Something has been annoying me for a long time and I need to write about it. Yes, women and how they are discriminated against if they have children, and if they don’t have children, Yes, basically just the fact that women can’t win when it comes to their ovaries. No one has every asked a man how he balances his work/life balance. Or how having children affected his career. And many famous men don’t have children and it is not pointed out in every single article about them a la Jennifer Aniston. But that has gotten me thinking: does having children hold women back? A lot of women in the June 2014 edition of Bazaar magazine thought so.
Zaha Hadid was interviewed and said: ‘With architecture, if you stop, it’s hard to go back. It’s long hours, lots of travel. If you have kids, it’s not obvious how to make it work.” and went on to say “When I could have kids, it just didn’t occur to me.”
Artist Phyllida Barlow said: “I don’t think having children and being an artist are compatible at all. I don’t mean that as a negative thing, just that both require full-time attention. Both are emotional and hazardous. Things go wrong” Phyllida has five children and a successful career so I am not sure what her point is.
This is an extract from the piece on artist Marina Abramovic: “She also knew she’d never have children. Every person, she argues, has only one source of energy, which can be transformed into work, family, children, creativity; anything. If you have children, you divide it.’ It isn’t a fashionable view, the article goes on, but there’s no doubt in her mind that it is not possible to be a great artist and have children: Maybe if you’re very rich and have nannies but then the children suffer’, she qualifies. The evidence is all around us she insists. ‘Why are there so many more male artists than female. Because a man doesn’t have to sacrifice as much as a woman.’ How sexist. She then goes on to cite Louise Bourgeois who had an amazing career post-60: husband dead and children who had left home, ‘So many artists start wonderful, talented, and then the children come.” Then how come so many men manage both? Oh, right, the woman gives up her life and career. Am I the only one who reads this and wants to scream the point that children have two parents? Surely the father could look after his own children at some point? And don’t get me started on men who refer to looking after their own children as ‘babysitting’. You contributed half of the DNA you idiot.
Weirdly enough, the sanest comment came from an Olsen in the June 2014 edition of UK Marie Claire: Elizabeth Olsen has been thinking about the working-women-having-kids-thing. ‘It’s more important for women to do well in their families lives because they end up doing better in their job if they pay attention to their family. There was a time when you’d have a career, get to the top and then have children, which I always thought was weird- as opposed to having kids witnessing the ebbs and flows, starting somewhere and growing together as a family’ Can someone please give this women a medal?
Oprah Winfrey has stated many times that she couldn’t achieve what she has if she had children, but how does she know? How can she honestly say that? Oprah is also quoted saying: “If I had kids, my kids would hate me, They would have ended up on the equivalent of the “Oprah” show talking about me; because something [in my life] would have had to suffer and it would’ve probably been them.” Do children say this about their fathers? In a typical family set up men are away a lot. Kids don’t hate them, they just miss them. People don’t give children enough credit. They know adults have to work.
Former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard was interviewed in the Telegraph and she was asked, once again, about her child-free status. She said: ‘I’m comfortable with my choices. It gave me my chance to work as an PM’. I mean, why ask a former Prime Minister about her career when you can question her ovaries instead?
But this hasn’t answered my original question. Does having children hold women back? Probably. I don’t have children myself, although I may one day, but I think the main question should be: if having children doesn’t hold men back, why should it hold women back? The answer is obvious. Women are supposed to sacrifice everything for their children and burn their ambitions and wishes on the alter of motherhood. And some of the worst critics for women is other mothers. I know married friends in their thirties, some of whom don’t even want children, who can’t get a job or a promotion because employers don’t want to risk hiring a women in their thirties, too worried that they will just get pregnant and then cost them maternity leave. Women are discriminated on the fact that they have wombs, whether they use them or not.
A book I will be reading is I Don’t Know Why She Bothers by Daisy Waugh. It rages against the social pressure of women sacrificing their entire life at the alter of motherhood and is an antidote to maternal guilt and pressure. Because you know what can stop children holding women back? Men picking up the slack and doing their fair share.
What do you think? Does having children hold women back?
Firstly, if you have not read Angelina Jolie’s moving account of her latest preventative cancer surgery then you should. Two years after having her breasts removed she had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed and has since gone into menopause. Read her moving account here. In her first appearance since writing the piece for the New York Times she gave a heartfelt speech telling the audience at the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards that it is okay to be different.