Every mother is a working mother

A banner hanging near the entrance to the Ramada Inn in downtown Ottawa announces that "Kids are Priceless." At first I think it's put there by the women who organized the symposium — a group of stay-at-home feminists who call themselves Mothers Are Women. But no. the sign is the hotel’s way of advertising its policy that kids stay for free.

There's more than a little irony here. Known to all the moms in the hotel (and to most of the moms on the planet) is the fact that kids never stay anywhere for free. Least of all, at home. This is the theme of the Mothers Are Women event and it is the theme of our lives, at least those of us who are trying to make a living and raise a family at the same time. Kids cost a fortune in terms of time spent, jobs compromised, seniority lost and benefits forgone, none of which is considered by the people, mostly men, who measure our GDP and set national policy.

This was precisely the topic - how to make "women's work" count - when 70 women representing 41 organizations gathered for a conference sponsored by the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. Women's work may be defined as, significantly, the work for which we are paid plus the unpaid work for which we generally pay in the end. The people driving the symposium are the women who have successfully lobbied to have unpaid household work included in the 1996 census, and the main object of this exercise is to prepare to greet the results next March: to claim and analyze them before politicians and the media have a chance to stake ownership.

So who exactly are these stay-at-home feminists? The term sounds like an oxymoron - and maybe it was, last year. But this is now, and here in this Ottawa hotel there is no dissension at all about the pricelessness of kids and the urgency of redefining both "work" and "feminism" to recognize this fact. An alliance has been struck here: an uneasy one, to be sure, but an alliance nonetheless, of aging revolutionaries, conservative homemakers, career-track boomers, unionized farm women, lifers from the faculties of women’s studies and radical grannies with "Home Manager" on their business cards. Indeed, if this symposium does nothing more than bring all these women together under one roof and keep them for a day without incident, it will have to be considered a success. (That it ends with a hand-holding, swaying chorus of Bread and Roses in French turns it into a small triumph.)

As all the research shows, women are in a serious deficit position these days, spending nearly two-thirds of our working time on the unpaid side of the ledger; men spend one third of their time there. Using Statistics Canada's 30-hour definition for full-time work most Canadian women work part-time in the paid labour force and full-time in the unpaid. The 1992 General Social Survey identified housekeeping as the main activity of 3.4 million Canadians, making it the largest occupation in the country - if it were considered an occupation, which it isn't, officially. There is little status and less security in homemaking and what security there is from the Canada Pension Plan and old-age security is shrinking fast.

The more time women spend at home, the more likely they will end their lives in poverty. Company pensions, RRSPs, extended health and dental plans, sick leave and paid vacations are out of reach of millions of Canadian women — even those who work for wages, but who don’t work quite enough to "count."

There are many reasons why women fall into the ranks of the uncounted and the undervalued, but the main one is children. And this, according to feminist critic Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, is why children have become this generation’s version of what Betty Friedan called the "problem that has no name." In Ms. Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the unnameable problem for '60s housewives was isolation from the world of power and economic productivity. And although the ensuing 30 years have brought countless opportunities for women to walk out the front door, we remain as trapped as those '60s housewives — but instead of being isolated at home, most of us are ghettoized in the lower end of the workforce where it is still possible (if just barely) to both work and raise children. Funny, but this doesn't feel much like liberation.

In her 1996 book, Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life, Ms. Genovese writes, "Children, not men, restrict women's independence. Children, not men, tend to make and keep women poor. Few but the most radical feminists have been willing to state openly that women's freedom requires their freedom from children. Yet the covert determination to free women from children shapes much feminist thought and most feminist policies."

And so, it is children, more than anything, that have fueled the backlash against feminism. "Family values" have become the movement's nemesis. "If you want to open the floodgates of guilt and dissension anywhere in America," writes Hillary Clinton in It Takes a Village, "start talking about children."

That's why the organizers of Mothers Are Women are gratified but realistic about the symposium. "We need to be aware of a risk," says co-ordinator Evelyn Drescher, an Ottawa mother of two. "In making our unwaged work visible, in calling for its measurement and valuation and demanding that it be included in public policy, the data may be used in ways that do not further the social, economic and political equality of women."

Specifically, it may be used to keep women in their "place." As in: if household work is so darned valuable, maybe that's what women should be doing - and it's the "should" that irks the great divide between progressive and traditional values, between women such as Ms. Drescher, who wish to take the revolution to its next stage, and those who’d like to see it go away.

When asked whether they consider themselves feminists, almost all the women I interview at the symposium say yes - though more than a few seem startled by the question, and pause as if sorting out some inner conflict. These are the ones wearing lipstick and June Cleaver heels. Carol Lees, the Saskatoon-based director of the Canadian Alliance for Home Managers (wearing no makeup and moccasins) is explicit:

"For many young women today, the term is highly negative. I certainly believe in equality and women having equal access and being valued equally with men, and if that's your definition of feminism then I'm a feminist." More than any single person, Ms. Lees is responsible for this gathering and the campaign to have unpaid work counted in Canada. With a single act of civil disobedience in 1991, she launched the movement: She refused to complete that year's census form because there was nowhere for her to record her full-time occupation. Indeed, anyone who had not worked for pay in the previous five years was forced to mark a box that said, "Never worked in life."

