Gillard vs Gillard Less than a year ago, Julia Gillard was interviewed by the Melbourne Sunday Age on the issue of feminism. What Julia has to say on the issue is important, as she is a leading member of the Labor Party and considered to be prime ministerial material. Her views were clear and very much in line with feminist orthodoxy. Girls, she opined, should have choices, except that the choice to be a traditional stay-at-home mum was no longer an option. In her own words:
So in May 2004 Gillard’s attitude was that women who wanted to be mothers would do so by mixing their careers with motherhood. To suggest anything else was out of this world. This is not what traditionalists like myself want to hear. We believe that the motherhood role is an important one, and that it’s a positive thing for women to be able to stay at home to raise their children. So should we be worried? Was Julia Gillard right to declare traditional motherhood to be unrewarding and effectively defunct? There are several reasons why we should not be too worried about Julia’s comments. First, she contradicts herself in the very same interview. Having declared that being a stay-at-home mum is too unrewarding to contemplate, she then declares of the modern woman that,
So it turns out that being an at-home carer is not so bad after all – Julia Gillard even recommends it as a liberating option for men. It seems that what Julia Gillard really objects to about women staying at home is not that it’s unrewarding, but that it’s a traditional gender role. This raises a further question. Is it really true that young women have rejected traditional gender roles? There are reasons to think not. For instance, a recent survey of 5,000 teenage girls in Britain found that an overwhelming 97% wanted their future partner to be the main earner in the relationship. They utterly rejected the idea of a gender role swap. Which brings us to the most surprising evidence against the Gillard view: Julia Gillard herself. She has now revealed that she might have happily ditched her career, despite having a most glamorous job, if she had met the right man:
Furthermore, she doesn’t think she herself could have mixed motherhood and career, despite recommending it as the only option for today’s women:
According to Sally Morrell, in today’s Herald Sun, Gillard continues by saying,
Sally comments,
So there is a divide here between what Julia Gillard thinks intellectually ought to happen (breaking down traditional gender roles) and what she values in her own personal experience (being brought up in the care of her own mother). The problem is that in these situations the intellectual understanding always wins out. It is thought to be more principled to follow the intellectual understanding, and to try to get young women to reject at-home motherhood, despite what we value in our own lives. Which is why we need to tackle the intellectual assumptions of liberalism, in which traditional arrangements are considered illegitimate precisely because they are so important within our own nature that they are seen to be an unchosen destiny, rather than a product of our own reasoned choices. If we continue to accept this liberal intellectual framework, then we won’t be able to reconcile what we understand intellectually and what is truly important in our own lives. Comments:2
Posted by Mark Richardson on Tue, 14 Mar 2006 03:30 | # GW, what were they thinking? (the parents, the photographer, the editors etc) Fred, agreed. Your description of the hell hole that older feminist women often fall into is very good - I’ve been meaning to write a piece on this. Post a comment:
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Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 14 Mar 2006 00:52 | #
Alas, only middle class young ladies seem concerned about their liberty. Down among the d-d’s (not a bra size), it’s a free council flat that occupies their thinking. Such as it is.