Here is a very interesting critique of Elisabeth Badinter’s arguments on motherhood from Anne Manne in The Monthly. (I’m not sure for how long they provide free access to the article so read it sooner than later). I find some of the analysis a little muddled, but in essence I think Manne and I are in agreement, we both have concerns over the scapegoating of babies in the tensions women experience between motherhood and the patriarchy.
Whenever a cultural flashpoint occurs – and Badinter has clearly struck a chord – it is worth travelling upstream to find the head of the river. If the history of parenthood is a history of ambivalence, then where do we sit in the continuum? Ambivalence towards children is mounting. Last year Jennifer Senior caused a stir with a story in New York magazine, ‘All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting’. It backed surveys showing that parents were less happy than their childless counterparts, a contention that Badinter also brandishes. Parents, Senior argued, might love their kids but they hated their lives. Life shrank to the size of a teacup. Everything turned to shit. Senior herself arrived home only to be pelted in the head with wooden blocks. She based her article on a Texan study which showed working mothers were happier doing almost anything other than childcare, even housework.
Recently I was interviewed by a feminist writer about my thoughts on where the resurgence in attachment parenting fits with feminism. I raised a number of challenges but I also higlighted what I see as harmonies between feminism and this style of parenting. There are two significant areas of overlap in my opinion. The first is that attachment parenting, at least in theory, is a style of parenting allowing women to perform parenting within their everyday lives. When babies are breastfed, co-sleeping and carried they’re potentially very portable. You can be caring for your baby while also getting shit done. In practice this isn’t always the case. The workplace, and public space in general, can be pretty child unfriendly and not every mother decides this is how she wants to live her life. But in theory it should be possible – women should be able to be full participants in life without being marginalised by their gender. And that’s feminism.
I think Manne believes the same to be true.
What is going on here? We all know of the women’s movement as one of the most important and compelling social movements of the 1960s. Less recognised is that another movement, one championing the humane treatment of children, was born in the ’60s. Like feminism, it has fearless and profound thinkers, passionate advocates as well as the usual crackpots. Unlike women, however, children cannot speak for themselves. As a consequence, the discourse bringing greater sensitivity and a new ethic of care towards children has emerged hesitantly, uncertainly, through the last century. It has run parallel to but is often overshadowed by the struggles over gender. Like feminism, it has at its core something deep and humane. It depends upon the same kind of ‘putting one’s self in the shoes of another’, of overcoming a sense of difference to extend our empathy, imagination and capacity for identification.
At its best, feminism is about justice. It calls us to a certain kind of attentiveness. So, too, is the movement for better treatment of children. Here lies ‘the conflict’. At the very same moment when we are offering women long-overdue opportunities, we also expect them to enact the new ethic of care, but with minimal help. One consequence of this conflict has been the revival of deeply flawed arguments about what is ‘natural’.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. May I leave a whole blog post in your comment box?
I’ve seen a lot of anti-attachment articles from “older” feminist mothers. I’ve seen a lot of rebuttals from “younger” feminist mothers. And what I don’t think is getting fully fleshed out is the role of the partner, if there is one. Especially when the partner is male.
Because nobody as a blog titled, “Crumbling Granola”. About crumbling granola: I’m an attachment parent married to a man isn’t into attachment and pays lip-service to equality of the sexes, and I’m sick of negotiating a better deal about fucking everything, so guess who’s doing all the work around here?
And I think that there are LOTS of attachment-leaning mothers with young children who are married to men who are not feminists and who are not sold on attachment either. But who wants to write about that?
So, I can easily spend 3 hours of doing gentle bedtime methods with my three kids. Meanwhile, DH reads/plays online/whatever because if it were up to him, they’d CIO. And I love that time with my kids, I do. But I’m also a SAHM, so the evenings would be my only time for adult interests and company.
Karen L – Fuck yes. I think you’ve raised multiple important points here. The fatigue of endless negotiations is something I have noted before: https://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2010/05/24/contemporary-family-life-or-death-by-a-thousand-negotiations/ and https://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/does-shared-parenting-lead-to-more-arguments/
It is a big part of the exhaustion one feels in trying to be a feminist AND a mother partnered to a man.
And you’re absolutely right about the grind that attachment parenting practices can become when you’re battling the patriarchy at the same time. Attachment parenting in isolation, attachment parenting while being part of the workforce, attachment parenting while battling domestic inequality = fucking exhaustion and exploitation. This is why I argue that the attachment parenting philosophy NEEDS feminism. https://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/why-attachment-parenting-needs-feminism/
But thank you for reminding me that I need to write about the conflict side of attachment parenting and feminism more. Because when you said “But who wants to write about that?” – Well, I want to read about it, so let’s have more of those conversations. Also, if you would like to write a guest post on this topic I’d be happy to put it up here.
