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Faminist Theory

Jill

Apparently women cannot be both mothers and feminists — we have to choose between prams and politics. And most women are choosing prams! Which means that while in the past “women were protesting compulsory motherhood; now, it seems, they are not protesting anything at all—they are too busy mopping up crumbs.”

Filed under “read it and punch something.”

19 thoughts on Faminist Theory

  1. Wow. Abortion numbers are dropping because “it’s all about the fam?” Also, any mention of all the women (Black women, Native women) who have been fighting for the right to reproduce all along? Of course not.

  3. There are quite a few false dichotomies presented in this piece. Uh, to start off, what’s with the pill vs. pregnancy dichotomy? There are in fact other modes of birth control. What’s with abortion vs. pregnancy dichotomy manufactured later in the piece? Again, other options exist, and I wouldn’t think abortion and motherhood are choices that exist in rivalry with one another given how common abortion is among mothers.

    And “faminist?” Observer, please do kindly lay off the trend piece coinages. The Observer seems so consistently to aspire to stoke insecurities and anxieties. You aren’t politically committed enough if you’re a mother; you ‘re out of fashion if you’re feminist; and you sure as hell aren’t adequate if you’re not wearing this season’s shoes or up on this moment’s inane cocktail chatter. Irina Aleksander has a particularly bad track record here, but it seems to be the raison d’etre of the whole of the paper. Ick.

  4. Faminists: Women who call themselves feminists because they saw it in a TV show once and thought it was cool.

  6. I’m just wondering if you listened to the audio portion of the piece. It sounds to me that she is stating that women can be feminists and mothers.

    She said that the “faminist” is the same as being a “feminist”. Feminism has changed to where women are pushing for lactation rights, school rights…etc. However, she does not state that fighting for abortion rights and not having a family is a bad thing. Women can have their careers and families as well, they aren’t mutually exclusive. Being a wife and a mother is okay if you’re a feminist. However, I don’t think that abortion and the pill are selfish, as she states.

    I think by just reading the article, you miss a lot of her meaning.

  7. I did not think the article was that bad.

    It describes a real phenomenon where many women have the perception that the feminist goals have been largely reached. If you believe this then you see no real need to fight for further feminist progress.

    In one sense these women are feminist, since they believe in the ideals. The difference is that they consider for example gender equality as a generally accepted given. So they do not see being a feminist as an important part of their identity and it is not a question they focus any energy on.

    How to address women like this is a very interesting question, but it is a very common view (at least in my anecdotal experience).

    If you do not see any injustices in your everyday existence it is fairly easy to not see it as a problem. On the other hand, as one of the women in the article said: “What flies in Park Slope and the Upper East Side is very different from most Americans. So the idea that woman as an individual is not a political issue is willful ignorance.”

    The slideshow was weird, though. It seemed to just show well known mothers, with no other connection to what I saw as the thesis of the article. So perhaps I am projecting a bit here…

  8. I thought the word “faminist” was from the root word “famine”, then I realized it came from “family”.

    I think I was right the first time.

  9. Anita, I think as a primarily written word journalist, she has an obligation to write a piece that can stand on its own and make its case effectively from within that piece. If she makes different points in the audio, that’s great, but it’s also inadequate.

  10. There’s something about that quote from Morgan:

    “When I read that article, I thought, ‘Am I not a feminist because I chose to have children early?’”

    I know that “if it’s not about you, it’s not about you” can be a tricky trope to pull out, but seriously – did the article say that women who choose to have children early are anti-feminist? In your decision to have kids early, have you also sought to deprive other women of that same choice? Then no, no one’s calling you anti-feminist, but if you feel better justifying your own choices by feeling embattled and put-upon, go for it.

    I will say one thing, though: I am selfish. That’s why I’ve chosen not to have kids – I like my life as it is, with the boyfriend and the dog and the free schedule and the scooter with no room for a baby seat. Having a kid would mean not having those things. But the choice not to have kids isn’t selfish – the selfishness is the reason for the choice. I think it would be more selfish to create a whole new person just to spend the next 18 years wishing I’d just gotten another dog.

    And while I’m griping, I’d like to get a little more context on “I think that means we’ve made it if we don’t need to talk about it all anymore.” Is Annie Horcasitas presenting that as reality in general or just reality as perceived by a lot of these “faminists”? Because the stench of privilege is strong there. Just because you “don’t need to talk about” anything more than the trendiness of parenting in Williamsburg, it doesn’t mean that other women aren’t struggling, and it doesn’t mean that women aren’t fighting all the time to maintain your rights to live according to your choice.

  11. Why is it that every time I read articles like this, I see “Maybe if we gild the cage enough and pad the bars with velvet, they won’t notice we’ve just locked them into dependence and economic servitude?” Must be something wrong with my eyesight, I guess. All I know for sure is I’ll be wiping up kid-food crumbs on a cold day in Hell…

  12. I will say one thing, though: I am selfish.

    No, ACG, you’re not. You aren’t selfish for not having or not wanting children….or anything else, for that matter. My working definition of selfish is: “All Me, All the Time. Fuck the world; I always come First, Period. Other people? Fuck them. If they aren’t existing to serve me, they don’t matter at all.” If your attitude is more like: “Other people are human beings too. They are just as valuable as I am. That means, sometimes I come first. Sometimes, I don’t. And other times, we all walk through that door together—no one is ‘first'”….then you aren’t selfish.

