Women: are we still either Madonnas or whores?
A ‘I don’t like being repeatedly told that I’m inadequate’
YOUNG mum on the verge of tears recently visited my surgery with a sick child she’d been called to collect from the creche and bring to see me. She has a busy successful job and leaving it mid-afternoon caused her all sorts of problems and she, like many other working mums, was experiencing that horrible sensation of not being on top of anything — her job, her kids, her life in general, and, of course, that nagging guilt that she was also somehow the worst thing any woman can be — a bad mother.
For working mothers there is always that nagging fear that by having a career she was somehow letting her children down, or worse, possibly messing them up. I knew exactly how she was feeling having lived with that guilt and that fear for many years. And when our eyes met there was a recognition there that we working mothers, career women with children, whatever you want to call us, are a particular — sometimes it feels embattled — group.
I probably wouldn’t be writing a column about it though, except, not long afterward — I was flicking through a women’s magazine in my bathroom and I saw an article by a millionaire, super-model with the headline ‘I’m a mum first and a model second’ with a photo of a very sexy woman in lingerie underneath it, who looked like she was a model first and if she had ever given birth — it had been to a walnut.
Now I never read women’s magazines, not because I’m too intellectual or anything, but because I don’t like being repeatedly told that I’m inadequate. So how this got there was a mystery, and I was looking at it mainly out of curiosity when I came across this puff piece on this woman I’ve never heard of, more or less doing the ‘job interview equivalent’ of when you’re asked what your worst characteristic is? And you answer with ‘hardworking perfectionism’
So it was. “Yes, I travel the world and make millions and am at the complete top of my game career-wise, but no, that all means nothing, compared to the fact that I am a parent.” She was quick to reassure us that her other achievements didn’t actually matter at all.
It stuck me that this was something else simply to make her look good. That without her spelling out that Motherhood was her real vocation, she would somehow not be as good or as nice or possibly even as attractive a person. She wouldn’t have as much worth as a woman.
Which may all be true. But that, on top of the woman I’d seen at work, got me thinking — is a woman only really feted by society when she is a selfless motherfigure? I said feted rather than valued because I think stay-athome mums would argue quite rightly that they parent full time and are not remotely valued. But by feted I mean, at least they are considered good women. Whereas it’s hard to know if career women really are.
Certainly Andrea Leadsom seemed to think her being a mum added a certain cache recently over Theresa May in the Conservative Pary leadership race. But is that what everyone thinks? That only women who are good and devoted mothers are truly valued? And other women, ambitious ones with careers or childless ones are somehow lesser? Are we still just Madonnas or whores? And will women ever be able to lay claim to their own personal achievements without having to assure us that actually they’d much rather just be raising their kids?