There is a fascinating discussion over at I Blame the Patriarchy about motherhood and radical feminism. All the usual tensions are raised (and they are tense) but fear not, generally the discussion is pretty respectful and non-defensive, and if you make it to the end of the 100 or so comments you’ll probably see your view, whatever it is, represented there somewhere. Twisty’s post is actually a call for unity between mothers and others in feminism but in it she makes an unfortunate appeal, both heartfelt and condescending. (I’ve indicated the statement in bold but have included the surrounding paragraph, which I pretty much agree with, for context).
We are desperate for women to reject the specious narrative that within the nuclear family we have “choice,” when in fact the “choice” (regarding motherhood) is between doing one full-time job (stay home and raise kids) or two full-time jobs (do paid work and also raise kids).* We are desperate for women to stop buying into the patriarchy-sponsored message about women’s fulfillment — that is, the notion that you are a selfish blob of failure, or worse, that you are missing out on life’s greatest joy, if you don’t martyr yourself to home and family and totally subsume your identity in the process. We want women to reject marriage and the nuclear family. We want women to not have kids in the first place.
Twisty’s plea made me wonder if when you don’t share a particular desire it is very difficult to understand that desire. You can reduce that desire entirely to a misguided will, an inability to exercise one’s true desire, a self-delusion, an excuse for other more legitimate desires, or simply a capitulation. How do you explain the desire to be a mother? How do you explain a desire, a very strong desire, one of the strongest you’ve ever experienced, to someone who doesn’t share that same desire? It must be as difficult as explaining sexual desire to someone without a libido. Women don’t just have kids because the patriarchy believes we should, women don’t just have kids because some of us have sex with men; some of us want children, truly desire children and even desire the ongoing life of motherhood. And this desire for motherhood can be entirely divorced from a desire for patriarchal structure. But articulating that very complex and yet very urgent (and consequently seemingly simple) desire is difficult, which is why I think we end up with so many clumsy statements from parents who appear to be crying out for either therapy or tact – like “wanting someone to love”, “wanting an embodiment of their love for their partners and families” and “wanting to do something meaningful with their lives”.
Mothers do themselves a disservice when they only speak about the sacrifices of motherhood – the drudgeries, the unfairness, and the costs, when they make their role appear to be one of complete martyrdom. It is not difficult to see how for someone with no desire for children and/or motherhood that this seems to be the route taken by the very stupidest of the herd-animals. If only they could think for themselves, they could liberate themselves and stop dragging us down with them!
I’m still reading Daphne de Marneffe’s Maternal Desire and her writing was fresh in my mind when I read Twisty’s post. De Marneffe really perturbed me when she suggested in her book that bitching about motherhood wasn’t really so fresh and liberating for women. One of my motivations for starting a blog was to be able to bitch about motherhood. But continually discussing the miseries of motherhood isn’t all that taboo, de Marneffe argued, denigrating more of women’s work is not really rocking any kind of boat; owning your desire for children, your love of mothering, fighting for its legitimacy and value, that is the real unspoken truth for mothers. Oh, there are plenty of ‘family values’ types and mothers’ day card producers willing to give voice to your desire, to articulate it and place it for you, but their understanding of the desire for motherhood is as limited as those who outright oppose motherhood.
Great post.
In all these sorts of posts, I find myself just so completely marginalised by this dichotomy: “the “choice” (regarding motherhood) is between doing one full-time job (stay home and raise kids) or two full-time jobs (do paid work and also raise kids).” Actually, I don’t have that choice, or even “choice”; my impairment/disability is such that I can’t do paid work. Am I a “SAHM” or a “Nuclear Mother” in the Twistyland? Something else? Erased yet again.
And this – “We are desperate for women to stop buying into […] the notion that you are a selfish blob of failure, or worse, that you are missing out on life’s greatest joy, if you don’t martyr yourself to home and family and totally subsume your identity in the process.” How about not buying into the notion that you are a selfish blob of failure if you’re not involved in An “Uninterrupted” Career or any Career at all, which is the capitalism-sponsored message that runs alongside this patriarchy-sponsored one? And how about not characterising motherhood as nothing but martyrdom, which as a label imposed from outside shits me to tears? (Which is partly what your post is about, blue).
