the mother wars
In the firmament, the mother wars are raging. Not the old son-father thing, or lovers spatting on Mount Olympus, that sound is of mothers waring.
A friend turned me on to the piece about Rebecca Walker in the British Mail. Based on an interview with Walker about her new book Choosing Motherhood After A Lifetime of Ambivalence (I will be reading this), Walker excoriates her mother Alice (of The Color Purple fame)--and all second generation feminists--for teaching her that motherhood was a form of servitude. Phyllis Chesler tried get them to kiss and make up on Salon.
I have to say that I am sympathetic to Rebecca Walker’s complaint about the feminism she was reared on. It has been surprising to me how empowering many aspects of motherhood are—from delivering a child to caring successfully for her needs. It comes as a surprise because the feminism that politicized me in college (and to which I owe much) pretty much gave the message that motherhood could be great, sure, but it was essentially a defeat. It was something, that like all aspects of female biology one gave into.
Which goes back to the PC wars of the late 1980s. This was not girl-power feminism. Womyn. Herstory feminism. Take Back the Night marches. It was a puritanical kind of feminism. I remember talking to a friend who had been reading Andrea Dworkin crying over the realization that consensual sex with her boyfriend (which she previously enjoyed) now seemed like rape to her. I remember walking around assigning the “male gaze” to everything. Yes, no two ways about it--female biology decreed victimhood in a patriarchal society. We modern women were charged with gaining command over these primitive, biologically essentialist impulses. Motherhood? A desire for something like motherhood was weak, atavistic—it had to be squelched—it was a siren song from the past. (I’m thinking here of de Beauvoir especially.)
How screwed up this now seems. I know that many second generation feminists were themselves mothers—often too-young mothers—and that they struggled with the conflict between duty to family and to self. They wanted their daughters to be saved from that conflict. Understandable, yes. But at what cost?
So I find myself sympathetic to Rebecca Walker’s complaints as a later-life mother that it delayed her decision to become a mother. (I sometimes wonder whether it delayed mine.)
Does feminism matter still? With Gucci advertising its “hysteria collection” of handbags (what would Germaine Greer think?)? Yes, yes, yes! It matters even more than ever. But I agree with popfeminist that it needs to be more inclusive kind.
What do other mothers, women, feminists of my generation think? I really want to know. . .
A friend turned me on to the piece about Rebecca Walker in the British Mail. Based on an interview with Walker about her new book Choosing Motherhood After A Lifetime of Ambivalence (I will be reading this), Walker excoriates her mother Alice (of The Color Purple fame)--and all second generation feminists--for teaching her that motherhood was a form of servitude. Phyllis Chesler tried get them to kiss and make up on Salon.
I have to say that I am sympathetic to Rebecca Walker’s complaint about the feminism she was reared on. It has been surprising to me how empowering many aspects of motherhood are—from delivering a child to caring successfully for her needs. It comes as a surprise because the feminism that politicized me in college (and to which I owe much) pretty much gave the message that motherhood could be great, sure, but it was essentially a defeat. It was something, that like all aspects of female biology one gave into.
Which goes back to the PC wars of the late 1980s. This was not girl-power feminism. Womyn. Herstory feminism. Take Back the Night marches. It was a puritanical kind of feminism. I remember talking to a friend who had been reading Andrea Dworkin crying over the realization that consensual sex with her boyfriend (which she previously enjoyed) now seemed like rape to her. I remember walking around assigning the “male gaze” to everything. Yes, no two ways about it--female biology decreed victimhood in a patriarchal society. We modern women were charged with gaining command over these primitive, biologically essentialist impulses. Motherhood? A desire for something like motherhood was weak, atavistic—it had to be squelched—it was a siren song from the past. (I’m thinking here of de Beauvoir especially.)
How screwed up this now seems. I know that many second generation feminists were themselves mothers—often too-young mothers—and that they struggled with the conflict between duty to family and to self. They wanted their daughters to be saved from that conflict. Understandable, yes. But at what cost?
