One of A’s current favorite books (to the point where I had to hide it this morning because I couldn’t stand to read it again today*) is a reworking of Hush, Little Baby. In the author’s note, the author and illustrator explains that she never liked the materialism of promising a child diamonds, livestock, and other sundries and restructured the song to focus on the relationship between mother and child. I rather like this take, but the first sentence of the explanation gets to me every time. It says “As much as I love being an artist, my favorite and most important profession has been being a mother.”
Maybe I’ve spent too much time in the practice of law, but I’ve always thought of a profession as something you get paid to do. Mothering is a job, no doubt about it, and it’s definitely an undervalued one at that. I think you can even accurately describe it as a vocation for some. But a profession? Not so much. I’ve read this book to A at least twenty-five times over the last three nights, and wind up reading the author’s note to myself on every reading. (Gives me an extra thirty seconds to pause before starting to sing again.) Most important profession…most important profession. As I start on Hush, Little Baby again, I’m vaguely annoyed. Profession? Really?
I think my annoyance is exacerbated by the fact that certain women (read: white, partnered, affluent, and without a disability at present) are encouraged to talk about how much mothering is important to them, how it’s the greatest thing they’ve ever done in their whole lives, how nothing could be as important. There’s a language of self-sacrifice and a sense of what an honor and privilege it is to be sleep-deprived and uncertain of when your next shower will be. (See this great post by Mindy at Hoyden About Town for a dissection of that kind of rhetoric.) Even if you’re privileged enough to be taking care of a child in physical, financial, and emotional safety, taking care of a newborn is frequently exhausting. Every age going forward presents a whole new series of challenges.
Motherhood is damn hard work, even before you get into the level of moral judgment that inevitably seems to accompany it. But it’s not a profession.
*An important lesson for new parents: never buy a book for your child that you’re unwilling to read at least 15 times in a row.
P.S. Googling for fatherhood and profession (a tangent I wound up not getting into here) led to some very interesting results, like this 1913 NY Times article on the need for a new profession of fatherhood, because, as the subtitle puts it: “Men Are Too Busy Nowadays to Make Home a Centre of Education and Recreation for Children as It Was When Fathers Took Their Duties More Seriously.”
Similar Posts:
- The Motherhood Discounting by Natasha August 26, 2010
- The nice pregnant lady’s guide to not offending polite society* by Natalia Antonova January 18, 2011
- Little Girls Are Natural Nurturers. by Flea May 21, 2007
- Diets all around! by evil fizz August 5, 2010
- Children will teach you about helplessness – and not only children by Natalia Antonova September 4, 2012
I think when you lack a paid gig, motherhood becomes your profession. I do have to add a qualifier; for the privileged.
“*An important lesson for new parents: never buy a book for your child that you’re unwilling to read at least 15 times in a row.”
An important corollary: if such a book comes into your home, hide it for a month or two or twelve, then donate. It is such a good feeling when Barbie: The Island Princess moves on.
I have that book too and I pondered that line many times. There’s something about the way women tend to rush to say that motherhood is The Most Important Thing to them that often seems diminishing of the rest of the self. Why do we need to rank these parts of us?
I stayed home with my babies because I couldn’t afford childcare. I think this is a situation that is often overlooked. Yes, a lot of at-home moms are very privileged, and there is privilege in my having been able to pass on the $100 a month the kind of job I could have gotten would have left me after expenses, in having a husband who earned enough to (just barely) cover the bills, but there are many women who simply can’t afford the cost of infant care, or don’t have access to it (small towns, facilities in large towns all full, etc). Most of my friends stayed home until their kids were old enough for public school and then went back to work. We weren’t home because of some ideology, it was just what had to be done.
I don’t know; I’m not necessarily turned off by the use of the word profession. I think, in essence, the author is trying to assign higher prestige to the job of parenting. To say it is your job to raise a child could possibly entail that it is not of your choosing, or that you do it because you have to, etc. Also, vocation isn’t really a word that it used to describe anything. At least not by me or anyone I come into contact with regularly.
