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

Tag: Family

Apparently it’s National Sanctimommy Week on the internet

Did you know that All Moms judge you if you’re a mom and consider abortion? Or that All Moms think you’re a whiny selfish narcissist who reminds them of their kindergartner if you haven’t had babies yet? No? Well, these moms, who speak for All Moms On The Internet, would like you to know that they’re judging you. Especially if you’re one of their “close friends” who confides in them, and especially if they are so selfless (being MOMS) that they naturally hear about 1/2 of what you’re saying and then make everything else about them.

Halloween Isn’t Supposed to Be Scary Like This

Halloween is a holiday that I enjoy a lot more in the abstract (costumes, silliness, chocolate!) than the specific (lack of sewing skills/glue gun, complete lack of imagination as to what to be, candy of dubious quality and people who give you raisins). Aside from my one true costume victory (when I went as the Feminine Mystique in law school by wearing a vintage dress, ruffled apron, pearls, heels, and carrying a martini glass and a pill bottle), I am largely content to let other people come up with really clever costumes and demonstrate their superior crafting skills while I hand out candy to the trick or treaters who come by our house. (For you crafty types who aren’t into sexy Halloween and are looking for inspiration, check out Take Back Halloween. They even link to places that sell the costume components.)

However, this year, my daughter is three and a half and invested in the idea of Halloween. When she was 18 months old, we acquired an ice cream cone costume on clearance from Pottery Barn Kids the day before Halloween. (By the way, kudos to BPK for having totally cute kid-appropriate costumes. I just wish they weren’t so damn expensive.) Last year, my husband located a Jessie (from Toy Story) costume online. We’ve not bought anything for her this year, in part because we’re trying to come up with a couple of options for her to choose from which meet all of our criteria (no shedding glitter, no princesses, nothing hazardous) and her request that it involve purple. What I did not anticipate was that our criteria needed to be revised to include “not a sexy costume”. Because, well, she’s THREE.

In an effort to at least get some ideas, T (my husband) and I stopped at one of those pop up Halloween stores while the kiddo was at preschool. (The kind that appears randomly in a shopping center for six weeks a year.) When we first walked in, we were really glad we had not brought the kiddo because the displays were loud and scary: giant spiders, zombies, things like that. (Also, inexplicably, an entire small display of dead, dismembered, and zombie babies. It felt like a pro-life house of horrors.) By the time we were done, we were really glad we hadn’t brought the kiddo because of the selection of costumes for kids.

I was absolutely prepared for the collection of “sexy” adult costumes. When we first walked in, my husband took a picture of me holding a sexy Army costume.

Sexy Army Costume

(In case you were wondering, I totally wore something like this every day in Afghanistan!)

I have laughed uncontrollably at fucknosexisthalloweencostumes Tumblr. [Note: the Tumblr features notes from trolls, some of which use some pretty hateful language. Also, there’s at least one picture of a “sexy mental patient” costume (because this wasn’t enough of a WTF before), so heads up on that, too.] I am making side bets as to whether or not I actually see someone dressed as a sexy clownfish* or a sexy watermelon. I am utterly baffled by the sexy skunk getup (which makes you look you were mugged by the reject boots from an Ugg factory), but hey. To each their own.

*This is a Finding Nemo ripoff, which is made even more disturbing by the fact that the female clownfish, Coral, doesn’t even survive the first three minutes of the movie.

But the kids costumes, dear readers, the kids costumes. Every photo below was taken in the kids section. Every single one is sized for kids. (At three and a half, my daughter is much too tall for most toddler kids clothes, so we’re looking a size or two up from what you’d expect for her age. She’s a size 5. Most of these are marked size 7-8, so she’ll likely fit into them by next Halloween, at the ripe old age of four and a half.) In addition to the costumes, check out how the girls are posed: hip thrust out, chest forward, lots of makeup, come hither look. I’m not awesome with guessing ages, but most of them look 11ish.

