Can mothers do it all?

Nathalie Abbott:

Picture a 1950s housewife.

CLIP:

You can organize yourself, so that you can do your housework first and still go out and still be home in time for the children when they come home.

Nathalie Abbott:

Cut now to the late 1980s. Replace the corset with shoulder pads, place a briefcase in one arm and a happy baby in the other, this new vision of the empowered, successful supermom, who juggles everything has been with us in different forms since. Influenced by 90s girl power.

CLIP:

Our philosophy is girls controlling our destiny, taking control of our lives.

Nathalie Abbott:

To the goal boss mantras of today.

CLIP MONTAGE:

Girl boss.

Girl boss.

Hashtag girl boss.

Nathalie Abbott:

These images really matter. They tell us what success is supposed to look like. They tell us that if we put in the work, if we reach out and grab success, we can thrive. It's a tantalizing promise, but is it the reality?

Nathalie Abbott:

Welcome to LSE IQ, the podcast where we ask social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. I'm Nathalie from the IQ team, where we work with academics to bring you their latest research and ideas. In this episode, I ask, can mothers do it all? I speak to LSE’s Dr. Shani Orgad about media portrayals of mothers and what effects these have on all of us. We find out the real reasons mums leave the workforce. Deep, dive into the media coverage of one of the world's most talked about mothers and get Shani's advice on how to do it all.

CLIP: Sheryl Sandberg:

I think there's a really deep irony to the fact that actions women are taking. And I see this all the time with the objective of staying in the workforce, actually lead to their eventually leaving.

Nathalie Abbott:

That's Sheryl Sandberg, business exec, billionaire and author of Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, her renowned 2010 Ted talk.

CLIP: Sheryl Sandberg:

Here's what happens. We're all busy, everyone's busy, a woman's busy. And she starts thinking about having a child. And from the moment she starts thinking about having a child, she starts thinking about making room for that child. How am I going to fit this into everything else I'm doing? And literally that moment she doesn't raise her hand anymore. She doesn't look for a promotion. She doesn't take on the new project. She doesn't say me, "I want to do that". She starts leaning back.

Nathalie Abbott:

Women, she argued are unconsciously holding themselves back from professional advancement. To counter this we have to lean in and reach out for success. I'm a millennial and I'm currently child free, but I'm thinking about my future. I find this message quite appealing. If I put in the work now, maybe I can thrive in all aspects of my life.

Shani Orgad:

These are precisely the messages that the women I interviewed were surrounded by to lean in, to feel positive about yourself.

Nathalie Abbott:

That's Dr. Shani Orgad. We spoke in north London park late last year. When researching for her book, Heading Home: Motherhood, Work, and the Failed Promise of Equality, Shani interviewed a number of middle and upper middle class women who had left successful professional careers after having children.

Shani Orgad:

I spoke to women who left the workforce seemingly as a choice and in many ways it was a choice and they were the first ones to admit that they made a choice and that they had a privilege to make a choice that many women don't. And at the same time, while it is framed as a choice, what I heard time and again, and what I learned is that it was as one of the women I interviewed told me a forced choice. And it was a choice that was forced by toxic work cultures, by work cultures that are utterly incompatible with family life and I'd say with life generally, I think even before having family.

Shani Orgad:

So we're talking about demanding working hours. We're talking about pay gaps. We're talking about sexism in the workplace. We're talking about the demand to be present, this idea of presentism in the office. Demands for relocation at a short notice and so on. And these toxic work cultures, weren't just their own, they were often also their partners. I only interviewed, I should say, heterosexual women, most of whom were married. Some of them were divorced by the point I interviewed them. And so also their husbands workplaces were toxic. And so these women were, to put it very bluntly, pushed out of the workforce. And yet the media construction and the cultural wider construction was that they opted out.

Nathalie Abbott:

So while Sheryl Sandberg claimed that the problem lies with women opting to lean back, Shani believes that it's really toxic work cultures, which force women not only to lean back, but to leave the workforce altogether.

