Caitlyn Collins

In her fascinating cross-cultural study of motherhood experiences, Caitlyn Collins examines how women combine motherhood and work, and how different cultural models impact women's experiences. For her fieldwork, Collins chose 4 countries that were roughly representative of her 4 social frameworks: Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the USA. The research (field work) was confined to middle class mothers, in all cases but Germany (for specific reasons) centering on the capital city. While this limits some of the conclusions (and she adds caveats where applicable and possible), it helps provide cross-cultural reliability.

Sweden follows a social-democratic framework, in which the government and the people consider children a shared social responsibility, and the goal is to promote equality. To this end, services are universal and extensive, with some means testing (for example, childcare is based on income, but is capped at approximately US$160/mo). Policies are tweaked to ensure that goals are being met: for example, parental leave was adjusted to increase fathers' uptake, though currently, women still take more leave. Swedish women report the highest levels of satisfaction with the system (80% report job satisfaction) and the levels of support available. What's clear, though, is that the system relies on a three legged stool of support--not just government policy but businesses and society as a whole. Pregnancy is treated as a norm at work and Swedish families report the highest levels of egalitarianism at home. This results in the highest level of labor participation at 84%, with 63% working full time. Swedish mothers felt that working was the norm and that being a housewife was actively stigmatized. Swedes, unlike other countries, felt that daycare was better placed than family members (84% vs 10%) to care for children past the age of 1.

Although Sweden is the most egalitarian of the countries surveyed (and in the top few spots worldwide) it is not perfectly so. There is still a pay gap and mothers are more likely to work in the public sector. Women did report some pressure regarding mothering norms, including pressure not to leave their children in daycare too late (the ideal seemed to be between 3-4pm).

Germany presented an interesting case because of the differing histories in East and West Germany. For this reason, Collins did research in both parts of Germany. The western model, still reflected in much government policy, is a conservative one, with strong state involvement but one aimed at supporting a "traditional" family with a primary breadwinner (still a model prioritized by the tax system and school hours). There has been movement towards more support for working mothers, but it's a work in progress. In East Germany, however, the model was a two earner family, with women returning to work relatively quickly after childbirth. Working with children under 3 remains more common in the former East, which retains a stronger childcare infrastructure (public Kitas). However, the women in eastern Germany had a preference for "working, but not too much"--a preference for part time work, which was widely available even in white collar jobs. Women here experienced their conflict as one with social ideals, especially in western Germany where working mothers are derided with the term "Rabensmütter", and discrimination against mothers. The former policy of 3 years maternity leave, which sounds generous to Americans, was resented by women as they felt judged for not taking it.

Italy's model is familialist: it relies on extended family networks. Maternity leave is mandatory for 5 months; paternity leave did not exist until 2013 and currently stands at 4 days. This shapes habits. Women here feel that they are unsupported, although on paper they do enjoy benefits such as subsidized childcare, and the target of their blame is the government. In return they feel little shame for working around the system, as do their employers (who employ loopholes). Unlike the Germans and Swedes, they make use of low cost private labor as nannies and cleaners, and had the lowest levels of male participation at home.

The US has an extreme form of the liberal (free market) model. (Other Anglophone countries follow this model to some extent, especially for childcare, but none to this extreme.) Unsurprisingly, given the low level of supports in the USA, the stories here were the most depressing. American women have low expectations and blame their stress and conflict on their failure to make poor choices and manage their situation--not on their employers' unrealistic expectations of them as ideal workers, or the poor state of US childcare. They consider themselves "lucky" when things work for them, even when they're just getting their legal rights such as lactation time. They experienced the highest level of conflict between ideals--the "ideal worker" and the intensive mothering expected of them as middle class parents. They also had the highest levels of financial stress and the highest need for outsourcing of labor. Although couples paid lip service to egalitarianism, it didn't bear out in practice in most cases, even in couples that had been egalitarian prior to children.

The clearest message here is that "What women want" isn't innate or an absolute: women's wants are shaped by policy and culture, and our choices are made in response to the incentives we have. In the US, we have a tendency to brush off women's decisions about motherhood as "choices," as if that represents our ideal and our heart's desire. It does not. It represents what a woman thinks is the best option available to her in a given scenario, not necessarily what she would choose to do in a universe of infinite options. It's also clear that there is a need for buy-in on multiple fronts for women to be supported. Although German and Italian mothers are not as poorly supported as American ones, they, too, report conflict because they lack full buy-in. The US fails here not only because of our hyper-individualism, but because policy solutions are often stymied by out insistence on seeing decisions about women's work and support as a moral question. We are taught to resent "paying for others," but we continually treat issues surrounding childcare as a woman's problem that is her job to handle.

Although Collins' fieldwork is limited by necessity (she spent a summer in each country interviewing women, so this limited her geographic scope) she does an excellent job of presenting the women's stories. I believe this was PhD research, but it's clearly written and an excellent read. It's not a journalistic "Europe does it better" book, but one that non-judgmentally seeks to see what each model does better and worse. Even in Sweden, where the overall picture is excellent, she's rigorous in reporting remaining issues, and in all cases, she brings up examples where well intended policies had unintended consequences.

As Collins points out, each country exists in its own context and we cannot conjure up Sweden--in part because we lack the tight sense of cohesion and communal responsibility that the Swedes have. While Collins doesn't get into this, the Swedish model also rests on support for other forms of caring for the disabled and elderly, which often also rest on women. Moreover, I suspect that even in an ideal world, the US' diversity would probably demand more diverse models. However, there's a lot to learn from here--if only more of us would listen.… (más)