First published in Quadrant as Secret Western Women’s Business on 29/08/2024 (now behind a paywall.) The article does not include the Victorian education graphs, but does include many mother and child art works.
Back in March, Janet Albrechtsen wrote a subversive article in The Australian, as is her wont. It was given the title Secret Truths of a Stay-Home Mother, and was accompanied by some delightful snapshots of Ms Albrechtsen with her three children. Her dander had been elevated, she explained, because…
…prominent [company] director Diane Smith-Gander claimed women were making a “false” choice to stay home to care for kids…being forced to make this “false choice” by taking on lower-paid work in order to care for children. She bemoaned a society that perpetuated a “gender stereotype that Dad goes out to work and Mum stays home with the kids”.
She recalled a conversation from her late 20s with a group of her peers by a playground at a Sydney beach who privately shared how much they loved staying home to care for their young children, and joked, sort of, that such a confession could not be made publicly.
We knew better than to rave in public about loving being stay-at-home mums – for two reasons. Hanging about playgrounds, wiping little noses and hands and bums wasn’t what we were meant to be doing after graduating from university with fine degrees, suiting up and working hard for big flash law practices and other professional firms. The other reason was we didn’t want our husbands edging us out of a role we loved.
Note the other reason.
If someone had offered me a heap of money to return to work when they were babies, I would have said “no thanks”. That’s not for me, that’s not what we want for our kids… Some years later…my kids were moving into their early teens and while they most assuredly didn’t think they needed me at home, I suspected they might. I didn’t want what the books call “quality” time because you can’t pick and choose those moments when kids need you most…
Many highly educated women I know started out in interesting, well-paying jobs, on paths to stellar, clever careers, but chose to step away… Many women, including me, would rather wipe the bums of many babies than live like that. My choice to alter the trajectory of my career, trading potential professional success for raising kids, was a no-brainer because raising three children will always be, for me, life’s greatest success.
It is remarkable to read these truisms from the middle of the last century from such a prominent woman in 2024. Remarkable and very encouraging. The skewering of “quality time” is especially satisfying. She touches on the well-springs of her desire to raise her children.
For some, the deep, primordial tug from a newborn child defies ideology and ambition. It can’t be measured in dollars. We are bombarded with the work side of the equation… But the culture of “I work, therefore I exist” denies the falling in love with baby so central to most women’s experience… [M]any women continue to embrace what Anne Roiphe in A Mother’s Eye calls the “whole complicated warm messy frustrating dear and dreadful business of raising children”.
…
There is a misery to the views of Smith-Gander and other gender ideologues that is untethered from the privilege and pleasure of caring for kids. The ideologues pine for a wretched world where men and women all work exactly the same way and every workplace is made up of equal numbers of men and women, and women’s choices to live differently are demeaned as false.
And so the lines are drawn. Ms Albrechtsen makes clear that she respects the choices made by the likes of Smith-Gander. But the latter expresses nothing but contempt for stay-at-home mums, and Ms Albrechtsen rightly lashes her for that, while economically evoking the affection and joy of mother and children, and “some of the most special times of our lives” when Dad was able to spend weeks at home with the family. It’s a wonderful picture, with which few families can fail to identify, and such pictures are long overdue.
There are however shadows in this sunshine. The “glaring omission” that Ms Albrechtsen notices from the work-worship of feminism is “the wellbeing of children.” She refers to the difficulties that New York psychoanalyst Erica Komisar’s experienced in publishing her book, Being There: Why Prioritising Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters. “Alas,” she writes in this connexion, “we still don’t seem interested in exploring whether having a mum – or dad – at home in the early years is best for a young child.” But Komisar’s book is about the necessity of motherhood, specifically. In a brief survey of commentary about the book, the only reference I found to fathers was in a largely negative review, which includes, “stay-at-home dads…are treated dismissively in the first section.” Partly from this cursory survey, but mainly from the title, I take it that Komisar does really mean motherhood. But Ms Albrechtsen is not to be dissuaded.