I think, aside from attachment leanings, there are a lot of couples where the primary caregiver gets a lot gentler through actually dealing with a little person as their primary thing, and the other parent stays about as authoritarian (or darwinian, if their parents were more hands-off) as they were raised, and they have conflict over it – both in terms of “well you chose the harder way so you do it” and also in terms of the primary parent feeling like they’ve learned what works through experience, and having that devalued by the parent who’s away more.
Just a quick comment to say that, while they didn’t call it attachment parenting, my mom and dad (raising youngins in the 1980s) pretty much made the choice to do that: my mother was the primary stay-at-home parent, and so shouldered the burden of incorporating parenting into daily life. A lot of people would have looked at my parents’ choices and seen a conservative gender-role division of labor, and imagined that was constricting for my mother.
But because my parents’ decision to home educate and practice child-centered parenting and home life fundamentally wasn’t driven by assumptions about gender but instead by what sort of family life they wanted, I actually see their parenting as foundational to my adult feminism. Their parenting taught me to identify and critique ageism — as parents they taught us kids from day one that our voices mattered in family life and in the world. Not to the exclusion of others’ needs (one of the best decisions my mother made was to assert that she, too, was a person with individual needs just like us). But we absolutely participated to the full extent of our abilities in daily family life. Without division according to sex/gender.
The respect I received as a child was directly responsible for my expectation that I be respected (and that all people should be respected) as I grew into adulthood.
Not to derail the topic, but Anna, thank you for the insight into what you saw as your parents family building and finding the life they wanted regardless of how it may have looked from the outside. As a home schooling parent, I often worry what gender roles my husband and I are unwittingly enforcing. (Though the power of my children’s kindness, feminism and political passion have allayed those fears somewhat, positive reinforcement from outside certainly helps!)
I only hope I am as successful at raising fair minded, feminist and empathetic human beings as your parents obviously have.
I’m a feminist and I do lots of crunchy attachmenty things (husband does not but in many ways we are ying and yang). I think that I am generally perceived as not-normal by my peers. These peers are typically not feminists & do not subscribe to attachmenty things. So I kind of assumed they naturally went together. Perhaps you could elaborate on this more. Now I’m curious. Certainly, this was not a topic from my university women’s study classes.
Thank you for this, and for the earlier interview with Ina May Gaskin. I have been contemplating all this since the birth of my first son three years ago. I am often saddened/enraged by the “discussions” that occur in the blog posts and comments sections of feminist sites around children and around natural parenting. I can no longer read Jezebel for instance without being rendered speechless with disappointment at what the writers and readers there say about natural/attachment parenting, whether it be birth, breastfeeding, gentle discipline and so on. It is a horror show – just look over there today at the posts about placenta pills and kiss feeding. Or at any post about natural childbirth, cosleeping, or breastfeeding that has been published over there. I often blame youth and inexperience, but I think it is all part of a cultural context of child hatred. It is my belief that misogyny and pediaphobia are inextricably linked, and I wish that feminists, both young and old, would realize that. The casual denigration of children and mothering that occurs on these sites is poisonous to the movement.
Rebekka, I agree with you so much! I can’t stand going to Jezebel’s site and I often wonder about my feminist, mother friends who love it there. It seems to me that too many of us feminists view feminism through a patriarchal lens. We are feminists as a reaction to patriarchy instead of being feminists because we recognize and respect our humanity and the humanity of all, well, human beings. This, of course, plays out in the conversations we have around parenting and the backlash against attachment parenting behaviors, specifically. It is disappointing to me and I think this is the real reason we haven’t seen as much progress for women in industrialized nations as we would have hoped. I am not a feminist because of patriarchy. I am a feminist because I am a human being and therefore have certain rights that I will insist are acknowledged and respected. Patriarchy is just one tool that is used to try to oppress me. My entire political frame-of-mind is not defined by that one tool.
I think you make a key point about attachment parenting, that it allows women to parent within their regular lives, I always felt that Attachment practices allowed me to focus on parenting as if it is a real, worthy task, not just something to add to my workload. I would rest while nursing my child, because I felt that it was equally important to other jobs, not just something to mutitask during. I think a lot of people think that being able to give the baby a bottle, or put it to sleep, or play with it when it’s calm is giving the mother a rest- when in reality that just lets her rush around doing more chores.
Attachment parenting and Feminism come together when we realize that for a multitude of reasons women are still the primary caregivers, and that makes Parenting ‘Women’s work’- and therefore not really ‘worth doing’ in our society. Anything that takes ‘women’s work’ seriously is a good thing I think.
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[…] Take a look at the Blue Milk post on The Conflict, but more importantly scroll to the bottom to find links to her other posts about Badinter, including Oppressed by Breastfeeding and Feminism and attachment parenting and why they’ve more in common than in conflict. […]
[…] mother, The split, How did the patriarchy influence parenting and what problems did it cause?, Feminism and attachment parenting and why they’ve more in common than in conflict, Why attachment parenting needs feminism, Can attachment parenting be saved?, and The accidental […]
[…] Milk (brilliant blog, must read!) suggests another place that attachment parenting and feminism meet. Attachment parenting is about treating your child as if they too have rights, respecting their […]
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