Renee over at Womanist Musings has written a great post in response to a piece by Twisty from I Blame the Patriarchy, calling for mothers to stop participating in the sexism of nuclear families (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, it may seem like the norm to Twisty, because she doesn’t come from a history of Whiteness selling husbands away from wives, and ripping children away from their mothers arms to earn a fucking buck, and that’s just Black women. What about the so-called friends to the First Nations people who thought it would be a good idea to send Indigenous kids to schools to divorce them from their traditions, culture and heritage? Apparently White women know more about how to raise our kids than we do. Then of course there is the history of forced sterilizations of Latinas, Indigenous women and Black women to confront. We didn’t have a gilded cage that trapped us. We were working to put food on the table and clothes on the backs of our children, trying desperately to raise them, when we were allowed to have them that is.
Renee’s post reminds me of Andrea O’Reilly’s Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart, which I talked about here:
Consider this, white feminist motherhood has been preoccupied with how motherhood has trapped women whereas black feminist motherhood sees motherhood as a political act of resistance. This is because white mothers take preservation for granted in the dominant white culture. On the other hand, black mothers need to work hard to protect their children, teach their children how to protect themselves, ensure culture is passed on, and heal those around them who missed out on this kind of mothering. White mothers have a history of their lives being narrowed to the home and have consequently focused their fight on getting the choice to work outside the home, whereas black mothers, who were rarely able to indulge the question of whether to work or not, have instead been faced with a consistent struggle to have their femininity even recognised.
Basically, the motherhood debate needs widening beyond its very white and middle-class sphere. If we are actually to be talking about ‘Motherhood’ and not just a little pocket of mothering experiences then we need to let many more voices into our debates. And in that vein it is also worth reading lauredhel’s response, as a mother with a disability, to that Twisty piece in my comments section, too.
blue milk 
LOVE
Eh, is this pile on Twisty week? There’s a piece over at Feministe praising a woman who wrote a whole series of pieces on how Twisty is “crazy”. Apparently ableism is perfectly fine if you’re piling on the hate figure du jour. Sure, Twisty wants to see an alternative to the nuclear family. So did Germaine Greer. Neither of them had/have children, so their outlook is a little too academic. Twisty’s ideal of destroying the patriarchy by destroying the culture of dominance and submission is also maybe pretty idealistic, but I think it’s beautiful.
@Helen, I certainly don’t want to pile on anyone. But that post wasn’t just overly academic about motherhood and women who choose to have heterosexual marriages. It was just plain wrong, and condescending on top of that. It reads to me like the work of someone who not only does not have children, but is not even willing to try to understand why someone might want children.
Imagine if I- a straight woman with no experience of lesbian relationships- wrote a similar post exhorting all women to help fight to make relationships more stable, and arguing that all lesbian relationships are necessarily unstable because of the structure of society, denying the possibility that any two lesbian women might build a stable relationship. I’d be pilloried, and rightfully so.
Of course, my status as a straight woman in a heterosexual marriage is much more privileged, so I guess it can be argued that I should just shrug my shoulders and not take her post too seriously. Which is sort of what I’ll do, but not without voicing my strong disagreement with the premise of her arguments.
And @Blue Milk- thanks for the link to the post from Womanist Musings. It was good to read and remember that no matter how much posts like Twisty’s annoy me, my complaints with them are small potatoes.
I couldn’t even get even part way through the Twisty post.
Everyone has an opinions on how to raise a child. Mine is that there are several ways to create a great human being.
Your posts here – esp that wonderful Toni Morrison quote – have really resonated with me. On npr, our big newsradio station in the US, has been doing this heartbreaking series on First Nation’s children being taken away at alarming high rates and placed in foster care with white families/group homes, even when they have relatives on the reservation (and in violation of federal law). I was just thinking about mothering while being First Nation in South Dakota.
I heard those, too, and they made me cry on my way to day care (the only time I really listen to NPR). So much that I take for granted is actually granted only because of my privilege.
When so many men died in the second world war, many white women were left to raise their children without fathers – they had to work too. Very few white women had the luxury of not doing so. Why do women always pick the living life out of one another? I do not care if you are black, white or purple, I do not care who you make love to – but I am absolutely sick of how hideously we as a gender treat one another.
