Feminist Motherhood

So I've been sitting on this post for a whole month, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I worry that my views aren't aligned closely enough with the group of parents that I consider my peers. Maybe it's because I really haven't settled on what I want this blog to be all about. But today I'm taking the plunge. Here are my responses to Blue Milk's ten questions about feminist motherhood (which I found through Daddy Dialectic's pro-feminist father response). At least one other lesbian mom has responded.

1. How would you describe your feminism in one sentence? When did you first become a feminist? Was it before or after you became a mother?

I'm not totally sure, but I think I was always a feminist. I was raised on Free-To-Be You and Me, and was given Matchbox cars to play with instead of Barbie dolls. I never even remember questioning whether I was a feminist. That said, I think that I've had to learn over time what it means to be a feminist, and my feminism has definately grown.

2. What has surprised you most about motherhood?

How much it has remained the same. Sure, we've come a long way since The Women's Room and Up the Sandbox, but in some ways we haven't come so far at all. We still feel defined by our success as mothers and alternately proud of and resentful of the sacrifices that we make. Women feel isolated and lonely at home. We feel that our partners can't be counted on for help. Too many women have told me how lucky I am to be parenting with another woman. When I listen to that Free-To-Be You and Me CD now, parts of it still sound radical and unreachable!

3. How has your feminism changed over time? What is the impact of motherhood on your feminism?

When I first got pregnant, I began to recognize how pervasive "doing gender" really is in our society and this has continued as I have grown into being a mother. It is impossible to interact with children without making the interaction gendered -- from someplace deep within ourselves we react differently to boys and girls in an attempt to replicate the gender status quo. Everyone oohs and ahhs over my daughter when she's in a pretty dress (even me, though I try not to!). No one seems to melt over a boy pushing a toy stroller the same way that they do for a girl.

Now, as I read stories to my daughter, I notice that all the stories are about boys. All the characters are male. All the animals are male (except the occasional cat or mouse). The farmer is a man. The zookeeper is a man. The astronaut is a man. The only character who isn't a man is the mommy who feeds and cuddles the children. Kids' books are full of mommies -- you'd think that daddies simply didn't exist. Or rather, you have no reason to know that the (male) astronaut/doctor/zookeeper/truck driver is also a father.

So, I'd have to say that becoming a mother has made me far more radical, and far more angry. I see sexism that I never saw before. Part of this is that becoming a parent has made me see how much we shut men out of children's lives, so I feel as thought I have become an advocate for men as well.

4. What makes your mothering feminist? How does your approach differ from a non-feminist mother’s? How does feminism impact upon your parenting?

I try very hard not to gender my daughter, but it is a losing battle. I guess I shouldn't say quite that. I don't try as hard as I could not to gender her out of fear of making her into a freak -- I want her to be able to "fit in" to our gendered society (so I guess I'm part of the problem here as well as being part of the solution). But I want her to see herself as a main character in a story (thus pronouns are frequently changed when we read). I want her to know that she can look any way she likes (thus I try not to praise her for "being cute" -- although I fail at that all the time). I want her to be active, physical, and assertive in addition to being articulate and sensitive, thus I try to let her take risks, rush forward headlong like a bull in a china shop, and I try not to tell her to "be good" too much.

5. Do you ever feel compromised as a feminist mother? Do you ever feel you’ve failed as a feminist mother?

Yes, absolutely. And I'll go ahead and answer "Yes" to the same statement with "feminist" removed. We are always compromised and imperfect -- it's part of being a parent. I suppose it is part of being a feminist as well.

6. Has identifying as a feminist mother ever been difficult? Why?

Honestly, no it hasn't. But it has been frustrating and depressing at times.

7. Motherhood involves sacrifice, how do you reconcile that with being a feminist?

First, my snarky answer: "Parenthood involves sacrifice -- how do we reconcile that with being pro-human?" I have two real answers.

1. There is no conflict. There's nothing about feminism that says we are forbidden from using part of our limited resources as parents. We can't do everything and we make choices all the time.
   
2. It sucks and I do not reconcile it! A disproportionate burden for child-rearing falls on women and that is absolutely not fair. As feminists we should fight it. We should put our collective foot down and say, "No more!" We should insist that our partners take on the sacrifice as well. We should relax our standards and stop insisting that our children get a chance to live the idyllic childhood that we never had. We should live in families where the housework and childcare duties are shared. We should find a way to equate fatherhood with sacrifice. We should stop comparing ourselves to some ideal sacrificial mother. We should prioritize taking care of ourselves.

8. If you have a partner, how does your partner feel about your feminist motherhood? What is the impact of your feminism on your partner?

Well, of course my partner is also a feminist and a woman, so I would almost want to say that this question is not applicable to me. But my wife and I have had thousands of hours of conversation (NB: I just did a quick calculation and I'm actually fairly sure that 700-1000 is a reasonable estimate) about what it means to be a mother and what it means to be a feminist mother. Parenting with another mother really has taught me a lot about what it means to be a mother. Can you be a mother when someone else is breastfeeding your child? Can you be a mother to your daughter when she has another mother that's staying at home with her full time? Are you really a mother if you are glad that you work four days a week because you don't want to spend every day doing the mind-numbing care of your beautiful infant? Can you be A mother if you aren't THE mother? I think these are questions that straight partnered women should be asking themselves these questions as well if they really want to let men in on the parenting gig as full partners.