So I find myself sympathetic to Rebecca Walker’s complaints as a later-life mother that it delayed her decision to become a mother. (I sometimes wonder whether it delayed mine.)
Does feminism matter still? With Gucci advertising its “hysteria collection” of handbags (what would Germaine Greer think?)? Yes, yes, yes! It matters even more than ever. But I agree with popfeminist that it needs to be more inclusive kind.
What do other mothers, women, feminists of my generation think? I really want to know. . .
Comments
Okay, so the second wave took the great, important, intellectual stride forward. We should all read and know about these theories. The second wave provided indispensable tools in feeling out the dimensionality of our lives as women (and men).
But ultimately, feminism is about self-determination. Women should not have to be mothers if they don't wish it. For those who do, I'm certain motherhood is anything but a "defeat"!
Anyway, to me, an Oberlin-in-the-80s women’s studies minor, feminism has not spoken with one unified, bossy voice. I might have read feminists who claimed motherhood shackled women, but I probably read just as many who celebrated women precisely because they had the power of birth. (Just as for every Andrea Dworkin there’s a Susie Bright, but that’s another topic.) I certainly felt empowered by the birth of my kids, and especially by my most recent experience. But far from being surprised by this because feminism had led me to expect something different, I felt surprised by how right-on the birthing movement “propaganda” was. During the pregnancy, I read Peggy Vincent’s Babycatcher and a lot of Ina Mae Gaskin and so forth—very feminist stuff, to my mind: Take back childbearing from the patriarchy! Trust yourself and the ancient power of women! It seemed a little much, frankly. Could this act really be so defining? But still high on nursing hormones, I’m going to say that working with the midwife and the doulas to birth Lilli was the most solidly feminist –and perhaps the most wonderful—experience of my life.
If anything made me hesitate to have children, it was probably my identity as a bohemian and a writer. I had Tillio when I was 32, so relative to my peer group, I didn’t hesitate too long, and even at that, the shocking joy of having a child made me wish aloud sometimes that we had started earlier. But that’s not to say the first years as a parent weren’t very difficult for me. Tillio was a tough baby, we couldn’t afford child-care and so worked an exhausting tag-team schedule, and I was trying to find time to write in the face of rounds of rejection. Seven years later, having just had my second baby, I feel so much more centered and content. I keep saying that silly as it sounds, it took me 39 years to be ready to be a mom. I get paid more now, for one thing, and I have a different relationship to time and to my own ambitions and just to life. I’m going to posit that if you have your first baby in your late thirties or your forties, it doesn’t necessarily mean you shorted yourself out on the particular joy you feel now. An earlier baby might have given you a different, harder-won joy. There’s no way to know for sure, of course, and the ticking clock of fertility sure does complicate any theorizing about it.
As for mothering equaling servitude—well, that’s a distorting exaggeration, but isn’t also just sort of calling a spade a spade? We might all experience differently the endless loads of laundry and rounds of food prep and runny noses and splattered pee, but I’m willing to bet that the degree to which one perceives parenting as drudgery has to do less with how much one loves ones kids, or loves parenting, than with how much help one gets—free from a family member or a from a partner who’s now expected to contribute or paid for in the form of baby sitters, house cleaners, or frequent take-out meals. My mom’s been here for a month, pitching in on the cleaning and childcare, and oh my god, what a difference that makes. And this isn’t to mention the women in the world who have no control over their reproduction, and for whom birthing and mothering and feminism must have far different ramifications than they do for us.
Becoming a parent—making a family with Mark—has been the most profound thing I’ve done, but I’m glad I got to discover the profundity for myself. I needed feminists for a lot, but I didn’t need them to spell it out for me. And I didn’t need “mainstream culture” to spell it out for me, either, need it rushing me past other points in my life because the collective wisdom had it that I would only be totally fulfilled through motherhood. I’m pretty sure it’s still more complicated than that for most women.
