Section:GDN 1J PaGe:5 Edition Date:190831 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 30/8/2019 17:53 cYanmaGentaYellowbla

Sat urday 31 Aug ust 2019 The Guardian •

5

Motherhood

and public life:

it’s still a battle

frontline politics because she had been “a poor daughter,

sister, partner and friend”, and that the birth of her son

last October had caused her to “make a diff erent choice”.

It was impossible not to empathise from the midst of

one of those failing-at-everything days familiar to many

working women, highlights of which included leaving

a valued contact waiting for me in the street in Glasgow

because I’d forgotten to cancel our meeting, and not

noticing my toddler was having a renegade shit on the

bathroom fl oor because I was checking my phone.

But Davidson deserves more than a mumly eye roll

of commiseration at the brutal pace of politics as she

hands over to – probably – yet another middle-aged,

middle-class white guy. The former Scottish Labour

leader Wendy Alexander, who stood down from the

position following a donations controversy when

her children were young, tweeted that she admired

Davidson’s candour and recognised her dilemma,

noting: “The overwhelming family sacrifi ces required

for serious party leadership only make sense when

you harbour no doubts about the prevailing strategic

direction.” Davidson was not coy about the political

calculation involved in her decision, although it was

notable that she did not use what was a dignifi ed and

collegiate resignation statement to criticise Boris

Johnson’s prorogation plans.

She has stated clearly that her decision was motivated

by a range of personal and political factors, the precise

percentages of which we shall never know, but let’s not

gloss over the boring balance stuff in the race to uncover

a juicier explanation. And let’s be clear, too, that she did

not suggest women can’t do top jobs and have young

children. When I interviewed her just before the birth

of her son, she was frustrated that the memoir she had

written about her struggles with mental ill-health and

her insistence that she didn’t want to be prime minister

(10 months ago, how fast the landscape shifts these



Libby Brooks

is the Guardian’s

Scotland

correspondent

days!) had been confl ated, and interpreted as suggesting

mental illness precluded suff erers from high offi ce. I’d

guess she is feeling the same frustration now. It has long

been a beef of mine, that way in which women in public

life are held accountable for choices they may not even

remember making, their individual fi xes or failures

extrapolated out to speak for their entire gender.

She spoke only for herself when she said she was

done with it, for now. For Davidson, it would seem the

sharpening of priorities brought about by motherhood

no longer tallies with the relentless, terrifyingly

capricious environment she has been gamely inhabiting

for nearly a decade.

And how quickly Scottish politics has changed since

the independence referendum of 2014, when Davidson

came to prominence, and the ensuing years when

female leadership appeared to have become the norm at

Holyrood, with Nicola Sturgeon , Johann Lamont then

Kezia Dugdale and Davidson.

Sturgeon and Dugdale did much to champion the

Women 50/50 campaign for equal representation across

Scottish public life, bringing women into politics from

council level up, though some worry these quotas

just boost the options of middle-class women while

failing to address underlying structural inequalities.

At national level, Women 50/50 points out that the

Scottish Tories are the only party not doing some

form of positive action such as twinning or zipping

for candidates for the 2021 Holyrood election. And at

home  there’s an urgent need to bring 50/50 equality to

division of household labour between men and women.

What has been magnifi cent about reporting on

these recent female leaders, a number of them

openly lesbian, is how unremarkable their presence

had become. What is painful about the aftermath of

Davidson’s resignation is being reminded that in reality

they remain the exception.

Libby

Brooks

I

’m racing across the central belt to cover Ruth

Davidson’s resignation , a row for missing an

important email from my son’s nursery ringing

in my ears, when I realise I’ve been reporting

on women’s diffi culty balancing work and

family for what feels like two centuries. No

wonder I’m feeling so ruddy tired. It’s the

sheer unwieldy intractability of the dilemmas

posed. It’s like getting stuck behind a motorhome

on a Highland road: the progress is teeth-grindingly

slow, you get tired of hearing yourself complain, then

suddenly you’re forced to reverse into a ditch.

At a press conference in Edinburgh on Thursday,

the now former Scottish Conservative leader, who is

widely admired for transforming her party’s fortunes

north of the border, explained that she was leaving

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