Guest Post: Being a feminist and raising ‘a lad’

Following my introduction is a guest post from Matari.

Because I have little kids I mix mostly with other parents with little kids and I rarely get to talk to a feminist mother who has raised a child right through to adulthood. Matari’s perspective as a single parent with a (now) twenty-one year old son in her response to my 10 Questions About Your Feminist Motherhood is really fascinating. Does this feminist parenting thing work? Can you see any impact on the person your child becomes? What are the feminist parenting issues you face with an adult child? Matari’s response touches on all these questions.

I particularly like the way Matari highlighted the extra work involved in preparing a child, not for sexism but for the classism he would experience as a working class man. In our email conversation she explained that “it felt at times like a double whammy – being a feminist mother and working class was a hard cross to bear.  Also, I took redundancy when my son was ten and went to university to get my degree – here I entered a solid middle class world and again felt marginalised. In fact I would say that I have felt marginalised more by my class than by my gender at times.”

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?

I became a feminist at the age of 11 when I was abused by my stepfather.  I learnt to call myself a feminist when I realised that as a woman, my abuse was nothing unusual and, in fact, represented the lack of power that women have in our society.

2. What has surprised you most about motherhood?
How attached I was to my son as soon as he was born – I almost expected to be able to fit him into my schedule and carry on as before.  But no, that was not the case AT ALL – I instantly became responsible for a little life that, if was injured in any way, would affect me for the rest of my life.

3. How has your feminism changed over time? What is the impact of motherhood on your feminism?
My feminism became more entrenched, as – with every other event in my life,- I recognised that as a mother I would (again) be a marginalised woman, exacerbated by being a single parent.

4. What makes your mothering feminist? How does your approach differ from a non-feminist mother’s? How does feminism impact upon your parenting?
As a mother I was and am straightforward about being marginalised by society for being a working class mother.  So, I ‘outed’ every instance where this happened to my son (who is now 21), so he would be in no doubt about what my place was in society and, by association, his place as a working class male.  Also I was very fierce about violence against women, and to the best of my knowledge my son has never hit a woman.

5. Do you ever feel compromised as a feminist mother? Do you ever feel you’ve failed as a feminist mother?
Yes I did feel comprised when I realised that he was accessing pornography – that was tricky. I had to find a way of explaining to him about how this demeans women that he could process alongside the messages he was getting from everywhere else – namely that everywhere else felt that porn is OK.  I feel that I may have failed to get my message across, but time will tell. In essence he is a kind lad, and would not cope with seeing any woman harmed – at the moment I don’t think he fully accepts that pornography truly harms women.  As I said, this is a tricky subject between mother and son. But I have hope – at the very least he has to think about it.

6. Has identifying as a feminist mother ever been difficult? Why?
Yes because people think it is all about whether you give your son a gun or your daughter a doll – whereas it is more about trying to bring a child up to consider issues that others accept without question.

7. Motherhood involves sacrifice, how do you reconcile that with being a feminist?
What a great question! For me the sacrifice was about my own space – as a single parent carving out ‘legitimate’ space to do my own thing, especially when I was working full-time – was very tricky indeed.  It took a number of years and some very good childcare options (family and friends) before I had that straight in my head and was able to take the time without feeling guilty.

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 have had several partners during my son’s growing up years but tended to keep them separate as much as I could from my son.  His father was a problem in that when my son was getting into trouble in his teens, his father dismissed this as ‘boys will be boys’; the general consensus was that I was an ‘over-reacting mother’.  As it turns out, my son is now reaping the problems of getting arrested as a teenager, and concedes that I was right all along.  This does not give me any pleasure at all – I just wish I had had access to support from an enlightened male who could have provided my son with a decent male role model.

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 was not an attachment parenting mother as I had to go to work when my son was 6 months old, so this didn’t even enter the equation.  However, I do believe that security and stability during the first five years are very important and was always straightforward with my son about when I was leaving him and when I would be back.  And I was always back when I said I would be – even today we are never off each other’s radar – for example I would not go away without telling him and he would not be on the other end of his mobile for longer than a day.

10. Do you feel feminism has failed mothers and if so how? Personally, what do you think feminism has given mothers?
I think that the first and 2nd wave of feminism did not take the attachment between mothers and children seriously enough – but only because they were fighting the get women recognised as equals.  Unfortunately society and the media then made feminism a dirty word and so the next stage – an examination of the bond between mother and child – was not examined by the next generation of women who were busy distancing themselves from the media representation of feminists as lesbians in dungarees with hairy armpits; witness the closing down of women’s studies in universities across the world.  Now we are in a situation where the sexualisation of girls and women is so prevalent – pole dancing etc etc – that young women are accepting things that the first and 2nd wave feminists find abhorrent, and quite rightly so. We need a new feminist discourse quite urgently and a space for the discourse to flourish.  One can but hope.

(You can find all the many other responses in this series here. If you’d like to respond to these questions yourself you can either email me your answers and I’ll put them on blue milk as a guest post or you can post them elsewhere and let me know and I’ll link to them).