And just to throw another thought in here: I’ve been interested in the phenomenon of Western women who are unable to conceive and/or carry a baby hiring Indian surrogates to carry a pregnancy for them. Judith Warner has an outraged post on the topic in her NYTimes blog, and the combo of her post and the comments on it give a lot of food for thought. Anyone want to talk about that?
As the mom of two adopted daughters and one biological son, I have to admit that the fascination with pregnancy and childbirth continues to elude me, although it's helpful to read the perspective of someone like Zoe on why such experiences can be so defining and empowering, and something a woman can claim and own away from the patriarchal medical establishment. But to me, motherhood has always been all about what happens AFTER you take the baby home. I didn't yearn for pregnancy when I was younger, and gave up very quickly when nominally "trying" to conceive in my early 30s, instead taking the chance to adopt from China, something I believed in a lot more strongly and had a lot more interest in than the biological process of pregnancy. While I later found myself pregnant with my son, I didn't particularly enjoy being pregnant any more than I had ever assumed I would when I'd chosen adoption over fertility drugs. It had its perks. It was fun to feel my son moving around in there. I also liked nursing, though I never did so exclusively, which may have made my experience somewhat different from those who don't also supplement--I had more freedom, and I also looked at the process strictly as a sweet, bonding thing and not as a huge health or political issue. But otherwise, I found pregnancy inconvenient and uncomfortable--I had some health problems, albeit, that maybe aren't typical. But it just didn't hold a lot of fascination or mythology for me, and in that way I guess I do fall in line with some of the second-wave feminists who felt women were being defined too rigorously by their biology.
What I do find fascinating and empowering and defining, however (and yet also of course sometimes frustrating and mind-numbing) is the process of loving, bonding with and caring for a child and helping guide that child through a life you forge together. Despite the way my own mother and many women of her generation sacrificed all for this process (and lost themselves), or the way second-wave feminists extolled the necessity of putting work and politics before "taking care of a family," the truth is that I have always believed the intimacy between mothers and children is the most primal and complex in the human race, and that it would be a great loss to me personally to miss out on this. In fact, I believe it is a tragedy that so many fathers DO miss out on this bond by spending all of their time and emotional energy elsewhere, not on really getting to know their children and being in relationship with them. I work, and I love my work, and sometimes it suffers because of the demands of raising a family . . . but the truth is that I cannot imagine being deprived of the sweet complexity of parenting, or anything else ever adequately taking the place of that experience in my life.
I know there are many people, both male and female, who have no particular compulsion to parent, and obviously I support and admire anyone who knows herself well enough to realize motherhood is not for her and to forego it, rather than just going along with societal expectations. But I don't think all the second wave feminists in the world (and boy, I sure read them, and continued to read them into my late 20s in graduate school, and wrote my first novel based on a lot of their revisions of psychoanalysis) could have convinced me that becoming a mother would be more limiting than it would be expanding. With both my daughters and my son, the interactions and emotions brought up by parenting have been a major part of my own emotional growth and maturation process--and also a major, major source of joy, probably the most ecstatic moments of my life.
To me, the important thing to remember is that theory is clinical. Even when "the personal is political" and the political is personal, feminist theory can never really encompass what it IS to fall wildly in love with your child. To look at it only as the number of writing hours I've lost, etc., would be reductive and sad, I think. It would be sad, too, to assume I could never write again because I have children! Life is full of variety and multiplicity, as the French feminists said. Parenthood is part of the human cycle, and while it is not for everyone, it is surely feminism's task to help women navigate how to parent and still be full human beings, not to either eschew or excessively laud motherhood as either catastrophic to identity or as the end-all, be-all of existence.
I would like to point out that motherhood is also, as corny as it sounds, about unconditional love and acceptance--something humanity rarely seems to achieve in any other realm. It has much to teach the species about how to avoid destruction, how to avoid violence and judgement, how to nurture and allow oneself to feel and care for others. To vilify it seems exactly the opposite of what the world needs, especially right now. I still believe that, while they can't biologically bear children (something I once thought I couldn't do either), learning to "mother" is something everyone should strive for, including men, whether or not they choose to raise kids.