When my daughter was just a couple of months old, we made a tea date in one of London’s ritzier hotels with a friend visiting from the States. Getting there took the best part of two hours by train and bus, and entailed the kind of new-parent over-provisioning that makes polar explorers look like light travellers. Never mind Antarctica—in those sleep-starved, love-drunk early days, it felt akin to getting us to the Moon. Still, I reasoned, as a nearly-new mother herself—not to mention one who’d just navigated a six-hour flight with a child under a year old—my friend could surely match us for tardiness.
Though she was already waiting when we arrived, her infant daughter restless but immaculate in what appeared to be vintage togs, Bo-Peep bonnet and all, we weren’t late. As I parked the pram and plopped down into a plush seat, I marvelled aloud at our punctuality. “I mean, I can’t believe we made it out of the house at all!” My friend only blinked vaguely back at me. And so it went.
I’d been looking forward to catching up, but when it came to the biggest news in both our lives since we’d seen each other last, we kept hitting conversational impasses. Not even sleep deprivation, the perennial parental equaliser, got much of a response. Eventually, all became clear: she was coy about admitting it, but my friend had a live-in nanny who frequently travelled with them.
Growing up, the closest I came to knowing kids with real nannies were those few with summer au pairs—Swedish or French teenagers, lithe and tan, who avoided us as much as possible. But in recent decades, nannies have wafted from children’s literature and royal households down into the upper-middle classes like a fleet of Mary Poppinses.
There was a fad, a few years back, for famous women to thank their nannies for facilitating their careers. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler even rapped about theirs in 2015. That moment has comprehensively passed according to a new book by Megan Stack. As Women’s Work tells it, women may refer to their nannies as “family” and take them along on holiday, but they rarely include them in family photographs or even anecdotes.
It calls to mind a riff in Joanna Ramos’s new novel, The Farm. An older woman inducts her niece into the art of nannying, from managing maternal guilt to controlling—or at least giving the appearance of controlling—the chaos that a child brings into lives that money has hitherto smoothed. Most crucial is this: though the parents will tell you to make yourself at home, “they do not want you to make yourself at home! Because it is their home, not yours, and they are not your friends.”
Feminism, to the extent that it deigns to peer into the domestic sphere these days, tends to over-emphasise the parity between professional women and those they hire—we’re all just working women in it together, right? Well, not really. Take gender out of the equation, and what you have are the privileged and educated becoming still more so on the backs of the impoverished and under-schooled. Moreover, while the former are often white, the latter are often dark-skinned. And who’s looking after their kids while they’re looking after ours? One of the first women I knew to have a nanny hired her from the Philippines. The nanny’s own young kids stayed home, presumably in the care of relatives, while she moved to London.
The ethics are complex enough—after all, who are we to question that nanny’s freely-made decision to work abroad?—but moral anxieties aside, the relationship between a child’s nanny and mother can be one of the most fraught going. As Caitlin Flanagan put it in a 2004 essay in the Atlantic, still bitingly relevant 15 years on, “The precise intersection of many women’s most passionate impulses—their profound, almost physical love for their children and their ardent wish to make something of themselves beyond their own doorstep—is the exact spot where nannies show up for work each day.”
For many high-powered women, live-in childcare is the only way they can have both children and careers. Katharine Zaleski, co-founder of PowerToFly, a platform to boost diversity hiring, says that when young women ask her for career advice, she tells them to “start a childcare fund.” Would similar advice ever be given to young men?
Maybe this is the one respect in which motherhood can claim to be the great equaliser it’s so often billed as: whether they’re doing it themselves or negotiating the tangled ethical and emotional terrain that comes with hiring a nanny, so much of parenting is still regarded as “women’s work.”
