The person is political- Working Mothers
‘The person is political’ is a slogan that was used by second-wave feminism to show how the multiple areas of a woman’s private and personal life link to wider patriarchal political and societal structures (Evans & Chamberlain, 2014). This can be demonstrated in my experiences of being a mother, in which I have struggled with negative comments and opinions for choosing to work or study, this normally centres around views that a mother’s place is in the home with her children. However, the problem with this ‘idealistic’ view of how a mother should be, doesn’t allow for women to have an identity outside motherhood and although motherhood is part of my identity, I feel that I should not be limited to this one dimension.
The negative views of working mothers are further reinforced by the way mothers are viewed in the context of a heteronormative patriarchal society, where the nuclear family is endorsed in policy and in the media. The nuclear family which is heavily promoted in media usually centres around two heterosexual parents- a stay at home mum and a father who works to support his family (Page, 2013). The problem with this is that this media view is very much translated into societal perceptions of women, who are seen as solely child-carers and nurturers, whereas men are often able to become parents without losing other elements of their identity.
Even when working mothers are portrayed in media, they are often seen as rushing around, too busy to spend time with their children and ‘neglecting their motherly duties’. This can be seen in a BBC short promotional video called Wonderland which aired over Christmas 2018. It shows a working mother ignore her son’s requests to spend time with him due to work related time constraints.
The video clip then displays a scene in which time freezes and the working mother’s computer screen also freezes to reveal a photo of her and her son. This then enables the mother to spend time with her son. Although, promoted as a heart-warming Christmas advert that shows the importance of spending time together as a family, I viewed this as another way to guilt trip mothers into feeling that they cannot combine parenting with other aspects of life and unlike the scene from this advert many mothers cannot simply freeze time or take a day off.
This is particularly important when considering that around 90% of lone parent families consist of lone mothers, of which a high proportion are in employment (Rabindrakumar, 2018). Yet single-parent families form one of the largest groups of people in poverty in the UK, whose lives are often impacted by patriarchal policies that favour the nuclear family and normative gender roles in society. This shows how the ‘the person is the political’ can be applied to the personal choices that parents make about how to structure work and childcare and how this choice becomes political.
References
BBC. (2018). Wonderland. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3G0UCk3DFA. Last accessed 14th January 2019.
Evans, E. & Chamberlain, P., (2014). Critical Waves: Exploring Feminist Identity, Discourse and Praxis in Western Feminism. Social Movement Studies, 14(4), pp.1–14.
Page, J. (2013). Will the ‘good’ [working] mother please stand up? Professional and maternal concerns about education, care and love, Gender and Education, 25(5), pp548-563, DOI: 10.1080/09540253.2013.797069
Rabindrakumar. S. (2018). One in four A profile of single parents in the UK. Gingerbread. 1 (1), pp3-13. Available: https://www.gingerbread.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/One-in-four-a-profile-of-single-parents-in-the-UK.compressed.pdf