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

Tag: Class

Pop Goes The Culture: Strong Female Characters (and more)

A few days ago in the #solidarityisforwhitewomen secondary thread, Gloria made a suggestion I really liked, so, welcome to the first edition of implementing Gloria’s idea! Last week, Sophia McDougall wrote an article in New Statesman that I’m linking to as a discussion kick-starter: I Hate Strong Female Characters.

P.S. Suggestions for discussion kickstarters for future Pop Goes The Culture editions are very welcome, pitching discussion-starter posts as Guest Posts is strongly encouraged!

What does a feminist parent look like?

I have been writing my blog about feminist motherhood for five years but it took a few years of reading and writing on the topic for me to have much of a clue, really, on how to define feminist parenting, apart from just the fact that it included me – a feminist with a baby. When I first became a mother I had one feminist friend with kids and that was it.

Sometime back in the first year of blogging I started wondering who was reading my blog, and if they were parents how they would define their feminist parenting. So, I put up a post with ’10 Questions About Your Feminist Parenthood’ and I waited to see what would happen. I expected maybe half a dozen responses, if I was lucky, but over the years word has spread and all together I have received almost 100 responses.. with more still coming in. (And you’re very welcome to contribute a response of your own, too).

The responses have come from all over the world, including Australia, USA, Italy, UK, Canada, New Zealand, France, Germany, South Korea, Singapore and South America, and they have included a wide range of parenting experiences, such as primary parents, step-parents, adoptive parents, grandparents, co-parents and one set of expectant parents. Among the people responding there have been single parents and partnered parents; queer parents and straight parents; and at-home parents, parents who are also students and parents working in paid employment. The responses have been an absolute pleasure to read – they have been equal parts fascinating, charming, funny, sad, reassuring and revealing. (They make for a great paper and, in fact, I delivered a paper last year to a conference on this very subject and you can see links at the bottom of this post for a summary of my findings).

These responses have also changed some of my views on feminist parenthood. For instance, no other question received as strong a response as that of question 7, which was about how women reconciled the sacrifice involved in motherhood with their feminism. An overwhelming majority of women said they couldn’t relate to the question, and some even found it offensive. (Interestingly, a few other mothers said it was not only something they could relate to but that it was something they were struggling with in their lives, and all of those women happened to be at-home parents). These responses helped me to realise that feminism often over-simplifies the barriers holding mothers back and that it can tend to be seen as blaming mothers, themselves, rather than the patriarchal ways in which we organise the world against mothers and their care work. It also made me think that ‘sacrifice’ is a very loaded word.

So, what does a feminist parent look like? Here is a smattering of highlights from the responses I have received to my ’10 Questions About Your Feminist Parenthood’:

How has parenthood changed your feminism?

“I drank with the boys, talked music with the boys, studied with the boys, worked with the boys, and hated every girl I saw. So, being female didn’t play a role in how I lived (except I got to sleep with some of my best friends). I first called myself a feminist after giving birth to a girl who I couldn’t help but like. It forced me to realise that I am female. When the party’s over and I can’t live like a bachelor anymore. It has forced me to identify with my sex”.

“Mr Mom was a fairly unusual arrangement 20 years ago and I thought it confirmed my feminism. Instead I worked nonstop as breadwinner and mother. In many ways I overcompensated for not being home during the day by trying to be the perfect mom at nights and on weekends. Did I mention I did all the cooking and cleaning too? Yeah, not so feminist an approach.. It has taken me a long time to understand that ‘motherhood means sacrifice’ does not mean mothers are solely responsible for sacrifice”.

“When I was younger I was all about women competing in the public sphere. Now I’m all about that if that is what folks want. But also I want work inside the home to be valued more”.

“My initial reaction to this is to think that my feminism hasn’t changed, that it’s just an immutable part of my personality, but this isn’t true. Working as a midwife has exposed me to just a selection of the myriad ways that women are abused, even educated, privileged, middle-class white women. And every day I think that if they are subject to abuse because they are women, what the hell must it be like for the non-English speaking, the homeless, the illiterate, the substance-addicted and the young women that also walk through our doors to have their babies?”

What surprised you about parenthood?

“I had no idea I would fall in love so completely and overwhelmingly. It amazes me that there is this big cultural silence on this issue. Where are the songs, the stories about any form of love other than the romantic sort?”

