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There is this myth that the Nazis invented Mother's Day, but that is as little as the rumor that Hitler was a convinced vegetarian. Maternal worship has been around for ages, and Mother's Day as a national holiday first appeared in the United States in 1914. It was an initiative of Methodist women's rights activist Anna Maria Jarvis, who found the commercialization of the holiday so bad that she later fought to end it. The Nazis jumped on Mother's Day outfit only after a florist's club brought the holiday to Germany in the twenties.

But although Mother's Day is not a Nazi holiday, there is a lot to complain about in the form in which it is celebrated. For a whole day, all the demands made on mothers will be decorated with flowers and drowned in icing, wrapped in compliments: Thank you for being the best (because of course you have to)! Thank you for giving so much, thanks for wrapping, comforting and cleaning (and woe, if not) to fatigue!

The Edeka commercial, which said, "Thanks mom, that you're not dad," is just a particularly obvious disgusting version of this supposed motherly worship. "We say thank you" stands as a title above the video, in which, of course, not at all thanked is said, but the feat is done to address parenting both women and men hostile: the idea that only mothers are caring, loving and attentive can, simply because they are women, is as old as obsolete. No, women do not know the shoe size of their children for genetic reasons, the birthdays of the children's friends or how a mixer works. "Mothers were not born knowing how to deal with children, they learn it, just like the fathers in the spot," author Patricia Cammarata wrote.

The promotional video has already been criticized, Edeka said, "Fathers do not want to portray bad, but something exaggerated and humorous way to mothers on the occasion of Mother's Day say thank you", I would just like to have a statement from Edeka about it how catastrophically she imagines the life of a child growing up with two fathers.

Mothers - the superman

Another agitator of the past few days was the question of plural marriage. "Men with SECOND WOMEN may become German," headlined the "Bild". It's a bit funny that home minister Horst Seehofer, the father of an extra-marital daughter, of all people, announces the fight. But above all, the opportunity is left to recognize relationships between more than two persons as marriages. The fact that there are men with several wives is only because there are no women with several husbands. The work that women do as housewives, wives and mothers would often be enough work for several people.

Appropriately, this year's Mother's Day coincided with the International Day of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Day of Nursing. It is absolutely right to thank mothers for bringing so much energy to create parenting, home and work in parallel. Unfortunately, this is often done as if this energy were inherently necessary, even though mothers would need far less superhuman powers if fathers demanded more responsibility. The power that mothers develop in a supposedly magical way is often just those that men do not have to muster because it does not give that expectation to them as a social norm. Nobody needs a cult to celebrate this, except patriarchy.

The extent to which our mother image is linked to the idea of ​​sacrifice is also reflected in the statutory provision on termination of pregnancy. In Section 219 of the Criminal Code, the section dealing with mandatory counseling before abortion states that "according to the legal system Abortion may be considered only in exceptional circumstances if the woman is burdened by the removal of the child, which is so severe and unusual that it exceeds the reasonable limit of sacrifice. "

Interesting picture of women. On the one hand, the state wants to "encourage" women to have children, even if they plan to have an abortion, and that is understandable at first: "Counseling (...) has to be guided by the effort to encourage the woman to continue her pregnancy and to open up their perspectives for a life with the child "- on the other hand, these perspectives are just that, that is directly said: sacrifice you already have.

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DISPLAY

Margaret Stokowski
Free downstairs

Publishing company:

Rowohlt Paperback

Pages:

256

Price:

EUR 12,00

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In the newspaper "Zeit" recently it was said that feminism would not care enough about mothers in Germany: "Is not the attribute 'mother' shiny enough for modern feminism?" I think that's half right and half wrong. Some of the publicly present German feminists are mothers and are committed to the needs of mothers (and not just those), but of course some media prefer to bring stories about "sex scandals" or beauty issues rather than spouse splitting, part time traps, old age poverty in mothers. At the same time, the diagnosis is that many women who know the problems of motherhood simply do not have time to be politically active.

Revision and money worries

One of the problems was addressed directly by the "time" text itself: "An average mother does not spend more than € 500,000 in her lifetime when she chooses the part-time solution." We would hear more about the problems of motherhood when women write about it more often, not only in blogs read by other mothers, but in the general public.

"A woman must have money and a private room to write," Virginia Woolf wrote 90 years ago. The sum of money that a woman needed to live as a writer, Woolf estimated at 500 pounds a year. That would be about 36,000 euros a year, more than most women have net available, who work full-time in Germany today. In Germany, mothers receive an average of 40 percent less pay than women without a child until they turn 45. As for the question of how many mothers have their own room today, I have not found a study, but would appreciate that it does not look very good there.

The best gift mothers could receive would be political and operational measures to ensure that motherhood is no longer associated with overwork and money worries. On Mother's Day you could solemnly remember how unworthy it used to be.