Tapu Misa: Looking after the kids is a proper job too

I am Working Mother, hear me whinge.

According to Sydney Daily Telegraph writer Jenny Dillon, that's all we working mums do, whine endlessly about how hard it is to juggle family life with work.

What could we possibly complain about? With fewer children, an army of paid help and all those labour-saving household devices, we women have never had it so good.

In fact, Dillon wishes we wouldn't trivialise our sacred role in the workplace by claiming, tiresomely, to be "working mothers", rather than "working women", because it suggests we might have to "pull out of money-making meetings to deal with the ironing". (As so often happens.)

It's important to note, lest we mistake this for another outbreak of the interminable "mother wars", that Dillon seems equally contemptuous of stay-at-home mums.

Thanks to "the weekly cleaner, the weekly gardener, the weekly shop, the microwave, the deep freeze, the takeaway food options", she writes "any woman with school-age children who isn't in the workforce is either playing tennis or organising poker afternoons".

I prefer bridge, and I don't have a cleaner or gardener, but I get the message: mothering is really all about the housework.

And there I was thinking it had something to do with the care of children.

Work-centred careerists like Jenny Dillon illustrate, all too clearly, the dilemma faced by any woman who didn't get the memo about what it is that women are supposed to want. (Work, obviously.) Back in 2005, American legal academic Linda Hirshman, who wrote Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, castigated educated women for failing the sisterhood by choosing to stay home with their babies rather than pursuing nobler ends.

She seemed in no doubt of where women could expect "the full human flourishing". Not with the family, "with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks", but in "public spheres like the market or government".

Hirshman couldn't conceive that an intelligent, educated woman would choose to care for a child (much less enjoy doing so) rather than, say, run up a record number of billable hours at her law firm, which was her idea of a good time.

Obviously, neither Hirshman nor Dillon bothered to talk to anyone outside their privileged, well-paid circles, where it's easy to believe that all women really want is to work, preferably full time, and that the only thing holding them back is the absence of child care.

As Australian journalist Anne Manne has noted, that picture has been shaped by an elite whose jobs provide them with "honour, power, status and money".

"They are writers not racehorse strappers, lawyers not waitresses, professors not the carers who wipe children's bottoms at the child care centre or feed elderly parents with a spoon in the nursing home. That point is especially pertinent in the light of deteriorating labour-market conditions for casual and low-skilled workers ..."

In extensive research during the late 1990s, British sociologist Catherine Hakim discovered a far more complex and diverse reality.

Contrary to popular belief, it isn't the absence of childcare that keeps fulltime mothers out of the workforce, but the fact that "motherhood and parenting [take] a central place in [women's] lives".

Hakim found that in the absence of financial need, only 5 per cent of mothers preferred fulltime work, three-quarters wanted a part-time job, and one-fifth wanted not to work at all.

According to Hakim, the majority of women (about 70 per cent) are "adaptive". They shape their working lives around their children, staying home when their children are younger and increasing work commitments as the children got older, or working part time throughout.

That's the group that I, and most women I know, fit into.

So how did we "adaptives" become so invisible to policy makers keen for us to park our children in daycare and find salvation in the job market?

In her 2008 essay, Love and Money: The Family and the Free Market, Manne say feminism's fight to open up equal opportunities in the workplace made it a perfect fit for neo-liberal economics.

Both "shared an insistence on employment as having a moral significance and placed it at the very centre of their grand narrative of progress".

That's meant more and more women being pushed to undertake paid work while still carrying most of the responsibility for care-giving .

As if that weren't enough, working mothers are expected to conform to the norm of the "ideal worker" - someone who could work long hours unencumbered by family responsibilities.

As Manne writes: "Career women, unlike career men, are far more likely to be childless. This is not a matter of choice. It is one consequence of our bloody-minded recalcitrance when it comes to altering institutions to recognise women's distinctive life patterns."