Just in case anyone thought the Turnbull ascendancy would usher in a golden age of mums and bubs in federal politics, the government’s chief whip Scott Buchholz has generously stepped in on Wednesday to correct them. Buchholz reportedly requested that Liberal MP and new mother Kelly O’Dwyer bottle-feed her infant daughter using expressed milk instead of breastfeeding, so that mothering didn’t interfere with her parliamentary duties.
Unbeknownst to Buchholz, under standing orders members are allowed to breastfeed in the chamber during divisions, or entitled to a proxy vote. The chief whip’s apparent ignorance of these rules aside, incidents like this demonstrate bluntly why politics, the corporate world, and many other public sphere environments are inhospitable to mothers.
This is a trivially obvious point, but it’s worth going a bit deeper. Whether or not you think female under-representation in the top echelons of society is feminism’s most pressing problem, the forces that resulted in O’Dwyer being given erroneous breastfeeding instructions by her male boss are at work all around us.
Often the exclusion of mothers from public life is put down to their own choices, or treated as an effect of individuals (like Buchholz) being personally prejudiced or ignorant. The truth is that our social structure, at its most fundamental level, assumes women’s bodies are deviant, especially when they are engaged in pregnancy, breastfeeding or primary care of an infant.
Of course, women are not the only group who must endure their bodies being marked as different from a pre-existing norm: people with visible disabilities are often physically excluded from shared spaces, patronised by long-existing practices and assumptions that assume the non-disabled body is the only type that will be present. Trans people are also tormented and harassed, for instance while using gender-segregated toilet facilities.
But public mothering seems to draw a particular form of ire. Noisy or misbehaving children frequently spark calls for kid-free flights and restaurants. Family parking is decried as a selfish indulgence. People complain that breastfeeding is inappropriate for outside the private sphere.
It is rare to hear these vociferous calls for segregation applied to any other group unless you’re deep in fringe territory (with the exception of anti-trans bigotry, which is widespread and disturbing). But it is perfectly acceptable to opine that children should be seen and not heard, and that therefore mothers, who make up the vast majority of the primary caregiving force, should stay cloistered indoors until their children reach the age of majority.
Navigating the world with children in tow can be a difficult and frustrating endeavour even before these complaints are added on top. The standard response to this line of argument is a condescending sneer: “Well, you should’ve thought of that before you had kids.”
Should we, though? Why should our families, our choice to have children, be controlled by the knowledge that public spaces are hostile to parents with children, rather than our own desire and readiness to reproduce? Why shouldn’t public goods and public spaces be equally accessible to all?
Why should it be unreasonable to say that, as a society, we are collectively responsible for the wellbeing of our children, and excluding their mothers from social and professional arenas is not in their best interests?
This attitude is treated as one of entitlement, as though equal access shouldn’t be a cornerstone of our community.
The entitled attitude is actually the reverse: the presumed entitled to child-free public spaces. Yes, people often find children crying to be annoying, or public breastfeeding weird. But crying babies and breastfeeding are a fact of life that will always be with us, like the weather.
Attempting to police or restrict these constants, like Buchholz did when he instructed O’Dwyer to modify her breastfeeding practice, only draws attention to how the existing set of arrangements is inadequate to deal with the full spectrum of humanity. Difference is all around us; the challenge is to change how we do things to accommodate as many people as possible, even if that means occasionally having to share a plane with a cranky toddler.
