CHAPTER 19
Carla Pascoe Leahy
We were talking about going back to work after 12 months, and I got a bit gutsy, and I said, ‘I don’t feel right, leaving a child at 12 months to go back to a full-time job’ … And she said, ‘Well, if I didn’t go back to work, my career would really suffer … It looks really bad on your resume’. And I looked at her straight in the eye … and I said, ‘Well, my résumé must look like shit’.1
The women’s liberation movement of the 1970s successfully fought to decouple maternity from femininity by focusing on the non-maternal aspects of women’s lives.2 A growing sense that adult womanhood comprises more than solely motherhood, and a rising conviction that women have the right to choose whether they wish to become mothers, has led to the rise of autonomous, or post-patriarchal motherhood.3 This significant cultural shift in Australia over the last 50 years has sparked a realisation that it is not solely gender inequality that mothers face. Contemporary Australian mothers experience a double discrimination based upon not only their gender but also their caring roles.
Since the 1970s a range of government policies has attempted to ameliorate this discrimination. The 1972 Child Care Act provided subsidised childcare services, followed by an expansion of childcare services in the 1980s. Overt workforce discrimination against women became illegal in the mid-1980s. Mothers have been entitled to unpaid maternity leave since 1979; this was extended to paid leave for mothers in 2011 and for partners in 2013. And yet there is plenty of evidence that policies concerning maternal workforce participation and early childhood education and care have not done enough. As Kristen’s quote which opens this chapter illustrates, Australian mothers still feel torn between caring for their children and engaging in paid work – and insufficiently supported to do either.
How and why have government policies fallen short since 1972? How have mothers negotiated care and work at different points in time? Drawing on interviews with multiple generations of Australian mothers, this chapter explains the ways in which their experiences of, and opinions on, work and care have changed over the past half-century.4 As we will see, mothers’ reasons for engaging with government schemes are often different from the objectives of maternal and family policies as outlined by governments. Policymakers need to better understand mothers’ experiences if they are to develop policies that serve women’s needs as mothers and workers.
The 1970s: A gender revolution begins
Before the women’s liberation movement, there was minimal Commonwealth support for working mothers.5 Although workforce participation rates among migrant and working-class mothers were high, the cultural ideal of the postwar years was that of the stay-at-home mother.6 Amid calls for reform in the lead-up to the 1972 election, the McMahon Coalition government passed the Child Care Act, which subsidised childcare services in recognition of the increasing workforce participation of women. Following its election in 1972, the Whitlam government increased funding for childcare and drew up the blueprint for a Children’s Commission, which was expansive in that children’s services would not have been tied solely to maternal workforce participation. Instead, it aimed to create services that also focused on the needs of children, families and communities.7 However, the Whitlam government was dismissed in 1975 before the legislation could be enacted. The subsequent Fraser government largely took the view that the care of children was the responsibility of family and the market rather than the state, with conservative politicians expressing consternation at the impacts of working mothers on children. As part of a broader objective of reducing spending on social services, childcare subsidies were restricted to those families deemed ‘needy’.
Beyond debates in Canberra, these policy changes of the 1970s were occurring in a cultural climate in which the concept of mothers engaging in paid work was still considered controversial. Some early adopters experimented with radical new arrangements. Sally was a teacher who grew up in a regional, Lebanese-Australian family. She and her husband split the day into two halves after their first child was born in 1978, with father and mother sharing paid work and caring responsibilities evenly. Sally said:
because I was the primary breadwinner I went back when the child was just over six weeks old … I was half-time teaching and he was with the baby in the mornings. I’d come home, breasts engorged and ready to feed and then he’d go off and do his classes in the afternoons and evenings.8
Nevertheless, Sally felt conflicted about whether she should be with her baby full-time, and recalls that attitudes towards the desirability of mothers engaging in paid work and children attending childcare were still very divided.
