Now, if you read nothing else this week, then read this: “Will Working Mothers’ Brains Explode? The Popular New Genre of Neurosexism” by Cordelia Fine. It is quite, quite perfect, as I am sure you will see from these two excerpts.
.. with the buzz—phrase ‘hard wiring’ comes an extraordinary insistence on locating social pressures in the brain. In The Female Brain, for example, the working mother learns that she is struggling against “the natural wiring of our female brains and biological reality”. According to Brizendine, combining motherhood with career gives rise to a neurological “tug-of-war because of overloaded brain circuits”. Career circuits and maternal circuits battle it out, leading to “increased stress, increased anxiety, and reduced brainpower for the mother’s work and her children”.But Brizendine promises her female readers that “understanding our innate biology empowers us to better plan our future”. It may startle some readers to learn that family friendly workplace policies are not the solution to reduced maternal stress and anxiety, and that fathers who do the kindergarten pick-ups, pack the lunch-boxes, stay home when the kids are sick, get up in the night when the baby wakes up, and buy the birthday presents and ring the paediatrician in their lunch hour are not the obvious solution to enhanced maternal ‘brainpower’. No, it is an appreciation of female brain wiring that will see the working mother through the hard times. (Predictably, Brizendine never even hints that the over-wired working mother consider the simplest antidote to the ill-effects of going against her ‘natural wiring’: namely, giving her partner a giant kick up the neurological backside).
If a frazzled mother can tell herself that her hard-wired powers of female empathy uniquely position her to intuit that the red-faced, cross-patch baby wants to get down from the highchair, then there’s no need to feel cross that she’s the only one who ever seems to notice. If she can take seriously Brizendine’s claim that it is only when the children leave home that “the mommy brain circuits are finally free to be applied to new ambitions, new thoughts, new ideas” she may feel less resentful that the autonomy to pursue a career unhindered, a freedom still taken for granted by her partner, is now no longer extended to her.
The pigeons of evo-psych desperately need a cat among them, and she is here – Cordelia Fine. Her book, Delusions of Gender sounds completely fascinating.
“…then there’s no need to feel cross that she’s the only one who ever seems to notice.”
Hear hear! She hit the nail on the head there. Thanks for bringing her to my attention.
This sounds really good– thanks for blogging about it! Evopsych really frustrates and enrages me, so it’s nice to see people looking at it skeptically.
Of course, there are days when I do feel that my brain is going to explode …
but I never thought that was my brain’s fault.
This stuff is such BS – how’s that for a critical reading?
I misread “Brizendine” as “Bridezine”, and I think I like mine better!
Looking forward to reading a review when you get your hands on it.
Whenever anyone starts talking about “natural” and motherhood in the same sentence, I am immediately skeptical. It seems to me that Evopsych propagates a myth and scapegoats ineffectual partners who are also fathers.
Well I had a mother of a ‘brain explosion’ this evening after a shitty week at work, sick kids for weeks and a trying day working from home (and working at home) and instead of listening to my motherly instinct, I stood up from the dinner table and went to have a lay down on my bed while the bedlam of dinner continued without me.