A year off is excessive? Why Hillary Clinton's former adviser is wrong about maternity leave
Standing alone on a packed commuter train this morning, dressed smartly (that is, without banana stuck to me) for the first time in a year, it felt strange to be heading into work again. After 12 months of sing-alongs, soft play and screaming (largely mine), I will be attempting to pick up where I left off, reinserting myself into an adult world where not all conversations revolve around baby sleep patterns and feeding routines.
Apparently I have made a grave error: a year off work on maternity leave, looking after my new baby and my less new toddler, was too much. Such is the opinion of Anne-Marie Slaughter, Hillary Clinton’s former policy adviser.
“You can really fall behind in a year,” she said this week. “It’s too long out of the workplace.”
Instead of women taking the full maternity leave to which they are entitled, new mothers and new fathers should take six months each, she suggested, dividing the time however they want.
“Both parents need to bond with the child and both parents need to understand what it takes to be parents and to be workers,” she said.
It sounds right and fair and like the kind of thing we should all be saying. To argue otherwise probably makes me a bad feminist. But before we rush to get the idea emblazoned on placards, let’s just think about it. First, there are practical things to consider: the last time I checked, my husband remained unequal to the task of lactating. While he is good at many other things (getting rid of spiders, finishing off the food in the fridge that’s already gone off, and so on), he would have been rubbish at breastfeeding our new daughter for the past year.
Of course, I’m aware I could have returned to work six months ago and either switched her to formula or sat in a toilet cubicle expressing milk every few hours, but neither option appealed as much as feeding her myself. After enduring nine months of pregnancy and12 hours of childbirth, retiring to the sofa several times a day with a book in one hand and a warm baby in the other felt like compensation. (Or it would have done, had I actually been on the sofa and not mostly on the floor of a church hall playgroup or on a bench at toddler football practice or, in one particularly uncomfortable case, nursing the baby while riding on a miniature railway.)
Second, let’s not forget the emotional factors at play: just because we want equal rights doesn’t mean we necessarily want to rush from our children’s sides at the earliest opportunity. Yes, there were moments in the past year when I’d have liked nothing better than to leave someone else to solve the mealtime tantrum, explosive nappy and major porridge spillage – all of which had a habit of happening simultaneously.
But call it maternal instinct or grim determination, I knew the right place to be - for me - was at the messy, noisy, frequently malodorous coalface of parenting. Which is not to criticize anyone who returns to work sooner. Like choosing a ridiculous name for your child, or opting for a water birth involving actual live dolphins, it’s a personal choice.
But the inconvenient truth is that some women – many women, in fact - want to spend the first year of their child’s life at home with them. Even those with degrees and good jobs, believe it or not. Those of us in our thirties or younger will probably be working until we’re at least 105, so what’s one year out (or two or three, depending on whether you can face repeating the process) in the grand scheme of things? A baby is not a baby for very long, but barring some kind of catastrophic fire or nuclear disaster, the office will still be standing for many years to come.
As for whether a year’s maternity leave results in us falling behind, sadly it can do. Research has shown that women endure lower pay and fewer promotions for decades after maternity leave. We can indeed expect to suffer in our careers as a result of inconvenient biological arrangements meaning women and not men have babies. This so-called ‘motherhood penalty’ is wrong and must be tackled. As Slaughter has argued, women still can’t have it all. Instead, we are left to juggle family and work as best we can, frequently feeling we’re falling short at both.
In this context, what is one year of feeding, pureeing, mopping up, bum wiping, pram-pushing and reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar a dozen times a day, compared to the decades more we will spend in the office? It didn’t feel excessive to me. It felt like making the most of motherhood, safe in the knowledge that eventually I’d be back at a desk, able to sit down, drink a cup of tea from start to finish – and do some (different) work.
