Be my baby

Some may say that is what being a mother is about: after all, the whole point of being a parent is that your child’s needs trump yours. Not in Asher’s view. Her book is nothing short of a call to arms for British mothers to (wo)man the barricades and spearhead a parenting revolution.

“Feminism needs fathers,” she says. “If women are to have more fulfilling lives when they become mothers, then men have got to step up to the plate and share responsibility for their children.” That sounds fine, but Asher’s argument is flawed. She wants a new Jerusalem where the state forces men and women to share child-related duties equally. She believes mothers long for more equality with their husbands and wants the government to take up the cudgels so mothers can work more and fathers care more.

This seems suspect to me. A wealth of recent studies show the majority of women, particularly when their children are young, would rather be at home than at work. A YouGov poll for The Sunday Times found that 69% of women would prefer to stay at home to look after their children if money were not a problem. Research by Dr Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics found that 38% of women wanted to “marry up” to richer husbands so they could be housewives.

Asher is guilty of projecting onto the wider female population her own feminist values. It is common for women in interesting, highly paid jobs to assume that all women are desperate to emulate their career-oriented sisters. I have been guilty of this myself: when you are a working mother who loves her job, it is easy to see the whole of womankind through one’s own prism.

The years of writing about these issues and the torrent of emails I receive from intelligent women who have chosen to work less, or to stay at home and raise their children, have changed my mind. I now accept that while I choose to work and love the balance I have in my life with a supportive husband, who more than pulls his weight, that is not a choice most women would make.

My dressing gown is covered in an appliqué of baby snot and nappy cream. My T-shirt is stiff with stale breast milk The thesis of Asher’s polemic is: “All I did was have a baby. What happened to my life?”

When I spoke to her she described how she went from being an independent career woman in a relationship based on equality “to feeling totally knackered, running around like a headless chicken but achieving nothing.

“Everything that I was, in relation to my life and my partner, went out the window. Of course I had expected motherhood to be hard yet wonderful, but what I hadn’t expected was that our lives would split down gender lines in separate directions. Every day I felt a terrible inequality in my life in relation to my becoming a mother.”

This was summed up for her when she saw a photograph of herself holding her two-month-old son. “He is in rude health,” she writes. “His complexion is peachy, his eyes shine with curiosity ... in comparison I appear to be in the grip of a life-sapping disease. My skin is sallow and drawn, the grey offset only by aubergine accents below the eyes."

A few months later the baby is still thriving but “I still look deathly ... my dressing gown is covered in an appliqué of baby snot and nappy cream. My T-shirt is stiff with stale breast milk ... it is possible to pick out a slogan. It reads ‘This is what a feminist looks like’: what has happened to me?"

This the starting point for a rant about how mothers bear the brunt of child-rearing. Well, we do have wombs and the wherewithal to breastfeed, so perhaps that is not so surprising. But she is having none of the biological explanations.

Asher believes government policy props up a system in which men are alienated from their children, forcing women to become the primary parent because mothers take maternity leave while fathers go back to work. This, she argues, gets parents off on the wrong foot, turning them into stereotypes: men as breadwinners and women as their children’s prime carers.

This is anathema to Asher, who is furious that it is mothers who become baby experts and are expected to fix doctor’s appointments, know the local children’s groups, buy clothes and arrange playdates while men swan off to the office (the implication being they are putting their feet up, Googling and guzzling Starbucks).

This female “burden”, she argues, is at odds with the equality her generation of women was led to expect. She thought — even though she took a year’s maternity leave and someone had to support the family — that her husband was also going to do half the work at home and share half the burden.

Asher’s solution to ensuring the male sex puts its shoulder to the wheel (and never again gets away with arriving home just as the children are bathed, read to and falling asleep, thus avoiding the suicide hour of family meltdown) is social engineering through public policy on a grand scale.

This, she suggests, should begin before the birth. Men should be given time off work for antenatal classes and be forced to take several months of fully paid paternity leave, left in sole charge of the baby while the mother goes back to work.

The aim is for fathers to learn to be as capable in charge of their babies as the mother is and to be sufficiently bonded to want to take joint responsibility for their offspring — leading to a more equal society.

Her inspiration is Iceland (where fathers have three months’ paid paternity leave so long as the mother goes back to work) and Sweden (which earmarks a chunk of paid leave exclusively for men).

Such policies, Asher argues, produce more truly egalitarian societies where men and women share responsibility for childcare. Her book is a call for similar policies to be introduced in Britain.

Those doting daddies David Cameron and Nick Clegg are trying to oblige. Today is not only Mother’s Day but also the date from which new fathers are legally entitled to take six months’ (unpaid) paternity leave. “If a mother returns to work before the end of her maternity leave,” said Clegg, “the father will be able to take the remaining time, up to a maximum of six months is only the start. Clegg talks of bringing in a right to flexible working for both parents by 2015 and extended periods of parental leave. Is this what parents want?"

Asher criticises modern fathers for not doing their share of domestic duties (F1 Online)

“In the 1980s and 1990s family policy followed public demand. This new right to six months of paternity leave is ahead of the curve,” said Julia Margo of Demos, the policy think tank.

“There are some largely urban middle-class families where the mothers are the main earners and the fathers take on more of a domestic role, driven in the past few years by the recession, which has seen a cull of typically middle-class male jobs in banking and housing. But in most of middle England and poorer families men and women take on more traditional roles and there is still hostility to the idea of daddy daycare. For most men it is not something they aspire to.is determined to pin the government’s new man credentials to the mast. He said the old rules, where only women were entitled to paid leave (with men getting a paltry two weeks after the birth) were “Edwardian”.