For her refusal to complete the form and her indifference to the threat of a criminal charge, she has been described as the Rosa Parks of unpaid work - which she finds both funny and flattering. "It was an entirely individual response, and I suppose like Rosa Park's refusal to give up her seat on a bus, my act did prove to be symbolic," she says during a break between workshops. "I wouldn't fill out that form because it was demeaning to me, and to my mother, and to my grandmother, and every woman in Canada who has worked outside the paid labour force."

She went on to found the Canadian Alliance for Home Managers, one of whose goals was to push for recognition of household work on the 1996 census. A number of women's groups joined the campaign, which came to be called "Work is Work is Work," and it worked. Statistics Canada added three questions (under the "activities" section, not under "labour," alas) asking Canadians how many hours they spent doing unpaid house and yard work, looking after children and/or providing care to seniors.

Like her first act of civil disobedience, the census change was largely symbolic, Ms. Lees says, "allowing Canada to focus for the first time on the issue of unpaid work. We should see this as a win, but certainly not as the end of the journey."

For one thing, there is no saying how policy makers will interpret the results of that census. "There are dangers inherent in all demands for change," says Ms. Lees. "The danger in demanding the choice to work in paid labour was that one day women might be required to work in paid labour. And now we're at the other end of that stick - where women are exhausted because they have a double workload. What they didn't count on was that their unpaid work would continue unabated, and they would assume an extra burden of paid labour. There are always dangers. We never know what the negative consequences might be, but that can't stop us."

Ms. Lees uses the word "us" with conviction. "This is not an issue that can be owned by one' group," she says. "The political left and right, women and men were included in the coalition leading up to the '96 census change, and that's why it was successful. When you try to claim ownership of an issue, you shut people out. It becomes an effort to empower yourself, and that’s not a successful strategy. I have had as much opposition from feminists as I've had from conservative women."

Indeed, she reserves her sharpest criticism for the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, the self-proclaimed vanguard of Canadian feminism. "There has not been much interest from NAC," she says "There has been a lot of lip service, but no muscle."

At least, not yet. But NAC does make its presence felt at the meeting in the person of its president Joan Grant-Cummings, and Ms. Lees sees this as encouraging: "We have to be hopeful they will absorb a little of the energy that is here, and understand more fully what we’re talking about and feel less threatened because NAC feels threatened by this."

It's the old problem of kids, and even Ms. Grant-Cummings acknowledges NAC has some guilt in this regard. In promoting day care as a community responsibility, feminists have alienated the women who choose to stay home and raise families. "If we're going to recognize the child-care issue within the home, what is the best thing to do? Should the government give an individual family support for this through the tax system? I think we have to have those frank discussions. I think we're afraid to engage in that debate, but we have to. To ignore it is to be seen as family values-challenged."

This is precisely what feminism has become. "We don't want the government or right-wing forces leading the debate over child care, which is the risk we're facing," Ms. Grant-Cummings says. "It's pretty clear to me this weekend that we're going to have to look for a solution that values women wanting to stay at home rearing children, in addition to the public child-care systems."

It's not as though these marching feminists are immune to the tug of motherhood. Ms. Grant-Cummings, 38, has an eight-year-old son and she never stops thinking about him. "It's a constant thing. My husband says, 'What's your problem? What are you worried about? This child has two parents — he’s fine!’ " But having just returned to her Toronto home from Brussels in time to repack and fly to Ottawa, she is deep in mommy guilt. "My son looked at me and said, 'You're going? You're not going to be at home tonight?' "

"People do what they have to do, and what they feel is best," says Catherine Buchanan, a mother of three from Airdre, Alberta, and national secretary of Kids First, a homemakers' coalition that has been lobbying for changes to the taxation system. Taxation in Canada "clearly penalizes you when you stay home," says Ms. Buchanan, and the underlying message is hardly encouraging. "If you're being penalized, it's easy to feel you're making a bad choice. You see this clearly if you've done it both ways, as I have. I've worked full-time with a child in care, and got the deduction for that, and the next year I was paying thousands more dollars to the government just because I changed my child care choice."

Kids First has been lobbying MPs and won strong support from the ranks of the Reform and Liberal parties for changes to the federal income-tax's Child Care Expense Deduction. The group and its supporters would like a sliding-scale benefit be made available to all families. The benefit would remain independent of labour-force participation, says Ms. Buchanan, respecting the choice of parents who leave work and acknowledging the financial sacrifice of doing so. Kids First's "Tax Equality" program also promotes a family-based, income-tax model, levelling the field for sole- and dual-income families. In a household with a $60,000 annual income, this would make a tax difference of $5,600.

"I don't think we have a lot of tolerance in this society for the fact that what works for one family doesn't necessarily work for another," says Ms. Buchanan. "And it's not just a question of what's best for the children. It's also what's best for many women."

Catherine Buchanan calls herself a feminist, which makes people like Joan Grant-Cummings crazy. But that's why the symposium is so interesting - and important. Feminism is changing, along with the yardstick by which its adherents measure the elusive goal of equality. To a growing number of women, equality is not about measuring themselves against the same yardstick as men. It’s about making a new yardstick.

Reprinted with permission. Paula Brooks is a Vancouver journalist and author of Work Less, Live More, A Woman's Guide, released this month by Doubleday Canada.