Working mothers have working daughters. So what?

What kind of message are you sending your daughter if you stay at home full time to raise her? A study out of Harvard implies that you’re not setting her up to make as much money as she can. Apparently, girls whose mothers worked make 4% more and are more likely to be in managerial positions.

Great!

I’m going to make a guess that girls who spent more time in institutionalised care who have mothers who prioritised bowing to the corporate master will also learn to “respect authority” and in turn bow to the corporate master. It’s great that boys who grew up with working mothers take on more domestic tasks though. I’m sure they saw their mother practically killing herself and she probably gave him chores and often told him to do more for his wife than his dad did. Now listen, I know how you all feel about this and I’m not shaming working mothers here. There are obviously benefits, both to the children and the parents in the current economic and social climate.

The thing I’m worried about, as you can guess, is that we are on the wrong trajectory. I’ve said before, we’re still demonising the unemployed, we’re still constructing this narrative that contributing to the GDP is the only useful thing you can do for society. How is that not obviously untrue?

There’s also the news that an EU report tells Britain it needs to get more women into full time work and lower child care costs. The tories are indeed about to introduce 30 hours free, substandard, underfunded childcare to working parents of low income. So they are all over it already anyway. Lets get more women into work, especially full time, even if there aren’t enough jobs at all. Everyone else can take those unpaid workfare jobs.

And what will happen to all these career crazed individuals when 47% of jobs have been lost to automation by 2034?

If the tories have their way, we’ll all be in workfare jobs. We are not ready. We will continue to demonise and sadly I see huge amounts of depression, both economic and psychological, because not only can we not find jobs and pay bills but we feel we have no intrinsic value. Which is exactly, by the way, what a stay at home mother teaches her children; that we have intrinsic value. We should not be judged by what we do for our employer and how much we can persuade it to pay us, but by what we mean to each other.

It seems quite clear to me that consent is more likely to be respected by someone who believes we all have intrinsic value, by the way.

You know what will increase equality? A cap on the number of hours a person can work at 28 per week. Everyone could work part time, everyone could share household and caring responsibilities and family members could see each other more often. Two parent families would understand each other better if their daily lives were more similar, and employers would no longer be aloud to squeeze the life and soul out of every employee that needs to work.

Obviously, we would need a living wage bill and a renewed commitment to the welfare state, or ideally universal basic income. Some pretty clever people think UBI is inevitable anyway though, considering that projection of massive jobs losses sooner rather than later. Certainly it is the only thing that will save us in the next 20 to 30 years. So we better start getting used to some very different thoughts about work and family, rather than this bull that we all need to be working 40+ hours per week.

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