    It’s important because women are always called “selfish” anytime we have anything of our own. Time for that meme to die an ignominious death.

    With that said, how often is the dust gonna be blown off this old trope, anyway…..the “mothers/feminists, never-the-twain-shall-meet” story. It’s as tired as the opt-out trope. Then again, the longer I hang around Feministe, the more verbally familiar I’m getting with the NYC landscape…..isn’t Williamsburg one of the more wealthy enclaves? That would explain a hell of a lot.

  13. Articles like this are SO frustrating. I had babies when I was young- 23 and 25 to be exact. And now I’m back in college for my second degree, because when my son started getting speech therapy I realized just how much I love working with kids and how much I loved speech pathology. So I am a feminist mom with a 6 year old and a 4 year old who uses birth control because a baby right this second would be a disaster, but not hormonal birth control because it makes me feel like shit. I am about to graduate near the top of my class, I have a job that I love and I have kids that are happy and well adjusted. To top it off, I’m not even thirty yet. Feminism and mothering DO NOT have to be at odds with each other. In fact, I think my feminism makes me a better mother.

  14. Right on as always, La Lubu. I cringed when I saw ACG describe herself as selfish and composed a response in my head before I scrolled down. What you wrote was better.

    As for Williamsburg, it’s an extremely large Brooklyn neighborhood that (like Flatbush) contains several sub-neighborhoods. Hipsters live on the north side and Latin@s and Hasidic Jews on the south, more or less. It has thousands of prosperous urban pioneers but even more thousands of poor people.

  15. I have to stand by it: I am a selfish person. I’m cheap, I’m pretty lazy, I can be self-centered, and I always have to be right and get my own way. I’m not proud of it, and I’m not saying I’m not working to change it, but I’m not denying it, either. Should a person like me have a kid? Hell, no. That would just be cruel. To everyone. In the world.

    But my not having kids isn’t selfish at all. I’m not leaving some massive hole in the world by not creating a new person to put in it. I’m not shirking on any divine duty to repopulate the world with more white, middle-class babies. And despite what the boyfriend’s aunts seem to think, I’m not intentionally burning them by choosing not to carry on the family name. Most importantly, I’m not trying to bring a kid up in a family where what I really want to be doing is what I was doing before, but society and his family kept telling me I was selfish for not having a kid and I caved and now I’m unhappy and so is the kid.

    I’ve got a ton of personal failings, but my decision to remain childless ain’t one of them. Hell, getting my IUD may have been one of the most generous things I’ve done with my life.

  16. Wow…I know I am a few days behind on this, but that is some privileged tripe right there! And La Lubu is right, this idea that mother/feminist-never-the-twain-shall-meet think is whacky. I am a mother and (somewhere on the) feminist (spectrum even though I am a little irritated right now), so I guess maybe I was missed in that great big blanket they threw over all women everywhere. But I am disabled and not white, so I probably didn’t figure into their equation when they put it together in the first place. *nods firmly*

    It is so irritating how things like the choice to be a mother regardless of race and class, the right to have good schools for your children regardless of race and class, the right have be able to feed your family good food, the right to live in a neighborhood where you will not be hurt and where the police will believe you if you are, the right to so many things that I could list here but it would become tl;dr… are not considered feminist issues, at least they are not most places that I read. I know I am in and out here, but it is good to see it discussed here, and I wanted to acknowledge that.

  17. Ugh, there was some kind of server error or Firefox error, and now it says my comment already posted! Sorry if it has! I am going to refresh before trying again!

  18. I know other has addressed the sickening amount of privledge in this but I’m going to pick on one little gripe. I know grad school isn’t the best time to have a baby but since when is 26 young to be having a kid? Maybe it’s just coming from a rural southern background but a young age to have a child is in your teens, during or right after highschool. Six women in my schools freshman class were pregnant last year; four of them married. They’re the young mothers; not a woman in her mid twenties who’ll have to put off highest education for a little while.

  19. I am so unholy tired of these media-fabricated battles between women. So. Tired. I got pregnant at 22 and had my baby. I was so broken and fucked up, I thought I did not deserve to keep her. That people like me should not be moms. My conservative religious upbringing had a lot to do with that, among other horrors. It was a concious move away from that vicious thinking.

    So it was the right choice for me, at that time. My daughter is 12 now and is all kinds of awesome. I work as a doula and have a fantastic girlfriend. I have women friends who have zero interest in motherhood, friends who have or want children, and some who aren’t sure if they do. Want them. Many of them have ladled guilt on themselves at one point or another, for their choices. Usually mildly, but there it is. And it really seems to me that the guilt is all coming from external forces. Women are not supposed to fully inhabit these choices for themselves, is what I think. We are supposed to internalize this cultural guilt for what we do or don’t do, when we do it and what degrees or careers we do or don’t have along the way.
    Because when we are guilty/regretful, we are distracted. There is a list a mile long of why not to have kids. And only one good reason to have them. Because you want to. And the more we own our choices and invest our time in making this world safer and more beautiful for everyone, the scarier we are. As long as abortion access is threatened, it’s a hot button fucking issue. I am queer, but birth control and abortion are vital issues to me because I care about every woman’s ability to choose. I could be raped again. My daughter is getting older and I want her to have the full scope of choices before her. I want everyone’s daughter to have that.

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