James Levine Quotes

The working mothers of America deserve medals.

If a mother is sitting in a chair at the office, someone needs to be at home with her child. In some cases, that is a father. Much of the time, the material manifestation of the conflict is a nanny.

There are 80 million moms in the United States. Forty million stay at home with their children.

Many men today can cook, or at least order takeout, and know where and how to hire domestic help, perhaps with refreshing clarity and less anxiety than ever-conflicted mothers.

It's the moms who always have to work a little harder, to make everything right.

We will never achieve equality in the workplace until we have more equality in the home. Our plans for an extra four weeks of parental leave specifically for fathers will help tackle the assumption that parenting is one of the 'girl jobs'.

We urgently need to address the assumption bound up in our employment laws and custody arrangements that women are the 'natural child carers' and men don't really want much to do with their children.

If a female wants to do a man's job, no one will stop her from doing it, but women have duties to perform as mothers.

All mothers are working mothers.

The reason child care is such a loaded issue is that when we talk about it, we are always tacitly talking about motherhood. And when we're talking about motherhood we're always tacitly assuming that child care must be a very dim second to full-time mother care.

As a partner in a firm full of women who work outside of the home as well as stay at home mothers, all with plenty of children, gender equality is not a talking point for me. It is an issue I live every day.

Women are smarter by basic instinct and by what we have to do to multitask at home and at work. My mother did that 50 years ago, but it wasn't called multitasking or stress back then. She had a job, two kids and the meals to make with no cook or maid. My father would come home every day and expect lunch. He was a nice guy, but he was clueless!

Working moms, stay at home moms, they're both extremely hard jobs.

The thing about dads is, even when they're very good, they don't do anything like as much as most mums do.

It's more pressure on women to - if they marry or partner with someone, to partner with the right person. Because you cannot have a full career and a full life at home with your children if you are also doing all of the housework and child care.

The more brutal it gets in the working world, the more appealing the prospect of having someone at home creating a sanctuary becomes. Increasingly couples, particularly with children, are making that tough choice, with one or other partner electing to embrace domestic duties while the other brings home the cash.

But, the truth is and we can argue about whether this is right or not as long as we want to, but the fact is that women really do spend more time with their families. Until I can find a man who can tell me the dates of all of his nieces and nephews birthdays and get presents out to them regularly, I'm going to stay by that statement.

Some women work while they are pregnant, but not me. That was a choice I had made. That's when I took a break. Men can work at whatever stage they are; whether they turn daddy, they still have their own thing. But women can't afford that because by being mothers, they have to be there for their kids.

As long as working women also have to do the work of child and family care at home, they will have two jobs instead of one. Perhaps more important, children will grow up thinking that only women can be loving and nurturing, and men cannot.

I know it's a lot harder for women who don't have enough help, but the truth is, no matter how much money you have, if you want to stay involved with your children and don't want to lose being a primary parent to them, you're still in the game.

And whereas women had to fight to find their way into the workforce, men are now fighting to reclaim their place in the family structure.

A mother's got to be there to raise the children. That's all there is to it. I feel badly for those mothers who work hard, and can't do it all the time.

I have been looking after the children. My wife has taken time off.

I think obviously we need to work harder at extending the women's movement. How do women who have prepared for careers and have a child get back to the workplace and still fulfill maternal roles?

I absolutely don't want to suggest that women are unreliable because we're mothers - on the contrary. But the question of who brings up the kids has a material effect on all women's careers.