Ugh. I mean, Twisty writes well, but scratch at her posts about motherhood and her repeated disclaimers about how she doesn’t hate mothers, not really… start ringing very, very false. Labelling me a poor deluded martyr-slave-collaborator? That’s hate. Just sneeringly disguised hate. And I kinda think we’re starting to need a proper word for mother-misogyny.
Which was a somewhat long-winded way of saying: “Everyone gets to butt out of my uterus and my life, including Twisty. Unsolicited expressions of your wishes for my reproductive organs are always unwelcome – and there’s a really good reason why “You should…” is the centre square on the Antifeminism Bingo Card II.“
Yeah, I was thinking the “capitalist-sponsored” bit too – I can’t think of any paid work that would bring me the happiness that being a parent does (although I guess a few lucky people have paid jobs that are also very satisfying in a contribute-to-society sort of way). But very VERY few people lead lives that are filled with something outside of paid work or parenting.
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I thought a lot about privilege when I was pregnant, because people (largely but not entirely women) almost all talked to me about parenting ambivalence. Hard work, feeling trapped, the days you can’t love your children. People talked to me about their childfreedom more than before or since: one person (my husband’s boss actually) took me aside and murmured vaguely disapproving things about population levels. (People who have had more than two children can now smile about how this only happened to me once.)
My husband though reported that everyone was thrilled for him: he heard constantly about how to men around him it was the best thing that had ever happened to them, that he was going to love it, and so on.
Now there’s a lot of separate things there: presumably many of those men aren’t having to deal with the hardest labour of child caring, but also that women don’t talk about or hear about parental love as much as men do, in my circles. Men’s love for children seems constructed as manly and women’s as weak and indulgent.
Wow. I always want to ask these people who they think would be around to take care of them when they get old if they got their wish and none of us had kids. But leaving that pointless bit of snark aside….
I also always find my hackles going up because I don’t feel at all oppressed in my standard heterosexual marriage. I support other people’s right to have whatever love/home arrangement works for them (as long as all parties are consenting adults). So why can’t they support my right to have what works for me? Why do they have to assume that I must be oppressed to choose it? This assumption does a great disservice to a lot of strong liberated women out there and the men with whom they have chosen to share their lives.
I, for the record, in no way do two full time jobs. Motherhood is full time responsibility for me, but it is not a full time job.
My husband and I both do chores around the house. We also choose to pay other people to do some of the work around our house, and to watch our children for part of the time. My husband is a fully engaged parent, who does not deserve to have his parenting work ignored and denigrated like that. Sure, there are some parenting things that fall more heavily on me, primarily because of the biological realities. But we have never had trouble balancing that out. My standard example of that is that he can do the dishes while I breastfeed. But also- he can get up early on weekend mornings with the kids, since the toddler insists on me when she wakes in the middle of the night. Etc., etc. It doesn’t always happen automatically (although often it does), but I have a voice and I can speak up and ask him to step up if I need to. Nowhere in my wedding vows did I say that I promised not to call BS on him. (And similarly, he can call it on me if he thinks things are out of balance.)
I actually think Twisty is buying into a little bit of the patriarchal lie, there, when she denies that arrangements such as mine exist.
And you are right, we should own and discuss the good parts of motherhood as well as the challenging parts- in fact we should own the good that comes from some of the challenges. I, for instance, feel like I have grown quite a bit emotionally due to being a mother, and that growth is directly linked to the sleep deprivation, and learning how to handle public temper tantrums, and learning to deal with the need to put someone else’s needs so absolutely ahead of my own needs, etc. I don’t talk/write about that much, though, because it feels to me that it might be insulting to women without kids- as if I’m saying that no one without kids could grow in these ways. That isn’t what I think at all- I think there are multiple paths to this sort of growth, but that parenthood is one of the most direct.
