The Female Factor
Motherhood as a Retreat From Equality
By KATRIN BENNHOLD
Published: August 23, 2011
I used to cycle to work through the Square des Batignolles, our local park in western Paris, and was always struck by the almost uniform ethnic segregation: mostly white toddlers chasing each other and their caregivers, brightly clad West African women chatting away on the benches rimming the sandpit. On those same benches on Sunday afternoons, I would socialize with other young, professional French mothers.
Here in Germany, the only adults populating playgrounds on any day of the week appeared to be mothers — often mothers with a university education who not long ago earned a respectable income.
Of the several social insights to be gleaned from this comparison, one is surely this: French mothers work, and many of them full-time.
The nanny culture seen in Paris is by no means unique. Indeed, in places like New York City and London, where the system of state child care is generally less developed than in France, nannies are also a common sight.
What is striking is that in Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, that nanny culture barely exists. Only 14 percent of women return to full-time work after having one child, and only 6 percent after Baby No. 2.
In France, where about 60 percent of mothers with young children work, two-thirds of two-income families employ a nanny, according to the national statistics office, Insee.
“I could not leave my children with a stranger at this age,” Jutta Funke said as we watched our 2-year-olds get covered in mud on a playground in this northwestern town where I grew up.
When she heard that I planned to resume full-time work within six months of having my second child, handing the care of two daughters to a nanny in London for 50 hours a week, she was polite but clearly disapproved.
Jutta is 34. She has a business degree and worked for an advertising agency in Hamburg for seven years, steadily climbing the ranks before meeting her husband, Horst.
When Horst, a doctor, was offered a job near Osnabrück, Jutta followed him. And when she didn’t immediately find work, she decided to have a baby. Next year, perhaps, she will look for a part-time job.
Does she mind being financially dependent on her husband? Putting her professional life second to his? “I don’t think about it that way,” she said. “I put my child first.”
I met several German mothers like Jutta on the playground and was torn between sympathy and impatience.
Most of them grew up with education and ambitions similar to mine: combining children with career and sharing family responsibilities with the partner. They all think of themselves as equals to their husbands. In practice, the roles they have assumed still bear a striking resemblance to those of their mothers, who had a much narrower set of opportunities and rights at their disposal.
Working mothers still face more stigma in Germany than in many other Western countries. A Teutonic mother cult infamously celebrated by the Nazis was institutionalized by successive postwar governments in West Germany. Even now, half-day schools are the norm, and the tax system rewards unequal earnings between spouses.
Things have begun to change: A fifth of German schools now offer full-day programs, and more are signing up. Mothers can share 14 months of paid parental leave with fathers.
Yet the shockingly low number of day care places in Western Germany is increasing only at snail’s pace, despite a 2013 deadline to give all year-old toddlers the legal right to a nursery place.
Why have politicians felt free to drag their feet on improving child care infrastructure? Why does the average Western German mother work only 25 hours a week 10 years after the birth of her last child? Why do only 19 percent of German couples with children both work full-time, compared with 42 percent in France?
Bascha Mika, author of a controversial best-selling book, “The Cowardice of Women,” published in Germany this year, thinks women have largely themselves to blame. According to her, they aren’t putting enough pressure on politicians, are failing to negotiate equal terms in relationships and often voluntarily retreat into a traditional mother role that spares them other hard questions about identity and purpose in life.
The Female Factor
Motherhood as a Retreat From Equality
Published: August 23, 2011
(Page 2 of 2)
It's a risky strategy at a time when the economic crisis is putting male jobs and incomes at risk, when increasing longevity means bringing up children is only a passing phase in a woman's life and when divorce rates are high. Even if childcare eats up all of the female income, there is a long-term pay-off to staying in the labor market.
“What’s the matter with us?” Ms. Mika asks German women. “Don’t we want to be free and equal?”
“We are collaborating with a system that reduces us to motherhood,” she writes. “We voluntarily choose to be powerless and adjust to self-inflicted victimhood. That’s cowardice.”
Whether the term “cowardice” helps anyone more than Bertelsmann, Ms. Mika’s publisher, is questionable. The power of tradition and lack of comprehensive state child care are strong barriers to effective gender equality.
But Ms. Mika, herself Polish-born and childless, has made a useful contribution to the protracted debate about women’s advancement in Germany by posing some uncomfortable questions about the implications of being emancipated in the 21st century.
Why do we insist on spending ridiculous amounts of money on our looks, all the way up to elective plastic surgery? Why do we still draw so much of our self-confidence from having a husband and a baby? Indeed, why do young professionals often obsess about being that elusive “perfect” mother?
Yes, women are fundamentally different from men: they give birth. So one answer is that they have different priorities and are making choices that make them happy. Another is that their freedom to choose remains somewhat illusory.
Opening up that freedom of choice may hinge less on bringing a nanny culture to places like Germany and more a social contract involving parents, business and government in altering the work-life balance.
One country where you wouldn’t find nannies on playgrounds is Sweden. But that’s not because parents worry about leaving offspring with “strangers”; most Swedish toddlers are in subsidized preschools, and most parents finish their jobs in time to pick them up.
With 21st-century reach-everyone-anytime technology, might we not rethink child-unfriendly work hours? In the process, more of Ms. Mika’s “cowardly” mothers might hang on to their careers.
It's a risky strategy at a time when the economic crisis is putting male jobs and incomes at risk, when increasing longevity means bringing up children is only a passing phase in a woman's life and when divorce rates are high. Even if childcare eats up all of the female income, there is a long-term pay-off to staying in the labor market.
“What’s the matter with us?” Ms. Mika asks German women. “Don’t we want to be free and equal?”
“We are collaborating with a system that reduces us to motherhood,” she writes. “We voluntarily choose to be powerless and adjust to self-inflicted victimhood. That’s cowardice.”
Whether the term “cowardice” helps anyone more than Bertelsmann, Ms. Mika’s publisher, is questionable. The power of tradition and lack of comprehensive state child care are strong barriers to effective gender equality.
But Ms. Mika, herself Polish-born and childless, has made a useful contribution to the protracted debate about women’s advancement in Germany by posing some uncomfortable questions about the implications of being emancipated in the 21st century.
Why do we insist on spending ridiculous amounts of money on our looks, all the way up to elective plastic surgery? Why do we still draw so much of our self-confidence from having a husband and a baby? Indeed, why do young professionals often obsess about being that elusive “perfect” mother?
Yes, women are fundamentally different from men: they give birth. So one answer is that they have different priorities and are making choices that make them happy. Another is that their freedom to choose remains somewhat illusory.
Opening up that freedom of choice may hinge less on bringing a nanny culture to places like Germany and more a social contract involving parents, business and government in altering the work-life balance.
One country where you wouldn’t find nannies on playgrounds is Sweden. But that’s not because parents worry about leaving offspring with “strangers”; most Swedish toddlers are in subsidized preschools, and most parents finish their jobs in time to pick them up.
With 21st-century reach-everyone-anytime technology, might we not rethink child-unfriendly work hours? In the process, more of Ms. Mika’s “cowardly” mothers might hang on to their careers.
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