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Here is the feminist economist, Nancy Folbre delivering a memorial lecture on Women’s Work And The Limits of Capitalism. It’s fantastic. You should watch it. We should all be talking about it.

It’s also long (though the questions she is asked at the end by the audience aren’t brilliant so you can skip those and also, the introductions at the beginning of the clip go on a bit, so, Folbre doesn’t actually commence her lecture until the 8 minute mark of the video so you can skip the first bit of the clip, too).

All in all, don’t read any further below if you want to listen to her lecture yourself because I am summarising, quoting and paraphrasing her lecture down there and it is so much better to see Folbre deliver these arguments herself. However, if you’re going to skip the video entirely or you’ve watched it and now want to see what I am saying about it then keep right on reading.

Let’s start with where we are today. Which factor is most to blame for the modern predicament of mothers – over-worked, exhausted, stretched to capacity, idolised yet invisible, and financially vulnerable – the patriarchy or capitalism?

Folbre says she used to think that ‘patriarchy’ was the noun and ‘capitalism’ the adjective but she now thinks it is the other way around. Capitalism is to blame. She goes on to deliver a brief history of the evolution of patriarchal systems, explaining that these systems suited certain labour-intensive stages of economic development, like warfare and agricultural societies, because patriarchal systems tend to result in higher population growth than do egalitarian systems. Folbre notes that “women are often held hostage by their concern for their children”. Children have tended to weaken women’s bargaining power and historically women have often gained more reproductive advantage from marriage than men. Therefore, women have tended to also pay a higher price for it, which resulted in unequal terms in the arrangement. The patriarchal household, she explains, forced women to over-specialise in care. She then goes on to talk about how economic theories of the firm can also be used to describe what occurs in the patriarchal household. I won’t go into too much technical detail here about this, unless someone is desperate for me to do so and indicates as much in the comments on this post, but suffice to say that basically, these theories explain why the optimum outcome won’t necessarily happen through negotiation and goodwill. The reason behind this is because of the different bargaining powers of the various parties involved and the various incentives they face according to the ways in which they’re each rewarded. For instance, the owners of the firm are paid ‘the residual’ (ie. whatever is left over after all the factors of production have been paid for including labour costs) so they have an incentive to drive their labour hard and keep the residual as high as possible. At the expense of superior outcomes for the entire household, there is an incentive for men to force women to over-specialise in unpaid caring work because of women’s inferior bargaining position and access to the household’s ‘residual’.

However, capitalism has eroded elements of the patriarchy, too – although, even with their tensions the two have brought about more mutual reinforcement than significant dismantling of one another. Or as Folbre jokes, it sometimes looks like the patriarchy and capitalism are getting ready to fight each other when what we are probably seeing is the two getting ready to mate. Capitalism, which emerged with the development of wage employment has undermined some aspects of the patriarchal family. If you can imagine life just before and after capitalism: families transitioned from living and working together in their homes and generally bartering, to the beginnings of industrialisation where men left the home to earn wages working in factories, and women and children (initially) stayed behind to perform the unpaid work of managing the family home – growing food, making clothes, tending to the sick and elderly, raising children, repairing the home, collecting fuel etc. This was when caring work became truly invisible. If you weren’t paid a wage for the work in the new economy then the work no longer existed.

But capitalism, with its introduction of an ‘individual wage’ rather than the ‘family wage’ made a significant dent in the patriarchal wall – the ‘individual wage’ helped encourage women to seek self-ownership and also to engage in collective action. Now that individual efforts could be so readily identified and rewarded, women wanted to own themselves and the fruits of their own production (see here for a beautifully captured example of this). The only problem with all this revolution is that capitalism is dreadfully dependent upon the unpaid caring work of women. The breadwinner’s wage (like, the Harvester Man concept in Australia) assumed the support of unpaid work from a wife in the breadwinner’s home. It is the neo-liberal dilemma, as Folbre says, capitalism needs families but would prefer not to pay for them. However, we know that eventually women entered the workplace and became contributors to the household income, and finally that they even also challenged the notion of a breadwinner by fighting for equal pay.

As Folbre explains though, self-ownership hasn’t been enough to guarantee gender equality. This is because, among other things, women continue to specialise in producing very worthwhile things (ie. human capital, or child-rearing as us mothers like to call it) that we cannot own. Capitalism does not provide payment for services and products that are not bought and sold in markets, and who, might we ask, does most of the work that happens outside of the marketplace? Women, of course. Folbre, also briefly at this point, touches on the introduction of the welfare state, a development which saw the socialising of some of the costs of caring for dependents and which greatly enhanced the lives of women. She highlights the ways in which the welfare state has been viewed as the feminised side of the economy; how it is referred to as ‘the nanny state’, for example; and more pointedly, how it is seen as something weak, spoiling, expensive, and needing to be controlled and disciplined.