Shani Orgad:

The other thing is how impactful, but also how insidious and terribly painful the impact and the influence of cultural representations and media representations can be. And so these women I've interviewed were deeply disillusioned by their attempts to combine motherhood and working lives. High powered careers. And they experienced deep inequality also at home because at home they'd come and start what Arlie Hochschild called ‘the second shift’.

Nathalie Abbott:

In her 1999 book, Arlie Hochschild describes the second shift as the unpaid labor done at home like housework and childcare after a work day at a paid job. While both men and women experience the second shift, women still tend to take on most of this responsibility.

Shani Orgad:

At the same time, they were surrounded by these images of women who kick ass and lean in. And so this kind of real deep discrepancy between what my colleague Rosalind Gill and I called the confidence culture, whereby there's this imperative through self-help advice, through popular television, through advertisement, through apps, circulating in our culture to adopt a wonder woman pose and feel assertive, to love yourself. You love your body, to be confident and feel in your own skin and so on and so forth. So there's all these kind of self-confidence imperatives where the kind of premise is that the problem lies in women as individuals. If we only as women fix ourselves, if we only work out with this app on how to hold our body and how to feel confident, we will crack it. Here's the key to solving inequality.

Nathalie Abbott:

Even though they recognize the huge structural problems in their workplaces, the women Shani spoke to were surrounded by images of empowered women – think briefcase in one arm and baby and the other – and messages about self-confidence and success. How did these women navigate this paradox?

Shani Orgad:

A very typical interview would go an hour and a half, two hours, with a professional woman who was a lawyer or accountant or a teacher or social worker. And she'd tell me all these kind of systematic structural aspects of inequality that she's experienced at work. The ways in which inequality at home has also impacted her decision to leave paid employment. And then she would end and say to me, "But the problem was really that I lacked the confidence, I didn't have the ambition" and I would stop and my jaw dropped every time and said, "How can you tell me that you lacked the ambition?" I spoke to a woman who studied medicine for seven years and then did specialism. I said, "You learned for all these years, you wanted to become a geneticist. How can you tell me that you lacked the ambition?"

Shani Orgad:

And she looked at me and she kind of giggled embarrassed. And she said, "Yeah, I suppose you're right. It's contradictory, isn't it. But yeah, I didn't have the ambition". These are women who are privileged women. Most of them are middle class. Some of them are upper middle class. They're highly educated, they have the resources and yet they blame themselves. So other women I think, would find it harder still. I think it's so crucial to understand how subtle but profoundly impactful cultural messages can be. And I go to the very problematic lean in manifesto by Sheryl Sandberg, where she calls women to internalize the revolution. And I found that rather than internalizing the revolution, they internalized the blame.

Nathalie Abbott:

While I wasn't entirely surprised to hear that these women found the modern work world and home life incompatible. I was shocked to hear that they ended up blaming themselves for their perceived failures, for their inability to lean in. As Michelle Obama reportedly put it in 2018, "It's not always enough to lean in because that shit doesn't work all the time".

Representations matter while we've heard how damaging images of the self-empowered woman can be. It's not all bad news. In recent years, public visibility of motherhood has increasing rapidly. I asked Shani what this means.

Shani Orgad:

We see more attention being given to motherhood, mothering, mothers. So there's more coverage that relates to issues relating to mothers. Politicians, celebrities identify much more actively as mothers or in relation to motherhood. And generally speaking, I think also within popular culture, we see much more attention and dramas that are really centering the issue of motherhood and mothering. The most kind of important and interesting aspect of this hyper visibility motherhood is also the diversification of representations of mothers. We know that historically mothers were represented in much narrower ways, and it's not to say that it's a perfectly diverse, but we do see more and more different versions of motherhood. That really question older and more conservative notions of what does it mean to mother at all?

Nathalie Abbott:

And why do you think there's been this intensification over the last few years?

Shani Orgad:

So one is the increased levels of education and greater participation of women in the workforce. Of course, the influence and ongoing influence of feminism. And more recently, the kind of rise of what's been called popular feminism, the whole crisis around reproductive rights, that is very much kind of on the political agenda. In various places around the world has of course been very closely attached to visibility of mothering and also the kind of ongoing questioning of biological view of motherhood with LGBTQ activism and related kind of social movements that really ask us to, or demand that motherhood is understood in much more expansive and complex ways.

