Roll up, roll up.
Read the Stunned: The New Generation of Women Having Babies, Getting Angry, and Creating a Mothers’ Movement extract? Got some thoughts on what you read? Questions for the author? Comment away here and we’ll get the discussion started and later I’ll invite the author, Karen Bridson to join us…
(Some of you emailed me directly with your thoughts on the book, would you mind posting them here in a comment instead, so everyone can see them?)
Alternatively, if you haven’t received a copy of the extract from me but you’re interested then email me so you can hop on in. If you emailed me previously and I neglected to send you the extract then (sorry and) please email me again with the word “SLACKER” in the subject header.
I thought the excerpt was fascinating, and I will definitely be buying the full book. I had quibbles with various points, of course. I think it’s sometimes too tempting to universalize about men based on your own partner – for instance, the bit on p37 of the PDF about her husband not even bothering to come in and physically check on their very sick child led her to say maybe men and women really are different. I think actually that comes down to personality, not gender, because my husband would have been in that room like a shot IF he’d even gone to work at all that day – he’s definitely at least as physically affectionate and concerned about our baby’s health as I am. In general, though, I thought she had excellent points in the parenting sections, especially about the need to understand all of these as social problems, not just individual relationship issues.
I’m glad to see a book devoted to opening up a conversation about feminism and motherhood in this generation. There were several moments during my reading of Bridson’s first chapter (Why Moms Are Mad) where I caught myself nodding vigorously. I’m an academic feminist who has done a lot of thinking about the meaning and effects of childbearing and have a feminist partner and I was STILL “stunned” to find myself in the days and weeks after I birthed our daughter to be the first adult to awaken and the last one to bed each night because the days’ work was just not yet done. So, in that respect, my and Bridson’s experiences of being “stunned” by the effects of motherhood on what had been a privileged (white, heteronormative, middle-class), equal opportunity life experience are quite similar. On the other hand, as an academic who has always identified as a feminist, the born-again feminist narrative frustrates me in various ways (I have had that conversation with many, many university students and feel like it becomes a stumbling block to getting at more substantive issues). I’ll grant that while I’m sympathetic to the conversation, I’m not exactly Bridson’s target audience. I’d like to see more substance.
For example, Bridson says she is “convinced…that most men’s motives are not driven by the belief that women should have to do more, but rather a matter of simple laziness and a tendency toward letting someone else do the crummy jobs. My husband says he doesn’t do certain cleaning jobs around the house because he knows I will. Pretty interesting” (12). I agree that it’s pretty interesting, and wish Bridson would push this much, much further. The disjunction between giving women equal opportunity and following through on that “belief” by giving mothers actual support that “stunned” Bridson into writing this book needs further interrogation. Patriarchy might not be an openly held “belief” nowadays, but it’s still the default. Excusing this “tendency” largely reserved to men as mere laziness seriously weakens Bridson’s position.
I must say that the almost exclusive focus on girls really bugs me. Here I’m referring to chapter six specifically, (which isn’t in the excerpt but is described in the preface) but also more generally. Why must we talk only about girls when considering what we “should” and “ought” to be teaching the next generation? Again, I think Bridson raises important issues I hope will get public airing but the moralizing orientated toward girls only is all-too-familiar. Where’s the discussion of cultural messages to boys? Bridson discusses how the birth of her son motivated this book. I would think Bridson would find opportunity to address the cultural messages being transmitted to boys– I’d like to see some of her insights about how patriarchal defaults are still being conveyed. I’m hoping she addresses this in chapter nine (which wasn’t in the excerpt).
So, generally, I have reservations about the scope of her approach to the movement she is advocating, and how it might limit its potential to effect real change. While I think that her research about mothering is really eye-opening and a great starting point, my immediate concern is that framing our culture’s systemic non-support of parenting as a girl-specific and woman-specific issue overlooks the wider social context and perpetuates the collapsing of “parenting” onto “mothering”.
Here are a few questions I would like to put to Bridson:
Why did you choose to frame the topic as a “Mothers’ Movement” rather than, say, “Parents’ Movement”?
I see that chapter six focuses on the messages and lessons we are giving girls. What do you see as some of the critical issues and lessons for the next generation(s) of boys? If there isn’t a section (I see indication that this might appear in chapter nine) addressing how to parent boys to be more proactive parity-seekers, I’m interested in hearing you talk about why you keep your scope to a focus on a female audience.
What approach(es) would you advocate for raising the consciousnesses of people besides “women who are having babies” and the men who want to stay married to them?
(My reactions converged on two subjects, so I’m posting one comment for each.)
The author cited a man talking about how women shouldn’t “withhold sex” as a “punishment” when we’re mad at a man. I HATE that stupid slander! What really happens is you don’t erotically desire someone you’re mad at, someone who’s exploiting you and breaking his promises to you.
