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| Feminist Motherhood |
Feminist Motherhood
How does being a feminist impact on being a parent? Why do we still have the Mummy Wars? How do we find equality with the role of raising children?
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Articles ...
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http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/07/31/1027926912827.html
“When I became a mother, aged 35, I too felt I had been duped. Suddenly, and dramatically, I was no longer independent; worse, I was not equal. Not just angry, I was furious. Instead of waves of contentment and joy, I was experiencing waves of boredom, frustration and loneliness. I was delirious with exhaustion and felt on the edge of madness most of the time.
I had worked in some stressful situations - with underground human rights groups under military regimes, in refugee camps guarded by armed militia, as a mediator between hostile opponents. None of this compared to the stress of caring for a newborn baby. Even more shocking to me, I was working harder than I ever had, and I wasn't even getting paid!
Motherhood impoverished me, both financially and socially. Gone was the moral support and peer recognition of my previous workplaces, along with the pay packet. My life seemed reduced to endless rounds of menial chores, and the isolation was terrifying. The reward? Well, my baby was happy. But I was miserable and angry. Why wasn't I told? Why did feminism forget motherhood?
The answer is, simply, it didn't. From the very first wave, through to the inception of the second wave with Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, feminists have identified motherhood as a primary factor in the oppression of women and a vital ground for struggle.”
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http://www.mothersmovement.org/features/05/playground_rev/peskowitz_1.htm
“I think the gap between growing up and feeling like we're in charge of our lives, and the reality of becoming a mother right now in our society can be debilitating, and depressing. It makes us feel ashamed, and it makes us frustrated and angry, and these emotions are hard to give voice to. So we take it out on other mothers, mothers we think are doing it wrong. Mommy Wars judgments really say "You working mom/stay at home mom, you think you have it made, you think you're doing the right thing, but you're not and you're wrong." That's their message. You're wrong and I'm right. They pretend that the answers rest in the individual decisions we make. We're mad, and it's hard to know who or what to be mad at, so we take it out on other women, because we know they're as vulnerable as we are.”
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http://www.wearsthebaby.com/askfemmom/oldaskfemmom.htm
“ASK THE FEMINIST MOTHER. "What about Barbie? It is perhaps the single most heinous reflection of sexism in childhood. But my daughter loves her, and I strongly believe that her creative play is her business, so what can I do?
What if your 5 year old boy wants a skirt and you have a limited clothing budget and realistically you know he won't get lots of use out of it.
As a feminist I am having a tough time with my recent admission that I would like to have a daughter. I mean we are supposed to be trying to get over this labeling people by gender and all that, so how come I still crave a daughter and should I feel bad about it? "
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http://www.mothersmovement.org/features/05/hirshman/homebound_1.htm
“Hirshman's dispassionate analysis of child-rearing as a shameful waste of human capital -- and her uncompromising (yet unoriginal) playbook for putting women on top -- managed to offend just about everyone.
I agree, for example, "the belief that women are responsible for child-rearing and homemaking was largely untouched by workplace feminism." Detractors of "workplace feminism" say it failed to factor in the realities of caregiving, but its fatal weakness was optimism. I also agree that mothers sometimes soothe the discomforts of their inequality by falling back on the motherhood mystique, particularly with the pep talk "being a mother is one of the most important jobs in the world," and the tiresome fiction that men are hopelessly unreliable when it comes to child care and housekeeping. (If you don't believe me, check out Rebecca Traister's interview with the co-founder of Total 180, a perky new magazine for the professional woman turned at-home mom. The magazine's editors trade on the title "CHO" -- Chief Household Officer -- because "when women leave the workforce, you feel like you've lost your identity," and apparently having a fake honorific of one's own can ease the pain.)
I positively applaud Hirshman when she writes: "Like the right to work and the right to vote, the right to have a flourishing life that includes but is not limited to family cannot be addressed by the language of choice." The freedom to choose -- which positions women not as self-determined individuals with inalienable rights, but as informed consumers in a world of market-driven options -- is far too murky and diluted a claim when the problem at hand is a shortage of social justice.
Beyond that -- well, nobody likes to be told she's living a "lesser life" because she prioritized child-rearing over career-building for a few years, or that her behavior is bad for her, "bad for society," and "tarnishes every female with the knowledge that she is almost never going to be a ruler." That the process of caring for others may lead to self-awareness -- self-awareness which can spark individual growth and development -- is not in Hirsman's realm of possibilities. Frankly, feminism has been around this block before, and it estranged many women with egalitarian sensibilities from the cause.”
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http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,548786,00.html
“Rachel Cusk is the author of three elegant, Jamesian novels but this strange book is more readable than all of them put together. It is as compulsive as a thriller although its plot (pregnancy, birth, colic, sleepless nights) is - naturally - a shambles and its cast tiny and undistinguished (mother, father, baby, doctor, health visitor, a few friends). Its time scheme is wild - vertiginously unchronological, as if to convey the disorientation of fatigue: babies destroy all sense of conventional time.
I recognised this account of motherhood and found it foreign - because it is so unrelentingly dark. She feels like an exhausted prisoner and wonders forlornly whether the baby likes her at all. And while her witty valour never deserts her (I love her description of the baby as a 'tetchy monarch'), there is no pretence that the book is anything other than a lament. Birth marks the loss of selfish freedom and an undivided mind.”
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http://www.mothersmovement.org/features/mhoodpapers/activist_mother/made_me_do_it.htm
“I'm always reluctant to make sweeping generalizations about the individual experience of motherhood, but I think it's safe to say the process of becoming a mother can alter a woman. Some of these changes may be superficial and temporary. Some may be welcome, others less so. Sometimes the process of becoming a mother works into the deepest cavities of the self and fundamentally transforms a woman's worldview. And although I still can't explain exactly how it all happened, in my case becoming a mother sensitized me to the asymmetrical distribution of power in our society and how harmful it is to women and families.’
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http://www.isis.aust.com/win/daughtersoffem.htm
“These anti-maternal feminists (many of whom happen to be mothers), who didn't tell us about our biological clocks, or how heartbreaking it is to have a termination, or how torn we'd feel about leaving our kids in care, they did nothing for mothers, right? Interesting then that accessible contraception and child care were the cornerstone achievements of second-wave feminism. That would suggest, wouldn't it, that feminists did know something about the limits of combining career and care.”
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http://www.mothersmovement.org/features/05/f_fox_0504/judging_mothers_1.htm
“What exactly is going on in mother's judgments of each other, and how is feminist community-building possible within this all woman sphere of critique?
Were these really judgments, or was I just being paranoid, touchy? I was grossly underslept; maybe this made me imagine a cruel intent that wasn't there."
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This Feature Topic has been researched and collated for the April 2006 Newsletter
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