Italy, in order to become a country for mothers, must kill the myth of motherhood
Non è un paese per madri by Alessandra Minello (Editori Laterza, 2022)
review by Claudia Mazzilli
A demographic essay that, while investigating the multiple causes of declining birth rate in Italy, is also a work committed to achieving the goal of parenthood as a free choice, for mothers and fathers. In this book, agile but rich in references to statistical surveys and accompanied by a large bibliography, Alessandra Minello explores the cultural, economic and social transformations that have hit Italian families, pushing them to make fewer and fewer children, within a broader European and global scenario updated to 2022, in the times of the post-pandemic and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, giving us the opportunity to recognize ourselves in a photograph just taken.
In the last seventy years everything has changed, apparently, with the entry of women into the world of work: yet we find that today only 50% of Italian women is part of the paid labour market and that women are still considered, first and foremost, as mothers. Unaffected by any economic and social revolution, resistant to any erosion, is the myth of motherhood. And the myth of work for men: while for men the birth of a child can even be a powerful career accelerator, because with the arrival of children fathers feel the duty to increase the economic resources of the family, the care of offspring remains exclusively a female vocation. A transversal figure for any class or level of schooling: for women with lower education, the arrival of a child can lead to make them quit their job (often because this is poorly paid and giving up women’s salary is cheaper than bearing the high cost of private care services or, according to other theories, because less educated women are less inclined to gender equality and more submissive in giving up economic autonomy). But highly educated women do not fare much better, for them, the arrival of a child in any case leads to a slowing down of their career, a demotion or a professional relocation below their aspirations.
The rhetoric of motherhood as the utmost achievement for women, used in public communication, is very often a plain propaganda, as in the case of the continuous attacks on the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy guaranteed by law 194; or also the Fertility Day established in 2016 which, instead of giving information on reproductive health, has become a reproducer of stereotypes, including the prejudice that “children suffer when mothers work”!
If until the mid-20th century, in rural society, birth control was not widespread and, on the contrary, children contributed to the livelihood of the family, providing extra hands for agriculture, today we want to guarantee children a standard of living at least equal to our own, but the Great Recession of the last decade, the mainstream narrative of the crisis, a labor market made up of unstable job contracts and winding professional paths do not encourage a higher birth rate. According to the Italian National Institute of Statistics data about families, social subjects and life cycle in 2016, 45.4% of women aged between 18 and 49 years don’t have children, whether as a result of a free choice or not: one of the highest percentages in Europe. Above all, according to Eurostat data, Italy is not a country for working mothers: 63% of women without children between the ages of 25 and 49 have an employment, a percentage that drops to 59% for women with one child, 56% for those with two, and 42% if there are more than two children.
Chapter after chapter, Alessandra Minello compares Italian public services for parenting support with those of other countries: in Italy there is no support for midwife home care for the period of breastfeeding, in which there is a high risk of postpartum depression (a service available in Germany); inadequate or insufficient nurseries and family allowances; working hours are not very compatible with school schedules of the children and with the “homework” assigned at school. These structural deficiencies are compensated in the parental support network: aunts, but especially grandmothers and grandparents, who once retired contribute financially, and also offering their time: a network reproducing once again the same stereotypes, (the grandmothers standing in for the mothers more than fathers and grandparents…) and however destined to become increasingly fragile due to the increase in the retirement age (because if you become parents later in life, you are bound to become grandparents later,) and the difficulty of counting on grandparents in a labour market characterized by strong territorial mobility (if today 66% of people over 80 have a child who lives less than a kilometre away, this figure could change in the future).
In some countries (especially in Northern Europe) the greater participation of women in the labour market is associated with effective welfare towards children and the family: in these countries fertility is higher than in Italy, but still lower than the two children per woman. For example, in Germany, despite the very reliable services offered to families, the number of children per woman is only 1.6: not much better than in Italy (1.3 children per woman).
Why so? Have women’s emancipation and the desire for education and a career killed the desire for children? Not really, and it’s not always the case. Here Alessandra Minello’s essay becomes more and more stimulating. If some pages seem to focus only to ordering or correcting partially information already available on the effects of economic conditioning on birth rate, with analyses that may not fascinate the lunàdigas convinced that the choice not to make children also passes through very intimate and private reasons (hence impossible to attribute to demographic or economic conjunctures), we then go on to analyse more hidden aspects, graye areas that risk going unnoticed.