“I always assumed that I would be a working mother. What I could not imagine is the anguish going back to work caused me. Leaving my son at 8 weeks old left me emotionally and physically bereft. I’d sit in my office at lunch, pumping and crying. Every day off that I spent with my son, I cried because I knew I would have to go back to work. Breastfeeding became a do or die situations for me because it was the one thing that I alone could provide for my son, regardless of whether I was with him all day or not. Not having any choices re. working part-time, working from home; being tied to my job in part because of benefits, it made me realise that mothering and how we choose to mother are FEMINIST choices”.

On suddenly feeling so dependent upon their male partner in a way they’ve not previously experienced (“when I was caring full-time for my son, who was born with a physical disability, I realised how dependent I was on my partner financially, and it freaked me out”), which was also a very negative experience for some (“the sinking feeling that I had tied myself to someone I really wasn’t sure I should have married. I felt like I was at my partner’s mercy. Once I had a baby he turned dictator”).

“I spent the last two months of my first pregnancy reading The Second Sex and I was so ready to raise this kick-ass, take nothing from anyone girl, and now.. that boy has three younger brothers”.

From a profeminist father: “At the end of the day, your main task is to survive and support your family and raise happy children; how you respond to the things you can’t control reveals a great deal about your character. You might discover a capacity for sacrifice and care that you never knew was there. On the flip side.. you might also find yourself erupting with petty rage and misdirected resentment, eruptions that frighten you, your child, and your partner.. when our worst emotions take over.. it is easiest of all for both fathers and mothers to fall back on traditional patterns of dominance and submission”.

What is feminist parenting?

“I wish I could say that my objection to patriarchal authoritarianism has translated into an approach to child-rearing that is gentle, reciprocal, and respectful. Let me tell you, though, I yell way too much. I pull rank all the time. I’m always indirectly playing the Bigger Than You Are card. I hate it. I also would like to claim that my experience as a mother has made me more politically active, more involved in my community. No. My experience as a mother has made me tired and cranky and frustrated.”

“As a mother I was and am straightforward about being marginalised by society for being a working class mother. So, I ‘outed’ every instance where this happened to my son (who is now 21), so he would be in no doubt about what my place was in society and, by associating, his place as a working class male. Also I was very fierce about violence against women, and to the best of my knowledge my son has never hit a woman”. (Several mothers who identified as working class talked about the importance of identifying intersection and training their children to cope with the multiple oppressions).

“Feminism has not necessarily made me a better mother. It’s given me.. an alternative, perhaps kinder model for self-critique, instead of worrying about whether the house is clean enough, I’m thinking about whether or not I’ve met my own social or intellectual needs, in order to ensure I’m fulfilled and happy, which in turn makes me a better more resilient, more patient mother”.

What are the hardest parts of being a feminist parent?

“When I look at the roles in our household I definitely do the majority of the housework. I hate what this models for my son. I feel like I’m failing him in terms of his future relationships with women (and failing those women too)”.

“Being the type of mother I am and the type of person I am means that fitting in with other new mothers has been a challenge at times. My ‘wanting to be liked’ side conflicts with my ‘opinionated and judgemental’ side. Yes, I want to be tolerant and respect other people’s choices, but I also want to speak my mind without being pigeon-holed as the freaky-hippy-lesbian mum”.

“Other feelings of failure – the first time you balance wanting your son to be whoever he wants to be and wanting to protect him from teasing if he decides he wants to wear pink to kindergarten. The catching of myself disliking my belly in the mirror. The moment when my three year old son told my woman dermatologist that she didn’t look like a doctor”.

For more, see the following links at my blog.

http://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2011/05/07/this-is-what-i-said-a-feminist-mother-looks-like-the-questionnaire-demographics-key-themes-and-becoming-feminists/

http://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2011/05/10/this-is-what-i-said-a-feminist-mother-looks-like-the-impact-of-motherhood-on-their-feminism/

http://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2011/05/22/part-3-this-is-what-i-said-a-feminist-mother-looks-like-being-surprised-by-motherhood/

http://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/part-4-this-is-what-i-said-a-feminist-mother-looks-like-defining-their-feminist-parenting/

http://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2011/08/25/part-5-this-is-what-i-said-a-feminist-mother-looks-like-the-difficulties-with-being-a-feminist-parent/

(You can follow me on twitter @bluemilk)

Not Another Mummy Blogger

Hi. I’m the writer from blue milk and I’m thrilled to be writing at Feministe. I write about motherhood from a feminist perspective and I sometimes write for the Australian feminist group blog, Hoyden About Town and other times I write for a couple of mainstream commercial publications. I also work half the week as an economist but I don’t know anything about personal budgets, sorry, as evidenced by my own household budgeting, which is woeful; so, if the figure doesn’t involve at least $100 million then I’m clueless.

