Thoughts From a Yummy-Mummy

My first thought when I read this piece of infuriating poppycock from Mrs. Tony Blair was, “Ms. Cherie can kiss my yummy-mummy hiney!”

Cherie Blair, wife of the former British prime minister, has said that she worries young women are turning their backs on feminism by regarding motherhood as an acceptable alternative to a career.

“Every woman needs to be self-sufficient and in that way you really don’t have a choice – for your own satisfaction,” Blair told Fortune magazine’s Most Powerful Women event held at Claridge’s in London last night, according to The Telegraph. “You hear these yummy mummies talk about being the best possible mother and they put all their effort into their children.”

“Yummy mummy” is a UK slang term typically used to describe young, attractive women who live on their husband’s wealth, staying home full-time with their children.

Blair suggested that children raised in households with a full-time mom lack a sense of independence and can’t make their way in the world because their moms don’t have “professional ambition.”

It goes hand-in-hand with this other piece of infuriating poppycock from Elizabeth Wurtzel at The Atlantic:

Let’s please be serious grown-ups: real feminists don’t depend on men. Real feminists earn a living, have money and means of their own…

Hilary Rosen would not have been so quick to be so super sorry for saying that Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life if we weren’t all made more than a wee bit nervous by our own biases, which is that being a mother isn’t really work. Yes, of course, it’s something — actually, it’s something almost every woman at some time does, some brilliantly and some brutishly and most in the boring middle of making okay meals and decent kid conversation. But let’s face it: It is not a selective position. A job that anyone can have is not a job, it’s a part of life, no matter how important people insist it is (all the insisting is itself overcompensation). Even moms with full-time jobs spend 86 percent as much time with their kids as unemployed mothers, so it is apparently taking up the time of about 14 percent of a paid position. And all the cultish glorification of home and hearth still leaves us in a world where most of the people paid to chef and chauffeur in the commercial world are men. Which is to say, something becomes a job when you are paid for it — and until then, it’s just a part of life.

 

So let me see if I’ve got this:  If I hire someone to take care of my children while I’m out doing my feminist duty, then it’s a real job because that person was selected for the position and is earning a salary; but if I take care of my own children myself every day, it’s not only not a real job but it’s a waste of my energies and abilities and an insult to women everywhere?

I’m sick to death of the femi-nazis whining about how I’m betraying the collective by staying home to care for my own children and putting their needs ahead of my own ambitions.

(Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some recorded soaps to watch, Bon-bons to eat, a manicure to schedule, and some retail therapy waiting after that.  Ah, the sweet life of a traitor who never works!)