I have had a version of this post swirling around in my head for quite a while. I think some of the women I know say motherhood is their profession or their job in order to give their mothering equal standing with the paid work they are no longer doing. In some ways it’s an attempt to raise the status of one of the lowest-status kinds of work (in US society). The more closely you work with children and the younger those children are, the less you get paid, even if you’re doing it as paid work.
Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels write about the “motherhood is the best job EVAH” trope in The Mommy Myth and I recall nodding vigorously throughout that chapter.
@Ted Actually I think vocation is the perfect word to use here. Unfortunately jobs considered “women’s work” like teaching, nursing and admin have been touted as vocations as an excuse to underpay the profession. Perhaps it is not the formal definition but I think of vocation as work that I enjoy so much that pay and social acceptance don’t matter. For some it’s parenthood, for me its science.
I think the author is just using “profession” to mean what you mean by “vocation.” I like the idea that we can have more than one “profession” and I don’t really see any benefit in saying that motherhood isn’t or can’t be a “profession.” Yes, a definition of profession exists that means being paid to do something (the opposite of amateur) as in, professional athelete. But we also think of a “professional” as someone who is competent, skilled, valued in their job and who takes pride in their job. When you say that someone acted in a way that is “unprofessional” it doesn’t mean they weren’t being paid.
So, I think that this is a reasonable use of the word, and that it’s needless boundary drawing and exclusion to say that motherhood can’t be a profession. You may not consider it your profession, and that’s fine, but I think it’s needlessly exclusionary to say that others are wrong to think or talk of it that way. I think the distinction between profession and job has to do with how highly the person doing the work values that work. And it’s OK that some women value the work they do mothering MORE than their paid work. And it’s OK that some women value their paid work more than the work they do mothering. We don’t contribute toward a world where all women’s experiences and work are valued when we say you can’t call it this or that.
I don’t consider motherhood a profession either. It’s work, I recognize that. Hard, unpaid work. But no one goes to school to be a mother (unless you go here: http://hylesanderson.edu/academics-2/programs-courses/). There’s no vocational training, no glass ceiling, no white-knuckled attempts to climb the career ladder. I also recognize that motherhood carries with it a unique set of challenges but they are not challenges associated with the life of a professionally employed woman.
Actually, I had a professional mother.
She studied child education in college to be a teacher, dropped out because she got pregnant with me, and proceeded to use her skills and training on me and my brothers. She kept up with the educational literature, and she took the concept that motherhood is a job, with a skill set and training that applies to it, very very seriously.
My mother is also a genius who was thwarted in her ambitions, not because she had kids — because her ambition was to raise children — but because it is perceived by society as a job anyone can do, that requires no intellectual skill, and that therefore is done by people who *have* no intellectual skill. Part of the reason she put so much emphasis on studying the job of mothering (and stunts like calling being a housewife a “domestic engineer”) was that there is no social validation whatsoever for a genius who is also a stay at home mother.
“Developer” covers everything from a script kiddie who can barely cut and paste code together to a systems architect who designs and orchestrates the development of enterprise-class software, but you can actually tell the difference because there are systems in place to measure the training and skill and experience of a developer. The only way we measure parenting skill is *in* experience — year per child — with no socially accepted extra credit for going to college to learn how to be a good mother, or reading studies of child psychology, or whatever. So people like my mom use terms like “profession” to indicate that they approach motherhood *as* a profession — that they are people with college education and professional workforce training who view motherhood as something you can improve your skills at, not something that just kind of happens to you.
I, personally, do not view motherhood as my profession. I don’t even view it as my vocation. My vocation is writing, and I would like it to be my profession; my actual profession is IT, business analysis and data management; but then what’s motherhood? It’s not a hobby, it’s too important. It’s a job, but calling something a job instead of a career implies that it’s a temporary McJob that you have no emotional investment in, with strictly defined hours, and motherhood is the opposite of that. It’s clearly not a business, since it doesn’t exist to make money… but it’s fundamentally similar to running a non-profit organization in many ways. Like your own business, you cannot put down being a mother, you own it, it’s yours 24/7 and the buck stops with you.