9. If you’re an attachment parenting mother, what challenges if any does this pose for your feminism and how have you resolved them?

We've done many things in my family that would be considered "attachment parenting" -- we co-slept (for 8 months), breastfed (14 months), worn the baby (we still do that sometimes), and spent a lot of time in skin-to-skin contact. However, I do not call myself an "attachment parenting mother" because I believe that attachment parenting, meaning the term coined by Pediatrician William Sears, is an anti-feminist idea that increases the time demands on mothers while simultaneously shutting out fathers. I don't object to the closeness and care practiced by those who subscribe to attachment parenting philosophies, but I do object to the staggering increase in time demands and the fact that those demands are placed on placed disproportionately on women. Breastfeeding isn't a religion, it's way of giving the baby closeness and nutrition. For those of us with ready access to potable water, breastfeeding is only marginally better than formula feeding. You can bond and be very close to an infant without breastfeeding (you can even do bottle feeding skin-to-skin) -- just ask my wife.

10. Do you feel feminism has failed mothers and if so how? Personally, what do you think feminism has given mothers?

Feminism hasn't failed mothers -- the rest of society has failed mothers. We can become mothers and still be feminists, but we need men to step up to the plate and become full parents if that is to work. And we women need to let men and non-biological mothers parent on their own terms and in their own ways, without feeling the need to manage that experience.

Presentation at MathFest

A couple of weeks ago, I made a presentation about my research at MathFest, the annual summer meeting of the Mathematical Association of America. I briefly sketched out how I am applying game theory to analyze the division of labor between parents (particularly same-gender couples). You can see the presentation here (it's a PDF of a PowerPoint file, and has a couple of glitches, but you should be able to read most of it OK)

Attachment Parenting

In the chapter on “Gender, Culture, and Fatherhood” of his book Family Man, Scott Coltrane blasts Robert Bly for his “mythopoetic” men’s movement, spearheaded by the book Iron John. This movement seeks to heal the emasculation of men (by their mothers, girlfriends, and wives) by reinventing male-only rituals and having men embrace fierce masculinity as a healthy spiritual opposite to soft femininity. Coltrane says, “What intrigues me here is not that Bly portrays men and women as different, but that he elevates whatever differences might exist to the level of spiritual essence and violent opposition.” This attitude fits nicely with the world view of attachment parenting, as promoted by “Dr. Sears” (a.k.a Dr. William Sears and Martha Sears, a registered nurse) and the La Leche League. Attachment parenting elevates the (biological) mother-child bond to a mythical and spiritual status. Breastfeeding becomes not a way to give a baby nutrition and comfort, but the way to bond with a baby. Breast milk is promoted as a great panacea, healing all wounds. The bond between the breastfeeding mother and the infant is seen as the most important thing in a baby’s life. We are encouraged to look to tribal cultures and to animal behavior to see the natural beauty of continuous, exclusive, and extended breastfeeding.

Attachment parenting often preys on women’s fears of not being good mothers, and gives a solution – an emphasis on breastfeeding, having constant physical contact with the baby (through co-sleeping and “wearing” the baby in a sling or wrap), and having the baby bond closely with the mother. The trouble is these things increase the workload of child-rearing and decrease the likelihood that parents will do significant sharing of childcare duties. That is not to say that it is not possible to share care and subscribe to attachment parenting – I know people who do it. And, for full-disclosure I'll say that my wife and I co-slept, wore our baby, and breastfed. I am saying that attachment parenting has a troubling emphasis on the role of mothers and breastfeeding that strikes me as anti-feminist. However, when you look at feminists raising kids, you see quite a lot of attachment parents.

Coltrane notes that in the Victorian era, “As women began to perform jobs that men had previously performed, and as men’s jobs became increasingly ‘feminized,’ romantic visions of halcyon days arose.” (p. 195) I think we’ve also seen that in the modern era (e.g. see arguments in The Mommy Myth). As women have taken to the workforce and challenged the power dynamics of the status quo, we suddenly have a new reason to take our shoes off and spend all of our time in childrearing. When I was preparing to go back to work after the birth of my daughter, I was nervous about pumping breastmilk and got Nursing Mother, Working Mother out of the library. Among the suggestion is that book are to get your infant on a schedule in which it feeds only during the evening and nighttime hours. So, as I was deciding how to go back to work and cope with my new family structure, I was told that a good mother would be eager to forgo sleep in order to care for an infant. I wonder what impact that would have had on my career.

One more reason people think unequal division is fair

I thought of just one more reason why women think that the existing unequal division of labor is fair – they don’t think that any other option is possible. If you are convinced that an equitable division is impossible, then you are forced think an unequal division is fair – it is the fairest of all available options. It’s funny, because now that I’ve thought of it, this seems like the most obvious reason why this unequal division would be called “fair.”

This idea actually came to me on considering some of the reaction to the equally shared parenting story in the NY Times featuring Marc and Amy Vashon. There was lots of the reaction that amounted to, “But this just won’t work for me (or for most people) because … (fill in a reason).” (the nastier version of the critique boiled down to “This idea totally sucks because I can’t do it.”) It is absolutely true that equally shared parenting won't work for many families, but that is not because it's a dumb idea, but rather because of economic inequity between men and women, our crazy work culture, and the constrictions that are placed on us by traditional gender roles.