“These old rules patronised women and marginalised men,” he said. “They’re based on a view of life in which mothers stay at home and fathers are the breadwinners. Women suffer. Mothers are expected to take on the vast bulk of childcare themselves. If they don’t, they often feel judged. If they do, they worry about being penalised at work. So it’s no surprise that many working women feel they can’t win.

“Children suffer, too often missing out on time with their fathers — time that is desperately important to their development. We know that where fathers are involved in their children’s lives they develop better friendships, they learn to empathise, they have higher self-esteem and they achieve better at school. Kirby, a family policy expert, is not so sure: “Clegg is in danger of confusing the importance of fathers being an active presence in their children’s lives ... with them actually being around as carers for their children during the day.

“The truth is there is very little evidence on the impact of father-care on children and the lessons from Norway and Sweden are also not clear-cut. Because of the immensely generous maternity benefits in those societies, women are overwhelmingly employed in the public sector. Private companies are terrified to hire them."

This has also been observed by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the American work-life balance expert, who argues that European women “are being killed with kindness. These immensely generous maternity provisions are putting employers off hiring them and making it harder for women to progress in the workforce”.

Iceland’s economic collapse has forced its government to cut the amount paid to fathers on paternity leave and fewer are taking it up. The timing could not be worse in Britain, too, given our fiscal squeeze.

“Those of us lucky enough to have jobs are having to go the extra mile to keep them,” said Kirby. “Workplaces are stressful, demanding, busy places and the recession is fuelling that. At a time when competitiveness is paramount for the economy, this is not the time to be introducing massive new employee benefits. Asher's assertion that women feel trapped in their maternal roles and would rather be in the office seems to fly in the face of the facts. The past decade has seen a boom in all things home-oriented. As Kirby puts it, “home-making is having a moment”.

Poor men. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t. It seems to me they are stuck in a classic dilemma Far from being isolated in their caring roles, mothers are largely freed by appliances from the heavy domestic drudgery of the past. With the internet and mobile phones they can engage in wider life. The popularity — and growing political force — of “mummy” websites are witness to that.

Justine Roberts, founder of Mumsnet, said: “When we survey our members they either want to work flexibly or part-time or to stay at home and look after their children, but to be respected for that choice without it being seen as unfeminist."

Those working full-time felt overburdened by also having to put in a double shift on the domestic front and would, she said, appreciate some more help from their men.

Fair enough: men can be useless, obsessing over “cooking dinner” when the dishwasher needs emptying, the cat’s been sick, the sheets have not been changed for two weeks and the nine-year-old needs picking up from Brownies. Yet it is the men in Asher’s book that to me command most sympathy. They cannot win. She berates them for assuming a breadwinner role but also for their lack of involvement at home.

As her husband puts it after she has given him a hard time for “tapping away on his BlackBerry” when she is trying to go to sleep (the poor man was trying to catch up on the emails he had missed because he came home to help her): “I feel as if I get nothing right, I’m failing at work and I’m failing at home." Rather than feeling sympathetic, this cheers Asher up; her husband’s use of the working mother’s favourite moan is, she reckons, “a perverse kind of equality”.

She realises there is something odd going on here. The mothers in her book are, she admits, “inconsistent, claiming they are frustrated with having to deal with the majority of the domestic burden, yet at the same time unwilling to cede any control over home life”.

She describes control-freak mothers who will not allow their husbands to dress the children or make the supper because, as one says, “I am not confident that it would be done to my standards ... I’ve done it all this far. So, yes, it’s better if I do it. Such women, Asher argues, “become invested in their identity as the unsupported domestic drudge and seek to maintain it rather than reverse it”. She quotes one called Jane: “If I’m completely honest, there is almost a bit of a martyr thing going on. I resent it, so I go on and on about it to make a point." Poor men. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t. It seems to me they are stuck in a classic dilemma.

“When I married my wife she was a lawyer, like me,” said David, 42. “When she had our first child I assumed that after six months or so she would go back to work. But she didn’t. And then we had another baby. And now it’s been four years or so and, without us discussing it, I’ve become the sole breadwinner and she’s a stay-at-home mum.

“Yet I don’t get to enjoy any of the perks of the old-style breadwinner; there’s no supper on the table when I get in. More often she hands me a screaming child and looks grumpy that I haven’t been there. But I’m doing my best and I’m stuck with the grind of paying the mortgage and keeping us all for the next 25 years; I don’t remember signing up to that."

While many men say they want to spend more time with their children, few ask their bosses for the flexible hours that Asher says they should have, or the four-day week that her husband now works.

Steve, 38, explained why: “If you ask for flexi-time you’re seen as a wimp, unmanly, not in the career game."

Other fathers described how hard it is to face up to an older generation of men who have sacrificed family lives on the altars of their careers and say you want to make a different choice. “I would like to work more family-friendly hours,” one breadwinner said. “But it is frowned upon for men to ask. You are seen as not fully committed. It is much easier for women to ask for those concessions and be heard than it is for fathers."

Yes, fathers need to man up a bit and show some courage if they want family-friendly hours. But Asher’s analysis, blaming “the system” for forcing women into choosing part-time work or staying at home with their children, seemed bewilderingly retro to most mothers I spoke to.

One mother of two who had read the book as soon as it came out last week described it as profoundly irritating. “I wanted to hit her and hurl it against the wall,” she said.

“It’s such a whinge. It totally ignores the fact that women today have so many choices. In fact we’ve never had it so good. We can choose to work, or work a bit, and if we’re lucky enough to have partners to support us we can choose to stay at home.

“Asher is massively bitter about the demands children make of women but that is what becoming a mother means: the baby’s needs trump yours. Maybe that is what modern women — spoilt by having a decade where they can work hard and play hard and follow their own whims — find hardest to take: their needs no longer come first. Well, that is parenthood. That’s the deal when you become a mum.”

Happy Mother’s Day.