It’s kind of perverse now that I think about it that we need to describe the *oldest* job humans can perform in terms of the new stuff we’ve invented within the last 300 years or so in order to give it some validation. Shouldn’t it go the other way around? But I guess familiarity breeds contempt.
Maybe motherhood *is* a profession. I’m not sure what else to call it. A vocation is something you’re obsessed with, that you’d do because it is your reason to exist whether you made money at it or not, and there are women (like my mom) for whom motherhood is that… but that’s not the case for me (I did actively choose motherhood, I did feel that my life would be incomplete if I didn’t have kids, but if I had had to choose up front between writing and having children it would have been writing), and it’s not the case for many mothers, and it plays into the whole “Being a mother is the reason for women to exist!” thing, so if you don’t feel that way it’s like a slap to be told you do. A job is just a job; you can clock out of it. A career has a path forward, and opportunities for advancement. Whereas a profession… if you’re a doctor, you’re always a doctor even if you quit being a doctor to go sell sodas. You may not be legally licensed to practice, but people will still call you a doctor. Your profession is your training and the thing you can’t stop being even if you don’t actually *do* it anymore. What else could you call being a mother?
So people like my mom use terms like “profession” to indicate that they approach motherhood *as* a profession — that they are people with college education and professional workforce training who view motherhood as something you can improve your skills at, not something that just kind of happens to you.
I find this very interesting. One of the things that I’m kind of alarmed by is the tendency to assure women who are having their first child that it will all come naturally, that women have being doing this for thousands of years, yada, yada, yada. Some things may come easily to a person about parenting, others may not. And there’s so much literature (of the pop psychology crap variety) that endeavors to show women how really simple it all is and elides the huge range of experiences that women have in mothering.
But I think this desire to see motherhood as instinctual and natural also encourages people not to think of parenting as a set of skills that can be developed and refined. There’s no sense that pregnancy doesn’t bestow enlightenment. And it just serves to reinforce the idea that you don’t need intellectual skills, it is a job that anyone can do, and enables people to handwave away the actual effort that it requires.
“My favorite and most important profession has been being a mother” reminds me of someone-or-other’s response to the suggestion that she should use “my fondest friend” to refer to her lover: “Actually, there are people I’m fonder of.”
I mean, all in all, if someone’s a brilliant cancer researcher and a mother, I’d rather they concentrate on the cancer research.
If motherhood is a profession, it has the crappiest benefit package of any profession I ever heard of, and the pay scale is simply shit. Sometimes literally.
If motherhood is a profession, it has the crappiest benefit package of any profession I ever heard of
Depends on where you live.
In most of the Western world, where there’s a state-run social safety net, no legal obligation on children to care for elderly parents, and little social stigma attached to refusing to do so, yeah, motherhood has the crappiest benefit package around. If you live in a country where “social security” is *entirely* based on how many kids you have who will be financially secure enough to care for you in your old age, though, the benefits package for motherhood is pretty damn good.
Although the benefits package for fatherhood, in such places, is equally as good, and requires much less work.
I don’t know. I kinda think that defining or redefining motherhood as a “profession” has issues. Not that I don’t agree on many points made – particularly the erroneous belief that young or new mothers should “instinctively” know how to take care of their babies (or the assumption that fathers lack that instinct). I had experience babysitting and taking care of other people’s children but I was lost (and somewhat isolated, in physical location) when it came to my own and mostly it was trial and error.
But, anyway, calling motherhood a profession just seems to work to separate the idea of motherhood by class or income or something, even race of course. Can’t quite put my finger on it, but I think a relatively well-off, educated woman with possibly many other options who described her mothering as a “profession” would get a fair hearing. A poor, relatively uneducated woman with few options who described her mothering as a “profession” would be laughed and sneered at. Unless, of course, she was describing mothering someone else’s child, for pay.
So, if a well(er)-off, educated woman’s motherhood is a profession, what is a less well-off, less educated woman’s motherhood thought to be?
It’s not a profession any more then being a sister, wife or daughter is a profession.
It’s a relationship and yes, there are certain activities and duties that go with that relationship and yes it does transform your life as relationships can do – but it’s not a profession.