Miroslava was raised in an inner-urban area by Macedonian-born parents and had her first child in 1975. She remembers that most mothers in her working-class neighbourhood were forced by financial imperatives to return to work in their low-paid factory jobs and place their children into childcare. Consequently, she says that ‘they still say to this day no grandchild of mine is going into childcare because I know what it was like when I had to put mine in’.9
Others outside the safety net of heterosexual marriage sometimes had fewer options. Sybil was from a Welsh-Australian, middle-class background. After separating from her husband, she found that financial considerations as a single mother forced her to return to a daytime teaching job. Her own children were at school by then, so she relied on the assistance of grandmothers and friends to manage the gaps between their school hours and her working hours.10
1980s: Legislative reform
Childcare services continued to expand under Labor governments in the 1980s and were mainly community-based and not-for-profit. The Commonwealth saw its role as encompassing the planning and building of non-profit childcare services to ensure equitable access across Australian communities.11 Legislation such as the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 and the Affirmative Action (Equal Opportunity in Education) Act 1986 was passed with the intention of facilitating female employment. But Australian mothers continued to face obstacles to workforce participation, particularly a shortage of childcare that met their needs and desires. As sociologists Jan Harper and Lyn Richards discovered: ‘neither the mother at home, nor the “working mother” feels clear societal approval’.12 As gender norms shifted, stay-at-home mothers felt some pressure to work, and working mothers felt some condemnation that they were not constantly with their children.
Hazel was from a middle-class, Anglo-Australian family and had her first child in 1989. Her progressive employer offered paid maternity leave and provided on-site childcare, which facilitated her transition into working motherhood. Although Hazel felt judged by others for working when her child was young, she realised that the maintenance of her pre-maternal career was important for her emotional wellbeing. She explained,
I realised very early on, you know that your world contracts … even though it was a juggle I was quite glad to go back to work … Somebody once said to me ‘happy mother, happy child,’ when I was worrying about going back to work. [But] my mother-in-law, in particular, was very, very critical of that.13
Some mothers waited until their children were at school and then took up flexible work. Genevieve grew up in a Catholic, Anglo-Australian family. She left her job in advertising when her first child was born in 1989 because she felt that ‘mothering was a valuable role’ and ‘a job that deserved respect and equal status’. However, she also felt that in her progressive, inner-city neighbourhood in the 1980s, some people judged women for ‘only’ staying at home and praised the importance of childcare. She recalls, ‘that harping of “Children love it! They’re so stimulated! They’d be bored at home!”’ Once Genevieve’s children were at school, she and a friend started a business that allowed them flexible hours to fit around their children’s school time, which was a pattern of combining care work with paid work that suited her.14
In regional areas, choices were particularly circumscribed for working mothers. Carol was a teacher who had six children, with the youngest born in 1984. She went back to work for financial reasons when her youngest was 18 months old. Doing emergency teaching two or three days a week, Carol would have little advance notice of the days she was going to work and there were very limited options for childcare in her regional town. Fortunately, a nearby friend offered to help mind her children. She expressed how hard it was for her to leave her youngest child to go to work and how reassuring it was to know he was being cared for by a trusted, close friend.15
The 1990s: Transitional decade
The 1990s were a period of transformation in gender norms. The Parental Leave Test Case that came before the Industrial Relations Commission in 1990 extended application of the maternity leave clause to fathers, in order to provide them with up to 12 months’ unpaid leave following the birth of their child. However, paternal take-up was very slow. The Inquiry into Equal Opportunity and Equal Status for Women in Australia found that a lack of childcare places combined with inflexible workplaces contributed to a persistent gender imbalance in both pay and workforce participation.16 In 1991, Labor began the commercialisation of childcare by extending subsidies and tax benefits to for-profit childcare providers and abolishing capital assistance to the non-profit sector. The Howard government continued this marketisation of childcare but declined to introduce paid maternal leave. Simultaneously, high tax rates on the second earner in families encouraged mothers to remain in unpaid care in the home.
