The Wife Drought

by Annabel Crabb

  Anna Burke says the idea of a spouse as a ‘political asset’ is usually a wife-shaped one, which doesn’t often survive the transition to husbands. ‘I take my husband nowhere. Nor would I ever send him as my representative, which I hear of male politicians doing from time to time. It’s my job, not his.

  ‘For a spouse, it’s hard, traumatic work. Do you really want to come to a Chinese restaurant to eat fatty food and hang out with a bunch of people you don’t know while your partner abandons you for the night? Plus then you’re also paying for a babysitter.

  ‘As a politician, you’ll have people coming up to you on those nights saying: “Where’s your husband? Thought you might bring him along to social occasions?” And I think, well – you might be at a social occasion, but I’m at work.’

  In fact, the enlistment of male partners for ambassadorial roles has a short and unhappy history. Tim Mathieson, the only man ever to be issued the Lodge’s second set of keys, was in 2008 appointed as an ambassador for men’s health, back when he was merely the deputy first bloke. The announcement was greeted with a degree of harrumphing about ‘jobs for the boys’, despite the fact that the gig obliged Mathieson to drive himself – unpaid – from country town to country town, talking blokes into having prostate examinations.

  Therese Rein’s sheaf of responsibilities, meanwhile, as patron of everything from the National Portrait Gallery to the Indigenous Literacy Project, were never questioned in the same way; neither were the similar activities of many of her predecessors.

  Weirdly, it seems that male political spouses not only are not expected to be useful; they’re viewed with something between panic and suspicion when they actually attempt to be.

  We shall not speak of Mr Mathieson’s professional skills; he was a hairdresser, which on one memorable occasion emboldened a radio host to ask Julia Gillard directly whether her boyfriend was in fact gay. Elsewhere, his job was viewed as a great joke, though not – I suspect – by any professional woman who has ever been required to attend a breakfast function or appear on morning television, by whom a hairdresser boyfriend might properly be viewed as money in the bank.

  In a properly functioning democracy, a parliament should reflect its people. And while the number of women in federal Parliament does not reflect that women are a shade over 50 per cent of the population, the parliamentary culture has done rather a better job of accurately reflecting our culture’s expectations of men and of women. Of men: work hard, and don’t expect any sympathy if you’re separated from your families. Of women: work, by all means. But there will be strings attached, and they will be fiendishly hard to sever; a mother’s absence from her children, in politics as much as anywhere else, will be viewed much more critically than a father’s.

  When Edith Cowan became Australia’s first female parliamentarian in 1921, the Age sounded a note of caution in its editorial pages. ‘A Parliament composed wholly or mainly of woman politicians is not a prospect to be regarded with enthusiasm. Were political office to become the ambition of the fair sex, and were standing for Parliament to become the latest craze of fashion, there would be many dreary and neglected homes throughout the country sacrificed on the altar of political ambition.’19

  Nearly a century later, significant remnants of those attitudes remain; the guilt of creating a ‘dreary and neglected home’ still weighs heavier on the shoulders of women in Parliament, even though by rights the partial loss of either parent to politics is a significant forfeit for any child. ‘Every politician is a selfish parent,’ says Graham Perrett, Labor MP for the Queensland seat of Moreton. ‘You have to be, to get on in politics. Your partner and your children suffer, and that means your partner has to sign up.’

  But when female partners sign up in greater numbers than male ones, the effect on Australia’s representative democracy is unmistakeable. Male politicians get wives, and female politicians tend not to. What flows from that is a greater natural hesitation – among women – to take on a political career.

  When I interviewed Greens leader Christine Milne for Kitchen Cabinet in 2012, she was full of enthusiasm for political life, with its unmatchable opportunity to engineer social change. The only juncture at which she showed any hesitation was when talking about the impact of politics on her two sons.

  ‘I missed significant things in their lives,’ she said. ‘One of my boys was Christopher Robin in a children’s play at Christmas time and I couldn’t be there because the Parliament was sitting and, unlike now, when people get pairs relatively easy in the Senate, there was no such thing in the Tasmanian Parliament at that time because the numbers were tight. There was just no way you could get a pair for a children’s play, so those sorts of things I missed out on.’

  ‘There is a stage when the feminist movement … where we all thought we could have it all. Everything we wanted to do we could achieve; we could do the university thing, we could go into careers and do that well, we could do the mothering well, we could do what we wanted in the community and we could volunteer and so on, and the reality is – you can’t.’

  Milne’s advice to women considering a political career was blunt: ‘I wouldn’t say avoid it, but just go into it with your eyes open and think about how you are going to stage your career. How long are you going to be there? What role? What level of responsibility would you like to take? Is this the best time to do it? Have you got that level of support in your own relationship and family that will enable you to do the job well? These are serious questions, but I think women have gotten to the point where they know that you can’t have it all any more.’

  ‘Having it all.’ It’s such a totemic phrase when used with reference to women, and it’s so loaded. ‘Having it all’ sounds greedy. Unreasonable. Impossible, too. And you will never hear that phrase used about a man, even though men – particularly in politics – very commonly combine demanding careers with young families. For them, having it all is perfectly possible because they’re not doing it all.

