I don't think my mum identifies as feminist; certainly she never used the F-word at home. But here are some things she made a point of telling me well into adulthood: stay independent, earn your own money, build your career.
This seems to come from some sort of anxiety, though I have never interrogated it. She practised what she preached and retired on a career-high, as city administrator for private schools in Cagayan de Oro.
Imagine her consternation when I told her a few years ago that I had left a permanent teaching position in suburban Melbourne, in order to write freelance (which, let's admit, is a fancy way of saying 'perpetually skint'). My security became almost entirely bound with my husband's capacity to earn enough for both of us. It was a leap made hand in hand; we're okay.
But does this mean I have let down my mum — and all those women who made it possible for me take my seat in the office?
At a recent Melbourne Writers Festival session, Anne Summers reportedly suggested that educated women are wasted on baking and sewing. It is a sentiment also expressed in her book The Misogyny Factor. In it, she says:
'How could it have come to this — and so quickly? Not even a generation after the women's movement fought for the right for married women to keep their jobs, to have equal access to promotion, and to be paid the same as men, scores of women are walking away and saying, "We'd rather be Mummies".'
Indeed how could it have come to this? Having embedded the concept of choice in feminist consciousness, prominent feminists would now insist that the higher choice is to participate in a neoliberal paradigm where work is only 'real' if it is predicated on material gain and vertical mobility. In this paradigm the inescapable biological realities of mothering are a , which is why recent governments have recalibrated maternity leave, childcare subsidy and single-parent assistance to nudge women into the formal labour force.
The premise of this paradigm is also that individual ambition can overcome the inequities that compound gendered disadvantage such as class, race, and migration status.
"Where do underpaid, undereducated cleaning women lean in? Where do Aboriginal mothers of dead children lean in? Do Somali women in immigration detention lean in before or after they have asked male guards for sanitary products and tried to shower in private?"
Lean in,