In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Introductions

Laura

Hello to all Feministe readers and contributors! I’ve been very invited to guest blog at Feministe this week. I’m very grateful to get this opportunity to discuss my interests in feminist politics with a new audience. I’m looking forward to getting your input and feedback. I thought I would first introduce myself and talk about how I first got drawn into learning more about feminism.

I’m Laura McKenna. I’ve been blogging at Apt. 11D for six years now. My blog covers a wide ranging topics ranging from education to parenting to public policy. I’m an academic. My PhD is in political science, and I’ve published papers on education politics and on new media. I just returned from a political science conference where I delivered a paper on internet politics. I’m still recovering from my trip, so my blogging will pick up as the week goes on and I catch up on sleep.

My interest in feminism was triggered not by my academic work, but by real life. I always considered myself a feminist, but I didn’t major in women studies and never took a class on that topic. I never felt that my gender had interfered with any of my goals. I did well in my classes and competed on equal footing with the men who dominated my field. I understand that I was very lucky. I was a feminist, but not a terribly active or informed feminist.

And then I had a baby.

Due to a gross miscalculation of the time that it takes to write a dissertation, I had my son, Jonah, when both my husband and I were writing our dissertations. We were living in a cockroach filled, four floor walk-up apartment in Manhattan, Apt. 11D. My parents loaned us some money, and we took turns writing and watching the kid. We both ultimately finished, but that experience changed us in many ways.

I read a ton of books while I was nursing. Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions was the first book I read. But as I felt my career prospects shift, the obstacles to employment increase, and the juggle of work and family became overwhelming, I turned to feminist writers for direction. I read the The Feminine Mystique on the sofa of that apartment, while breastfeeding Jonah. I read Naomi Wolf, Ann Crittenden, and Arlie Hochschild. These women were midwives of a sort as they ushered me into a greater understanding of the obstacles that women still face as they seek to raise their children and to fulfill their own professional promise.

This week, I would like to write about feminism and motherhood. My training is in political science, so I tend to see things in terms of problems and solutions. What are problems that hold women back? Can we define these problems and quantify them? How can government step in to make things better? Can we create public policies that enable women to achieve their goals and improve the lives of their children? I hope to point readers towards great organizations and proposals, as well as get ideas from the collective knowledge of the blogosphere about how to improve my own thinking in this area.

Thanks for reading.

9 thoughts on Introductions

  2. My story follows yours in that I practice law in a male-dominated field (tax) but have never felt limited by my gender. As my due date approaches and I remain unmarried…well it’s already getting interesting. Looking forward to your posts.

  3. I look forward to your posts. Like you, I experienced little overt discrimination (the occasional wtf conversation, but not much else) for much of my life. And then I had a baby. And HOLY GOD, gender inequity landed on me with both feet. And I have a spouse who at least tries to be an equal partner. Over the last two years, I’ve gotten angrier and angrier at the gender inequity inherent in the expectations of the nuclear family.

  4. I’m looking forward to your posts too, but I can’t say that I haven’t experienced much overt discrimination—more like a lifetime heaping helping (with seconds! thirds!) of it. It started before kindergarten and kept on truckin’.

  5. I remember how much I loved reading your blog when I lived in Brooklyn/NYC and am glad to see you still at it!

    To me, the basic problem is that “work” is based on patriarchal assumptions; childbearing, childrearing, and caring for others is considered “extra” or superfluous, not something that work scheduling should have to take into account. If women had been allowed to work at an equal level with men all along, then maternity leave, working from home, flextime, and daycare benefits would be standard, not “luxuries,” and men would have similar rights as well.

    Right now, you’re considered to be getting away with something or a good negotiator if your employer does any of those things; you are often also resented by other employees for getting “special treatment.” When of course, the truth is that a) women work and b) a majority of adult women will have at least one child in their lifetime. And c) men are parents too, of course.

  6. You might not have felt discrimination, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. It’s so enmeshed in our culture that it’s inescapable. Succeeding despite it doesn’t excuse it in my mind. Look at the recent example of our mutual friend whose first-grade daughter didn’t have to do the challenging math worksheets. Only the boys had to do those. The little girl didn’t experience that as discrimination, and the teacher (a woman) wasn’t even aware of her bias. Could that little girl turn out to be a math major despite this? Yes. But every instance of this sort of treatment diminishes her chances.

    I have no doubt that motherhood brings out a whole new dimension of discrimination and judgment. Our ideas of what a mother should be and do run deep, and when a woman deviates it’s worse than when a single woman deviates because, think of the children!

  8. Oh, yes, Suze. I’m quite sure that I faced a lot of subtle discrimination over the years. For example, I was really good at computer programming in high school and college, but my parents never encouraged it. I ended up editing computer books instead. A rather sizable pay difference, no? I just wrote that I hadn’t noticed it at the time. That’s why I hadn’t read up on the topic. Forgive me. I’m slow.

  9. I’m kind of jealous that you and some of your commenters never felt any discrimination before kids. I, on the other hand, have been discriminated against since the day I was born, and not only by men. My grandmother told my mother that if I was a boy, she would give her a set of china. Alas, no boy, so no china. The same occurred with my sister’s birth. I have received a lifetime of discrimination and mixed messages from various family members as well as from society as a whole. I don’t know how you missed it all.

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