What about the fathers? Won’t somebody think of the fathers? Such as, for example, that whole bunch of fathers attending the Nato summit in Newport. Isn’t it amazing? What with them being fathers, I mean, thus having brains presumably clogged up by so many fatherly things, such as wearing comfortable jumpers and knowing how the bloody, goddamn car seat works. And there they are, somehow juggling all this while not managing to avert a new Cold War, as if none of them had ever had a sperm penetrate a lady’s egg at all. I wonder how they do it?
You think that’s impressive? There was this other guy — dead now — who launched the globe into a new era of terror, kickstarted at least two wars, caused one superpower to go crazy for ages, and actually managed to arrange for a pair of aeroplanes to be crashed into two of the tallest buildings in the world. And do you know how many children he had? Twenty-six! Yes! Granted he probably had help, what with the five or six wives, and the way he was far, far away from most of them, living in a cave. Probably hadn’t knelt on Lego in ages. Still a father, though, and once you’re one of them, that’s all anybody notices. Why, I can still remember the headlines. “Father of 26 pledges jihad against . . .”
Wait, hold on. Did that happen? Maybe I’m not thinking of fathers. No! Mothers! They’re the ones! It’s them who are parents first and people second, isn’t it? To the extent that we can all just refer to them like this, in lieu of any other characteristics. “Mother of three . . . ” you might read, in place of, say, “Former chief executive of the Financial Times Group”. Because there are loads of the latter, aren’t there? Can’t move for them. It would just confuse people.
I refer here, mainly, to Rona Fairhead, the preferred candidate to chair the BBC Trust. “Mother of three poised to lead the BBC,” was how one newspaper (happily not this one) headlined that article. This led to quite a fuss, albeit mainly on the parts of the internet that enjoy such fusses. Counterproductively, if you never remember anything about her at all, not even her name, you will probably remember this.
Which is odd, and odd in many ways. Not least because even if you were the mother of three sets of triplets all under four (Mrs Fairhead is 53; unlikely) and still up all night breastfeeding them, then the chairwoman of the BBC Trust is just the sort of job you’d be after. For her predecessor Lord Patten it seemed to largely involve not having difficult conversations about Jimmy Savile, before issuing alternate statements saying “everything is fine” and “no it isn’t”. Which you can probably do from home.
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So many different things are going on when we are asked to think of all women with children, first and foremost, as mothers. Some mothers, it must be said, ask us to do it, too. Treading gingerly into this minefield, I think this comes from an admirable urge to establish parenthood as equal to more professional achievements. In status terms that’s all well and good, but normal jobs aren’t actually much like parenthood at all. Even very tricky jobs, I’d say, are a bit like trying to climb a mountain. Whereas parenthood is more like painfully falling down one. In the sense that it obviously matters whether you do it well or badly but, unless something truly awful happens, you’re going to make it to the bottom either way.
When public figures are hailed as mothers first, though, this isn’t really what is going on. In truth it’s a mask of admiration, hiding a face twisted into slightly scornful disbelief. It masquerades as “and she’s even a mother!” when it’s truly “but she’s really only a mother”. Pretend feminism, but actually the reverse. It’s not unlike the glee with which various websites have been reporting that trend for Iranian women to shed their headscarves. “Isn’t she striking a brave and powerful blow for feminism?” they’ll crow, in an article which is basically pointing out that she’s quite saucy now you can see her properly, next to another one about Katie Price’s bottom in a see-through dress.
This is not to say, however, that the parenthood of public figures should instead be kept as a dirty secret, hidden away, like athlete’s foot. You can be a person and a parent, too; in the real world, that’s a given.
Yet, just as mothers in public life aren’t allowed to be anything else, fathers in public life seem to have the opposite problem. Fatherhood is a distracting amendment when stuck on to male politicians; seeming somehow incongruous next to everything else we still think about them. When a female politician declares in an interview that she’ll put meetings on hold for the school run, it might be portrayed as a weakness, which is bad enough. But when a male one does so, it’s more likely to be regarded as a pose.
Which is madness. Especially when one considers the fatherhood revolution over the past thirty years. Yet weirdly, this seems to make no difference to our expectations of how men with power and prominence are likely to behave the rest of the time.
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And thus, possibly not into theirs, either. So what I’m thinking, slightly to my surprise, is this. Maybe the problem isn’t that we see a woman of power, and immediately want to know her family situation, so we can bundle a bunch of expectations and preconceptions upon her. Maybe, in fact, the real problem is that we don’t do the same with men.
Because, if we did, just think how much nicer the world would look. In Newport right now, for example, we’d see a Brit with three kids, and an American with two kids, sitting down with a German with two step-kids and a Frenchman who claims to only have four kids but increasingly makes you wonder.
What they’d be worrying about, chiefly, was how to persuade a Russian with two kids to ensure a peaceful future in which all these kids could grow up. And, put like that, and if they thought of themselves like that, too, then you’d sort of have a bit more confidence that they might manage it.