Mothers' Day this year, again, was a bit of a horror. According to the commercialised tradition, it's a day when we are supposed to buy appliances, lingerie or flowers for mums who're overworked, underpaid and unrecognised.
Particularly revolting ads show hubby feeling extra heartfelt, making brekkie in bed for wife/mum — something she is surprised and tremendously grateful for.
Mothers' Day was first proposed in 1905 by more conservative Â鶹´«Ã½ of the suffragette movement and became a national holiday in the US in 1914.
Although the suffragette movement at the turn of the century was united in a struggle for political equality, it was divided along class lines in both methods of struggle and underlying aims.
Working-class women then, as now, suffered from the same exploitation as working class men, and carried the added burden of lower wages and domestic servitude. For them, the struggle for formal political equality was part of a struggle for full social and economic equality.
Although wealthy women carried the burden of domestic management (the actual work was generally done by others), like all members of the ruling class they did not work or suffer exploitation. Holding some power in a domestic sphere, but denied it in the public sphere, they led very separate lives to men.
Thus these women did not have the same impetus to demand economic and social equality. In fact, they argued that it was on the basis of their social role as nurturers, carers and educators that they deserved these rights. They sought to perpetuate women's role in domestic work, not challenge it.
So it should not be surprising that they initiated the horrific marketing exercise of Mothers' Day.
But it was not a great victory for feminist activists. Despite the name and its connection to the suffragette movement, it demanded no improvement of conditions for mothers, such as child care, reduced working hours or cheaper nursing products. Instead, it concentrated on "celebrating" mothers' role within the family.
It was enthusiastically backed by greeting card companies and other businesses also lobbied for it to be a holiday. It has grown in scale, but remained essentially unchanged.
Our mums are owed $1.2 million each for rearing us, according to Monash University calculations of women's unpaid labour, $187 trillion a year. That's a lot of money which corporations and governments don't want to have to cough up.
All the work women do free "for love" could be socialised. In the early years of the Russian Revolution feminist communists argued against building Western-style homes with single stoves and laundries. They fought for mass food halls with quality food, child-care at work and mass laundromats.
This runs directly counter to the interests of the ruling elite, who much prefer domestic work to be done individually by women for no reward, rather than to have to fund it themselves.
A real Mothers' Day would be like International Women's Day, an opportunity for women to unite and fight together for improvements in the living conditions of women worldwide. But by making it a "celebration", it is a celebration of capitalist fantasies of motherhood.
It's not just a good chance for florists to sell their wares, it's also a good time to beat women over the head with sexist ideas about the inevitability of women caring for children without reward.
The really scary thing is there are some women calling themselves feminists now who advocate the same strategy as the ruling class feminists of the turn of the century. And not content with Mothers' Day, they have International Women's Day firmly in their sights.
There have been recent attempts in Sydney, Newcastle and Adelaide to transform IWD into a "celebration" of contemporary womanhood, including festivals, corporate sponsorship from cosmetic and baby product companies and dropping the demands on the government.
But such events, unlike the current marches, will do nothing to take women forward to full equality. Instead they, like Mothers' Day, will simply perpetuate a sexist division of labour in society and place the burden of child raising firmly on our shoulders.
Now, where's that $1.2 million?
BY RAE EVANS & ALISON DELLIT
[The authors are members of the Democratic Socialist Party, .]