Only 4 per cent of families reported that a man usually or always looked after the children. In other words, even with women pouring out of universities at higher rates than men, leaving with more degrees than men, filling the professions in equal numbers many women continue to embrace…raising children.
Change is afoot, of course. And if gender ideologues treasured the important job of caring for young children instead of treating it as a chore, maybe more men would choose to do it sooner.
In what way is this aspiration different from what she had earlier been criticising?
The ideologues pine for a wretched world where men and women all work exactly the same way and every workplace is made up of equal numbers of men and women…
Only in this.
…and women’s choices to live differently are demeaned as false.
In Ms Albrechtsen’s ideal world, equal numbers of men and women would be making the choice to stay at home and bring up the kids (and they would be respected for those choices.) Put another way, men and women are interchangeable in the workplace, and at home, bringing up the kids, and presumably homemaking.
At the end of the day, both Mses Smith-Gander and Albrechtsen express the beliefs of feminist “gender” ideologues, with this critical difference: Smith-Gander’s viral ideology, if implemented with totalitarian rigour, would soon enough destroy its host. Ms Albrechtsen’s particular fantasy world at least has the advantage that it would be renewable. But fantasy it is, as her article selflessly reveals.
The other reason was we didn’t want our husbands edging us out of a role we loved… I wasn’t mentally prepared to fall pregnant at 27…For months I could barely say the word pregnant… My reticence turned into a fierce desire to stay at home to care for our kids…the deep, primordial tug from a newborn child defies ideology and ambition… I would have fought off my husband like a banshee if he’d said he wanted to stay at home and care for our kids.
Ms Albrechtsen’s then husband, John O’Sullivan, was a senior partner in “prominent corporate lawyers Freehill Hollingdale & Page” when she married him. While she does “freely acknowledge [her] good fortune” in being able to stay home with the kids, there was no financial pressure for her to work at all. I think I can assume that the same applied to the other mums at the beachside confessional. Were any of them ever obliged to fight their husbands for child-rearing privileges? Nonetheless, in site of that improbable suggestion, Ms Albrechtsen clearly felt these “deep, primordial” emotions to be with her children and to her role as their mother. Does she really imagine that fathers experience their love of their children in identical fashion?
I wonder also whether the first sign her impending confinement was an urge to clean house, becoming more and more urgent until her water broke. I suspect so. It’s not something that you hear about unless you are privy to conversations between mothers and their near-term daughters, but it is more sand in the eyes of “gender” ideologues for whom the only (so-far) ineradicable difference between men and women is the gestating womb. Could it be that women generally do the home-making and the house-cleaning for reasons other than the millennial oppression by The Patriarchy?
Ms Albrechtsen is apparently incapable of drawing out of her own experience the lesson that there are fundamental, ineradicable differences between the sexes, and that these differences are rooted in the biological reality that women have the babies, and that “having” the baby does not suddenly stop after parturition.
Fathers fall in love with their children too, but the love of fathers for their children expresses itself in different ways. Nonetheless, the different and complementary presence of the father is as critical to the development of both boys and girls as is the presence of the mother. But that biologically-rooted difference dooms Ms Albrechtsen’s fantasy of “equality.”
Ms Albrechtsen’s concerns for equality seem to blind her to a reality of systematic inequality, even as she notes the evidence of that inequality.
…even with women pouring out of universities at higher rates than men, leaving with more degrees than men, filling the professions in equal numbers, many women continue to embrace…the “whole complicated warm messy frustrating dear and dreadful business of raising children”. [My emphasis.]
To put some numbers to her comment, female higher education enrolments rose from 28.5% of 175,4035 total enrolments in 1971 to 45.3% of 329,523 in 1980 to parity (50.1% of 393,734) in 1987 to 55.2% of 695,485 in 2000 to 57.3% of 1,622,857 in 2022.
In these circumstances, how is it that women are “filling the professions in equal numbers”? That would imply either that the excess of women over men graduates is not entering the professions, or that Ms Albrechtsen can’t see them, because she cannot escape her commitment to “equality.” Women have in recent decades outnumbered men on entry into the university-trained professions, and the bastions of male work culture in the trades are now being invaded, with the consequent suppression of the traditional outlook and behaviours in those areas. The techniques of behaviour modification of men and positive discrimination towards women that were developed in white-collar workplaces are now being applied, suitable adjusted, to the trades and blue-collar workplaces, progressively immiserating those workplaces for men.