I write about juggling work and family, about art and pop culture, about sex and arguments with my partner, about a bunch of traditional feminist topics like rape, breastfeeding, abortion, and the sexualisation of little girls, and I also write about politics. By and large, my writing is pitched squarely within the framework of motherhood and technically, I think this probably makes me a ‘mummy blogger’. I’m not all that offended by the term. I can see that it’s meant to be somewhat insulting, even children get embarrassed calling you ‘Mummy’ once they get to school, it is just that I am too tired to care. And there is a part of me that feels if a label is stigmatised like that then maybe it’s worth defending. After all, the belittling of mummy blogging has a lot in common with the ways in which mothers are marginalised.

There’s a lot we could do to improve the public discussion of motherhood but here is where I would start. We would not be so judgemental towards mothers if we recognised that mothering is work. If you aren’t yet able to accept mothering as work then you have some reading to do – it will involve economics and history. Start with the emergence of industrialisation when family work first became invisible. And if you can’t see that breastfeeding a baby was every bit as important as collecting firewood for family survival, then keep reading back through feudalism. But once you knock that patriarchal lens of distortion from your eyes you will never see mothers and children quite the same way again. Everywhere you look you will see something a little bit horrifying – hours and hours and hours and hours of unpaid labour. It is work performed very often with love; it is work with possibilities of personal reward and great satisfaction, much like some other jobs, except it is unpaid.

We would have better public policy and better rights for women if we were able to acknowledge more honestly that capitalism is not a marketplace, it is rather, a system that involves the intersection of the market with government, families and communities. We are talking about the greatest heist in capitalist history, because it is estimated that unpaid work in the USA amounts to 50 per cent of all hours of work performed. Imagine any other resource vanishing from the national spreadsheet like that. Capitalism, in its present form, could not survive without that unpaid support. It is not mothers who are draining the system, it is mothers and carers who are propping up the system.

I don’t want to over-complicate what is supposed to just be an introductory post here, but it says something about living in a patriarchy that we would have women specialise in a very demanding area of work that is both vitally important to us and utterly worthless in terms of monetary compensation, doesn’t it?

And there’s lots of other stuff to consider – children are not ‘units of production’, they’re small people who deserve to be nurtured with love and dedication; and yes, mothers are driven by an intense maternal desire to be with their children in spite of the sacrifices; and yes, self-ownership through individual wages was an incredibly important step in feminism and who am I, a mother in the workforce, to deny it? All I am saying is that you do not need to believe in universal minimum incomes and legislated entitlements for at-home parents/carers (though it would be nice) to know that there is a problem here when we penalize mothers through regressive tax systems and workplace discrimination for providing essential care work.

And while capitalism helped women mobilise collectively and seek ownership of resources you cannot pretend that capitalism and the patriarchy are not also mutually reinforcing, which is what you are doing when you tell mothers to just stop looking after kids and get a real job, already. Because whenever a mother enters the workplace a deal is being cut somewhere for childcare. Thinking care work vanishes when a woman’s time is suddenly accounted for in paid employment is patriarchal thinking. Either she is negotiating with a partner for him/her to stay home with the children (and obviously, this favours partnered parents over single parents and high-income couples over those in minimum wage jobs); or she is asking a female relative or friend to help out (more unpaid care on the balance sheet); or she is paying someone to look after the children (and fine, if she can afford to and is willing to pay a fair wage to someone for the task; but let’s not kid ourselves, childcare is female-dominated, poorly paid, and has a history of exploiting poor women for the task).