“The position of women improves but the position of mothers deteriorates – pauperization of motherhood or “motherization of poverty,” Folbre explains as the next step which occurred in the evolution of the patriarchy. Why is it that women have gained in status in comparison to men, but mothers have remained so vulnerable?  In other words, why hasn’t the feminism of the last fifty years been enough? Why aren’t mothers sticking together to force change? (The economic answer would be this: capitalist competition creates incentives to exploit resources that are unpriced, especially where competitors are doing the same thing; but you may be relieved to know that we can also explain the answer with less economic terms).

Here is where Folbre’s analysis is at its most useful.

We don’t assign any value to unpaid caring work. We convince ourselves that mothering is so sacred it can’t be valued, that counting it would diminish its worth – cheapen it somehow. Folbre explains that while economists and others do in fact acknowledge that unpaid work in the home exists and isn’t counted, they also tend to assume that the consequences of this are not all that serious. This is wrong, Folbre argues. If we’re interested in material living standards, and we very much are, then we should count caring work. Why? Because it is work, because someone is providing it, and because providing this work has costs. The magnitudes of unpaid labour are really high, using the American Time Use Survey for instance, Folbre is able to show that half of all the hours of work performed in the United States are unpaid. (However, she doesn’t provide a full clarification of these hours in her lecture so I wasn’t able to determine their exact structure – do they include unpaid overtime by wage-earners as well, general work in the house, caring for the elderly, caring for people with disabilities in the home?) This means that half of the work done in the economy does not happen in the capitalist system. Folbre rightly notes that this unexamined work has really important implications for living standards.

Then Folbre throws the following puzzle to the audience.

Say there are two families, both with two parents and two pre-school aged children, and both with a household income of $50,000.

Family A – is comprised of one wage earner working full-time earning $50,000 and one full-time home-maker.

Family B – is comprised of two parents working full-time, both earning $25,000 each.

Which family is better off?

Current measures of inequality treat both families exactly the same – but Family B is in fact worse off because they are obviously having to also purchase services which are otherwise being performed for free by a full-time homemaker in the other family. Namely, childcare. It is important, Folbre points out, to put some value on that unpaid work if you want to understand the relative living standards of different households.

When we look at women’s equality we are mostly concerned with our market income. With women entering paid employment, household incomes have risen. And market income has become more equally distributed across the sexes. But this is because we are comparing a time when women earned zero value in market income to a time in the present where they have been increasingly earning a market income for paid employment. What happens, Folbre asks, if you assign a value for non-market work and you ask not what happened when women started working but what happened when they changed the type of work they did from unpaid to paid work?

In general, women’s unpaid work has been pretty much of a similar value across women. (There were some big shifts when the world began to understand how human capital, and thus economic growth, could be increased by the education of children – mothers were consequently encouraged to be more specialised in their mothering. Mothering capabilities have been tied to education levels, too, but generally, a mother is a mother regardless of class, education and income).

While all of women’s unpaid work has been of a similar value, women’s paid work has not been. Some women are highly paid and highly educated (thanks to feminism) and others are not, and what we’ve seen in economies like America, is that overall living standards have become much more unequal now that more women are in paid work. In a way, the patriarchy was equalising. Every married man used to get an unpaid house-keeper and child-carer – and the services provided to him were roughly of the same value regardless of the income of the man. Why is there more race and class inequality among women now? In part, it is the success of feminism in a capitalist system. Women overall have gained more education, but a lot among us have not had access to these opportunities. Poor women have been trapped in disadvantage.

Now, back to the question of this post, which is why haven’t women pushed harder for caring work to be valued? If we know that unpaid caring work – child-rearing, elder care, care of family members with disabilities – is stretching most mothers/carers to their limits why aren’t we changing things? Why can’t we get political change happening for mothers/carers? Folbre makes the rather devastating case, and I think she is right, that it is income inequality which has undermined efforts to seek change. “Higher paid women benefit from their ability to hire low-wage women to provide child care and elder care in the market”. Even if we don’t benefit directly we can still afford to ignore the plight of others. It is one of the reasons why the campaign for paid maternity leave was so slow to get going in Australia. A lot of women like myself, with education and good pay had already secured some form of paid maternity leave from our employers long before a national scheme was in place. It was women with lower incomes and less secure jobs who were least likely to have beem able to negotiate paid maternity leave in their jobs. (By the way, we finally got a Labor government who did in fact introduce a paid maternity leave scheme here).