The difference being Silver, that now that war is long over and once again many white women have the option of not working while few women of colour do. White children aren’t taken from their homes by authorities in the same numbers, white women aren’t looked down upon for having children by society in general, white women’s choices aren’t suspect. This is not something that other women can say. That’s why these posts are still important. Our sisters are still suffering and we should at least acknowledge that, if not do something about it. Don’t worry, women of colour get treated even worse by their gender than white women do. FTR I am white.
While I couldn’t get through the Twisty post so feel a bit out of the loop with what the original post is about, for some reason this exchange came back to when I was cycling my bike the other day. It made me think about what I witnessed in Hong Kong recently – my white friends’ children being looked after by live-in Filipino nannies. There was a very bizarre dynamic in their homes with the nannies living in rooms the size of box cupboards and expected to get up through the night plus look after the children all day and cook dinner for the family. It turned out that one of my friend’s nannies (she has two – one for each child!) had her own 8-year old daughter back in the Philippines whom she saw only once or twice a year. The other nannies had very little chance of setting up their own families. While the work my friends provided these women no undoubtedly increased their extended families’ prospects back home, I couldn’t help but see it as depriving them of the chance to be mothers to their own children. I saw the same thing when I lived in New York – my white friends’ children being looked after by black nannies. And they’d downplay the support they received from these women so these women were denied their nurturing roles twice over.
The racial and power imbalances in nannying are so obvious to me yet they are so often swept under the carpet because to acknowledge them is seen to taint somehow the opportunity this imbalance gives to white women to go back to work.
@Jen, I agree that the situation you describe is terrible for the nannies. We have something similar here in the US with women who come (usually illegally) from Mexico and Central America, often leaving families behind. It is a horrible choice for them- they are choosing between staying home and trying to raise families in crushing poverty versus coming to the US to make money to support their families at the expense of having any time with those families. Since they are in the country illegally, they often can’t even go home once a year- each trip back in is expensive and risky. The book Enrique’s Journey provides a heartbreaking look at this, from the viewpoint of the son of one of these women.
Needless to say, any policy changes that might address this problem are tied up in partisan politics and barely disguised racism. This issue is not one that my country handles well, to say the least. I blame racism for that, but also sexism, because I think that for many people, the default solution is just to tell women like me to quit our jobs and stay home with the kids.
For this reason, I think it is important to acknowledge that it is not a binary choice: stay home with your kids or employ a nanny in a repressive arrangement. Another option is to treat child care like a valid career, worthy of respect and subject to work place protections.
My kids are in a day care center, but some of my friends use nannies- nannies who are legally in the US and who work only during the work day. The teachers at my day care are white, hispanic, and African-American. I cannot speak for any other parents, but I personally view them as professionals, just like me, who have chosen early childhood education as a career. Unfortunately, my country has not figured out how to make this career as lucrative as I think it should be, but the same is true of elementary school teachers- and I don’t generally get told that we are repressing our elementary school teachers.
Paying someone else to assist in child care need not be a repressive thing, and need not involve the power imbalance that you so correctly point out. I wish we could find a way to fix this.
@Cloud: “Another option is to treat child care like a valid career, worthy of respect and subject to work place protections.”
I completely agree. Just didn’t have the time/energy to write about that aspect of it. My friend just finished her doctorate on the legal treatment of nannies in New York – how they get hidden from view and thus exploited in just the way you describe. More legal protections are definitely needed. Also agree that this doesn’t have to be the case and there are many instances where they are not. I bristle at the suggestion that paying someone to look after your child in inherently exploitative (like some ppl do) but it seems like the results can be. It doesn’t seem to be the case where I live (small town in the UK) but I definitely see it in big cities (Hong Kong, New York) etc. I was quite shocked at how my friend’s Filipino nanny was being treated. And then it did seem to be quite clearly a race issue too.
We do not give anything real up, as white women, to acknowledge that racist shit has been done and is still being done to black women, indigenous women etc. We’re also strong enough, as white women, to hear some anger and hurt from black women, it won’t kill us. The understanding we gain of other women’s experiences of oppression will only enhance our feminism.
Yes, there are lots of stories of oppression in motherhood – lots and lots, and poverty and classism and gross disadvantage effect white women, too, I’m happy to talk about all that on this blog, but this post is about the ways in which the key discussions of motherhood frequently ignore a whole spectrum of experiences and perspectives – those of black mothers.
I don’t believe hearing the voices of mothers who feel marginalised by motherhood debates will tear our gender apart. We can handle this, let’s not back away.
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