One challenge of patriarchal society’s representation of a ‘personal trouble’ came through feminist insistence on the need for access to twenty-four hour, free childcare. Women have borne most of the responsibility for childcare (see Brown et al., 2001; Oakley, 1972; 1980). There is no reason why, having given birth to the children, women should have to do most of the work of raising them. Even where women wish to breastfeed they do so only for a small portion of a child’s life. With education, access to reasonable facilities, and tolerance of public breastfeeding, mothers can continue working and still breastfeed if they wish (Rea et al., 1997). However, children do continue to require attention and although many men are now more involved with childcare, the ultimate responsibility for children usually remains with the mother. If children are sick it is nearly always mothers who must reorganize arrangements for their care or take time off themselves. Women also continue to face attitudes within the workforce about them not being serious about their jobs either because they will soon have children or already have children, who are assumed to be their main priority. These attitudes affect women whether or not they actually do or will have children. They also affect a woman no matter how involved her partner (be they male or female) is in childcare and no matter how well a woman has made childcare arrangements (Adkins, 1995; Hochschild, 2003). Meanwhile, men can be fathers without that being thought to reflect on their job performance. Indeed it is possible in many cases that having a family can enhance a man’s career prospects, especially in the professions. A politician, for example, can make considerable use of his wife and children to promote an image of himself as respectable, strongly heterosexual and effectively paternal. For women, even though caring for children may bring much joy, family-unfriendly workplaces can make combining work and care very difficult. For instance, mothers frequently end up with little to no leisure time that is not devoted to family activities (Brown et al., 2001).
For all the above reasons feminists saw childcare provision as essential in the fight for equality. Those feminists who were less radical may have thought that twenty-four hour, free availability was an unrealistic demand but nevertheless agreed that if gender equality was to be achieved then women needed access to decent care for their children. The less timid insisted that care needed to be freely and constantly available if women were to be able to participate in work and other aspects of public life to the same degree and with the same success as men. They also were not convinced that the nuclear family of Mum, Dad and the kids was the best way to raise children free from ‘gender stereotyping’. Many felt that well-run childcare centres for all would help to raise a generation of children with
more egalitarian attitudes. The ‘private’ approach to childrearing was thought outdated and conservative, tending to reproduce old-fashioned gender roles. It was time, many feminists felt, for the important work of childrearing to be shared by the community as a whole. Also important in working towards raising children free from old gender prejudices was that women be able to plan whether to have children and, if they did, how many and when. Thus contraception was a crucial feminist issue.