The birth rate is higher only where the distribution of care roles within families is a little more balanced, even if it still does not reach full gender equality: a cultural change that must take place in the couple’s private life and is therefore more difficult to achieve – in any Western countries – but which sees women in Italy, Greece, Romania juggling through real “balancing acts” between work outside the home and domestic care work: a difficulty that seems to be a “reconciliation” between work and family and which in reality is an “overload”. Difficulties that, according to the data, even German women have, despite Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, is often cited as an exemplary model of emancipation, as a mother of seven children!
And it is necessary to make qualitative as well as quantitative clarifications regarding the time dedicated to children and the home. While fathers devote time to their children in activities of play, study support and in general affective relationship (perceived as more rewarding), women have the responsibility of the real and – alas – solitary domestic chores (cleaning, washing, cooking). Not without denial and self-deception.
A recurring game among those who deal with these issues is to note that every time you reflect publicly on this topic, there is always a woman who raises her hand and says: “Actually my husband at home does everything!”. When this person is asked: “But does your husband also clean the bathroom?”, silence generally falls, because in that “everything”, except in rare cases, the activities for which we consider a division of roles normal are typically included(pp. 39-40).
And so the “all” of men is to do the shopping, do some DIY work, throw away the garbage and entertain the children for a few hours, the “all” of women is everything else: too much.
Caregiving roles in the management of the home and the family, in a subtle and hidden way, greatly influence the paid labour market and penetrate the mechanisms of education orientation. Women carry out professions related to care that would not be very rewarding for men. Women, who in 1940 covered only 20% of university enrolments and in 1975 40%, in 2017-18 became 55%, thus achieving full gender equality in access to studies: however, the wage gap between men and women persists which, by linking women to the role of mothers, makes them perceive their salary as an accessory supplement to the fundamental salary, which is that of men. Moreover, women mostly enrol in humanities or pedagogical faculties instead of Stems (science, technology, engineering, information technology) perceived as more difficult or with careers that are not compatible with the family; some professional categories are now almost totally feminized (the teacher, the professor, the psychologist, the nurse…): it is precisely these professions that have lost prestige, because when women entered the labour market they did not have the same preparation, experience and awareness of men in terms of trade union rights.
Only slightly more than half of women managers in Italy have a child and, if women who have children do not reach the top positions, it is difficult for forward-thinking policies of reconciliation between work and motherhood to be implemented. Where men and women enter a profession in a more balanced way, it turns out that women are still conditioned by the “obsession with care”, obviously an unconscious adjustment that we carry with us by the game of caring for our dolls (the game is culture!). A clear example comes from university teachers who, in addition to being penalized and suffering career discrimination related to motherhood, during which they interrupt or slow down the commitment to scientific research, are also destined within the academic institution for care work: bureaucracy, teaching, reception and tutoring students…, to which they usually dedicate more energy spontaneously (or even by horizontal segregation) than their male colleagues, without this commitment being valued in career paths compared to mere scientific publications.
All this helps to outline and even strengthen the myth of women who, as a result of cultural pressures, ask themselves to be “caregivers” in every area of professional and private life, and whose multitasking commitment has fatally worsened in the pandemic, when the boundaries between childcare work and paid work have become permeable for smart-working and children’s distance learning, with additional stress, guilt and feeling of being even more inadequate (in simple words: having all family members at home increases the burden of tasks) that still remains to be explored for the psychological, social and demographic sciences. So much so that the job losses in 2020 has had a much greater impact on women than on men.
Still some pictures: in Italy families with only one child are half of the families with offspring, whether by choice or due to the difficulty of being able to plan further children before women’s fertility begins to decline.
Precisely because we are the country with the myth of motherhood, but of “natural” motherhood, very Italian-style, like tomato on pizza and organic limoncello lemons, we have prohibitions and taboos of all kinds. Surrogate motherhood (a theme that is actually divisive even for feminists, due to the ethical implications related to the exploitation of the female body…) is not legally viable in Italy, while heterologous assisted fertilization and adoption are legal but find strong limitations, to be sought in the cultural roots of Catholicism, causing discrimination between high-income families, which overcome practical or bureaucratic obstacles, even going abroad, and families with medium or low income, homosexual couples and single people, who access it with difficulty or cannot access it at all because they lack the requirements and are excluded by law. Alessandra Minello rightly observes that less exclusive laws on these matters would have little impact on the level of numbers in terms of birth rate, but would still lead to a healthy change in the myth of motherhood, so hindered in Italy because of an anachronistic vision in the framework of traditional, heterosexual marriage characterized by strong gender disparity.