Nathalie Abbott:

It sounds like the definition of motherhood is constantly shifting.

Shani Orgad:

Yeah, exactly. It's a shifting terrain. I think that's absolutely right.

Nathalie Abbott:

Definitions of motherhood are morphing. On this landscape of shifting terrain Shani and her co-researcher Kate Baldwin have been examining the coverage of one of the decades most talked about mothers. She sits in a very unique position, identifying as feminist and as a woman of color, she has also made her way into one of the world's most white conservative and traditionalist institutions. If we take all of the media coverage seriously for a moment, what can Meghan Markle tell us about what we as a society think about motherhood right now.

CLIP MONTAGE:

Meghan Markle.

The Duchess of Sussex.

Meghan Markle.

Meghan Duchess of Sussex.

Duchess Meghan and Prince Harry have just announced that they are expecting their first child.

Nathalie Abbott:

Let's take a look at the timeline of events.

Shani Orgad:

The moment it was back on 6th of May 2019.

Prince Harry:

Mother And baby are doing incredibly well, has been the most amazing experience I can ever possibly imagined. How any woman does what they do is beyond comprehension, but we're both absolutely thrilled.

Shani Orgad:

That's a break from all previous kind of Royal announcements of birth. This really reflected the couple's kind of very millennial, progressive egalitarian mindset. And it's a moment of recognition and appreciation in public discourse of women's labor. More specifically, it's significant in the context of black motherhood. So given the invisibility of black motherhood and specifically the invisibility of black motherhood and black maternal mortality.

Nathalie Abbott:

According to reports published by embrace UK in 2021.

CLIP:

Black women in the UK are four times, more likely to die from complications in pregnancy and childbirth than white women.

Nathalie Abbott:

Harry's statement was a refreshing recognition of black maternal labor, but what was hidden in this moment.

Shani Orgad:

The Royal couple insisted on not sharing where she's giving birth. There were again, lots of rumors and guesses.

CLIP:

Archie Harrison, Mount Baton Windsor, his birth certificate has been released and it confirms that the Duchess of Sussex gave birth to her first child Archie, at the private Portland hospital in Westminster.

Shani Orgad:

There's a very small minority of women in the UK who can afford giving birth in a private hospital. There's a dual thing there in recognizing labor, but also hiding the very particular, highly privileged ways in which her labor and comparing her to any woman. She is not any woman.

Nathalie Abbott:

Cut forward two months to the 10th of July 2019, Meghan arrived at a Polo match carrying baby Archie, and a series of photos of the pair quickly went viral.

Shani Orgad:

Almost immediately she was shamed for holding the baby in this quote, unquote, wrong way as if you were about to drop him. Objectively as a mother myself, looking at this photo, there was nothing to suggest. We have in our study, kind of looked at a lot of the social media and it was quite shocking to see the cruel responses and their repetition of mother blaming and harsh judgments. Comparing also Meghan to a nanny, which is of course, extremely racial is a lot of black women are recounting the story of being confused to be the nanny. But also again, speaking to the comparison of Kate, there was nothing off that kind ever.

Nathalie Abbott:

Shani is of course, referring to Kate Middleton. Kate's motherhood has garnered a huge amount of media attention, but Shani points out that she's hardly ever criticized in the same way as Meghan.

Shani Orgad:

Those are more specific racialized and racist undertone that black women have historically been seen as you irresponsible mothers. Yeah, who don't know how to parent their children. And there's lots of writing from African American feminist critics to black British feminist about this.

Nathalie Abbott:

This in the face of all of this ugly public scrutiny. Meghan made a very un-royal intervention. She spoke about her feelings. During an interview for an ITV documentary about the couple's Royal tour of Africa. She was asked about the immense pressure she'd been under.

Meghan Markle:

Look, any woman especially when they're pregnant, you're really vulnerable. And so that was made really challenging. And then when you have a newborn and especially as a woman, it's really a lot. So you add this on top of just trying to be a new mom or trying to be a newlywed it's... And also thank you for asking, because not many people have asked if I'm okay, but it's a very real thing to be going through behind scenes.

