The Emotional Labour of Performing Motherhood

Being a young university student with lofty aspirations of academia and published writing from a Berlin apartment, I naturally became a nanny for my third unglamorous job. Despite the inflation of qualifications and the impossibility of getting a job with just a lowly bachelor’s degree, no such restrictions exist in the world of casual childcare. Instead, being a cis female grants you immediate acceptance into someone’s home to look after their Precious Little Ones for ten hours every Thursday.

Despite my total lack of experience with children under age nine, I rocked up on my first day feigning confidence to nanny a four year old boy and two year old girl. And I was shocked at the amount of… things one must do.

Morning tea time, simple right? Just set up the high chair, put on bibs, make sure each child gets their preferred colour of plastic crockery, mediate arguments about who gets which cookie, regularly wipe hands and face with baby wipe, the two year old needs a nappy change, but by the time of return the four year old has thrown the food everywhere and yoghurt was definitely a bad idea. Change clothes for both children, set up with toys so you can have an undisturbed fifteen minutes to clean up food, wipe down chairs, table and floor, sweep, wash dishes. Remember to make children drink water!

Going to the park, easy. Pack spare clothes, nappies, towel, baby wipes, bandaids, tissues, water, jackets and raincoats into pram. Somehow convince children to wear helmets. Help two year old ride scooter with one hand, push pram with other hand, and endure glares from strangers because the four year old isn’t stopping properly before crossing the road so I’m clearly a bad child carer. Play “Lion King” on the slide for an hour at the park. I need to pee, cannot leave the children alone so convince children to come to gross park toilet block with me. Convince children to come into cubicle with me because they will otherwise literally run away. Children are too tired to bike and scooter home. Put children into pram, push pram with one hand, bike with the other and carry scooter on back. Four year old wants to bring the pram inside to play with it, pram does not fit through the front door. Endure ensuing tantrum. Remember to make children drink water!

In all my various jobs and volunteer gigs, never have I gone home so utterly exhausted, covered in various kiddie excrements, dishwashing water and mud. Never have I performed so much physical and emotional labour for other humans; waitressing, seminar presenting and camp-leading do not compare. I earned twenty dollars an hour.

My nannying experiences demonstrated two distressing facts of the gendered reality of childcare in our world. Firstly, the complete and utter refusal of society to recognise non-educational child care as labour. As work. As fucking difficult. Mothers are expected to do this crap every single day for several years for free. Paid maternity leave for a handful of weeks cannot possibly be counted as legitimate pay for the burden of child care, especially when the labour reaches into the night with breastfeeding, colic babies and scared toddlers who accidentally watched Doctor Who. The fact that cis women have historically been primary caregivers, that they will do it without pay regardless, and that they get enjoyment from raising children does not stop childcare from being incredibly difficult, and a barrier to earning enough money to live.

The disregard of childcare as a legitimate form of labour has everything to do with the devaluation of women and non binary people as social contributors. Paying women for their work requires actually admitting that women are important, and that their labour deserves appropriate value. Shunning childcare into the murky depths of “women’s business” removes their literal sweat and tears from the public eye and ensures men maintain social precedence as the ones who perform the “real work” and actually contribute to society. Childcare is pitted as beneath men; too simple and intellectually unchallenging to warrant effort from the big brains and brawny muscles of hard working dudes.

The reciprocal is in effect too; jobs that require working with children are deemed less valuable than other professions, evidenced in the negligible pay of teachers in the public system. I easily imagine that this occurs in part because why would we pay child carers and children’s educators a decent wage when mothers already do this stuff for free? Shockingly, I would argue the answer is to… pay women, and primary caregivers of any gender.

The other horrifying truth that passed before my metaphorical eyes during my nannying stint was to observe how good I was at being a “mother”. With emphasis on my nonexistent experience with toddlers, I figured out within the first few hours what needed to be done and how to do it right. Changing nappies felt like second nature, I became a pro at cleaning a kid-wrecked kitchen halfway through the first five minutes, I quickly developed a mental checklist of all the stuff to pack should we leave the house. And to be perhaps problematically essentialist for a moment, I could not imagine any of my male friends performing motherhood as well as I did without guidance. From playing with dolls, from having homesick kids on camp literally handed over to me to deal with, from being told women are natural mothers, I am incredibly good at childcare. There need be no further qualification for nannying than being cis female because we are so shaped as career mothers from birth with no other virtue than having a vagina and identifying with the ensuing feminine gender.

Being assigned female at birth is a one way ticket to being conditioned to effectively performing motherhood. When faced with a childcare problem, something inside me told me I should know how to deal with it. So I just… did. Men aren't so relentlessly told they can care for children, in fact they’re often explicitly told they are incapable; that nappies are a dealbreaker, that dads are goofy pals to their kids who can provide such minimal domestic labour that they exclusively order pizza for dinner. This does a disservice to men, who should be able to be primary caregiver, who should connect to children with meaningful emotional integrity and who should actually aid their partners in the division of domestic labour.