Delinquent Devil

Exhibit 1: “Delinquent Devil” aka a really twisted sexy schoolgirl fantasy gone wrong. (Description: A 11 to 13-year-old white girl with long brown hair wearing a fedora with little devil horns sticking out the sides, a skintight red shirt with cap sleeves, a little black vest, a black and red plaid tie, red wings, a black and red plaid miniskirt, knee high red socks with black stripes around the top, and black low rise Converse style sneakers. She has one hand on her hip and is pouting at the camera. The costume is labeled “Girls Size Costume”.)

Asian Princess

Exhibit 2: “Asian Princess,” for a side of racist appropriation along with bizarre sexualization. (Description: a 9 to 13-year-old girl with dark hair wearing a pink patterned robe with long, drapey sleeves and a wide dark pink sash, i.e., the sort of thing that many Americans would label geisha-style without really considering the implications of that phrasing or its casual racism. Her hair is up and she’s wearing some sort of headpiece which is included in the costume. She’s looking demurely at the ground and not at the camera.)

Fire Chief

Exhibit 3: “Fire Chief,” for a reminder that all badass skills are best accomplished in a skirt and knee high boots. (Description: a 6 to 8-year-old white girl with wavy long brown hair wearing a black baseball hat, form fitting black dress with what looks like a reflective safety belt for trim on the short sleeves and as a belt. There’s also what looks like a piece of reflective belt as a *collar*. The skirt’s well above the knee and she’s wearing high heeled, knee high black boots with the outfit. The smallest size this costume comes in is 4-6, so it’s meant for ages 4 to 6.)

Circus Clown

Exhibit 4: “Circus Clown,” because clowns weren’t creepy enough before. (Description: a 7 to 10-year-old white girl wearing a big bow on top of her head, a small red clown nose, a ruffled collar and cuffs (not attached to any shirt), a red spaghetti strap polka dot leotard with yellow, blue, and green polka dots, a very short red and orange tutu, sheer red tights, and rainbow striped legwarmers. Again, the smallest size this costume comes in is 4-6, so it’s meant for ages 4 to 6.)

Shipmate Cutie

Exhibit 5: “Shipmate Cutie,” to remind you that there was something a little creepy about Shirley Temple, too. (Description: a 4 to 6-year-old white girl with long blond hair wearing a white sailor hat, little blue sailor dress (skirt well above the knee) white knee socks, and black mary janes. She’s wearing a lot of makeup, has one hand on her hip, and is saluting. Size 4-6.)

Radical Red Crayon

Exhibit 6: “Radical Red Crayon,” although there isn’t anything radical about sexualizing kids. (Description: an approximately 12-year-old white girl with long blond hair wearing a “tank dress”: a sleeveless red minidress meant to look like a Crayola crayon wrapper. The dress is very short, worn with black tights and (although you can’t see this in the photo), black heels. She has what looks like a little pointed party hat on her head meant to be the tip of the crayon.)

This is only a sampling of the pictures I took. I’ve posted a complete set here. When all was said and done (due to the funky lighting in the store and the fact that I was taking them with my cell phone), I pulled photos of 19 different costumes. The other titles include Edgy Vamp, (seriously, WTF?), Fallen Angel, Dark Angel, Cheerless Leader (sort of a zombie cheerleader) Gothic Rag Doll, two different Monster Brides, Clawdeen Wolf (a character from something called Monster High who’s described as a fashionista), Midnight Vampira, Harujuku Cutie (which I assume is related to Harajuku, but I couldn’t say for sure), Dreamy Genie, Little Black Dress (yes, it’s just a little black dress for the preschool set), and Flapper.

I’m still having a hard time getting over how many of these costumes there were. This was a big place, with a lot of selection. After we ruled out sexy costumes and Disney princesses, pretty much the only thing left was an Olivia costume that looked okay but was made pretty cheaply. We considered a pair of butterfly wings and a headband with antenna, but were unenthused by the idea, so we left to go pick up the kiddo from preschool.