Come to think of it, that’s a way of sorting out advice books: the ones who acknowledge that anger and betrayal are turnoffs, and suggest that men step up more, are dealing with reality. The ones who tell women not to “withhold sex” are making false accusations to pressure us.
p.29- “You need to make the reward system obvious…If your man learns that he can score a happier, ‘more available’ spouse simply by pushing the vacuum around the family room during commercial breaks in the hockey game, everybody wins.” writes David Baker.
This was another place where I nearly blew my stack with rage. Reward system? Why should we have to behavior-modify them? Why should they get rewards for doing the minimum necessary to qualify as decent people?
And it is scandalous how many men see no difference between being allowed to press themselves on a woman who doesn’t want them and isn’t enjoying it, versus actual lovemaking. Do they all really want us to lie to them, want to live in a completely false simulation of being loved and desired?
This passage from page 26: “The enemy is not your husband, but yet you wish the enemy was clearly outside of your home…sometimes it’s hard to hold all of that complexity.” seemed to me to connect with this passage from pages 97-98: “Once I began to see how much I had in common with other mothers, how they struggled with the same challenges and inequities I faced, I began to connect the dots on how all of this stems from the structure of our social and political worlds. I began to see how our personal experiences extend well beyond our individual state of affairs, encompassing something much bigger. From there, I began to recognize the political nature
of other situations, how people’s circumstances often result from systems working against them, because the cards are stacked against them from the beginning. Once we can separate ourselves from the idea that our problems are ours alone and that we’ve reached total
equality, we can readily recognize the similarities we share with others. With this new awareness, we can join together as united women and initiate change.”
The second passage nails it: the enemy is patriarchy. It can be hard to grasp, or get across to others, because there’s nothing concretely visible, kind of like Sauron in Lord of the Rings.
Even once you get that far, it’s hard to deal with the fact that the husband is cooperating with patriarchy; hard to get men to acknowledge the existence of patriarchy, or to admit they’re maneuvering to exploit their wives, even though, as she points out, they admit it to friends. But that means they’re deliberately lying when they tell us they aren’t trying to exploit us, it’s all a total coincidence that they ‘don’t notice the dirt’ or ‘can’t remember how to use the washing machine’.
How can we live with husbands who lie to us and exploit us? Why should we? Once you recognize how many men lie smoothly about patriarchy, how can you trust anyone enough to have kids with him?
– * –
“Some people believe the gender wage gap is caused by the voluntary choices men and women make about work and family. For instance, some may say men stay more career-focused and push harder to get ahead, while women choose to give up career advancements in favor of sacrifices for the family. But the truth is, women rarely have a choice. Someone has to take care of the children and do the housework, and we live in a culture where women are expected to accept these responsibilities. Usually, the woman makes less money than the man anyway, so some people believe it makes sense for her to give up her lower paying job. We often make these sacrifices without complaint because we love our children, families, and homes. But make no mistake, the decision is not a freely made personal choice for women. It is a decision made out of necessity.” p.45-46
The passage above is very important. All this rhetoric about ‘choice’ is a snow job. It’s political and economic pressures making us choose between things we shouldn’t have to choose between, and taking away certain possibilities so there’s only a restricted set of options left. That’s not free choice, that’s railroading.
i think i can’t read it
my english skill is very poorly…..
I found Chapter 1 interesting, but very, very reminiscent of Susan Maushart’s book, The Mask of Motherhood. It would be interesting to know if Karen Bridson has read it.
That “my man is different” thought is comparatively old; I quoted Mary Daly quoting it a few weeks back in one of my Friday Feminist quotes, and I think Daly herself is quoting something from Robin Morgan’s 1970 anthology, Sisterhood is Powerful anthology. I don’t have either the anthology or Daly’s work on hand, so I can’t check, but here’s a bit of what I quoted from Daly.
NB: Daly is controversial; her attitude towards trans women is awful. I admire a lot, but by no means all, of her work.
Anyway, that thought from Daly ties rather nicely into Bridson’s theme about not needing to reinvent feminism, or to invent another name for it, because actually, a lot of what first and second wave feminists were saying is still relevant today.
And a final meandering thought which like the others, doesn’t quite amount to a question (yet). Bridson seems to be terribly worried about oral sex, and particularly, girls giving boys blow jobs. I suppose that I am concerned about casual sex too, ‘though Julie’s post at The Hand Mirror about how she will talk to her son about sex is relevant here. But not about oral sex per se, c/f ordinary old vanilla intercourse, or not so vanilla intercourse, or anything else really. I’m kind of, well, bemused by the focus on oral sex. But there was only a short piece from that chapter in the extract you had available for us to read, so maybe the rest of the chapter has more to say about how we should be talking to girls (and boys!) about how to approach sexual relationships and / or causal sex, rather than the actual acts involved in sex.