Safiya – I disagree, being a sister, wife or daughter does not require specialized knowledge or automatically come with the ultimate responsibility for someone else’s health, happiness and well-being. Motherhood is far different from and far more demanding than any other relationship a woman embarks on.
Perhaps the US should pay women who stay at home and care for their children – other countries do. Perhaps we should provide specialized training for women (and men) who want to be a stay-at-home parent.
If it’s not a “profession” now, what would have to change for it to become one?
There’s no vocational training, no glass ceiling, no white-knuckled attempts to climb the career ladder.
There isn’t a glass ceiling or corporate career ladder for a lot of women in working class positions. It sounds like some people use ‘professional’ and ‘white collar’ synonymously. In that case, motherhood is not a profession, but neither are a lot of working class jobs.
Some women are/were involved with low paying, boring, unfulfilling work. It’s not as though everyone has a fabulous exciting career to fulfill them. Being a mother or caregiver is so completely devalued, especially if you’re taking care of your own children as opposed to working for someone else- an option not always open to women of color.
I mean, all in all, if someone’s a brilliant cancer researcher and a mother, I’d rather they concentrate on the cancer research.
Proof that motherhood is undervalued. Nanette, I agree that upper class white women would probably be able to use the word profession, while lower class women of color could not. Until motherhood is actually held in high regards, women of color will bear the worst of the disrespect and devaluation.
I’ve been hesitant to comment on this because of the damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t attitude towards anything in relation to mothers and their choices one finds in the online feminist community, but I have the following thoughts…
My work as a mother is much more important than the work I do as my paid profession. I use the knowledge I obtained in earning two degrees in caring for my son. I am much more satisfied by the work I do with him. He is more demanding than my “real” job. Most importantly, I do not expect everyone to feel this way. I would, however, ask that others not deride the work that I or any other mother does as easy or unimportant.
It also doesn’t make me less of a feminist for feeling that way. It also doesn’t make me a bad person when I use the opportunities afforded me by life’s circumstances to give him the things he needs for a good start in life. It often seems as though moral judgment of mothers is bad unless we’re judging the haves instead of the have-nots. I’m not really sure that’s helpful.
I agree that, as a society, we could do a lot more to support families (all families) and mothers specifically as most of the care-taking (of both children and the elderly) falls to them. Which, by the way, makes how mothers are perceived (whether they work or stay at home, regardless of the reasons) a very feminist issue.
There is a tension when it comes to motherhood that makes it almost impossible to have a reasonable conversation about it: If motherhood is given too much value, then the risk is that women will not be allowed to be more than just mothers; give it too little value, and the work of millions of women is essentially called worthless.
The system as it stands thrives on this tension- liberal women who don’t want to be seen as just a mother, downplay their motherhood, making sure people know they are also a lawyer or a writer or whatever; conservative women who don’t want to be seen as lacking in femininity downplay their career ambitions, making sure people know that being a mom is their most important job. Every woman is screwed by this. Women should be valued for all the roles they choose to take on, whether in the workplace, the home, both, or either one alone.
To me, denying motherhood a title of value, like “profession”, doesn’t help things, rather it just plays into the messed up system we have in place. There needs to be a dual-tracked effort of reinforcing that women have the right to be in the workforce and valued for more than just their children, which include includes valuing women who are not mothers, while also insisting that the work women do as mothers does not devalue them.
For me, right now, I feel like I most often have to defend myself against people who think that being a mom (and valuing that part of myself) means I am less intelligent, less ambitious, less motivated, just lesser, regardless of what I do in addition to motherhood. (There are other women who must defend against being considered less valuable because they don’t have children, which is also unacceptable).
So if there was an general acceptance that motherhood doesn’t make a women less valuable or intelligent (including by conservatives who claim to praise family values but still treat mothers like idiots), then whether or not it was called a profession would not matter. But right now, that isn’t the case. So I would push for the title.