One of the things that T and I have struggled with with the kiddo is the increasing pinkification of childhood (read: girlhood). I don’t think I’d call it Cinderella Ate My Daughter, but it’s certainly a familiar enough concept. Girl stuff is glittery, pink, and pouty. It’s sexualized, but more than anything, it’s normalized. What was most distressing about the costume buying adventure was just the absolute ubiquity of the sexy costumes.

Kids (especially ones as young as my daughter) have no real concept of how they’re being perceived and the image that they’re projecting. They can’t. Age and lack of experience preclude it: they just don’t have context. This isn’t a knock on kids: it’s a knock on adults. Adults who should know better. Adults who should not be encouraging kindegarteners to vamp it up in bikinis while dancing to Single Ladies. Or buying them “Edgy Vamp” costumes when they really don’t have the skills and wherewithal to either pull it off or handle the reactions of others. Adult women have the capacity to manipulate their own image and to choose costumes they like. (They also have the capacity to deal with people who are jackasses in response.) Teenagers are sometimes able to handle that. The under-8 set certainly can’t. Pitching costumes to them like they could is disturbing.

My daughter is three. If she wants to be a sexy clownfish when she’s in college as a throwback to her childhood obsession with Finding Nemo, I can manage that, but I’d at least like her to be old enough to know what irony is first.

Why Breastfeeding Is A Feminist Issue

What’s going so wrong with the breastfeeding and formula-feeding conversation?

Start with the rampant individualism. Conversations about how you feed your baby tend to be preoccupied with women’s choices and decisions.. and then, blame. You know the conversation has little feminist value when you end up at a point where some poor, exhausted woman is trying to justify her decision to formula-feed her baby to you, or likewise, if some other poor woman is trying to justify her reasons for breastfeeding her toddler to you.

The main reason why the breastfeeding/formula feeding conversation is not moving forward is because it is bogged down with this individualism. I think there are several factors behind that. Firstly, public health messages, like those promoting breastfeeding, are notoriously heavy-handed and don’t deal well with nuance. This is a shame because people’s health is actually quite nuanced. Secondly, the breastfeeding message is, in part, a marketing message attempting to compete with the marketing messages of formula companies. When you do this you invariably make women consumers. Thirdly, we live in an era when motherhood is hyper-competitive and driven by perfectionism. Everyone is trying to Get It Super Right Or Terrible Consequences Will Happen For Their Children, and everything seems to come down to mothers and their choices. This leads to conversations that over-emphasise the role of choice in outcomes and also, that invariably run into the limitations of professionalising motherhood when it is still monetarily worthless. Finally, it’s just so terribly easy for a patriarchal culture to put all the responsibility on mothers and not chase the real culprits behind the big decline in breastfeeding and long-term breastfeeding rates in Western countries, which are things like inflexible workplace policies, the absence of universal maternity leave schemes, insufficient anti-discrimination legislation and hostile societal attitudes towards women’s bodies.

One of my good friends was an unapologetic formula-feeder with her children. She tried breastfeeding but having grown up with constant fat-shaming she was unable to ever feel comfortable with breastfeeding. When she found herself forcing her newborn to skip feeds during the very hot days of summer so as not to have to breastfeed in front of visiting family and friends and then panicking about whether she had dehydrated her tiny baby, she decided it was time to formula feed. She loved bottle-feeding – it helped her to start enjoying her baby. Was there much pressure on you, I asked, to breastfeed, and were people judgemental about your formula-feeding? Not that I noticed, my friend told me, but this world can apologise for how much it hated my body before I will apologise for not breastfeeding my children.

Good for her, except, what a bloody heart-breaking way to finally reclaim some space for yourself. Experiences like hers remind me what is so damn wrong with individualism in the breastfeeding/formula-feeding conversation. We’re pushing breastfeeding as a message but we sure aren’t embracing it as a culture. And we somehow blame individual mothers for the shortfall.

