The Privilege of Time: A Review of Motherhood

Motherhood: How Should We Care For Our Children?

by Anne Manne

Allen & Unwin, 2005: Paperback pp. 392, $34.95

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Late one night during the pandemic when I felt uneasy about the conflicting demands of loving my two-year-old son and loving my work, I typed “anti-feminist” and shortly after, #earlyMomentsMatter. That was how I discovered the expression “maternal feminism” and Anne Manne’s Motherhood: How Should We Care For Our Children? Published in 2005, the book deftly intertwines Manne’s personal experiences raising her two daughters in 1980s Australia with commentary on contemporary policies and parenting preferences among the educated elite.

The book’s main thesis is that the most important gift newborns and toddlers receive is time with their parents. Manne writes, “the new fetish of paid work as the ultimate arbiter of one’s worth has had profound consequences for mothers—whether in or out of the paid workforce […].” She notes with wit and perceptivity the reversal of emotions associated with home and the workplace and our obsession with preparing the child for independence from caregivers in the early years.

Manne divides her book into three parts. In “Part One: Feminism and the ‘problem’ of motherhood,” she contrasts women from her university-educated peer group against the women in her outer suburban rural fringe who were the “lynchpins of volunteer labour.” Of the first group, she writes: “Emotional static clung to the question ‘What do you do?’” and of the latter, “The question ‘What do you do?’ was irrelevant. . . . They knew what you did. You were part of the invisible community, putting your shoulder to the wheel of parenthood.” She chronicles voices from the early feminist movement, such as Simone de Beauvoir, who repudiated motherhood as oppression, and Betty Friedan who documented the woes of the suburban housewife. She compares their bitter tone with the work of other feminist writers and economists like Sara Ruddick, Ann Crittenden, Nancy Folbre, and Marilyn Waring who sought recognition for women’s caregiving and domestic work. 

Manne introduces the maternal feminism movement that values family life for women at home and supports removing the care penalty for women in the workplace. She describes maternal thinking as the kind of knowing and being that comes from intense, generous attention to others, and she emphasizes that it is neither natural nor easy for women to decenter the self to focus on daily parenting efforts from one mundane moment to the next. She writes, “To be truthful about the complex, ambivalent feelings of motherhood one must often contradict one statement with another, and leave them there, letting their proximity to each other do the work.” In the pages bookended by “Prologue: Down among the children” and “Postscript: Up amongst the men,” Manne “offers the possibility of honouring the ethic of care, rather than arranging our economic life in such a way that the interests of women and children persistently collide.”

In “Part Two: Taking children seriously,” Manne shifts the conversation from the affordability of daycare to the quantity of time that parents spend with their newborns. She asserts that while preschool-aged children might benefit from group childcare arrangements, infants and toddlers are best left in the care of parents or close family members. She wonders whether society could have done better than to teach a generation of parents to normalize separation anxiety in favor of keeping one’s feet in the world of professional work: “The temporary limits imposed by separation distress can be borne more easily by being shared between two parents. It might mean as little as a few years of cutting back a little out of a working life of forty-five years.”

Her argument gave voice to my misgivings about sending my son to full-time daycare. While her book sometimes comes across as a long-winded justification of the choices she made, it sheds light on our assumptions about what children and their parents need. For those of us who, like Manne, see clear benefits to intergenerational bonding, daycare represents an early acculturation into the separation of work and play, adult-life and child-life, learning and living. However, other parents value peer companionship for toddlers to cultivate skills and habits that are difficult to teach at home. For others, dual-income, full-time work is the only pathway to self-actualization, economic stability, marital equality, or participation in society. In her critique, Manne doesn’t acknowledge the host of reasons that make daycare a reasonable solution for these parents.

In Part Three, Manne continues by providing a window into the daily lives of time-pressed, dual-career couples with titles such as, “Affluenza: The new ethic of work and spend,” “The McDonaldisation of childhood,” and “The time bind: the Taylorisation of family life.” Citing Arlie Hochschild’s insights on the competing priorities of work life and family time, she observes that parents often opt for time poverty over embracing a slower pursuit of fewer career goals. This has profound consequences for family life and early childhood. She writes, “If, in the History of Childhood, one finds developmental goals and qualities ascribed to children reflecting the deepest values of each age—for the Romans valor; for the Puritans purity, piety and obedience; for the Victorians innocence and vulnerability; and so on—it is distinctive to our age to see the enthusiasm for early independence.”

Manne presents part-time or flexible work as an alternative to the time bind. She advocates for a policy framework that is neutral to decisions concerning early childhood care and does not penalize parents who step away from or slow down career pursuits to raise children. She acknowledges that we need to get better at creating on-ramps back into the workforce for parents who prioritize care in the childbearing years. Manne looks up to the European model of extended parental leave (two years, with the eventual aim of three years, and the right to return to their previous job). She also mentions the “hub and spokes” model of early childhood in the community through neighborhood centers and parent-run childcare centers. Her arguments pushed me to think beyond male and female symmetry in workforce hours and to imagine a world in which one’s “being there work ethic” is treated on par with a “parental being there home ethic.”

When I moved to a new country as a parent to a toddler, what I wanted was not so much a return to my full-time job or a childcare allowance as the opportunity to be seen as a worthy, contributing member of my society. For parents on a visa or without a family support network, the options sadly are “to never see our kids during daytime hours or never put our college degrees to work.” Manne recognizes this loneliness and loss of identity that comes with parenting in a nuclear family without the village that some of us struggle to build and belong to. She writes with empathy about the ostracism and guilt experienced by mothers who don’t fit into the dual-earning middle-class identity. It is incredible that regardless of the context of each personal situation, women feel lonely and judged by other women whose paths differ from theirs. 

Books like Manne’s provide a nuanced perspective that can elevate dialogue beyond the mother wars. 

In the epilogue, Manne describes her uneventful transition back to writing life after taking her younger child to her first day of school. She recounts the commiserating comments and glances from well-meaning peers about what might be possible in the realm of work after a decade spent parenting. She declares confidently that she wrote the first essay of Motherhood that school term. It feels fitting to write this review the term that my son started kindergarten. I am grateful to Manne for helping me frame these years in motherland as a career comma rather than a career full-stop and as a temporary invitation into the messy and spontaneous presence of parent time, instead of a permanent choice between mothering work and working mother.