Ok, so this mother is now at work and by being there she sends important signals to her colleagues and employers about the role of women, she also sends a message to her partner (if she has one) and her children about her identity, she’s feeding her family, and hooray! she officially exists in the marketplace. Good for feminism, but as long as we don’t get ahead of ourselves and expect her to be the entire gateway for female liberation. In fact, it’s an uncomfortable notion but dual, high-income households have seen poor households slip even further behind since women joined the workforce. Turns out when rich women are working and marrying rich husbands, who are also working, that this only widens the gap between them and poor households. Go figure. Obviously, I’m not against women in the workforce but I’m saying this stuff is complicated. It will take a few bites of the apple before we get it sorted out.

If feminism, in approaching the unresolved question of mothers, does not recognise that motherhood is messy and emotional and diverse and political then it has missed the mark. It is important not to try to over-simplify mothers, not to stereotype them and not to ignore that their tasks are real work. Again and again in my writing I try to emphasize that last point, because I suspect much of the hostility towards mothers, including between mothers, would fade if we just understood that mothers are people trying to do a job and it’s consuming and tiring. It is difficult to imagine we would be bothered with The Mummy Wars if we were mobilising around the exploitation of unpaid care in our economy instead.

Because how ludicrous, how shameful, how utterly trivial our judgements of a teenage mother suddenly become with this one acknowledgement – that she is working, that it is hard work and it is for no pay and no recognition. Or our judgements of a mother with a disabled child having an outburst in public; or a mother breastfeeding her toddler; or a mother trying to help her teenage child with their drug addictions; or even, a mother blogging. (Oh, you want to tell me how I should do my unpaid work more to your liking? Fabulous, do tell). It sometimes helps to remember that even the most privileged mother is occasionally woken in the middle of the night by her sick toddler and sits bolt upright in bed, bleary-eyed and shivering in the dark, to catch vomit or shit in her bare hands. It may take some of the sting out of her, apparently, selfish lifestyle.

It is an uphill battle though, some of the fiercest defenders of mothering as a task too precious to be sullied with the term ‘work’ are mothers, themselves. There’s a lot invested in an identity when it is all you have. This does not mean that we can’t question the decisions mothers make or criticise the institution of motherhood. In fact, I would be lost as a mother without feminism and its difficult questions. But as feminists we must ask questions and listen to the answers, we must be prepared to change or expand our theories when we get it wrong, and I advise that we tread lightly in these discussions – that we tread as someone walking over the toil of unpaid workers.

What Doesn’t Belong? Or, that Awkward Vacant Condominium on My Block.

I live on a funny little street corner in Brooklyn.

If you walk in one direction, there is Greenpoint—filled with Polish bakeries and businesses, and perhaps one of my favorite shop signs in all of New York City.

In another direction is Williamsburg—filled with coffee shops, vegan restaurants, bicycles and hipsters in flannel shirts and cut off shorts. In Williamsburg, fancy and expensive high-rise condos overlooking the polluted beauty of the East River (and I suppose the Manhattan skyline) have become as ubiquitous and indicative of the neighborhood as the classic, flat colorful houses or vegan laundromats.

It is not a joke!

In the opposite direction are abandoned factories, some transformed into artists’ lofts, some into crack dens and some probably a lovely combination thereof. To the south, is Grand Street—as you walk south, the predominant language changes from English to Spanish, the businesses are Puerto Rican, the bakeries are Dominican and there is music from every corner—whether it’s the radio outside the shop or cars driving down the avenue with all of the windows down.

On my block itself, there is a motorcycle training school (it comes in handy), several little houses with flat wood paneling on the outside and our bodega. Our building itself has a little bit of graffiti on it and a bicycle out front. It has red trim on the windows, and I can see the Palestinian flag I have in my window from the street. It’s home.

There—amidst the flat wood paneled houses, no more than three stories high, the bodega and the super convenient motorcycle training school and few warehouses that characterize my block—is a chic, glassy condominium.

It is completely empty.

Williamsburg has seen record rates of condominiums popping up over the past five years—and Bushwick (and apparently my little area that happens to be nestled in between) seems to be quickly following suit as the most quickly gentrifying neighborhood. But for now, these condos of the future venture capitalists that find a quaint charm in my local motorcycle training school are empty—while homeless men and women sleep outside the subways and many across New York City face foreclosure evictions from their homes. On a less extreme scale, the types of businesses that the condo-inhabiting corporate types and of course, the notorious young white hipster crowd bring are often out of the price range and immediate needs of those who already live in the neighborhood.