And, now that I’ve taken the time to read the entire post over at IBTP… I feel compelled to add that I pay both the people who clean my house and the people who work at our day care a hell of a lot more than the price of a meal. Unless the IBTP folks eat at MUCH nicer restaurants than I do.
I don’t recognize my life in that post at all. No doubt they would tell me that I am blind to my own oppression. Or at least blind to the oppression I am somehow inflicting on the people around me. Whatever.
yeah, it really bites when other people suggest that I am oppressing other women by paying them to look after my child or clean my house.
I love Twisty, except when she writes about motherhood. Who’s the “we” in we don’t want you to have children?
I was going to reply back on Twitter (thanks for replying to me, btw!), but I can’t keep to 140 characters. I think I’m too long-winded for Twitter.
So, I like this post you’ve linked to…but like the other commenters, I feel like she’s barely disguising her mother-hate, or at least mother-pity. Don’t pity me, Twisty, because I do feel like I’ve made this choice rather than having had it made for me. What really bugs me about this kind of attitude (and I have felt the need to justify my choice to have kids, unfortunately) is the implication that my choice is wrong, and her choice (the one to not have kids) is right. I don’t see either as right or wrong, just different, and up to the individual to decide. I really loathe the insinuation that I need to educated and “saved” from patriarchal oppression, because if I was really aware of the system in which I live, then I wouldn’t have chosen to have kids at all, right?
You’re right: it’s condescending. I completely respect her (and others, whoever the “we” is she is talking about) choice to remain child-free. Why can’t she respect my decision to have them? I guess this is often the result when extreme or radical thinking. It’s not bad, not at all…someone needs to think this way and put it out there. It just often comes off as “I know better than anyone and I’m here to save you all from your ignorance”. Hmm.
Anyway, showing off my long-winded skills here, so I’ll leave it there. I always read but have never posted, even though I often want to! I’ll make more of an effort in the future.
Twisty’s post implies that it’s women’s job to fix the overpopulation problem. I find this highly problematic. What else it implies is that it’s women’s job to fix the patriarchy, which is sort of like saying that it’s women’s job not to get raped.
It’s not that the institution of ‘nuclear motherhood’ is beyond criticism. But Twisty writes from a perspective that asserts that all women who are mothers are victims of the patriarchy’s ideology. If that’s the case, what about other women? Specifically – what about other women like her? Is she magically free from the influence of invisible social institutions?
Does Twisty think her mother shouldn’t have given birth to her? Does Twisty earn a living in a way that is completely divorced from the patriarchy? Does Twisty live in a house, shop, even blog, in a way that is completely free from the influence of the patriarchy?
I disagree with a lot of what Twisty says in that post but I want to point out that she clearly addresses that she is not magically free from the patriarchy. She says:
“But anyway, check it out: we’re all of us cozied up to the Man in one way or another. Turn over the keyboard you’re typing on right now and read the fine print. Mine was made by slave labor in Malaysia.”
Still, I want to put a positive spin on what she goes on to say but I’m struggling to.
Point well taken. But it seems that she’s saying that women with children are less well-positioned to fight the patriarchy. Which I strongly disagree with.
[…] over at Womanist Musings has written a great post in response to a piece by Twisty from I Blame the Patriarchy (the same one that I re-contemplated recently): Just raising a kid in a family is challenging the status quo for many Black families. Of course, […]
Wow, I’ve read Twisty’s post and all the comments and I really didn’t take her to be either mother-blaming or mother-hating at all. She is pretty explicit that she, you know, blames the patriarchy. I didn’t take that she is setting herself above mothers, but that her job (on the blog) is to identify the patriarchy where she sees it, and one of those places is the nuclear family. Identifying the patriarchy and its role in the nuclear family (as she defines it) does not, in my mind, mean I can’t love my kids, love being a mother and want to be a mother. It does mean that I should be aware of the ways in which oppression is at work, even if I personally might not be feeling it, or might be choosing to ignore it.
Well, at the very least she was being unreasonable, asking women not to have children in the first place?
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