Child care deserves the social value of any other highly demanding job. Just because the labour is emotional in nature does not mean it comes free, and just because it is primarily performed by those brought up as feminine does not mean it is worthless.

How Much Weight Should Biology Hold in a Conversation About Gender?

We are taught that there is a pretty clear distinction between "girl" and "boy"; either a person has a vagina and can give birth, or they have a penis and produce more testosterone. Like many things taught at a young age, the reality is far more nuanced and complicated, and can't really be summed up in such a simple statement.

Human beings are incredibly complex, and the intricacy of our biological bodies create room for enormous diversity in their structure and function. So when we acknowledge that "sex" is a combination of sexual organs, reproductive systems, chromosomes and hormones, we can understand how there is in fact a large spectrum of sexes; so many different physical and chemical combinations of "sex" can and do exist. It is extremely common for people with vulvas, female reproductive systems and breasts to have “male” levels of testosterone. Nor is it particularly “strange” for someone to be born with neither the XX nor XY chromosome patterns. Many babies each year are born with both, neither, or a mix of both the “male” and “female” genitalia. Basically, intersex people are very common, and despite the social stigmas, they are alive, healthy and fully functioning. Check out more statistics at www.isna.org/faq/frequency.

When we accept that the biological science of sex isn't particularly straightforward, we start to struggle more with this idea of gender. "Gender" is apparently inherent traits of a particular sex, but if so many people exist outside a black and white male/female sexual reality, and so many people identify as transgender or non binary, how can this hold true? It is difficult to justify how oestrogen makes women more apt to an arts degree rather than STEM subjects, or how a Y chromosome makes boys prefer blue to pink in the face of the very real diversity that exists with every unique person. The conclusion that many feminists have come to is that "gender" is a socially constructed concept, and is far less natural than we like to think it is.

When we start looking at typical feminist issues such as women's role in the workforce, it is easy to see how the "female gender" actually disadvantages people who identify as women. Although women may be excellent politicians, the idea that the all females have a strong and inherent maternal instinct has held us back from positions of power throughout history, as it has been believed that we will not be able to make the difficult decisions. Although women may be fantastic scientists, the idea that we are more inclined to creativity rather than logic has, and continues to, block STEM opportunities for women. What we continually see is that women are discredited from entire fields of work because of assumptions based on the "biological essence of the female gender", despite the huge diversity that exists in 50% of the world's population, and despite varying levels of oestrogen having a fairly minimal impact on rational decisions made by a trained and educated employee. This issue detrimentally affects men, as well. Men who wish to take on more traditionally "feminine" roles such as early education and child care are discouraged from doing so, as "women's" work is beneath the entitled capacity of men. Again, this is in spite of men's very real ability to be excellent fathers, child carers and preschool teachers even though they may contain higher levels of testosterone, and not have a functional womb.

However, as much as a the feminist dream is a world without gender where people can express themselves and make choices purely based on what they like rather than pre-ordained roles, this world can likely never be achieved due to the entrenched ideas of gender that are built into the metaphorical fabric of society. Moreover, most radical feminists are willing to accept that biology isn't 100% irrelevant, the difference between my body and my brother's body does contribute to some of our differences. Testosterone does make muscle easier to build, and oestrogen does more easily trigger protective and possessive emotions.

The issue then lies with society's priorities of biological capacity.

We have come to believe in so many ways that men are "better" than women purely because of biology. We have come to believe that the "maternal instinct" is an undesirable trait, that means women are bad at corporate jobs, and will always be annoying, over-attached girlfriends. We have come to believe that dunking the ball in basketball is a sign of superior athletic ability, and so men are better than women at basketball due to their natural testosterone and height.

This is arbitrary.

If you grew up in a world where the most valued thing was the ability to relate to young children, and running a business was not a desirable job choice, you would likely view the female gender as "better" than the male, and pride the role of mother above the role of corporate leader. If you grew up in a world where the whole point of basketball was defence, and keeping it on the court, then you wouldn't value men's ability to jump and dunk the ball.

When we properly step through the links between sex, gender, and personality traits, we see that if often doesn't line up into the neat gender binary we perceive there to be, and we must accept that "male" and "female" are not natural states of being for so many people. However that doesn't mean biology has zero impact. Maybe men are stronger and faster because of a chemical composition that some people with penises also possess. But this does not make them inherently "better"; men are only "better" than women because of the relative values created by society, which arbitrarily favour men due to several thousand years of patriarchal society. Maybe people with certain combinations of organs and hormones are different from another group, but we must accept that the idea of valuing certain trains associated with these differences over others not nature, but generations of accepted expectations and norms that have become ingrained in our society.

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Love, Hannah