It is easy to feel queasy about this issue of gentrification. It’s multi-faceted—and there are many valid and sometimes contradictory arguments. I know that by all definitions I’m a technically gentrifier in my neighborhood—but as Nona Willis Aronowitz points out in a recent piece
for The Atlantic, the current economic climate leaves few other options. I live in a little room in a building that has quite obviously been there for decades. I try to make my presence small, support the local businesses and avoid the newer, more expensive establishments that are most aggressively transforming the neighborhood’s traditional economic cycle. But what about these fancy condominiums? What about these tall, glassy buildings with elevators that are sold by relators as “East Williamsburg” and boast views of Manhattan from a carefully groomed roof? What about the buildings that were there before and had to be torn down to make room for the newer building? Where are the people that were forced out, who—like me–used to look up at their windows from the street and call that street corner home?

In a recent interview on GRITtv with Laura Flanders, Julia Abumada Grob—co-creator of the (wonderful) web series East Willy B—a show exploring the Latino perspective of the complications of gentrification in Bushwick—presented the idea of productive gentrification: how do you harness the positive effects of gentrification while still preserving the character—and in habitants—of the neighborhood?

What do you think? What is your relationship to your neighborhood? Do you think that if wielded properly, there is a less aggressive form of gentrification can be a positive force that revives a neighborhood, allowing both the families who have lived there for decades and more recent inhabitants to coexist? What is it like for all of you non-New Yorkers in your respective cities?

Hello! Thanks for Having Me.

Hi There!

For those who don’t know me already, I’m Anna–or perhaps my nom du tweet, @agoodcuppa.

I am a writer (no way, the guest blogger is a writer!), a social justice activist and rabbel rouser, and an unapologetic feminist with a bleeding heart.

I hail from the Bay Area in California. My mother is Lebanese and Greek, and my father is French-Canadian. I consider myself an ethnic mix of “questionably Brown” largely informed by being just Arab-American enough in post-9/11 America. I’m very Pro-Palestine, and have taken a long, painstaking journey to express this in a way that distinctly separates Judaism from Israeli-ness from Zionism and recognizes that Israel has been established as a state, and a solution must account for these effects. I have absolutely no idea what that solution will be–besides that it must include an end to the military occupation of Palestine. I hope–and have faith–that this solution will arrive in my lifetime.

I’m a loud-mouthed woman with a lot of opinions. I’m a millennial and a recent graduate. More of us need to be given a voice to express who we really are (hint, its not GIRLS), and how we are trying to negotiate this brave new economy.

Appropriately enough, I now live in New York City.

Content-wise I’m all over the place–and will probably write a lot about the Middle East, a little about Brooklyn and everywhere in between. In addition to writing, I’m an artist with a recent obsession with infographics–if you are lucky, my blog will include an occasional visual element. Get excited–my last infographic included a cartoon riot cop, described as equal parts adorable and terrifying!

A little word about comments–I will try my best to moderate, but am a busy lady and probably don’t have time to antagonize over your bull shit. So if you really have a problem with me, save it for a hardcore face to face barfight. I’m in.

So, welcome to my brain–I hope you enjoy your stay! Please, comment away on what you would like to see discussed! Big thanks to Jill for inviting me and Sally for suggesting me.

Feminism + Housewifery

I realize the rest of the feminist internet is going to disagree with me on this one, but I loved this Elizabeth Wurtzel piece on 1% housewives.

Is it mean? Yes. Is it representative of most women’s lives? No. But maybe it’s time modern “internet feminism” made room for polemics and hard-nosed viewpoints and positioned itself as a serious social movement, instead of focusing on identity and making everyone feel good.

A night at the Oscars (“Phew. There. I solved racism!”)

Managed to miss this year’s Oscar nominees, and now you’re biting your nails because the big night is coming and you aren’t prepared?! Me, either. But the good people at Jest have us covered in adorable fashion, with Kids Reenact the Oscar Nominees. For instance, if you missed The Help, little kids can show you what you missed.

Filming Against Odds: Undocumented Youth “Come Out” With Their Dreams

By Anne Galisky, cross-posted at On The Issues Magazine.

“Papers”is the story of undocumented youth and the challenges they face as they turn 18 without legal status. More than two million undocumented children live in the U.S. today, most with no path to obtain citizenship. These are youth who were born outside the U.S. and yet know only the U.S. as home. The film highlights five undocumented youth who are “American” in every sense but their legal paperwork.