After recognising the problem with individualism, often the feminist discussion retreats to a place where everyone agrees to respect one another’s right to choose what is best for them and their babies and then to just all shut the hell up. Initially this makes sense, if everyone is shouting over the top of one another and everyone is feeling very defensive about their feeding decisions then let’s agree to turn down the volume. The problem is that once you turn the volume down on breastfeeding activism and formula-feeding choices we don’t get silence, we get another kind of noise. Because we exist not in a vacuum but in a misogynist culture.

I swear, I really do write about other issues in motherhood, even though I seem to have made breastfeeding my core topic in guest posts at Feministe.. and this is maybe why it has been my topic du jour, because breastfeeding is more than a choice about how to feed your baby, it is a lens through which you can see with absolute clarity the intersection between misogyny and motherhood. There are a million other possible examples but this area of mothering is a stunning case of it. Because, let me be clear about this – women get harassed and shamed and illegally evicted from public space for breastfeeding; women get threatened with losing custody of their children for breastfeeding for ‘too long’; women get ridiculed and bullied for trying to pump milk at work; women get described as a freak show for breastfeeding twins or tandem feeding; women get called names like ‘stupid cow’ or ‘filthy slut’ for breastfeeding; women get told they are sexually abusing their children for breastfeeding; women get told they’re not allowed to keep breast milk in communal fridges because it’s a dirty bodily fluid (and cow’s milk isn’t?); women are bullied into stopping breastfeeding because breasts are the sexual property of their husbands; women get told that breastfeeding is obscene in front of other people’s children or other people’s husbands; women get told their bodies are too fat and too saggy and too veiny to be exposed while breastfeeding; women get told to stay at home with their babies until they are no longer breastfeeding; women get instructed to throw blankets over themselves and their babies if they wish to breastfeed outside the home.. and on it goes. This is not the result of some peculiar sensitivity towards babies and small children eating, this does not happen with bottle-feeding, this is specifically about breastfeeding and it is about policing women’s bodies and lives.

Breastfeeding is a feminist issue not because mummy bloggers like me say it is, but because it’s about working to ensure that women and their bodies are considered as important (as normal) as men and their bodies. Something happens for all of us – regardless of whether we are breastfeeders or not – when a woman is allowed to breastfeed, in public, as a member of her community, while getting shit done in her life – it makes a statement that women belong, that women’s bodies belong, that women are here.

The animosity shown towards mothers who formula-feed is judgemental crusading and it should never be condoned by feminists but you are missing the big picture if you argue that bottle-feeding is demonised and breastfeeding is not – that we’ve gone too far with lactivism. Quite simply, something is very frigging wrong in our world when women are harassed and shamed for doing something that women’s bodies do as a routine part of raising children. This should trouble all feminists.

Breastfeeding also provides an example of how deeply hostile workplace culture is towards mothers.

Breastfeeding can be hard work in the beginning. (I got the latch so messed up when I breastfed my first baby that in the first couple of weeks I almost ended up with the end of my nipple torn off. My baby would finish a breastfeed and dribble blood out of her mouth. I know, so vampire. All those years of averting my slightly horrified gaze from mothers breastfeeding in public when I was young did not prepare me at all well when I came to breastfeed my own baby). Breastfeeding in those early months requires a lot of energy. You need to be eating and drinking and resting regularly or you can’t sustain a milk supply. (Try chasing dairy cows around the paddock all day long and see how much milk you get from them in the evening). This is an excellent argument for maternity leave, lactation breaks in the workplace and generally supporting new mothers. But it also shows you how far we have to go, because in the United States there still isn’t a universal paid maternity leave scheme and even for those who do have access to maternity leave it is usually woefully short. No sooner do you get breastfeeding established and bang! you’re back at work (full-time, of course), and separated from them all day long while now being expected to suddenly get used to a breast pump. And then, oh, breastfeeding didn’t work out for them, what could possibly be the explanation?