Shani Orgad:

This was a really important moment that highlighted Meghan's maternal vulnerability and the mental and emotional price of motherhood. She talks about it being behind the scene, being invisible and perhaps unsurprisingly, it was very quickly endorsed by many people. On Twitter, on social media, in mainstream media who praised Meghan for her candidness and bravery, lots of women just said, "That's me. Nobody asked me how I am in this whole story. All the attention goes to the baby". And so in this way, there was something very authentic, fresh and significant in her candid kind of... Particularly centering of vulnerability. But at the same time in this confession that Meghan gave in the ITV documentary, she remains quite vague about what causes mothers to be vulnerable. She alludes to problems of mental health, but she says nothing about actually the huge work, labor that's mothering entails. And she leaves a connection of what feminist have called the personal and the political completely untouched. She failed to link it.

Speaker:

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Nathalie Abbott:

You're listening to LSE IQ. In this episode, we are asking, can mothers do it all? We've heard Meghan publicly describe the pressures on her mental health and how some found her message relatable and refreshing as Shani points out though, Meghan didn't really highlight any specifics. What are the structural problems she's up against and what work really goes into mothering? When thinking about that last question, it's quite hard to forget about Meghan's immense wealth and privilege.

Shani Orgad:

In the Royal couple's Africa tour and what was very interestingly hidden is the nanny.

Nathalie Abbott:

At the beginning of their Africa tour, paparazzi photos of Meghan and Harry disembarking from the plane emerged behind the couple can be seen the blurred image of their nanny, who is usually hidden from view.

Shani Orgad:

There was no mention of the nanny and that's curious and interesting and important because it's on the one hand again, very typical of celebrities hiding that part. And what it does is of course it contributes to the myth that mothers do it all. And it completely obscures the very large, often an expensive infrastructure that facilitates this wonderful balance. So here we see Meghan perhaps struggling as she's confessing, but nevertheless, we don't have a sense of so much of the labor of mothering.

Shani Orgad:

Definitely there could be good reasons why they wouldn't want to expose the nanny and to identify her. So it's not to judge them but it's to suggest that there's an issue there in this consistent hiding.

Nathalie Abbott:

And then...

CLIP:

Buckingham palace has confirmed that The Duke and Duchess of Sussex will not be returning as working members of the Royal family.

Shani Orgad:

The exit at least at the time we wrote, it seemed to perhaps offer an opportunity for a slightly more radical as it were rewriting of what black maternity is, because it enabled this kind of perhaps release from the shackles of the very rigid and narrowly and tight expectations and definitions of what a good mother in the British Royal family looks like i.e. Kate Middleton.

Nathalie Abbott:

So Meghan's Royal exit in some ways, represents an escape from oppressive old school ideas of motherhood. Of course, the media coverage of all of the events we've looked at was frenzied complete Royal mania. So what can looking at these representations of Meghan, both from the media and from herself, really tell us?

Shani Orgad:

She's an instance or an example of how more traditional and conservative notions of the good mother are being troubled and questioned. The kind of dominance of white motherhood and invisibility of black motherhood is being challenged and questioned, I wouldn't say transformed. Her representation kind of remain in many ways, quite circumscribed or limited by the things that they obscure and these things that Meghan's representations obscure are the things and the aspects that are obscured more broadly in contemporary representations. So back to what we talked about, birth and birthing back to what we've talked about, childcare. Representations matter, the images and the narratives we see around us, the ideals of what does it mean to be a mother or a good mothers? The more they are diverse, complex, not kind of perfect, honest, the more I think there is and there would be a space for allowing and giving women the kind of vocabulary and enabling, not just women, but parents more generally to articulate the difficulties.

Nathalie Abbott:

I've always found the images and stories of women who do it all quite appealing, but it's hard to imagine how juggling everything would actually work. Shani and I talked more about the ways childcare stays hidden in the public arena.

Shani Orgad:

There was a very interesting article in the run up to the last US presidential election, where lots of politicians were involved in earlier stages in the kind of presidential elections were asked about their childcare arrangements and they all didn't want to comment. So there's something quite systematic about hiding the childcare, which supports this myth that parents do it all in particularly good mothers do it all on their own. And we know that's not true, but these type of representations, including Meghan's really reinforce this very problematic myth.