Not only are there inequalities in financial capital but there have also been inequalities in human capital – that is, the educational opportunities of our children are not spread evenly. Increased fear and anxiety about the welfare of our children, and the competitiveness that goes with this discourages the co-operation between mothers that is needed to agitate on a political level for change. Or as Folbre explains, it is difficult to unify women around a systematic political agenda when countries like the United States of America are so fractured along lines of race and class and family structure. Increased inequality among women has contributed to a fear of collective action – in fact, the very idea of being associated with caring work is seen as unpalatable in the modern political economy. A lot has been invested in the myth of self-reliance. Caring for someone makes them dependent and being dependent undermines their self-reliance, a state of being seen as entirely repulsive in our economy and which we would prefer was privately and quietly dealt with by families in their homes on their own.

Inequality matters for political change – it affects decisions about pooling risk, redistributing income, and banding together – all parts of the solution to the problem of unpaid caring work. And inequality hurts the bottom of the income distribution the most, where it has huge legacy effects lasting generation after generation. Inequality breeds more inequality. Folbre contends that it is increased inequality among women which has led to the success of conservative movements like The Tea Party, where the political visibility of women has been striking. It is also interesting to note that this movement has been very much targeted at the welfare state – it is anti-state and individualistic. Take care of your own family first and don’t worry about how other families are managing.

So, how do we begin to change all this? Well, as Folbre argues, nothing will change until we can rally a larger coalition and to do this we need to first document and explain inequality better, and to do that? – we need to start counting unpaid caring work!

“We need a more sustainable organisation of production and social reproduction” – Nancy Folbre, want more? Try her posts on The New York Times. And of course, you can buy her books.

Everybody knows it. So why are so many people, from health professionals, to friends, to mothers-in-law, to husbands, intent on making the mother feel inadequate and getting her to quit breastfeeding? I have to think that many of them are not doing it on purpose. That they are misinformed and uneducated about thebenefits of breastfeeding, about how milk supply works, and about the normal course of breastfeeding.

If you want to support a woman that is breastfeeding, maybe your spouse, your sister, your friend, your daughter, your daughter-in-law, your colleague, your neighbour, your patient, your client, then this post is for you!

What not to do

Let’s start by understanding what you shouldn’t do. A number of people have written excellent posts on this already, so rather than repeat what they said, I am going to link to them. Please read them. It is important.

How to make breastfeeding difficult: This amazing article by IBCLC (that’s International Board Certified Lactation Consultant) Linda J. Smith, written in 1986 (that’s 22 years ago!), has been making the rounds ever since and is still as relevant today as it was back then. I’ve seen it crop up on at least 3 blogs in the past week, including two of my favourites The Canadian Lactivist andParenting Baby to Sleep. This article busts a bunch of the myths about breastfeeding that misinformed people so often use to undermine breastfeeding mothers.

How to know a health professional is not supportive of breastfeeding: Written by breastfeeding guru Jack Newman, this handout helps you to understand if a health professional is supportive of  breastfeeding or not. Too many women blindly listen to their doctor or nurse without realizing that they often only have a few hours of breastfeeding education under their belt. If you like this, please also support the Newman Breastfeeding Clinic & Institute that is in desperate need of funding.

A plea to MILs and Mums everywhere (oh and Dads of course): This is a guide for the grandparents of the new baby on what they shouldn’t say and also what they should do to support their breastfeeding daughter or daughter-in-law.

What to do

Now that you understand what not to do, here are some suggestions on what you can do to support a breastfeeding mother.

Tell her how proud you are of her: Breastfeeding isn’t always easy (but don’t remind her of that). Instead, tell her how proud you are that she is breastfeeding her baby. Tell her this when the baby is 1 day old, 4 weeks old, 3 months old, 6 months old, 1 year old, 2 years old, and so on. Breastfeeding doesn’t stop being the best thing for baby at a specific age and many moms find that the support they have from others decreases exponentially as the baby grows. The World Health Organisation, Health Canada, and other key health organizations recommend at least 2 years of breastfeeding.

