I just re-read this guest post I wrote for Feministe earlier this year because I was trying to find it for someone and I have to say, I still agree with me:
If feminism, in approaching the unresolved question of mothers, does not recognise that motherhood is messy and emotional and diverse and political then it has missed the mark. It is important not to try to over-simplify mothers, not to stereotype them and not to ignore that their tasks are real work. Again and again in my writing I try to emphasize that last point, because I suspect much of the hostility towards mothers, including between mothers, would fade if we just understood that mothers are people trying to do a job and it’s consuming and tiring. It is difficult to imagine we would be bothered with The Mummy Wars if we were mobilising around the exploitation of unpaid care in our economy instead.
Because how ludicrous, how shameful, how utterly trivial our judgements of a teenage mother suddenly become with this one acknowledgement – that she is working, that it is hard work and it is for no pay and no recognition. Or our judgements of a mother with a disabled child having an outburst in public; or a mother breastfeeding her toddler; or a mother trying to help her teenage child with their drug addictions; or even, a mother blogging. (Oh, you want to tell me how I should do my unpaid work more to your liking? Fabulous, do tell). It sometimes helps to remember that even the most privileged mother is occasionally woken in the middle of the night by her sick toddler and sits bolt upright in bed, bleary-eyed and shivering in the dark, to catch vomit or shit in her bare hands. It may take some of the sting out of her, apparently, selfish lifestyle.
It’s the utter lack of recognition of what motherhood is that galls me – that we should never be tired, angry or sad – but live in society’s myth of motherhood as something all-fulfilling.
One of the (many) things I took out of reading Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s work was the realization that it is actually healthy for a culture to have a variety of types of mothering going on in it. Different mothering strategies will “succeed” in different environments, and a culture can’t predict the environments its members will face, so some diversity is likely to mean a more robust culture that can better survive problems, much like having some members with random mutations in various genes can help the group come through a new disease outbreak.
Anyway, that realization made me less judgey about other moms.
[…] patriarchal attitudes towards motherhood then look at how teenage mothers get treated and a lot of feminist sites have really dropped the ball on this one, too. Great article from Amy Benfer in Dame Magazine […]