Spot the working mother: happy, busy, and still treated as the caretaker

I didn’t have many positive images of working mothers when I was growing up in New York in the 1980s. Ferris Bueller’s estate agent mother was the first one I remember taking notice of, and what I noticed was that she was constantly being reprimanded by authority figures for being a slack parent while Mr Bueller was left alone in his high-tower office, bothered by neither his children’s irate headmaster nor the local police, so he could get on with his day of having fancy lunches. Then there was JC, the Wall Street executive in 1987’s Baby Boom, played by Diane Keaton, whose bosses were so horrified when she became a mother that they basically pushed her out the door. (Banished to Vermont, JC made money the only way open to mothers, which was making baby food.) Probably the best was Clair Huxtable, the lawyer mother in The Cosby Show. But let’s be honest, she never seemed to do much lawyering and, let’s be even more honest, if your most positive example comes from The Cosby Show, then you’re really scraping the barrel.

Like the majority of mothers in Britain, I work. My mother stopped working when I was born and I loved that she was always there when I got home from school – but that is not a financial possibility for me and, anyway, I really like my job.


Source : theguardian