This week I posted ten probing questions on feminist motherhood and a bunch of women quickly reviewed their lives, beliefs, thoughts, and decisions, and wrote terribly clever and thoughtful responses. Some were guest posted here (see the previous five posts), but you really shouldn’t miss these two other fascinating ones posted on Two Women Blogging and Two Peas, No Pod either. Here’s an excerpt from each.
From Jay at Two Women Blogging:
Has identifying as a feminist mother ever been difficult? Why?
Yes, because it sets me apart from other moms in a way that can read as really snotty to some people. Why can’t my daughter buy the same stuff and dress the same way and watch the same TV as other people’s kids? If I explain why, I sound as if I’m judging other people’s choices (and, in effect, I am). And being a feminist mother also means standing up to my own mother and asking her to change, which is pretty damned difficult.
From Cristy at Two Peas, No Pod:
If you’re an attachment parenting mother, what challenges if any does this pose for your feminism and how have you resolved them?
I think that this is the reason that I cannot always expect the same level of sacrifice from my partner – he cannot feed our daughter during the night and sometimes (well often) she is far more easily comforted/settled by me – meaning that my sleep is more interrupted and I get far less time to myself.I have yet to resolve these issues, but believe that they will get easier as our daughter gets older.
Lurkers? Are we missing your own viewpoint and experiences of feminist motherhood? I’d love to read your thoughts, either email them to me here and I’ll put them up as a guest post or post them on your own blog and let me know so I can link to them.
I love this, bluemilk. Mine will be up tomorrow. I’ll link to you and let you know. I feel like I’m taking a “feminism in the 21st century class with you.” Thanks for the prompt that’s making me put my thinking cap on.
I read your original post and have been thinking I’d like to post on how motherhood made me come back to feminism in a big way. Not that I ever really left. Life is getting in the way of pretty much everything else at the moment. Will lety ou know when I do post, even if it’s in a week or so.
This has been a really valuable series of posts thanks. Not that I’m a feminist mother (being a father for starters) but I have been confronted by the way my and my wife’s world changed when we had a child and how it seems like something that nobody talks about.