The birth of a baby to a woman in the paid workforce puts the mother in the position of having special needs compared with an ideal worker. These special needs have long been the subject of feminist debates about sameness/difference—do maternity leaves protect women, or marginalize them? If the leave is too long, is the woman harmed? How do we conceptualize policies protecting breastfeeding workers at work—policies to allow pumping breaks, for example—within an equality-promoting approach?
Breastfeeding workers, because they have distinct needs, are entitled to special treatment. But how can we ensure that this special treatment does not make breastfeeding workers more vulnerable? Williams argues that “treating women differently can leave them vulnerable as well” (2000, 207).
To correctly apply the principle of treating men and women the same requires that formal equality be combined with an analysis of gender and power. Once this is accomplished, an analysis of masculine norms takes center stage. (Williams 2000, 207)
That is, the ideal-worker norms that define appropriate work behavior need to be dismantled. Breastfeeding workers receiving special treatment at work will be vulnerable so long as that special treatment is not combined with a dismantling of ideal-worker norms. The ideal-worker assumption that employees will come to work in the morning and be available, with no family or care commitments, until they leave nine plus hours later must be discarded. Once that norm is discarded, the “special treatment” of breastfeeding workers in the workplace will cease to render women vulnerable.
42
regime. An equality-promoting regime is not a genderless, sexless regime. But, if ideal-worker norms are dismantled, and fathers’ and mothers’ caregiving roles are acknowledged, then all manifestations of caregiving commitments at work will be accepted. Fathers and mothers can leave work to pick up sick children, or to take their elderly parents to appointments. Indeed, changing institutions to remove assumptions that they are built for male lives is important; “When institutions are designed around men’s bodies or life patterns, the first step in achieving gender equality is to dismantle masculine norms” (Williams 2000, 217). Mothers alone will retain the “special,” sex-specific need for breaks in which to pump breast milk. But in a context where caregiving is expected and accommodated, this difference will no longer operate to marginalize mothers in the workplace.
One need not be a maternalist or in favor of a norm of mothercare to argue for special treatment of mothers. One can argue for a new norm of equal parenting while still
acknowledging that mothers have special needs and that there are tasks (like breastfeeding) that can be completed only by mothers. Even in the period in which breastfeeding is time intensive (for at least the first six months of a child’s life), fathers can remain equal carers, providing for the dozens of other caregiving needs of infants.
It is true that only breastfeeding mothers at work will experience the interruption to their work day from pumping breaks, and that fathers and formula-feeding mothers have no similarly situated task to perform. If we accept that the ideal-worker norm is untenable, this is just a fact of human life. Alternately, we can advocate for maternity leaves that will accommodate the bulk of the breastfeeding relationship. Feminists have good reason for advocating for longer maternity leaves on the basis of the needs of breastfeeding workers: maternity leaves offer mothers access to their children (as I discuss in chapter 3), which is correlated with higher levels of
43
breastfeeding success, and avoids the logistic problems associated with finding appropriate places at work for mothers to express and store milk.
Another option is to advocate for on-site childcare facilities, which allow breastfeeding workers to go to their child to feed, rather than take time for pumping breaks. But this only works at relatively large firms where workers remain in one location throughout the day. The important point here is that an equality-promoting model that acknowledges the existence of sex- specific needs, and which has eschewed the ideal-worker norm, will be able to accommodate longer maternity leaves, on-site childcare, and pumping breaks without harming breastfeeding mothers. Under the current scheme, longer maternity leaves are (arguably, see Keck and Saraceno 2013) associated with an overall reduction in mother’s labor market participation and overall financial security, but that need not be true in a system that expects that all parents (and, indeed, all humans) have caregiving responsibilities. Under the current scheme, on-site childcare is unavailable to most workers because access to children is anathema to the ideal-worker norm. But it need not be under an equality-promoting regime. If the equality-promoting model
succeeds, it will do so within a redefinition of gender roles that accommodates caregiving. The happy conclusion of this is an ideal that can accommodate sex-specific caregiving differences like breastfeeding without increasing women’s vulnerability.