Nathalie Abbott:

Do you think that also contributes to the fact that we might undervalue that labor as a society?

Shani Orgad:

Absolutely because it remains largely invisible, doesn't it? So we know it's often low paid. It's often called low skilled, but it's a highly skilled job, but it's often performed by migrant women, women of color and poor women. And the fact that it's hidden serves its continuing invisibility and devaluation. Absolutely both economic devaluation, but also devaluation, which is social devaluation

Nathalie Abbott:

Over the past couple of years though, issues of childcare have crept more interview

Shani Orgad:

In the context of the pandemic, so many stories came out of precisely the kind of labor that mostly women have to carry out at home that remains invisible and that the workplace very comfortably often ignores.

CLIP:

• The response of the Coronavirus outbreak and the local level activities…
• [Child interrupts]
• That's all right, we know how it is working at home. Do you need to do anything?
• I'm good thank you.
• Carry on.

Nathalie Abbott:

That's LSEs Dr. Clare Wenham and her daughter in a viral 2020 BBC interview. So many similar videos have been shared over the past couple of years. And for those in office jobs, seeing kids on their parents lap during zoom meetings became normal.

Shani Orgad:

Oh, surprise! This remains hidden. Why is that? Why is it that this part of people's lives has to remain completely outside the framework as if we're all pretending.

Nathalie Abbott:

It sounds like we might have to be a little bit patient for some of these broad social structural changes to take place. Now in the interim, I'm a millennial, I'm currently child free, but I might have children and I'm at the beginning of my career and the myth of the woman who does it always very seductive. And sometimes it's very overwhelming and feels kind of impossible. So what kind of advice would you give to individuals to bear in mind?

Shani Orgad:

It's really interesting to me that you said that you feel that there's a need for patience because the conclusion of my book is entitled Impatience. And that's my advice, I think women have been told for too long to be patient and to wait because these things take time and I'm not denying that these things take time. But I think the notion that somehow you will have to wait now a decade or two until things improve. What it does is that it denies the fact that you have agency to perhaps not completely radically change things, but to definitely instigate and demand change. I'm very ambivalent and reluctant to give advice because part of what I'm so critical of is how women are constantly asked to do more work on themselves. So any advice I'd give you would be do more of this.

Shani Orgad:

And I think women are constantly being exhausted to work on themselves, to improve themselves. My message is not to say, I'm not to blame, I have no responsibility. It's not this. It's to say when there's a problem, let's see if there's a way to address the structural issue rather than to internalize it myself as an individual problem. The other advice is to reach out to other women because I think at least for my own experience personally, but also for my research, lots of the women I interviewed experienced this alone thinking that they're the only ones. And so I think, solidity is really based on sharing experience significantly not to leave it just a therapeutic space, to share collective experiences into demands for structural changes. We live in a moment that there're lot of depressing things happening, but there is at least noise about diversity and about inclusion.

Shani Orgad:

I think a lot of it is performative, box ticking, superficial, not genuine, but the opportunity is there to come and say, "This is on your agenda, this is what inclusivity would mean to me". That's my very limited piece of wisdom with a very big caveat that I think women should stop internalizing the blame and resist these kind of constant barrage of messages that we should do more work on ourselves that we should... Even if it's cost is positive, it's always more work and more labor. It's five steps to becoming more resilient, six steps to becoming more... Even to be kind to yourself and don't be harsh on yourself, there're steps and there's work to be done. And I think that's something that is exhausting, but is also reproducing inequality rather than improving it.

Nathalie Abbott:

This episode was produced by me, Nathalie Abbott, with support from Sophie Mallett. If you'd like to find out more about the research in this episode, head to the show notes. And if you enjoy IQ, please leave us a review coming soon on LSE IQ.

Speaker:

Everyone has a view on it and everyone thinks that it's going to fail and that's really depressing. A lot of people have said that to me are mediocre people. So I don't need to care what they think and I wish I'd just been a lot more like, yeah, whatever

Nathalie Abbott:

Next month on LSE IQ Sue Windebank will be asking, should you follow your passion?