Help her get knowledgeable support: If she is struggling with breastfeeding, unless you have training in lactation, help guide her to someone that does have that training. Often people that have breastfed think they can give great advice to others. However, each mom’s experience is different and things that may have worked for you may not work for others. For example, some moms can go for more than 3 hours without breastfeeding and not have their supply compromised and not get plugged ducts, but many many others cannot. Some moms can eat anything they want while breastfeeding and others find that their baby is sensitive to certain foods that they eat. Help the mom to get access to an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC), get her to attend a La Leche League meeting, or if she likes using the Internet for support get her to go somewhere with knowledgeable breastfeeding counselors assisting other moms like theKellymom.com message boards.

Buy her a book or take one out from the library: Get her a quality breastfeeding book, like Jack Newman’s Guide to Breastfeeding, La Leche League’s The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, orMartha and William Sears The Breastfeeding Book. Or get her to spend time online on the research-based kellymom.com Web site that provides lots of information and advice on breastfeeding.

Offer to help with everything BUT feeding: Everyone always wants to feed the baby. Sorry, but that is mom’s job. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t help. You can change diapers, burp the baby, do laundry, cook meals, run errands.

Cross posted from PhD in Parenting blog

Today, I learned that it is closing next month. York University, where it is located, is continuing to refuse to provide any base funding to the association and no one else is stepping up to provide it a home either. You can read the details in a letter from Dr. Andrea O’Reilly over on the Parentopia blog.

I am so much in shock over this that I can’t come up with anything intelligent to say about it, but I am devastated. I own a couple of the books published by Demeter Press and had put the rest of them on my Christmas wish list this past year. They are apparently going to be going on sale at a discount on their website and I plan to buy each and every one that I don’t own already.

But I’m disappointed that there will no longer be a place to bring together the important research on mothering and to foster the research and thinking on this topic. I’m heartbroken that I may never get to read some of the forthcoming books, like Mothering Canada (Spring 2010),  Disability and Mothering (Spring 2010), Giving Breast Milk (Spring 2010), The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art (Fall 2010), You Say You Want a Revolution: The 21st Century Motherhood Movement (Fall 2010), The Palin Factor: Politican Mothers and Public Motherhood in the 21st Century (Fall 2010), Adoption and Mothering (Spring 2011), Latina/Chicana Mothering (Fall 2011), Queering Parenting (Spring 2012), Living Feminism Through Mothering (Spring 2012), and Being a Mother Academic: Theory and Narrative (Spring 2012).

Is there someone out there that can save the Association for Research on Mothering? Please tell me there is. This is too precious to lose.

Annie blogs about the art and science of parenting at the PhD in Parenting blog. She is in mourning over this loss.

Go and check out www.beingawomanisnotapreexistingcondition.com.

Cross-posted on PhD in Parenting.

What are the societal barriers to breastfeeding?

Formula advertising: Everywhere you look, formula is being pushed on new moms. Buying maternity clothes? You can enter a draw to win a year’s worth of formula. Buying a parenting magazine? Expect a few two-page spreads telling you about the latest hype on formula being closer than ever to breast milk. Giving birth at a hospital? Expect to go home with a sponsored bag full of formula samples and coupons unless you are lucky enough to give birth in a baby friendly hospital. Surfing the web looking for breastfeeding advice? The formula companies will try to deceive you into clicking on their ads by pretending they are about breastfeeding. We need to push to make compliance with the WHO International Code of Marketing Breast-Milk Substitutes into a standard or a law or find some other way to ensure that formula and bottle companies are not acting unethically and unnecessarily sabotaging breastfeeding in pursuit of corporate profits.

Insufficient education of medical professionals: Women having trouble with breastfeeding often turn to their pediatrician or to a general practitioner. Unfortunately, the amount of education that these doctors have in breastfeeding is insufficient. It will obviously range from school to school and jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but I have heard of some doctors having merely a few hours of training on breastfeeding. In addition, pediatricians attitudes about breastfeeding are declining, doctors whose skills are most lacking are least likely to seek training to upgrade their knowledge and skills, and there are plenty of medical professionals who are just downright not supportive of breastfeeding, either on purpose or out of ignorance. So when I hear people say, the pediatrician said “X” and I trust him, so we followed his advice, forgive me for being a bit skeptical. If you are having breastfeeding difficulties and your doctor does not refer you to a lactation consultant, you should be concerned. Be proactive and build your A-Team before your baby arrives.

Lacking access to lactation consultants and breast pumps: People who are struggling with breastfeeding need access to qualified lactation professionals, i.e. International Board Certified Lactation Consultants, and may often need access to a quality double electric breast pump to help maintain or increase supply while working on breastfeeding issues. However, a lot of people who do have access to health care still do not have access to these essential breastfeeding supports.

