How do working mothers feel about the government, and the resources it provides to support them?

In my interviews, Taiwanese working mothers generally feel neutral toward the government whereas Spanish working mothers have a rather negative, complaining attitude toward it. Interestingly, this satisfaction gap appears reversed—the Spanish government provides double the paid maternal leave (16 vs. Taiwan’s 8 weeks) and sixteen times the paid paternal leave (16 vs. 1 week). Shouldn’t Spanish working mothers be wildly happy?

It comes down to, I think, what came before and what you have in the neighborhood.

In Taiwan, just a couple of generations ago, mothers and fathers worked long hours. Their goal was basically survival. If they looked around their communities or to neighboring Asian countries, they saw the same thing everywhere: people working long hours with governmental support aimed squarely at workers. When the Taiwanese government began providing family-related benefits, women, at least most that I interviewed, took it in stride, neither clamoring for more nor less. Even my nonsalaried interviewees, Yu-Lan, the hairdresser, and Mei-Fen, the facialist, did not complain about receiving no pay for time off. Yu-Lan, in fact, returned to work early, not just for the money but because she was getting bored at home.

In Spain, however, paid leave—despite being generous in comparison to Taiwan and the US—is often a source of dissatisfaction. According to Sara, a content creator from Pontevedra-Galicia, moms have more responsibilities during the child’s first two years and should therefore receive two years(!) of paid maternity leave. Sofía, from Madrid, was dissatisfied with the 16-week paternity leave Spain instituted in 2021. Not begrudging the time her husband received, she felt that women needed correspondingly more time off—after all, her husband could not breastfeed their child.

Where is this dissatisfaction coming from? Perhaps Spanish moms are looking north to Sweden, where parental leave is more than double. With far more generous policies just next door, neighborhood envy is hard to avoid.

But the real kicker is with US working mothers. Remember, the federal government provides no paid time off—the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 only allows eligible employees up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave. In addition, Congress passed the Break Time for Nursing Mothers Act (2010) and expanded its coverage to more women in the 2022 Pump Act. Employers must “provide all breastfeeding employees with reasonable breaktime to pump and a private lactation space that is not a bathroom.”

My students and I were recently discussing the plight of US working mothers, described by Caitlin Collins in Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving. We kept noticing how grateful US mothers were for the crumbs provided by the government. In practice, those “designated spaces” were often uncomfortable or unsanitary, and working moms were still, according to Collins, pumping in supply closets, storage rooms, and handicapped bathroom stalls, and in their cars (222). Hence, when a company actually follows the law, the working mother is effusive with praise. According to one working mom Collins interviewed:

It’s beautiful…It’s a separate room with a lock key entry…it has lockers, it has I think four individual rooms with curtains, and each of them has a commercial-grade pump in it…it has a fridge and a microwave and a sink (221).

Collins notes that this mom was “grateful” for a room with just some curtains, a pump that could be shared, and a fridge to keep her breastmilk—even though a designated, non-bathroom space was required by law.

One of my own interviewees, Samantha, had made it her personal quest to do better for other moms at her company, noting that off and on ramps from work after having a baby were vital. She described how much time she wasted each morning and evening getting her breastfeeding gear organized and cleaned. So she pushed to install a commercial-grade machine at work so that new moms could save time. She also wanted to arrange for new parents to rent the SNOO smart sleeper, a $1,500 smart bassinet designed to soothe fussing newborns. But all this reinventing the wheel takes its toll—within a month of our interview, she had left this company.

These feelings—neutrality, dissatisfaction, and gratefulness—are real feelings these women express, rooted in particular lifeworlds they inhabit. It is perhaps through the comparative perspective that we might consider feeling something different. One student of mine kept insisting that there was something off about all this gratitude from US working moms—and here, I have to agree.