When feminists write about these tensions for mothers there is a tendency to argue that because it is so difficult to breastfeed in these circumstances that we need to back-off about breastfeeding. I’m a little sceptical of this strategy, though I think it comes from a good place. Women are entitled to their choices, of course, let’s not head back into individualism, but isn’t it awfully convenient that we never question the institutions of power that happen to arrange themselves in such a way that women have little real choice about breastfeeding?

Because here is the other thing about breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is lazy. Ultimately, I came to love breastfeeding as a mother because I am quite lazy. Breastfeeding is fast food. Breastfeeding is multi-tasking. Breastfeeding is portable. Breastfeeding is unstructured and unscheduled. All of these elements are very pleasing to lazy people, like me. So, it annoys me no end as a feminist that we, as a Western culture, stigmatise breastfeeding when in the long-run it can often make mothers’ and children’s lives easier.

I can’t help but be suspicious that we prioritise solutions to this work-life conflict that suit a model of workplace built around men’s lives and that consistently challenge women to find new ways of adapting without ever questioning whether our economy could be moulded just a little more fairly around care work and dependency. Because, dependence is not deviant behaviour – being young, being old, being unwell, being hurt and healing, being disabled – it’s normal life. And this is not hippy stuff; this is just finding a better way of working with capitalism. For that matter, breastfeeding is not hippy, it just is. It’s not some special gift, it’s not a sacrifice, it is just the way mammals generally feed their young.

If we were more accepting of breastfeeding on those grounds instead of trying to up-sell it then maybe we wouldn’t be stuck in such an endless loop of defensiveness with formula-feeding choices. Yes, breastfeeding has nutritional and immunity merits but it is also offers a way of being close with a baby and that, in itself, is valuable enough. There are other ways to experience that closeness, of course, and mothers shouldn’t be forced to parent in that way if they don’t want to, but for those who do, we shouldn’t sabotage them. And this is where the feminist conversation must be particularly careful, and it’s a tricky juggling act, but in our desire to neutralise all that ridiculous individualist blaming of women for their choices we often diminish the significance of their choices to them. Because when we say breastfeeding is not all that important we silence the grief some women feel about not having been able to breastfeed and we take away the sense of achievement other women feel about breastfeeding in spite of multiple obstacles, but possibly worst of all, we undermine the broader message every parent is trying to give, which is that workplace and institutional change needs to happen.. and it needs to happen soon.

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P.S. I want to acknowledge and thank one of the writers of Hoyden About Town, Lauredhel who stayed up late with me one night so I could bounce my arguments around with her and who steered me when I was off-track and reminded me of elements I had overlooked. Thank you, L.

P.P.S. I also want to acknowledge that although I have generalised about breastfeeding mothers here, as I recently discussed on Feministe, fathers sometimes breastfeed, too.

A Simple Saturday Post: Leave Me Out of Your “Everyone,” Mr. Apatow.

I just wanted to quickly mention the trailer for the new Judd Apatow movie, “This is 40.”

Of course, we all know that Hollywood is guilty of all sorts of offenses all of the time, but it seems rare even today to find one that is quite so up front with its surface-level exclusion. The tagline at the end of the trailer reads: “This is not just their story. This is everyone’s story.”

Please, watch, if you’re so inclined:

(Trigger warnings regarding this trailer: man on a toilet, Megan Fox in underwear, humor about spousal death, anti-aging, inherent anti-lotsa-stuff…)

The trouble, of course, is with the assumption that “everyone” will see some aspect of themselves in this story… a story which appears to be about a wildly wealthy (do you KNOW how much a house like that costs in LA?), white, American-born, middle-aged, thin, conventionally attractive, cissexual, child-rearing, married couple. I’m going to give Mr. Apatow and his corporate marketeers the benefit of the doubt and assume they know not “everyone” will conform to all of those attributes at once, and are trying to make a more general point about the basic similarity of human experience, but even I—a white, cissexual, American-born woman raising a daughter—feel thoroughly alienated and offended by this at just a core level. My heart and stomach clench to wonder how other “everyones” must feel when watching this trailer and getting smacked by that tagline.

