Free choices!

Reaction to reading this Guardian article "Should women really be rushing back to work after-birth?"[1]:

The more I read it and the more I find it misleading, while at first glance it rather seems to take sides for a good cause.

I agree that a woman will most certainly feel the need and the desire to devote time to her baby and body after birth, and the ideal would be to have longer maternity leaves, flexible hours, businesses and states that are more proactive in this field etc. However I cannot help but think that this search for "the more natural" can be a look back at many advances of women’s rights and free choices for which our mothers fought, and make it more difficult or confusing for women who might want to go back to work as a free choice.

If one is able to make any wish in a conscious and free way, then there is nothing to say, but we have to watch out for the occasions in which those wishes are “recuperated” buy the market economy, by politics, by a way of talking that is not coming from the “free meaning of being a woman[2] ”, nor of being a man.

I think that an article about these questions should mainly put in evidence the fact that women don’t want to do it all at the same time and be these superwomen that society asks them to be. Because we know that the meaning of work has to change, for women and men, and it is being delayed.

Moreover, besides the fact that I agree with many comments on the Guardian website on some dubious comparisons the writer makes, I wonder: is it not time that this kind of Article also mentions the word "fatherhood"? At least once? Respecting all the personal options of each woman, should we not put into the balance that these issues very often concern two people, and that if more men don’t get involved into the debate and start to stand up for their own rights, this will never advance.

And finally, the most important anyway is it not that women have a choice? The freedom to do with their bodies, their work, their life what they want, consistent and shared with men or women if they chose to form a family? And that if they are happy working relatively early, their children and their families will be too?

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[1] http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/11/should-women-really-be-rushing-back-to-work-after-giving-birth

[2] From the expression of María Milagros Rivera, “el sentido libre de ser mujer”. In RIVERA GARRETAS, María Milagros: La diferencia sexual en la Historia. Valencia, Universitat de València, 2005