I agree with some of the other commenters that “profession” suggests something long-term and chosen and that one chooses to devote themselves to, and which suggests that you can improve at it and become accomplished at it. All of which I like in relation to motherhood. I think the construct “motherhood is my profession” is a lot different than talking about it in relation to others. I think in the abstract, talking about motherhood as a profession contributes to seeing parenting as mothering and something that only women can do. But as a statement of a person’s personal understanding, I think it makes a lot of sense. While it would be hard for me to say that child care workers are “professional mothers” (because to me that does sound like saying that it is inherently women’s work), I have less trouble seeing an individual, female child care worker as a “professional mother” or as engaged professionally in mothering children.
Part of the probelm is the slipperiness of the word “profession”. It has been through alot of lives in the language. There was a time when the only professions were “the law, the Church, the military and medicine.” Does anyone even remember that anymore? (I hope not. I hope it has died finally.) Then it became work you did for pay, as long as you wore fancy enough clothes for it – marketing types and salesmen and all sorts of people that people in the four professions would never have been seen in public. So by now the word is shapeless.
I agree with whoever said upthread that she/he has a probelem with calling a personal relationship a profession. I also have a problem with having to call any work a profession to have it be taken seriously. So what’s the point?
I think the fact we consider motherhood as a profession or job says more about a widely held capitalist mindset – something is only valuable if it has some kind of financial worth and mothers are vastly cheaper than professional childcare.
The act of raising a child should be seen as valuable and important enough, without having to coat it in a corporate sheen.
Mightydoll – Different and more demanding yes, but still a relationship.
So, if a well(er)-off, educated woman’s motherhood is a profession, what is a less well-off, less educated woman’s motherhood thought to be?
Boom. Right there. In fact, being one of those “bad” non-degreed mothers, I seethe at the answer.
Nanette and Miss S hit it on the head by recognizing that “profession” is a loaded word. Not all of us get to claim it for our paid work, nevermind the disrespected work of parenting. I like the way Safiya Outlines compared it to other relationships; other forms of belonging to one another. That’s what motherhood holds for me—its own intrinsic reward, just like any other relationship. I dislike the mercantile connotations of “profession” being applied as a quick way to garner respect—a means of co-opting the language of the marketplace simply because that happens to be valued more. Does not having a diploma in it (or anything else) mean you suck at motherhood? And if so, what does that say about our own families? My great-grandparents were illiterate peasants. Three of my grandparents don’t have a high school diploma. Despite their lack of formal credentials, they were at least as good at parenting as any highly degreed person, period.
Use of the term “profession” also brings to my mind the argument that people should be “licensed” to be “allowed” to have children. A pedigree by any other name.
I think the problem is that women feel as though they need to use these phrases to give their work as mothers value. Studies show that women with children are seen as less intelligent, less motivated, less hardworking. Using ‘profession’ is a way of saying that you are skilled, intelligent and competant. It’s unfortuante that moms even have to do that.
La lubu, I come from a line of incredibly intelligent women, and many of them didn’t have college degrees. Some of them never finished high school. So, nope. Our families are proof that you don’t need a degree to be a good mom :)
The question is, why the hell is motherhood so devalued?
I’m not a mother. (I am an aunt, and for about nine years I was a semi-professional childminder – which is to say I looked after unrelated kids a lot and got paid for it.)
I stopped being a childminder, with some relief and a little regret, the day I got my first full-time post-graduate job.
All my life, whenever I’ve looked after unrelated kids – well, at least for 20+ years – people have looked at my ability to meet a strange kid or group of kids, and get along with them – have them like me enough with a few minutes to enjoy themselves, not fret too much, do stuff reasonably peaceably, and do what I tell them (within reason: I’ve never had to try to get kids to do actual boring work, beyond picking up after themselves) and ask me “Haven’t you ever considered making a career of this? You’re so good at it!”
(Sorry for the self-praise. But yes, I am.)
To which the honest answer is:
No. Looking after kids was the best possible solution for me to how to earn money while I was a student. It didn’t pay much, but there were long periods when I was officially “earning money” during which I was free to do my academic work (well, read/write) providing I kept half an eye on the kids to make sure they were doing OK. And I liked it. And I was good at it.
I never for a moment wanted kids of my own. (This pre-dates doing paid childcare.) I used to get home after a stint and drop with exhaustion, relieved that for me this was a per-hour job. I have the highest respect for anyone who takes on being a parent.
