When New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern brought her baby to the UN General Assembly last week, there couldn’t have been more shock if she had flung the three-month-old’s nappy at the Iranian delegation.
There was a similar cacophony of tut-tutting earlier this month when MP Jo Swinson took her baby son into the Commons. Personally, I couldn’t see the big deal. That infant probably makes more sense than the entire Labour front bench put together. But both kerfuffles highlighted something that’s long been troubling me: the extent to which mothers and motherhood have been neglected by modern feminism.
I’m not a mum myself yet, but I hope to be one day. And I’m keenly aware how many of the most important issues surrounding motherhood – from breastfeeding to the struggles of those women trying to balance work and kids – are now pushed below the surface, on to internet forums like Mumsnet.
When New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern brought her baby to the UN General Assembly last week, there couldn’t have been more shock if she had flung the three-month-old’s nappy at the Iranian delegation, says CHARLOTTE GILL
The trouble is that the modern brand of feminism has always treated mothers as a bit of an afterthought, even though some of the loudest feminists are mums themselves. In its current guise, feminism is the perfect home if you’re single and want to be rude about men.
You’ll hear plenty of ‘patriarchy’ this and ‘patriarchy’ that. But never is there talk of the other P-word: parenthood.
Huge numbers of feminist debates have become centred around sexual harassment, consent and body image. All of these are certainly vital subjects, but there are also lots of others specific to mothers about which much less is heard.
For instance, is IVF a safe and healthy choice? Is it right that we live in a society where more and more thirtysomething women are freezing their eggs, even though statistics show there is a tragically slender chance of many of them eventually becoming babies. Is it right that private clinics are making fortunes by charging desperate women huge sums to be pumped full of hormones?
Another important talking point is the right to choose. I’m not referring to abortion – an obsession of modern feminists – but whether or not women should have the right to have a caesarean. C-sections are one of the most neglected feminist areas even though there’s real suffering when they are denied – usually because cash-strapped NHS hospitals say they are too expensive.
In August, a report revealed almost one in six NHS trusts do not offer women caesareans on request. Rebecca Schiller, chief executive of the campaign group Birthrights, said: ‘It is clear that women requesting caesareans meet judgmental attitudes, barriers and disrespect more often than they find compassion and support.’ So why aren’t feminists talking about it?
Then there’s breastfeeding. The many women who, through no fault of their own, can’t manage it face huge levels of distress, stigma and bullying from proselytising NHS staff. But where are the sisters proclaiming formula milk a feminist issue?
AS FOR the much-discussed gender pay gap, comb through the evidence and it’s crystal-clear the biggest reason women don’t earn as much as men isn’t discrimination – it’s babies. This is because women still take on the brunt of childcare, which pushes them towards part-time work, and that’s the lowest paid.
The gap becomes even more pronounced as women get older and become ‘sandwich carers’, looking after both their children and their ageing parents.
Which brings me to another right to choose mothers should be allowed: the right to stay at home and look after their babies if that’s what they want to do – without being derided by politicians or other women at the school gates.
At the Conservative Party conference this week, Jacob Rees-Mogg is going to accuse the Government of not doing enough to help traditional families, and he’s right.
Policymakers have become relaxed in this area because these is nothing driving them to do otherwise, no #MeToo movement for mothers. Come on feminists, it’s time to stop keeping mum.
At the Labour conference, Jeremy Corbyn lambasted ‘greed-is-good capitalism’. This line sums up Labour’s hatred of aspiration, for which the party increasingly uses ‘greed’ as a synonym. Anyone who wants to succeed in our capitalist model is demonised. The Left’s constant smearing of high earners, as well as anyone else with ambition, will prove ruinous for the economy. Who is going to earn the cash to fund Corbyn’s socialist utopia? Forget the money tree – in Jezza’s vision we’ll need magical wind farms spinning out cash into everyone’s hands.
The incredible shrinking noses
Lady Gaga has boasted that Bradley Cooper stopped her from wearing make-up for their film A Star Is Born – so that she could be ‘completely open’.
While that all sounds lovely, let’s be frank: Lady Gaga, left, isn’t the first person who springs to mind as Ms Natural 2018.
Not least because her nose seems to have shrunk suspiciously over the course of her career.
Lady Gaga attends the Audi Canada And Links Of London Co-Hosted Post-Screening Event For ‘A Star Is Born’
In fact, nostrils have become one of the most meddled-with features on a celebrity woman’s body.
The only reassurance is that large bottoms have become cool again. If we can reinvigorate the big booty, why not the big snooty?
More than 50 million Facebook accounts were hacked in a breach that engineers discovered on Tuesday but which was only made public on Friday. This is the future now. Buckle up. Or quit social media…
Startling scenes at the US Senate hearing on Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s candidate for the Supreme Court. Dr Christine Blasey Ford, a psychology professor, alleged he assaulted her when he was 17 and she 15. Kavanaugh, almost in tears, professed to be innocent. It is impossible to know the truth, but what is appalling is the number of celebrities on Ford’s side merely because she is a woman. Pop star Pink posted a photograph of Ford on Instagram, writing: ‘We see you, we hear you. We believe you.’ How ignorant. Celebrities need a tough lesson in how justice works. It’s not about liking the look of someone – it’s about evidence. Men deserve to be believed as much as women. Anything else is vigilantism.
J. K. Rowling has defended herself after a Korean actress was cast as Voldemort’s pet snake, Nagini, in the Fantastic Beasts spin-off. Critics said this was racist in a scandal called ‘Nagini Backlash’. For backlash read about four sad people on Twitter…
How can ‘woman’ be hate speech?
Am I a woman? I’m not sure, after a strange event in Liverpool last week, involving the removal of a poster that spelled out a dictionary definition.
It read, ‘Woman, women, noun, adult human female’ and was commissioned by Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, a feminist campaigner who has become fed up about the erasure of the word from our lexicon. This is becoming a very real problem, with Cancer Research UK recently taking out ‘woman’ from its cervical-screening literature. Keen-Minshull’s poster was up a week before it was deemed offensive by Twitter activist and NHS doctor Adrian Harrop, who isn’t transgender, but said it perpetuated ‘the spread of transphobic hate speech’.
The billboard company immediately apologised and promised to remove the poster, which demonstrates just how scared businesses are to stick up for common sense.
How have we got to a situation where a simple definition can be treated as if it were The Satanic Verses?
The French President is fast turning into Macron the Meanie – and not just because of his bad manners towards Theresa May in Salzburg. A few days earlier, he gave a jobless man the Gallic equivalent of Norman Tebbit’s ‘get on your bike’ line. He haughtily told the struggling 25-year-old: ‘If I crossed the street I’d find you one [a job].’ Which seems a bit unlikely given the French unemployment rate is 9.2 per cent versus the EU average of 6.8 per cent.