Feminist Motherhood

The thoughtful and wonderful feminist mother blogging at Blue Milk interviews her blog readers with a bunch of interesting questions, and it has taken me weeks to get to it, but I found the questions provided a good starting point for crystallizing some of my own thoughts and enunciating some of my own views:

1 How would you describe your feminism in one sentence? When did you become a feminist? Was it before or after you became a mother?
Ack – one sentence? Feminism is cultivating a society and a personal life which allows and values the expression of our diverse and different selves. No, that doesn’t quite get it. I grew up Bahá’í with the precept that the realization of the equality of women and men was essential to the progress of the human race, and know my parents worked hard at having an “equal” marriage, at least in terms of respect even if sometimes the division of responsibilities fell along more traditional lines — but my 1970′s childhood was rife with messages about being able to do anything a boy could do. I had a Free to Be You and Me record, and it wasn’t until I was listening to it with my own children that I realized that it was so strongly messaged, because that message was so ubiquitous in my childhood. I think there was a distinct moment of feminist awakening in early adolescence when the sci-fi I had always really liked suddenly seemed to be missing the point when it ignored and neglected women as interesting characters. Then in college I took a course titled “The Philosophy of Feminism” and came away finally able to articulate my own feminism as believing that every individual ought to be accepted as the person they really are, not just who they are supposed to be according to norms and expectations.

2 What has surprised you most about motherhood? Having a son! 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. And I still find it worth fighting the good fight for messages about gender — I get as frustrated at the ways the world is unfriendly to boys, classrooms that ask them to sit still painfully long times, the violin teacher who told me my sons would learn so much faster if they were girls, the dumb things people said about them as babies, how girls are faster to potty train and learn to talk, like having a boy was being a runner-up somehow, and I’ve come to believe every harmful stereotype of femaleness has a corresponding harmful stereotype of maleness.

3 How has your feminism changed over time? What is the impact of motherhood on your feminism?
My feminism has moved a little with motherhood — become more concrete and more urgent. I think that it as a feminist that I am frustrated by the economics of doing work that isn’t valued by society and how that becomes a division between groups of mothers that should be fighting for each other and not with each other, angry about the constant messages about our bodies, about attractiveness being the measure of our value as women, even angry about the messages given to my sons about what being a boy means. My feelings as a feminist and my feelings as a mother and my feelings inhabiting a body that has borne four children are hard to separate out from being sad about women who don’t like themselves very much, angry about the working conditions of women throughout the world, wanting to protect my own children and feeling guilty about how much cushier their life is than so many, wanting to cultivate their consciences and awareness, their media literacy. I don’t know that it isn’t this seeing myself as a feminist that also shapes my feelings about the environment, the valuing of profit over people and it all sounds knee-jerk-y doesn’t it? I get frustrated that something as simple as believing that men and women are equal does spiral out into all of these other issues. It’s hard to remember that post-birth “I’ve joined a sisterhood of women throughout history who’ve done this amazing thing” when I see the woman at the supermarket smacking her kid for not listening, and I feel compassion for her as well as the child, and I don’t know how to avoid feeling judgemental when I do believe that some things have a right way and a wrong way to be done.

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 think more than anything, I am critical of the really essentialist statements, people telling me what boys are like and what girls are like. For all of the differences that seemed to appear despite consciousness about the messages our kids got in their first years (e.g. my sons’ fascination with weapon-play in the face of all of my pacifist preaching, friends daughters who strongly prefer dresses and princess play), I think that the feminist parents I know still hold back from generalizing to much because it is so easy to slip from characterizing those differences to making inferences about capacities, imprisoning kids in roles that may not be right for them. I also think that my partnership with sons’ father, my husband, is a striving for a feminist balance, because our children are watching. We’ve recognized that with our different interests and abilities we are going to have different roles in the household and in our children’s lives, and still work we have to make sure that there is some justice, that both of our needs’ are being met, that we both have room to grow, that there is respect going both ways.

5 Do you ever feel compromised as a feminist mother? Do you ever feel you’ve failed as a feminist mother?
Yes and yes. I do the housework — and on the good days, it seems to balance his having to produce work for an employer to get a paycheck, and on the bad days I wonder why he gets to change jobs when he’s unhappy or complain about work and have weekends and vacations. But it’s been interesting as he has been working from home more in the last year, he is more aware, I think of what needs to be done all day and more likely to unload the dishwasher during a break between phonecalls. He is also very encouraging and supportive of the non-parenting, non-household things I do. He is much more involved in the lives of our children and aware of what is happening in their lives. Other small compromises and 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 presence of video games in the house that my husband and sons love and I have no interest in. The catching myself disliking my belly in the mirror. The moment when my three year old son told my woman dermatologist she didn’t look like a doctor, and I realized the two family practitioners we’ve seen since he was born were both men, as is his dentist.

6 Has identifying as a feminist mother ever been difficult? Why?
I suppose, in some ways I am defensive about it because from the outside it looks like we’ve taken on such traditional roles in our family, and I want to say, take me seriously, I really am a feminist. I am married to someone who is comfortable speaking to rooms full of two and three hundred people and I find the prospect excruciating, so just talking about how different our interests and capacities are and how I struggle to get outside my comfort zone, take small risks (like blogging!) seems like a gendered thing, and I sometimes will feel in a social sitation like I am hanging off him, which doesn’t feel feminist to me. The fact that the word feminsim is such a splintered and confusing thing, meaning something different to everyone who uses it means I cannot just encapsulate my views with one convenient label, and my not use it to identify myself to others at all times.

7 Motherhood involves sacrifice, how do you reconcile that with being a feminist?
I loved the book At the Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst by Carol Lee Flinders for her attempt to reconcile the sacrifice and humility of a spiritual practice with the need to be assertive and find her voice as a feminist. I think that this is a similar reconciliation — and so I remind myself of the ways that I have chosen these sacrifices, the ways I’ve been enriched by motherhood, of the sacrifices my husband makes, of the sacrifices my own parents made and 95% of the time I wouldn’t go back to that other existence for anything.

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?
I suppose reading answers above, our domestic bubble is where I play out a lot of my striving to feel equal — and yet he consistently has treated me as capable of doing anything I wish to do, as having contributed significantly to our lives, as deserving things I sometimes don’t feel entitled to, and yet as I have this imaginary conversation with him in my head, he would call it justice rather than feminism, which is ok with me. He thought it reasonable I keep my last name, and give that last name to our sons, has been supportive of our sons pursuing the interests they have that are different from his own. I suppose that my feminsim and his being married to me, has made him have to consider a female viewpoint on some situations, but who he is is so justice-minded, it’s not that it was a big compromise.

9 If you’re an attachment parenting mother, what challenges if any does this pose for your feminism and how have you resolved them?
I am a do-what-works-for-you-and-your-family mother, mostly, but yes, in my son’s infancy I did a lot of the parenting work and a lot of the time enjoyed it, and because it did feel like a valued contribution to the family and household it didn’t feel like too much of a contradiction to my own rendering of feminism.

10 Do you feel feminism has failed mothers and if so how? Personally, what do you think feminism has given mothers?
I don’t know if I can talk about feminism as a monolithic thing that has failed or given me as a mother — the ideas out there in the world, the increasingly critical evaluation of messages and media, the voices of other women who proclaim themselves feminist, even when they interpret things differently than I do, are empowering, and I am grateful for all of the political movements of the last two hundred years that have moved for increased rights for women. I do agonize at the way movements splinter and divide and forget the essential things that they were formed around, and think that issues protecting women and their children need to be seen as feminist as much as workplace issues and political issues.