  If ‘having it all’ means ‘doing it all’, then of course it’s never going to fly. Tanya Plibersek doesn’t have a ‘wife’. But she’s got a pretty useful composite alternative: a husband who juggles, and help where she needs it. I have those things, too, and until such time as they become common-place, I will continue to feel lucky.

  8

  ROLE REVERSAL

  One of the most comfortable things about assumptions is that they don’t feel like assumptions at all. Mostly, they just feel like the natural way of things. Take fathers working long hours, for instance, or male politicians spending eighteen weeks a year away from their young children without anyone really batting an eyelid. Or mothers looking after young children for long days while their partners are at work – or even for weeks on end if there’s business travel. The assumption that a boss makes when an employee is sent on a snap business trip is that there is someone at home to work around that unexpected event. If a child is taken ill at school or child care, in most cases staff will call the mother first. That’s an assumption, and often it’s a reasonable one.

  How can you test whether something’s an assumption? Try this: switch things around, and check how bananas everybody goes.

  For the last eight chapters, more or less, we’ve looked at what happens to women and men when they behave in ways we generally consider to be normal; the expectations of what they will do when they have children, and the consequences for their lives and jobs. Now, just for our own entertainment and for a dirty great slab of confirmation that these assumptions actually do exist, we take a look at what happens when people do the unexpected.

  The first thing that happens when you start behaving in a way that is contrary to expectations is that you get a lot of questions. This is pretty normal human behaviour. If you’re walking a bunch of kids to the park and one of them wanders off down a side street or starts balancing on a wall, what’s the first thing you yell? ‘What are you doing? Come back here!’ And at work, if someone wears high heels when
normally they don’t, or turns up in a suit, or brings a packed lunch when they normally buy a hamburger up the street, the first response from colleagues will ordinarily be a question. ‘Going on a date?’ ‘Got a court summons have you, mate?’ ‘Ooo! Economy drive, is it?’

  Questions are human beings’ cheapest and most direct technique for dealing with things that are not quite right. There are questions that are regularly asked of working mothers, but would rarely, if ever, be put to a working father. And there are some others that are fired daily at fathers who look after their children full-time, but would never be levelled at a stay-at-home mum. Questions are ostensibly demands for information, but they can run both ways; sometimes, their purpose is as much to deliver intelligence as to elicit it.

  How do you do it? This is a golden regular for working mothers, especially those who have obviously demanding jobs. Usually, it is not a hostile question; it’s just that the questioner is genuinely baffled to some degree by the actual mechanics involved in a mother working long hours. Instinct tells them that mothers spend a lot of time with their children; the fact that this mother is obviously also spending a lot of time working creates a sort of conceptual logjam, from which the questioner is requesting to be released.

  Much as a woman might occasionally be tempted to answer ‘Parapsychology’, or ‘Jedi mind control’, the answer is usually pretty basic. Either the dad is doing more than the average male allotment of stuff around the house, or some kind of third party is involved: grandparents, nannies, formal child care, and so on. People don’t ever ask working dads how they ‘do it’. That’s because they already have a pretty good idea how he does it, and they’re usually spot on.

  How can you do it? This is a variation on the first question – a slightly more emotionally loaded one.

  Jane Morrow, a Sydney publisher, was given a significant promotion at work when she was thirty-two weeks pregnant with her third child. In order to take the job, she knew she would have to come back to work pretty quickly after maternity leave. She and her husband, Nathan, a human resources manager in the energy sector, discussed the matter (she really wanted to take the job) and decided that he would take three months’ parental leave. On his last day before going on leave, his company told him he would be made redundant on his return.

  So when Jane went back to work, she was the sole breadwinner.

  ‘We had a relative come round to drop off some stuff when I was going back to work,’ she recalls. ‘Audrey was four or five months old, and we were borrowing her breast pump and all sorts of paraphernalia. She said to me: “It’s amazing that you’re doing this. It’s not in my nature to leave my babies.”’

  This is another, slightly more sophisticated use of the question; here it is used not principally to elicit information, but to deliver a message. It combines a shot of admiration ‘You’re amazing!’ with a Bob-Hawke-sized chaser of disapproval. It reminds the target of the natural world order, and her place outside it. At heart, it really means: ‘I so admire you for being able to do something of which I, with my fundamental decency, would be entirely incapable.’

  Jane, for her part, was gobsmacked. ‘I was like: “I’m leaving them with their DAD, for God’s sake.” It wasn’t even like I was leaving them at a childcare centre, which I don’t think there’s anything wrong with, by the way. An actual parent was going to be looking after them.’

  Where’s the baby? This isn’t one that mothers get asked by their ordinary workmates – she might get it when people know she’s had another baby recently, or maybe by professional associates she hasn’t seen for a bit. Because our assumption is implicitly that children will be looked after principally by their mother, confronting visual evidence that this particular mother seems to be without her children may prompt an episode of childlike confusion in the questioner.