It’s obviously impossible to cast aspersions on Mr. Apatow’s film itself– at least until the movie premieres, this will remain a marketing problem– but he is a hugely powerful filmmaker in this town, and I believe it’s fair to say that the tagline came down to him. It represents at the very least a myopic and embarrassing perspective on the world. At worst, it suggests that those with the most privilege in this country are unwilling to even bother extending an invitation to see their new movie to those that aren’t adequately “like them.”

And frankly, in order to chalk up a box office success, they will presumably need more than middle-aged rich white people (traditionally not the most movie-friendly audience out there) to go see their film… So couldn’t they have come up with a slightly less exclusionary pitch?? (I’m kind of seriously asking this, and also leaving the comments section wide open here for complaints, suggestions and heavy-duty snark.)

I am very lenient about humor, and I know what Judd Apatow’s movies are like. Some of his stuff has made me laugh, some has made me cringe, some has made me cringe through laughter or laugh through cringing. In addition, I believe he has every right to tell this story—clearly a personal one—if he chooses to do so. But if his marketing is going to display a level of ignorance this enormous, and work to exclude us so egregiously, then “everyone” can certainly choose not to see it.

Quick things

I am writing a rather complicated post at the moment for Feministe, so in the meantime..

Quick things to look at – some pretty, pretty pictures in “Yes These Bones Shall Live” over at the International Museum of Women, which is an exhibition of photos of Roller Derby mothers in Canada. (My HTML is not working for some reason at Feministe so here’s an old-fashioned link: http://mama.imow.org/yourvoices/yes-these-bones-shall-live )

Quick things to read and think about –

“When feelings run deep, as they do about mothers and motherhood, the temptation to make extreme statements is high… Motherhood is a raw, tender point of identity, and its relationship to other aspects of ourselves – our other aspirations, our need to work, our need for solitude – almost inevitably involves a tension. It is hard to sit with that tension, which is one reason discussions of motherhood tend toward a split view of the world.

Where we side depends on what we see as the most essential threat. For those working for gender equality over the past forty years, an enduring concern has been that women will be marched back home, restricting the exercise of their talents and their full participation in political and economic life. Efforts to mobilize public opinion against that regressive alternative have at times oversimplified women’s desire to mother and assigned it to a generally backward-looking, sentimental view of women’s place. When taken to the extreme, the argument suggests that women’s care for their children, the time spent as well as the emotions aroused, is foisted on them by purely external economic and ideological forces. Locating the sources of the desire to mother “out there” may temporarily banish the conflict, but ultimately it backfires, alienating women who feel it does not take into account, or help them to attain, their own valued maternal goals.

For those who identify most strongly with their role as mother, the greatest threat has been that caring for children and the honorable motivations behind it will be minimized and misunderstood, becoming one more source of women’s devaluation. Such women feel they suffer not at the hands of traditionalist ideology but rather from the general social devaluation of caregiving, a devaluation with economic and psychological effects. At times, proponents of this position insist on the essential differences between the sexes and the sanctity of conservative-defined “family values”. Such views end up alienating both women who question such prescriptive generalizations and those who feel their own sense of self or their aspirations are not reflected by them.

Most of us feel ill at ease at either pole of this debate, because though the poles represent opposing position, they both flatten the complexity of mothers’ own desires”.

From Maternal Desire by Daphne de Marneffe. This was such a thought-provoking book; I recommend it.

Daddy’s Little Girl

While my daughter was away, she—my beautiful, hilarious, little girl—started growing up. I don’t want her to bemoan the inevitable; she will grow up. She IS growing up. I want to be in complete control of the kind of woman she turns out to be: strong, smart, powerful, unstoppable, and feminist. I want that affirmation, and my routines, to be enough armor against the effects of a mostly-absent father.

But I can’t really—really really—control the woman she is becoming, regardless of which coast she’s on. So what’s a mother to do?

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)

Paid sick days

Many women have to choose between earning money to provide basic necessities for themselves and their family, or staying home sick or with a sick family member. It’s not really much of a choice, is it?