For me the real shock of motherhood, and the inequality of housework, was not that my partner was (sometimes) a doofus, able to talk the equality talk but fail on delivering, it was that my feminist mother and his feminist mother and almost every other working-out-of-the-house self-described feminist mother I knew colluded. The shock of hearing my mother, my very well educated mother who owns her own screwdrivers and expects my Dad to get the dinner on when she’s out late on Tuesdays, tell me that I would be happier if I gave up on making my house fair and just did the housework myself. Apparently my partner who was once perfectly capable of living alone, washing dishes, cooking meals and changing sheets (because he was taught to do these things by his feminist mother) was biologically determined to lose these skills when he moved in with me, that is, he was biologically determined not to act like a grown up once he became a father. Fortunately once I contained my rage long enough to explain it, my partner was smart enough to see why “just ask me and I will help” wasn’t a good response. The housework is not mine to delegate. When I explained it, my partner thought the attitude that he was incapable of doing the housework and childcaring was offensive to him, and from there we started to talk more about what we wanted our son to see.
We wanted our son to see and hear that all adults in a house see and do housework, that both parents are capable of choosing clothes and kissing sore knees, that all adults have the time and energy to play and be silly and buy treats (because if one parent can do those things all the time the other is forced to be sensible and too busy for fun all of the time). Most of all, we wanted to make sure that our son never has to have this fight with his partner when he grows up.
There have been a lot of surveys and books and so on and on and on about how unequal heterosexual marriage is, and it’s pretty much all written for audiences of heterosexual women, thereby giving women yet another job on their list: “Make the relationship fair”. So I wonder, why not direct this book at a male audience? Maybe it ought to have been called “Fatherhood in the 21st Century: how to avoid getting divorced for all the same reasons the Babyboomers did”.
Some of my thoughts on this book.
Things I like:
* Bridson’s unpacking of her relationship with her husband and how she got to her feminist motherhood (loved this! and see it as a real strength of the book.. in fact I think this type of shared discussion – the negotiations, the outcomes in our intimate relationships – could be the next vital step in feminist motherhood)
* Bridson’s use of self-disclosure generally, she tells engaging and revealing stories about herself that will both disarm and reach out to her readers.
* good summary of the literature (though a little repetitive if you’ve read the same primary sources as she has), and certainly a very motivating summary of the problem.. I felt angry all over again about the exploitation of mothers when I read chapters 1 & 2 and I thought I was beyond getting emotional about this stuff anymore.
* Generally great treatment of the topic and provides a solid path to ‘feminist motherhood’ for readers.
* feminism 101 – Bridson is likely to be an appealing author for mothers new to feminism, and her book is constantly working at reassuring and building bridges of understanding with women new to the movement. (This aspect will frustrate less novice feminists however).
*discusses the whole ‘feminism has a bad name’ problem (and identifies strongly with a third wave style of feminism) without dissing or ignoring the contributions of second wave/radical feminists.
Things I don’t like so much:
* Bridson’s preoccupation with the merits of “female sexual power”, particularly as she doesn’t define it adequately or explain how it can be used “safely” by women.
* Until the final chapter much of Bridson’s solutions to these enormous problems she is uncovering seem to amount to ‘the first step is being aware that this is a problem’… kept finding myself going, Yes And?
* Speaks almost exclusively to readers like the author herself – white, middle-class, educated, heterosexual, American etc. Women outside this group are ‘other-ed’ at best and patronised at worst.
* Dabbles in a bit of eco-psych.
* In my opinion, trips up quite a bit when exploring the sexualising of young girls – including being overly reliant upon conservative hysteria, buying into it being a girl problem and not a boy problem, and a bit too much teen pregnancy tut-tutting (NB. teenage mothers are good mothers too).
Now having made my own contribution to the discussion I’ve allowed myself to read your own comments above.. and how damn clever you all are! Great discussion points and I look forward to inviting the author to join the discussion.
I know several women who have said, “I don’t want to be at work, I want to be with my baby. After having a baby, work held less appeal.”
Caring for one’s children is a valid, biological desire. So what is the response?
After having my child, I energetically jumped back into work eager to demonstrate my commitment to my career. I had seen several women have babies and then become B players in the workplace. They didn’t care. They didn’t put forth effort. If they were playing a sport they would have been benched because they weren’t catching the ball.
What’s the response to that?
One thought I’ve had is that the workplace needs to be more friendly so that both men and women can freely parent and work. Would those low performing women be more motivated and better at their job if they could balance work and mothering better?
One of the issues I remember from feminism in the 80s is that there was lots of fighting between those who stayed home and those who went to work. We can’t fight each other when we want the same thing, right? But what do we really want?
Maybe she outlined that in other chapters because it’s more than equitable sharing of housework.
When I think the economic reality is that many parents need to work, so how do we structure the workplace so it’s conducive to allowing parents to raise their children as well?