Why girls can't have it all

BROADSIDE - ROSEMARY McLEOD

Why am I so reluctant to admit that girls can't have it all? And when are we going to give up pretending that they can?

We've spent decades building up their expectations so they can study anything, work alongside men in equal roles – and be just as thuggish, like the Parisian girl gangs who came to light this week, arming themselves to fight outsiders flirting with the boys in their housing estates.

They don't have to marry, have kids, even dress to please. A virtue's been made of looking androgynous as a kind of perverse come-on: "Dare to get to know me. Share my millet porridge first." And I have no quarrel with this. Marriage is often a trap, and motherhood isn't the only satisfying experience women want before they pop their clogs.

We had to change. And yet there's biology, which is immutable. It makes us men or women, and programmes us for gender- based roles, to be mothers and fathers, whether we admit it or not.

We know a lot about how to create life in laboratories, but very little about the feelings that go with having kids. In our bid for complete equality, women have denied that it's a transforming experience: rather, we've sidelined that, along with other "feminine" feelings, as being beneath intelligent people. By feminine feelings I mean any associated with the drive to nurture; the vulnerability of pregnancy and having young children, when you're desperately in need of support; the astounding love you feel for your children; your fear for their vulnerability – yukky feelings that make you weak and unequal to the task of driving careers, competing, and asserting yourself.

Currently, these feelings are seen as gutless, and we suggest women deal with them by handing children over to professionals to look after so they can go out and work, which is gutsy and real. But women still hanker for some form of home life – look at the many magazines devoted to the idea – and they actually want to spend time with their kids while they're awake, not pick them up from day care and fling them into bed at the end of the day.

We may plan for nannies and childcare centres when we're first pregnant, and believe we'll use them, and then something else happens. Babies, that professional inconvenience, turn out to be surprisingly fascinating.

That's a problem, because women want the immaculate interiors they see in magazines, too, but now they can't afford them. It's not easy to create a serene, restful home, to shop and prepare food for a family, and to clean up after them while competing in the workplace. But without working, you'll barely get by.

It's also not easy to have a sick child and still have to go to work, to endure sleepless nights for months on end because a child is a fretful sleeper, and to deal with such stresses in an adult way with your partner. God knows how women who go it alone get on.

This is why National's Katherine Rich would not join her then leader, Don Brash, in attacking solo mothers, for which she was demoted. And it's also why she has decided to quit politics at the next election, despite the certainty of a Cabinet post if National is elected. She's chosen to be a mother to her two young kids because she's not a paragraph of dogma in a feminist manual but a human being, and the brave feminist model just wasn't working for her any more.

I'd once have been embarrassed at acknowledging motherhood as pivotal in life, but life changes you. Even clever people struggle with having it all, and after 40 years the world of action is still geared toward men and single women, despite the rhetoric: the odds are still stacked against mothers.

To prove my point, a new woman politician is about to be sworn in as a Labour MP. Louisa Wall is a former champion netballer and rugby player, Maori, bright and personable, just five years younger than Mrs Rich – and gay. For her there won't be heart-wrenching crying in the night, conflicted loyalties, the guilt of saying goodbye to small children. She can have the best of one world – which is fine – but we persist in claiming that women can realistically hope for two.

- © Fairfax NZ News