The Australian gender order was in flux in the 1990s, with views decidedly mixed on whether mothers should engage in paid work and whether children should be in childcare.17 Caitlyn was raised in a large Irish-Australian family. Living in a small regional town when she became a mother, she felt that she was judged for returning to paid work in 1992 when her firstborn was 15 months old. However, she believed that the choice was vital to her emotional wellbeing. It allowed her ‘to get my identity back. Get my sanity back. Feel useful.’ In Caitlyn’s community, ‘Childcare back then seemed like a dirty word.’18
Katherine was born into a highly religious, Dutch-Australian family. She had her first child in 1993 and realised when her baby was three months old that her partner’s part-time salary would not cover their expenses. She reluctantly went back to paid employment and discovered that although she needed childcare urgently, the waiting lists for local centres were months long. Instead, she found a local woman in her urban neighbourhood who offered family daycare. As her children developed close relationships with this care provider, Katherine felt increasingly comfortable with her decision. She explained the importance for her ‘of them going to one woman, who may not have been perfect in every way, but she was their person, you know; it wasn’t an institution. I felt very comfortable with that.’19
Working and caring in the twenty-first century
At the dawn of the new millennium, Australian mothers increasingly engaged in paid work outside the home, but they continued to struggle amid an inconsistent policy environment that sent mixed messages.20 In a new tax-benefit arrangement introduced in 2000, the Howard government granted working parents the right to 50 hours of childcare subsidy per week for each child, while non-salaried parents could claim 24 hours.21 Subsequently, however, a 2007 Human Rights Commission report confirmed what interviews also indicate, that ‘parents often preferred their children to be cared for by someone they knew, such as grandparents or friends, rather than in formal centres’.22 Interviews conducted in 2005–2007 found that recently arrived migrant women preferred to rely upon fathers and grandparents to care for their children.23 Time-use surveys revealed that mothers managed the difficult juggle of work and care by reducing their own leisure time, so that the burden of inadequate policy supports fell upon them rather than employers or children.24
Kristen was raised in the UK and Australia in an Anglo-Australian family by a deaf mother. She had the first of her three children in 2009 and decided not to return to paid employment until her youngest was in kindergarten. In her middle-class suburb of professional women where work is the ‘new religion’, this decision left her feeling misunderstood by other mothers and hence socially isolated. She recalled that, ‘Philosophically, for me, motherhood was easy – and I think in that regard, I was quite different from a lot of my friends … who just thought about a career, and then motherhood.’25 Motherhood was challenging and disruptive for Kristen’s friends who had based their sense of identity upon their careers.
Between 2007 and 2013 Labor governments reformed early childhood education and care with the intention of building workforce participation and therefore productivity. In 2011, government-funded maternity leave was introduced for the primary carer followed by the introduction of Dad and Partner Pay in 2013. In 2018, a new childcare subsidy was implemented that requires parental work or an activity that improves work skills. Sociologist Deborah Brennan argues that this contradicts international trends to provide free or low-cost services focused on children’s needs not parental work.26 Recent Australian policies leave mothers who have chosen to prioritise what they perceive as their children’s best interests over career progression, feeling alienated from the maternal norm promoted by government policy. This was the case for Kristen, whose experiences opened this chapter.
Despite decades of campaigning for parental leave and subsidised childcare, and the general overturning of prejudices against mothers of preschool-aged children working, we have not yet realised a working mother’s paradise. Many contemporary mothers report feeling mixed emotions and considerable strain in trying to combine care work and paid work. Rowena decided to work part-time after having children. She had watched her own mother battle with working full-time and feeling constantly guilty and stretched. She clarified that ‘I don’t want to put myself through that because … if I’m lucky enough to have kids, I want to focus on, you know, having them and nothing else really matters as much. Like, people think they’re indispensable at work but everybody’s replaceable.’27
Ariana has an Anglo-Australian background and was raised by a single mother. She has a partner and three children and works full-time. Ariana described being a working mum as:
really … difficult … on so many levels and for so many different reasons … You do care about your job. But you also care about having a family. You shouldn’t have to choose which one you care more about but it’s like people expect you to … I’m really careful not to tell too many stories about my kids … at work.28
Ariana told me that she feels guilty and sad when her children tell her they don’t want to go to childcare, but that she doesn’t want to be a permanent stay-at-home mum and she doesn’t see how she can work less than full-time in her role. She concluded that she feels ‘this need, this yearning, to maybe get better balance and not go to work five days a week because I feel like I should be with my kids more but I don’t quite know how I’m going to do it’.29
Grasping towards solutions
The patterns of behaviour that we revert to under conditions of crisis tell us much about our most deep-seated gender values around care and work. In this regard, the COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated tensions between maternal care work and paid work. The closure of schools to all but the children of ‘essential’ workers has revealed starkly gendered patterns in home-schooling. Overwhelmingly, mothers have taken on a greater proportion of the increased care and education of children in the home.30 Yet, alongside the public health orders requiring parents and children to work and study from home if they can, there has been no accompanying government mandate that employers reduce the normal working hours of parents conducting remote learning. The result has been that in most households, an additional load of teaching and supervising children is added to a mother’s customary workload. Building on sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s influential work on the ‘second shift’ that mothers undertake, we might call this a ‘pandemic shift’ that mothers are required to squeeze into their day.31
COVID-19 has also been profoundly revealing of what we value – and therefore remunerate – and what we do not. When the federal government temporarily made all childcare free early in the pandemic, we glimpsed the possibility that this could be a permanent reform. But the subsequent removal of this extra support for working parents clearly communicates that this is not something that the government is willing to prioritise, when so much care is otherwise performed unpaid by mothers.32
Alongside free early childhood education and care, what other kinds of policy changes do mothers want? A reconsideration of the roles of fathers and partners – as well as grandparents and other family members – is a useful place to begin.