  An amusing way to answer this one is to widen your eyes, clap your hands to your face, scream ‘Oh my God!’ and run out of the room. Again, there are not actually all that many possibilities here by way of serious answer. Logic tells you that if the baby is not with its mother, and assuming it has not been put on eBay or left on the train, it will either be with its father or with a third party. If the baby is with its father, there will be more questions.

  Fiona Sugden is the woman with the long blonde hair you have seen a million times walking behind Kevin Rudd in campaign footage. She is one of the rare Rudd staffers who found a moment to breed during her time working for him; three children in five years, all born when Fiona – a typical Rudd staffer in at least this respect – was aged under thirty. When Rudd took back the leadership in June 2013, she had a four-year-old, a two-year-old, and a six-month-old baby. He asked her to come back for the campaign, and she said yes. Leaving young children and disappearing for months on end is a familiar part of the life of a campaign staffer; it’s the same sacrifice politicians make, only with none of the pay, fame, and selective adulation. It’s far more usual to see fathers doing it, though; Sugden faced a lot of questions.

  ‘I just literally left my home for four months,’ she says. ‘I had to accept that I would be judged. Even within the Labor Party. Constantly, every day, I would get it: “Where are the kids? How are you managing this? Are you okay? Are you mad?”’

  In truth, Sugden didn’t always know exactly where the kids were. She knew they were being looked after, capably, by her husband with the help of a nanny. They were fine. But lots of people assumed Sugden was not.

  Aren’t you lucky? This is one for the mothers with ‘wives’; partners who do stay at home, or work fewer hours, in order to take care of children. A working father with a stay-at-home partner is a perfectly ordinary proposition. A working mother with a stay-at-home partner, however, is lucky. This question, more than any of the other questions, involves a confusing and intimate clash of impulses in the breast of the woman being questioned. Usually, she does feel lucky. But she might also feel a bit stabby.

  While Sugden was treated like something of a freak for leaving her three young children to travel with the prime minister, her husband – who worked, and had the support of a nanny – became something of a hero.

  ‘He had much more help than I ever had,’ says Sugden, bluntly. ‘But people were all over him. “Can I help?” And to me: “Oh my God. You’re so lucky.” Even the childcare educators – “You’re so lucky that your husband can even do this!” Well, he had those kids too. Of course he should be able to look after them. It was as if he was some kind of male god. Of course I was grateful that he was supportive, but … my God.’

  Look around you. How many mothers do you know who routinely wrangle two or three children by themselves while the fathers are at work, or travelling? It’s so common as to be utterly unremarkable. And no one would ever track down the dad and remind him of his good fortune. That arrangement isn’t lucky. It’s just normal.

  Aren’t you amazing? Men who stay home and look after their kids, rather than working, can occupy an extremely strange neural landscape. It’s a landscape of extremes, in which they experience either the chill winds of exclusion or the hot breath of overpraise, but precious little in between.

  ‘There are daily comments like “Isn’t he amazing?” and “Isn’t it wonderful how he manages all the kids?” in a tone as though he were a charmingly bumbling Hugh Grant character,’ says Jane Morrow of her husband. ‘He feels patronised. I feel like shouting: “Yes, he is. But no more so than all the mothers out there juggling the same!” I did it for six years, and no one told me I was amazing.’

  A man who answers ‘I’m a full-time dad’, when asked the inevitable question at a backyard barbecue, can expect two broad responses. First, he may be viewed with suspicion or even contempt by other men. Secondly, he may be in distinct danger of being kissed to death by the women present.

  Daniel Petre, whose book Father Time was written about his active decision to put his family and children first, says he gets very distinct reactions from men and women. He had
hundreds of letters from women when the book was published; most lamenting their inability to reconnect with their overworked spouses. And mothers he met at school and elsewhere were hugely enthusiastic.

  ‘I’d get it all the time: “You’re such a great dad!” But I would just think, well, how would they know? And I’d say: “Let’s see. Wait till they’re twenty, and then we’ll see where I fucked up.”’

  Among fathers, though, Petre’s terrain was distinctly rockier. ‘You’re ostracised, because their wife thinks you’re a better father than he is. Men who had read my book would say, “You’re a dickhead. You’ve caused me more stress in my life.”’

  The hero–zero complex entangles men because – even after all these decades of change for women – we’re still not entirely sure where a man who does housework actually fits. Is he a failure, or a triumph? It depends who you ask. But its daily impact is more pernicious. Caught between two dizzying extremes – silently thought a failure by some, and wildly over-applauded by others simply for remembering to put socks on a child – a father doesn’t ever get a clear sense of how he’s actually doing.

  The American comedian Louis C. K., who has built his own TV show around his life as a full-time dad, is angered by the constant assumption that when looking after his children, he is just taking a break from his proper job.

  When I take my kids out for dinner or lunch, people smile at us. A waitress said to my kids the other day, ‘Isn’t that nice that you’re getting to have a little lunch with your daddy?’ And I was insulted by it, because I’m like, I’m fucking taking them to lunch, and then I’m taking them home, and then I’m feeding them and doing their homework with them and putting them to bed. She’s like, ‘Oh, this is special time with daddy’. Well, no, this is boring time with daddy, the same as everything.