Beware, fellow feminist witches, conservative columnists are on to us!
My local branch meeting of loose and pantless family-wreckers in the broad coven of Big Feminism were obliged to address an interesting addendum to our agenda yesterday.
We already had a lot to get through. There were the blessings to Aradia, Queen of the Witches, to be made in libations of the blood of male conservatives, with which we start every meeting. Then, of course, we had to knit poppets from the spilled intestines of goats so we could hex the traditional family with appropriate ceremony. Our action list included cursing the milk yield, a fundraising review and the destruction of all that is holy, and a guest was coming from the Country Women’s Association to explain best practice for preserving mandarins. They’re in season.
But then Angela Shanahan published a rant in the Australian about New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s pregnancy that was so bonkers we all had to talk about it, and rescheduled the CWA for next week.
You see, wyrd sisters, Angela is on to us. I’ve always thought feminists have done pretty well as a movement to keep our true nature as conspiratorial sex magic chaos agents under wraps. But Shanahan’s spotted the Kiwi PM as One of Our Own, as well as the bearer of an unholy pregnancy. Perhaps it was Shanahan spying Ardern “decked out in gold dress and feathered cloak” at the recent Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting that tipped her off.
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The gist of Shanahan’s tirade is that feminism is a devilish cult and its unquestionable diktats will make Ardern a bad leader as well as a bad mother, and she should instead be more like a successful, conservative German lady Shanahan read about – and like Shanahan herself – who stayed home for years with lots and lots of children before doing something else with their lives.
Alas, according to Shanahan, feminist nefariousness will compel Ardern’s lactation schedule, with feeds that “being a greenie leftie, she will try to do using her own milk”. She insists Ardern has abandoned herself to “feminist dogma with its one article of faith that you must never query any decisions women make about their babies”, and she cites no less than the “modern feminist playbook” as coercing adepts “rigid in its assumptions about when and how to have children”.
My first question is: who leaked these pages from the modern feminist playbook? The first rule of playbook is don’t talk about playbook! Although, I guess there’s no superpower like that of conservatives, who – consistently – can see what they wish to see. People wonder how our politics have become so polarised and divisive, and then you get these demonising stereotypes purported by commentators, whose straw parts they set on fire with the alacrity of Lord Summerisle to a wicker man.
It would be like me concluding that the conservative movement is comprised of feeble-minded apologists for women’s misery leading sheltered lives of limited imagination, merely because the evidence of their commentariat suggests that’s what they are. Shanahan’s understanding of the modern working woman, for example, is restricted to “standing up in a department store all day or in front of unruly children”, while a lucky few “may work in an office somewhere”. Heed this, you unwomen of trades, care, science, tech, hospitality, national leadership or anything else – get ye to an office job pronto lest your womanhood fall right off.
Real life, of course, is intersectional and complex, even for women. For all Shanahan’s fascination with the reproductive practices of feminists, I’m genuinely surprised she hasn’t learned that feminists are not actually spawned fully-formed from ungodly forces within a mudswamp. We maintain relationships with (gasp!) families, (eek!) friends and social networks from church groups to sporting clubs, and (ye gods, preserve us!) engage with the agency of the workplace. And, like all women, we make decisions about partnership and pregnancy within those systems even as we swear oaths to Hecate with cups of fresh raccoon blood at our lips.
It was no feminist tract but my own mother who begged me not to get pregnant to the dazzling fool with whom I was besotted 10 years ago – my mother who, by the way, gave birth to me later in life after she’d learned a few lessons of her own. And I listened to her, because she loved me, knew me, wanted me to lead a happy life. Also, she was dead right.
But radical notions like “happiness” or parenting out of love aren’t mentioned in Shanahan’s column. For her, motherhood is something to be “achieved”, children something to be “managed”. “The key is a committed father in a secure marriage,” she says, without once suggesting that key may be anything like joy, for parents of any gender, or their children. There is a revealing sadness when she writes of Ardern’s “blithe confidence that after six weeks her partner will take over as full-time care-giver,” and adds “Well, good luck with that one.”
I suggest that if Shanahan is truly concerned about “maternal bonding” postpartum, the focus of her activism should not be chiding feminists for the fantasies she creates about our lives, but rather joining us in campaigns for community and workplace childcare. “Childcare provided on site by an employer helps promote breastfeeding and allows parents to check in with their children throughout the day, and often it’s of higher quality than other care,” says early childhood expert Lisa Bryant, supported by a vast body of research that’s found workplace childcare reduces absenteeism and staff turnover, as well as improves employee focus and productivity. Imagine.
If she wants young people to start families younger, I’d also sug-
gest Shanahan grab a placard and start marching for an end to insecure work, and agitate for pay parity and higher minimum wages which could stabilise the material and emotional circumstances which parents duly consider before planning children.
But what’s best for mothers, children, families or workplaces isn’t the purpose of columns like this, so much as repolishing old sticks with which to beat anyone who suggests that women, parenting, the workplace or the world may be different to the conservative conception of it.
Something tells me that the presently pregnant prime minister of New Zealand has a greater policy contribution to make in support of the diverse reality of modern parenting than spitting at made-up witches has ever achieved.
• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist