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Taxing families: families are finding they have no real options as ''flexible'' tax policies keep women and men firmly entrenched in their traditional roles.

Article Excerpt
The question of whether a 'balance' between work and family is achievable has dominated the heated debate around motherhood, feminism and the so-called fertility crisis in recent years. Sadly, the words 'conflict' and 'struggle' are far more commonly used to describe the negotiation between work and family than anything reflecting potential harmony between these supposedly distinct spheres of life.

While these spheres continue to be treated as separate under an economic system in which market forces rule, the chance of realising any such balance is slim. The ideologies of work have come to dominate our lives and, more tragically, regulate our thinking. As noted by Julie Stephens in Arena Magazine (no. 35, 1998), paid work and mothering are both subjected to an intensified (and unrealistic) technical rationality.

In the struggle to realise new definitions of the relationship between work and home, shared parenting has become an increasingly popular option for many families, including my own. Particularly once that first year of intensive mothering begins to loosen up and Dad starts to register more strongly on the baby radar, many women--whose careers were equally significant and often just as, if not more, lucrative than their partner's when they became pregnant--are seeking to re-establish some involvement in the paid workforce.

However, in making such a choice, many couples are forced...

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