KEY FEATURES:.A leading feminist has hit out at the argument that people “need” a man to feel satisfied.
“It’s just you’re not looking hard enough.”
That argument is heard in a range of contexts, from the workplace to the boardroom.
But Jacinda Ardern, deputy leader of New Zealand’s Labour Party, has hit out at it when talking about women’s desire to have children, something she has dubbed “pregnancy satisfaction.”
In an opinion piece for New Zealand Herald, Ms. Ardern was reacting to the news that the lifetime risks of breast and ovarian cancer had been halved over the past 50 years.
“Statistics show that less women are getting pregnant as a result,” she wrote.
“Yet the narrative is that women ‘need’ men to be happy, to be fulfilled. “They ‘need’ to be pregnant for them to be satisfied. But their desire to be fulfilled does not revolve around men,” she added.
Pregnancy satisfaction is one of the ways that a “gender essentialist” society distorts female identity, she argued.
“It means that when a woman is ‘happy’, it’s because she’s ‘having children’. It’s not because she’s a carer, a wife, a friend, an aunt or a daughter.”
The first official discussion of pregnancy satisfaction will take place at Labour’s national conference in October, which Ms. Ardern has called to “ensure that pregnant women and mothers at all stages of their lives are supported by their workplaces and governments.”
“But that kind of needs-based policy is not only about well-being. It’s also about power.”
Ms. Ardern said she wanted to see a “real power shift” in how maternity is treated.
It was now not enough to allow women to take a paid break when they gave birth and to provide them with adequate compensation for having a child.
The answer was a revolution in how maternity is treated at work, she said.
Pregnancy is “no longer expected to be unpaid leave, or treated as a job which simply stops when a
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