Full-time work is increasingly difficult to reconcile with family life: this is why we should think of new ways of understanding parental leave
When Rubin Ritter, co-CEO of Zalando, announced his resignation to devote himself to his family and allow his wife to focus more on her career, I immediately thought of my brothers-in-law. My husband’s brother and his partner met in London as soon as they were twenty, they were making masks in the same cinema, one of the many jobs with which young Italian emigrants made ends meet. When I joined the family, they had 2 children. And the story of how they had raised them was already legend. At the birth of the first, it was she, who became a midwife, who took part-time work to follow him. At the birth of the second, he did it, bookseller. In their case, it wasn’t astonishing careers or six-figure fortunes at stake, but survival without relatives or help in a city like London, of great distances and great costs. The famous compromise that leads thousands of new mothers to leave their jobs (40,000 in Italy in 2019) or to take part-time work. With the difference that my brothers-in-law, in the 90s,
Anyone who thinks that the choice of Rubin is a luxury for rampant entrepreneurs or a benevolent concession to his wife should therefore know that this is not the case. On the other hand, the invention of the housewife at the end of the 19th century, as Silvia Federici in Gender and Capital recounts , was a work of social engineering aimed at accompanying not the career of the ruling class, but that of the workers . Capitalism wanted them strong and robust. So much so that he raised the men’s wages so that they could keep a woman who would take care of them and raise a generation of equally solid future workers.
Rubin’s choice reveals a truth that we tend to minimize for fear of losing emancipation quotas: you can’t really have everything, full-time work for both and family . Many make it, I know, but thanks to a network of aid or at the price of hidden compromises, which trigger a sense of inadequacy in those who do not want and cannot make those compromises. Rubin’s choice tells us that it is time to plan new family pacts. As the housewife was designed over a century ago, now that physicality is no longer the main skill required in the world of work, we can imagine a completely new couple’s time schedule, which puts both ambitions and desires on the same level .
The choice of Rubin tells us that you can dedicate yourself to the family because you want to do it and because that too can be an exciting project. Beyond the headlines, what he wrote to his employees is that “after 11 years of Zalando having priority, I want to give my life a new direction”. In these words we feel not the oars in the boat, but a compass pointing to a new goal, that of raising and starting children in the world. A completed project, little more than a start-up . After which to open a new chapter of our existence.
