From here to maternity

Run a country and juggle the responsibilities that come with a new baby? Good luck with that, Jacinda Ardern. Even New Zealand needs a full-time prime minister.

Jacinda Ardern at Buckingham Palace last week. Picture: Toby Melville/AP.

The CHOGM conference is sometimes thought to be an abbreviation for Chaps Holidaying On Government Money. Mostly, it is a good excuse for heads of Commonwealth nations to have their photos taken with the Queen or a glam young royal.

Increasingly it isn’t just chaps having the photo ops and this year all eyes were on one female head of state, and every woman who saw a photograph of her, decked out in gold dress and feathered cloak, including, I have no doubt, the Queen, probably were thinking the same thing: “How the heck is Jacinda Ardern going to manage to be the prime minister of a country and the mother of a new baby?”

Ardern has been challenged about her maternal plans on New Zealand radio, which annoyed her and brought forth the usual feminists yelling: “You can’t ask that.”

Why not? We know she is prime minister of New Zealand, not of Pakistan as Benazir Bhutto was when she was in similar circumstances. But even New Zealand needs a full-time prime minister, doesn’t it? There is disquiet on a few fronts in New Zealand about Ardern’s forthcoming parturition, for which she plans a mere six weeks’ maternity leave, while her partner becomes full-time carer.

Let me say right off that I give Ardern credit for her optimism, and I certainly don’t question her decision to have a baby in office. I wish her luck. She will need it.

There are the simple practical issues: the three to four-hourly feeds for which, being a greenie leftie, she will try to do using her own milk; the sleepless nights, which reduce many women to a zombie-like state; and the blithe confidence that after six weeks her partner will take over as full-time caregiver. Well, good luck with that one, too, because the father is not the mother and there is such a thing as maternal bonding, which is a basic post-partum physical need for mothers and infants. This woman needs at least six months off, not six weeks.

A more interesting person than Ardern is Germany’s Defence Minister, Ursula von der Leyen. Compared with von der Leyen, Ardern is a rank amateur. A protege of Chancellor Angela Merkel, von der Leyen is a physician by profession. She has been in German federal politics since 2009 when she was minister for labour and social affairs. In 2013 she was made Defence Minister. She is the first woman in German history to hold that office and she has been tipped, at various times, to succeed Merkel. Von der Leyen is also the mother of seven children.

How she manages with her children is interesting. She was a stay-at-home mother and part-time doctor for a while. Then she swapped places with her husband, also a doctor but with an academic career, so he could work from home. They are fairly well off but not rich, and although she seems to be the very model of a modern feminist the most interesting thing about von der Leyen is the way she diverges from the modern feminist play book, which is rigid in its assumptions about when and how to have children.

She was 28 when she married, but not only did she have many children, she had her children early in her marriage and close together. She is a great believer in the ability to combine your work and your family once the infant years are over and there is more time to devote to other things. Even though the adolescent years sometimes can prove to be more of a challenge than the infant years, there is simply more time when children are at school, especially if one has a supportive spouse.

We have long lives to live and there is no reason the apogee of a woman’s career should be achieved in her 30s. I had seven children in 10½ years. I was only 34. So, not only did I have another two children a bit later, relieved to be out of a classroom, I started a second career.

In many ways von der Leyen’s way of doing things heralds a new way that more women, particularly professionals, could achieve motherhood if they married securely and young. Obviously, the key is a committed father in a secure marriage.

Ardern is well versed in the feminist dogma, with its one article of faith that you must never query any decisions women make about their babies, even if she is the prime minister. Fair enough, one’s baby plans are a personal issue, but I do think people have the right to know how their prime minister intends to do her job when as a new mother she also will have a full-time baby job. There is no reason a woman with children cannot have a full-time career should her situation allow it, as does von Leyen’s, but this is the factor that shows up the essentially elitist perspective of feminism. There is a big difference between Ardern’s and von der Leyen’s situation and that of most women.

Most women are not high-flying careerists. Most women just have jobs that they do for money, whether it is standing up in a department store all day or in front of unruly schoolchildren, as I once did quelling the Visigoths of 9E remedial English. If they are lucky they may work in an office somewhere, but wherever they are working most women find the ideal of the glamorous career girl in the mould of something from Suits or Sex and the City is elusive or non-existent, and whatever they are doing most women want time with their babies, particularly their first baby.