As the daughters of second-wave feminist women have become mothers, the issue of housework has re-entered the fray as a major feminist issue, alongside equal pay, paid maternity leave, flexible work and access to childcare. In the Australian, columnist Emma Tom recently let fly on the perennial problem of how domestic labour is divided between heterosexual couples, revealing that many of her women friends were shocked to discover that having kids is still ‘such a gendered affair’. Young women, raised to be independent, career-focused and with an expectation of equality, suddenly find themselves at home all day with small children, drowning in domestic chaos and wondering when they agreed to all this.

With the so-called ‘mother-wars’ dominating the feminist debate in recent times, it seems mothering has emerged, at least in the West, as the movement’s final frontier. In a young childless couple, there may be arguments about housework, quibbling about who takes responsibility for the shopping or who forgot to pay the gas bill – people of course come to depend on each other and lives become intertwined in myriad ways – but prior to having children, a couple can still consist of two people leading independent lives.