The groundwork for this revolution is laid in secondary and even primary schools. The “struggle session,” in which boys at Brauer College in Warrnambool were forced to apologise to the girls because they are boys, is just the most egregious example. The most disturbing aspect of this ridiculous event is that it could be conceived and carried out at all; that secondary school teachers had nothing in their socialisation and training that held them back. What does that tell us about the condition of teacher education, not only in Victoria, but throughout the country?
Bettina Arndt was interviewed in 2022 by former Deputy Prime Minister, John Anderson, “to discuss men’s issues in relation to domestic violence, the education of boys and the demonisation of men in our culture.” She pointed out the accelerating failures of boys in school.
Boys are… less likely to finish school than they used to. We have 60% of graduates are now women. …in Year 9 NAPLAN writing tests, girls are two years ahead of boys…
Anderson prefaced his response to this catastrophe by saying, “it seems important to me to say…I have three daughters…it’s a tremendous thing that they are getting the best possible education, achieving, reaching their potential…that’s not what’s in question.”
But it is in question. The evidence of the last fifty years of feminism, the evidence adduced by Ms Arndt, and the evidence of our own experience, is that changing the educational balance of girls and boys is a zero-sum game. She wrote her first article about the problems that were appearing in boys education forty years ago. The situation has continued to deteriorate since then.
And this should have been obvious from the beginning. If there had been unbounded teaching resources for the professions, and unbounded openings for graduates, then the push for women in those places would not necessarily have displaced men. There were not, so increasing the representation of women was always going to come at the expense of men.
Even if this had meant that men were being displaced by more capable women, the consequences for the supply of men who could support a family, and the consequences for the the concentration of wealth on two-income professional families, would have been grave. But the situation described by Ms Arndt does not support such a scenario. Yes, the performance of boys is steadily decreasing. Yes, their interest in, and commitment to, education is steadily evaporating. But could it be that the influx of girls has simply raised the standard? Apparently not, according to the latest (2022) OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results.
Almost half of Australia’s 15-year-old students are failing to achieve national standards in key areas of maths, science and reading, and the nation is now more than four years behind the world’s top-performing jurisdiction in maths…
The latest …PISA… results – the first since the COVID-19 pandemic – show Australia has regained its place in the international top 10 for the first time since 2003, but testing authorities say this is largely due to the decline of other countries, rather than local improvement…
Australian students’ performance has been in steady decline over the past two decades, with maths dropping 37 points since 2003, science falling 20 points since 2006 and reading down 30 points since 2000. [My emphasis.]
Comparing boys and girls, in mathematics tests, boys and girls have declined at a similar rate, though boys have maintained a significant edge over girls. (The following graphs are for students in Victoria.)
Science testing has a similar profile, though the difference between boys and girls is less.
The decline is also obvious in reading, although here the girls have a substantial advantage over boys. However, the decline of performance for girls is more marked than that for boys. The boys’ decline in reading seems to have reached some stubborn plateau over the seven years to 2022.
In her conversation with Anderson, Ms Arndt told a illuminating story about a conversation with a director of curriculum.
I said, “What will we do if boys continue to fall behind?” And she said, “We’ll wait two thousand years, and analyse the results very, very carefully.” And she said, “Oh no, that was only a joke.” But of course, that’s exactly what they’ve done. We have really very much feminist ideology infiltrating all our education systems, systematic programs to continue to advantage girls, and no-one taking any notice of the fact that boys are falling out in huge numbers.
No, it wasn’t a joke. It was a glimpse of this director of curriculum’s ideological driver. But such views are typical of the sort of women who have seized control of Western societies’ educational, legal and increasingly, governmental institutions. For these women, the past two thousand years have been a dark age of the oppression of women by men – all men. The reciprocal love between men and women, the love of parents for children, and the joys of family life have never been more than a delusion, like the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave; a means by which men have terrorised and controlled women with absolute ruthlessness. And this curriculum director reveals the hoped-for outcome: reparation and revenge for two millennia of oppression.