In investigating the interweaving between culture and structure, between deep-rooted socio-cultural stereotypes and the system of services, Alessandra Minello recalls the sculpture Family Monument created by the British artist Gillian Wearing in 2007 in Trento: a mother, a father, a male son and a female daughter, a dog. If the work already aroused criticism at that time, today it would be even less representative of the many possible families that exist even in Italy. For example, immigrant families that, in turn, make fewer and fewer children: foreign women, in fact, are not much encouraged to procreate because they have equal or greater difficulties than Italian women in accessing public assistance services and also suffer a traditional distribution of the roles of care, for women, and paid work, reserved for men. In many cases these women, especially those from Ukraine and Romania, do not have children in Italy because they have left them in the countries of origin; like Italian women, they are often graduates in humanities, in which the language barrier is harder to overcome than for Stem degrees in access to work… And then, there are the families built on gay or single parenthood (one in ten families is a single parent family: they are the ones most exposed to the risk of poverty). And again: families with separations or divorces in which the burden of care is not shared but divided (each parent, when the children are with them, must meet all their needs). Families are also the couples without children, families or couples built out of wedlock (children born out of wedlock are now a third of the total), “extended” families, families in which the new partner does not have a defined legal role, even singles are “families”.
The 2019 Eurobarometer data show that 27% of Italians are opposed to equal rights for lesbian, gay and bisexual people, ranking among the least inclusive countries in Europe, although the international scientific community has demonstrated since the 1990s that there is no negative effect of homosexual parenthood and, if there are differences, these are positive, because the children of homosexual couples are more equal with respect to gender roles and more inclusive of any difference.
And it was 2009 – writes Alessandra Minello evoking a near past from which we struggle to emancipate ourselves from – when Lorella Zanardo published Women’s bodies, a documentary in which she denounced the sexist and stereotypical representation of women in the media, especially on television. Italy, still, is not a country for women: from domestic violence to those on social media to feminicides, hatred for women seems the cultural habitus of many men, and since 90% of violence is carried out by a family member (partner, former partner or relative), Italy remains a country where the family is often a container of oppression and violence often primitive (the most used weapon is the knife), not at all that celebrated “welcoming shelter” in which the “maximum possible realization” of a woman is accomplished, motherhood. It is worth mentioning also in this article the number 1522, which makes it possible to request assistance in the event of danger: a service prepared by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers and the Department for Equal Opportunities, within the framework of the tools that follow the Istanbul Convention against violence against women.
Alessandra Minello’s book does not fail to mention Lunàdigas as one of the communities most committed to deconstructing the myth of motherhood and to spreading the culture of women’s reproductive freedom. Because motherhood can’t be everything to a woman. And the data collected are really significant: according to the Swell-Fer (Subjective Well-Being and Fertility) survey, Italian mothers are among the most unhappy:
when their children are small, women do not find the time to take a shower, let alone meeting their friends. These should not be the standards, just as this status of hyper commitment and devotion should not be a medal to hang around the neck in comparison with other mothers or with those who are not mothers (…). Speaking of well-being, national and international research tells us that the well-being of mothers increases just after the birth of a child, but in the long run non-mothers have higher levels of contentment than mothers (pp. 48-49)
As the proverb says, small children, small problems, large children, big problems.
According to the ILO (International Labour Organization) gender equality in caregiving roles will be achieved in 2066 because the cultural implications of caregiving roles are very resistant to change. In the last pages of the essay, the scholar analyses the limits and potential of policies dedicated to family support, including paid paternity leave, a tool introduced in 2013 but of which only 33% of fathers have benefited (a percentage reached only in 2018, according to INPS data): the poor use of this tool, which does not weigh on the costs of the employer, can be explained only in cultural terms: the father who is ashamed of being a “mom”.
In a situation of equality, of dissolution of the spiral, every choice will be less constrained by ideological orientations, wherever they push. Whoever decides to be only a mother can do so, possibly in a system that facilitates all the paths that lead to motherhood. Whoever decides not to be a mother will not be judged. Whoever wants to be a mother and a worker will do it more easily (p. 115).
Above all, the author concludes, it is necessary to “kill the myths” and initiate in the family, in schools, in all training agencies, an education that is truly marked by gender equality, because the different education of girls and boys acts as a multiplier of differences by perpetuating stereotypes. Italy, in order to become a country for mothers, must kill the myth of motherhood.
