Kids are only well when mothers are well.\u00a0 Her project ‘wellcome’ helps families to order the everyday chaos.\u00a0 Strong women, strong country.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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Feminist theorists note that there are two ways to integrate women into a society as equals to men: as citizen-workers (who perform the same tasks as men, namely breadwinning) or as citizen-mothers (who perform different tasks than men, namely parenting). If, and this is a big if, we truly valued parenting as much as we valued breadwinning, then the latter is a perfectly viable strategy with which to bring about a gender egalitarian society.<\/p>\n
In the U.S., we conflate the idea of equality with gender sameness, assuming that any difference between men and women is a sign of oppression.\u00a0 So, to many Americans, the fact that this ad makes fathers invisible and holds women alone responsible for parenting is problematic (as Susanne noted).\u00a0 But different isn’t necessarily unequal and Germany (as well as France) has a tradition of supporting women as mothers.\u00a0 By “supporting” I mean generous social policy that rewards women in concrete ways for reproducing the nation.<\/p>\n
I’m not sure to what extent Germany still supports mothers with pro-natal policies.\u00a0 Susanne’s critique may very well be more accurate than my comments about different ways of integrating women into the state.\u00a0 However, I think it’s useful to problematize our assumptions about what equality would look like.\u00a0 If women were truly valued for their unique contributions, that would be okay.\u00a0 The problem in the U.S. is that we hold women responsible for childcare and also devalue that work.\u00a0<\/p>\n