This is typical of the feminist project as a whole, however, is driven by another agenda than “equality.” Since its early days in the mid nineteenth century, it has been driven by a desire, not so much for “equality,” but for revenge for the fanatically cultivated view of the eternal oppression of women by men. It is about turning the tables, about reducing men to a caricatured form of the subjugation that feminist legend imagines that women (until the advent of feminism) had always suffered at the hands of The Patriarchy.
There is another interesting aspect to this story. Ms Albrechtsen qualified as a lawyer, and worked full-time in that profession until she had her first child. She subsequently had a primary commitment to her children, and a very much secondary one to her work from home, presumably as a lawyer. At a certain point she began to write, and her writing, reporting and the research it requires, appears now to be her primary professional pursuit. The CVs of her fellow mums at that beachside conference would be interesting. How many of them had similar professional qualifications? How many had started, and then abandoned for child-rearing, the careers for which they had qualified at university? How many lawyers, doctors, dentists, physiotherapists, and the like, put their highly qualified careers on the back-burner to pursue a traditional mother’s role, perhaps interspersed with part-time work, perhaps not; perhaps returning to their divers professions in later life, perhaps not?
An increasingly prevalent side-benefit of university education in the professions is that it functions as a kind of dating service where women can find men of similar professional interests and intellect for the purpose of concentrating the earning potential of two professional educations in a single household, while simultaneously reducing the realisation of that potential by up to a half. That earning potential is an indicator, crude as it may be, of the benefits to the society of such an expenditure of educational capital that is, despite the ravenous appetite of various faculties for fresh meat and the government funding that comes with it, subject to economic scarcity. For a woman with such an outcome in mind, this function is best realised if more men than women are studying. For the ideologues, though, the desire for a secure and happy family is class treachery. Rising demand for increasingly scarce men is an unfortunate side-effect on the road to reducing men to a marginalised remnant in the professions.
Two questions arise when looking at the displacement of men from higher education by women. The first — are women just smarter than men when it comes to gaining entry to higher education? — has been addressed above.
The second question is, how does this flood of women actually perform on the job? We cannot put to one side the issue of women’s lesser lifetime participation – for the reasons eloquently delineated by Ms Albrechtsen – when considering whether women’s commitment to and performance at work is a match for men’s. It is at the heart of the question, not just in terms of time on the job, but of the psychological drivers of work. Men don’t have the babies, and Ms Albrechtsen’s fantastical “maybe more men would choose to do [caring for young children] sooner” is an attempt to un-see the very biological imperatives to which she gives such cogent witness in this article. The commitment of men to their work has deep roots in the biological reality of sex. Women’s protectiveness of their children does not find expression in the same way. I don’t have to make this point to employers or to men in workplaces; they know it full well.
In 2020 an article titled What’s Really Holding Women Back? appeared in the Magazine of the Harvard Business Review. The authors, “scholars of gender inequality in the workplace,” had been asked by “a global consulting firm” to find out why there were so few women in the upper reaches of management. So the firm was anxious to correct this “problem,” having failed with “off-the-shelf solutions.” The “scholars” devote much text to the “myth” that “high-level jobs require extremely long hours, women’s devotion to family makes it impossible for them to put in those hours, and their careers suffer as a result.” Their (expensive) conclusion? Reduce hours of work across the board, so that there is a better work-life balance for both men and women. This, to a global consulting firm. The firm rejected their findings. Why would the lessons drawn in this instance by non-feminist observers not be applicable to more modest companies?
The scarcity has another socially damaging effect. Given the limits on domestic enrolments , the affirmative action which has resulted in the vast increase in women’s enrolments is being achieved at the expense of men’s enrolments. The combination of the women’s unrealised professional potential and the concentration of that potential in joint professional households is a severe constraint on the ability of excluded men to support a family. It is a development that is predicated on a contempt for, and a desire to dismantle, the traditional family, except, of course, for the privileged minority.