But mostly, the reason why I never thought of putting my skills into this as a profession: The pay was crappy. The pay always is crappy. The career structure and professional regard is minimal to non-existent. And while it’s certainly an important, difficult job, worth doing well – there are other things I do well that pay much better.
Which I used to say, sometimes, to people who asked me why I didn’t want to do this as a career. Sometimes they nodded and sometimes they went quiet and sometimes I worried they were being judgemental, but mostly I didn’t.
Me: “I mean, all in all, if someone’s a brilliant cancer researcher and a mother, I’d rather they concentrate on the cancer research”
Miss S: “Proof that motherhood is undervalued”
Really? How is it different from saying “I mean, all in all, if someone’s a brilliant writer and an accountant, I’d rather they concentrate on the writing”?
In which capacity did Dr. Salk have a more lasting impact: as a father, or as a developer of a polio vaccine?
Some people do have jobs that are more important than parenthood.
Some people do have jobs that are more important than parenthood.
And….some people don’t? Some people have jobs that are, “six of one, half a dozen of the other”, so no great loss if they lose their job? Or become a parent and get “mommy tracked”? In other words, if you aren’t out there saving the world and curing cancer and doing something superhero-ish…..the hell with ya?
Now, I know that’s not what you said, and probably not what you intended…but that is indeed the assumption that many of us are laboring under, both in our capacity as a breadwinner and as a parent. It dovetails neatly with the hierarchical status quo…..the status quo that is more than happy to accept the dividends paid by all that free labor mothers perform, without giving monetary compensation or respect for that labor.
It is different from comparisons between accounting and writing in that those occupations are both considered professions, held by educated people, and worthy of respect (oh, and “coded male”–yes, women write, but when they do it under a male pen name they get better reception). Whereas mothering is something….”any old dummy can do…hell, anybody can get pregnant and drop a kid….it’s not rocket science/brain surgery…what a waste…I thought she was smarter than that”…(fill in with another of the odious cliches you’ve heard over the years).
…or the shorter version: would we even know of Dr. Salk if he was a she? Would a female Dr. Salk who was also a mother been able to develop the polio vaccine?
Why does motherhood limit one’s professional capacity…while, magically, fatherhood does not?
“In which capacity did Dr. Salk have a more lasting impact: as a father, or as a developer of a polio vaccine?”
No one assumed he was not capable of doing both. Perhaps he was crappy as a dad, we don’t know. But no one suggested being a father would diminish his ability to be a researcher.
Whereas when a woman becomes a mother, many people assume she loses braincells.
All I want is for being a mother not to be a demerit against my ability to perform other occupations (or my intelligence in general). I want to not feel it necessary to always provide a caveat when I mention I have children.
For most (middle class, white) men, being a father is at the worst simply a neutral fact, and sometimes a positive. For women, if it were just a neutral fact, it would be a huge improvement.
for me (and this is just me), motherhood is no MORE of a drag than whatever craptacular job I could get with my, er, “qualifications” (such as may exist). and I feel safe in the knowledge that on this gig, my boss, so to speak, will not act like an irrational pants-wetting toddler FOREVER.
now, if I were curing cancer or creating heartbreaking works of staggering genius or benefiting humanity even a little bit by contributing to the so-called work force, I’m sure that would look like a better deal. but I was a pretty much useless eater (administrative assistant? seriously? that’s still a job?) prior to having children, and I don’t see my position changing anytime soon, barring someone somewhere raining down a scholarship to harvard on my undeserving head.
most of my job consisted of making sure people had enough coffee and pencils and paper and crap like that to make it through the day, ensuring their general physical comfort, and seeing to it that their daily plans were not interfered-with. it was a lot like being a mommy, but to adults who should have been able to do that job themselves. now I’m a mommy to someone who actually needs a mommy. I’m not proud, or ashamed. it just is. and it’s not going to last forever.
This is similar to how I feel. I go to work and try to teach teenagers who act as though I’m bothering them and treat me accordingly. I do this instead of staying home with my son who loves me and WANTS to learn something. It makes me cranky.