Looking back upon the history of Australian mothering since the mid-twentieth century, it is clear that progress in gender-equitable parenting has not been linear. Some parents in the 1970s were inspired by the women’s liberation movement to try radical new ideas to share the care of children beyond the sole responsibility of a stay-at-home mother.33 But since then, the gender revolution in care seems to have largely stalled. Many contemporary Australian women are confident before they become mothers that they will divide care work and paid work equally with their partner. But after the birth of a child, they find that taxation systems and social structures work against equal parenting.34
With such a stubbornly entrenched social issue, where cultural attitudes have partially shifted but practices lag behind, social policy has enormous potential to effect change. But to do so, base assumptions about ultimate policy objectives need to be expanded, as does our understanding of the potential beneficiaries of family policy. This chapter started with the question: how have Australian mothers interacted with family policies? We could equally ask this of fathers/partners and children. I asked my six-year-old what she thought about the history of mothers working and she said:
In the olden days, all the dads went to work and all the mums stayed at home. But that was really unfair on the dads, who didn’t get to spend much time with their kids. Now dads can spend more time with their kids and that makes them feel happy, and their kids like it too.
Note her assumption here: that all parents want to spend more time with their children if they have the opportunity and the means. Following this line of thought, what would family policy look like if its objectives were more than simply increasing maternal workforce participation?
Many contemporary fathers and children report wishing that they could spend more family time together.35 Perhaps, therefore, the objectives of family policy could be widened to encompass promoting maternal, paternal and child mental wellbeing, by making it possible for all parents to spend more time with their children if they desire. Or to restate what sociologist Bettina Cass contended as far back as the 1990s: the problem is not the ways in which women’s lives intertwine with care roles, but rather men’s seeming independence from care responsibilities.36 Social policies that extend the paid parental leave of both partners – in line with similar schemes that have been highly successful in Sweden – would have multiple benefits, including increasing maternal workforce participation, heightening paternal involvement in parenting, and enhancing parental and child wellbeing.37 These kinds of reforms would provide positive outcomes to families that extend beyond the narrowly economic.
Lessons from history: We need a more holistic approach to childcare
In the last few decades, government policies have gradually offered more support to working mothers, particularly through childcare subsidies and parental leave. But government statements about the benefits are narrowly focused on female workforce participation and economic productivity. Media accounts have been dominated by discussions of the affordability, availability and flexibility of childcare. These are not the only factors that motivate mothers to participate in such schemes, nor influence their decisions about work and care. Public debates remain mired in the rational and the economic, while mothers describe their decision-making as motivated also by emotions and relationships.
Despite the diversity of circumstances and views among Australian mothers, there are consistent threads in their stories. Most mothers want some continuity with their pre-maternal identity, want to feel a sense of contribution to their society, want to be able to enjoy their relationships with their children, and want them to be looked after by people they trust. They do not want to feel that they have to make ‘either/or’ decisions about work and childcare. Mothers’ motivations are as much about wellbeing as they are about money and career.
Family policy can only be partly successful when governments fail to comprehend the reasons why mothers choose to use various supports. Workforce participation and economic productivity are reasonable objectives of government policy, but they are not sufficient unto themselves. If we ignore the equally important objectives of parental and child wellbeing, we will continue to see rates of perinatal depression and anxiety rise. Increasing numbers of Australian women will ask the reasonable question: why choose motherhood when your society fails to adequately support that choice? One of the key lessons of recent history is that family policy can only be truly successful if it understands and responds to the broader needs of all members of the Australian family – mothers, partners and children – and the communities in which they live.