Ramming this destructive ideology into the trades will displace men who would be tradies, eliminating their best chance of being able to support a family, while creating a phalanx of women part-timers. It is destabilising also in this respect: tradesmen, who have traditionally worked exclusively with other men, and trained young men as apprentices, are placed in a different and sexually fraught situation when they are daily acting as mentors to young women. Feminists’ responses to such suggestions is to ridicule them, to feign ignorance of the human sexual dynamics of which they have taken ruthless advantage, and finally to put the onus on men to control themselves.
It is one thing if boys cannot be recruited into trade apprenticeships in sufficient numbers to meet the demand, and the shortfall is being made up by recruiting girls. It is another entirely if girls are being privileged for positions ahead of boys. The example of recruitment for the professions gives no encouragement (depending on your point of view, of course.)
Under the Smith-Gander model, women either cease to have children, or, in a curious echo of privileged elements of Edwardian society, they treat their care and raising as an inconvenience that is delegated to the lesser orders. Their ideology dies with them, or is abandoned by their few children, as was observed in the children of the radical kibbutzim. Under the Albrechtsen model, the expression of family that older Australians grew up with and in turn implemented is preserved and defended, but the opportunity to share in that experience is more and more restricted in the interests of feminist or libertarian “equality.”
It was not so long ago that when a woman married the purpose was to raise a family, and to allow that to commence as a deeply desired effect of the couple’s new sexual intimacy. The Pill, coming only three decades after the first breach in the religious wall against contraception, shattered that connexion and that expectation, and with it the manners and morals that governed our sexual behaviour, and the structure that sexual fertility gave to personal and family life. This change was embraced by women and seconded enthusiastically by men. With the sudden appearance of optional fertility, created by the Pill and its necessary complement, abortion, it is as though a new sub-species had appeared amongst us, and that sub-species has colonised the entire Western world, and by different means, China. Yet homo infecundus appeared within the culture and history of its predecessors – a culture whose religious foundations expressed an anthropology and consequent morality of both transcendence and biological practicality. Homo infecundus found it inimical, and set about destroying it.
This was and is the most sudden and comprehensive change in human history – changing human biology in respect of the engine of species survival by sterilising young women at the peak of their sexual attractiveness and capacity for child-bearing, and bringing about this change within a generation. This was most starkly seen in China, where the now-abandoned one-child policy eliminated by fiat and abortion the categories of brother, sister, uncle, aunt, nephew and niece, and inverted family trees. Yet China’s was just a more extreme form of Western infertility.
The revolution led, not to Nirvana, but to an inter-personal and societal wasteland, in which we are stranded, simultaneously entertained and bemused. We shadow-play at marriage and family, picking up threads of primordial necessities and tattered remnants of civilisational wisdom to make modern pastiches of family life. The divorce rate climbs, driven primarily by women; men are legally denied access to their children, even as they provide support for them; enthusiastic and repeated consent for sexual intercourse is required even within marriage; and the embittered and sterile women who have gained inordinate power in these matters consider the carnage they have wrought to be insufficient to curb the inherent toxicity of the hated male of the species.
Is this the society we want? I think that for most men and women the answer is clear. Also in early March, Robert F. Kennedy Jr released a video with his own State of the Union address. He said a number of things that struck a chord, but none more than this: “Working Americans could provide for their families on a single salary. They could buy a home, raise a family, save for retirement, without mountains of debt.” The reason that statement resonates so much is that it still represents an unspoken and unspeakable ideal for so many young adults who are the backbone of Kennedy’s support. The same may, hopefully, be true in Australia. Not touched upon directly in such a statement of aspiration is the question of who is to provide the single income, of who is to be the breadwinner. The answer is obvious.
We are in the middle of an unprecedented civilisational experiment, and to restore any kind of vigour and optimism to Western civilisation, vigour and optimism must be restored to the family. It may be too late, but if it is to happen, both men and women must forego appealing behaviours and beliefs that have come to be regarded as non-negotiable demands in the new wasteland.