Lack of maternity leave: In the United States, women do not have access to decent maternity leave. Some have no access to maternity leave at all. In Canada, most women have access to maternity leave, but there are things that prevent many women from being able to take leave or that force them to go back early. It can take months to get breastfeeding well established and many women are back at work before that has happened.  The lacking maternity leave provisions in many countries pose a significant barrier to breastfeeding.

No workplace support for breastfeeding: Whether they are forced back to work due to lacking maternity leave provisions or choose to go back to work, women do not have sufficient support for breastfeeding in the workplace. Some states have laws that protect women’s rights in this regard, but many do not. Even among those that do have laws, employers are known to put pressure on breastfeeding women or make them feel bad for needing facilities or time to pump. There is also not enough support for babies at work programs, which allow women to bring small babies to work with them if they choose. Without the right support, women often find themselves trying to pump enough milk sitting on a toilet without frequent enough breaks to maintain milk supply.

Milk banks not a priority: As I explained in my post on blood, milk and profits, there is an entire industry and infrastructure set up to collect, screen, and distribute blood to those that need it. But milk banks are not a priority. There are too few of them and the ones that exist appear to be in it more for the profits than for ensuring every baby has access to breast milk. Making milk banks a bigger priority would allow women with excess milk to provide it to those that need it, thereby reducing the dependency on formula.

Attitudes and imagery: People will breastfeed if they see others breastfeeding. Peer pressure, feeling normal, having role models. Call it what you like, it is what it is. If the predominant image in public, in magazines, in movies, on television, is bottle feeding, then people will see that as normal. If it is not, then fewer people will breastfeed and those that do will be ostracized and discriminated against by the anti-nursing-in-public brigade. This is one of the reasons I think it is so important to breastfeed in public. This is why I think we need at least as many breastfeeding dolls as bottle feeding dolls.

We need to keep providing medical, technical and moral support to women who are struggling with breastfeeding. That will always be a requirement. But to truly facilitate breastfeeding, we need to break down these barriers so that all families and all babies can benefit from the health benefits of breastfeeding and the economic benefits of breastfeeding.

Which of these barriers have you faced? Did it prevent you from breastfeeding for as long as you wanted to? Are there other societal barriers that I missed?

Annie is a breastfeeding advocate and blogs about the art and science of parenting at the PhD in Parenting blog.

On May 17,  I participated in the Fem 2.0 chat on twitter. The topic of discussion was mommies and feminism. We talked about a lot of things, but one thing I said towards the end of the chat seemed to resonate with a lot of people. I also think it is an important point, so I thought I’d turn it into a post and explain more than I could in the 140 character limit.  Here is what I said:

I think we need a society that values parenthood, not just motherhood. Otherwise it will always be about making concessions for women.

I find that a lot of the focus in the feminist mothering movement is on ensuring the rights of mothers and furthering the position of mothers in society. But what is the role for the men in that equation?

The problem with feminist mothering is that it either pushes for women to be freed from the shackles of motherhood (by making it easier for them to put their kids into day care) or it pushes for concessions in the workplace for women (more maternity leave, more sick leave, breaks and accommodations to pump breastmilk at work, etc.).

While I don’t think there is anything wrong with pushing for those things, I think we need to push for something more, something different.

We need to push for a society that values family and parenthood. One that recognizes that role that parents play in raising the next generation. One that recognizes that fathers, like mothers, may need to strike a balance between their career and their family life. One where women don’t feel that they have to be an equally uninvolved parent in order to reach their goals, but where they can ask their partner to step up too.

This isn’t happening right now:

- In a lot of jurisdictions (like Canada), men have the opportunity to share parental leave with their partners, but not many of them do and when they do share that leave it is often frowned upon in their workplace.  Quebec has probably had one of the greatest success rates in this area, with 1 out of 2 men taking advantage of some of the parental leave available to them.
- When a child is sick, it is almost always the mother that takes time off of work.
- If the baby sitter flakes out, it is the mom that is left scrambling.
- Men seem to have a harder time saying “I’m sorry, I can’t stay late, I need to be home for dinner with my kids” than their wives would.
- I sometimes hear men saying that they can’t do XYZ because they have to babysit their kids. Since when are fathers babysitters?

I think we need to fight for men and society to recognize the importance of equally shared parenting in realizing feminist goals. Women cannot achieve equality until men take on their share of the responsibility for raising a family.  Women will continue to be discriminated against in the workplace when they need to care for their families until men start taking on their share of that burden.

Annie blogs about the art and science of parenting at PhD in Parenting, including discipline, gender issues, attachment parenting and more.