult in Ireland.

But as the election campaign warms up, all we hear on all sides are cries of "Childcare! Childcare!" The National Childcare Strategy (1999) blandly predicts demand for childcare will rise by up to 220,000 places by 2011 and proposes servicing the demand as the answer. Shamefully, it presents the reasons why quality childcare benefits children based solely on research relating to the over-threes.

Women's - indeed, parents' - confidence that they can rear their own children is beginning to disappear. I heard a woman recently saying "He's much better off in the crèche, because they have the skills", while another woman I know still maintains her minder knows best, although her child beseeches her every morning not to leave her there.

Where are we going as a society if we don't listen to children? What has that to do with International Women's Day? Everything. If raising children is not central to our project as a society, what is it - a private hobby? That seems to be the feeling among many pioneering women who gave today's younger women so much - including the important right not to be mothers if they so wish. The Second Commission on the Status of Women (1992) recommended against a payment to full-time homemakers, describing the work as "primarily a private benefit to the earning partner, and as such . . . hardly deemed to warrant a State pension".

As many Irish women work in the home as out of it. Does their work have no value? Why? Because it doesn't bring in cash? Is that a progressive measurement? If women make those value judgments it is very easy for the powers-that-be to ignore maternal and children's rights - and make no mistake, that's what they want to do. I am calling here for a new wave of Irish feminism which claims caring for the unprotected as a sign of strength and remains true to our real potential as women, as mothers and as citizens.

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