Susan Faludi is the business. “Facebook feminism, like it or not” in The Baffler is brilliant.
Beneath highly manicured glam shots, each “member” or “partner” reveals her personal “Lean In moment.” The accounts inevitably have happy finales—the Lean In guidelines instruct contributors to “share a positive ending.” Tina Brown’s Lean In moment: getting her parents to move from England to “the apartment across the corridor from us on East 57th Street in New York,” so her mother could take care of the children while Brown took the helm at The New Yorker. If you were waiting for someone to lean in for child care legislation, keep holding your breath. So far, there’s no discernible groundswell.
When asked why she isn’t pushing for structural social and economic change, Sandberg says she’s all in favor of “public policy reform,” though she’s vague about how exactly that would work, beyond generic tsk-tsking about the pay gap and lack of maternity leave. She says she supports reforming the workplace—but the particulars of comparable worth or subsidized child care are hardly prominent elements of her book or her many media appearances.
And
Sandberg’s admirers would say that Lean In is using free-market beliefs to advance the cause of women’s equality. Her detractors would say (and have) that her organization is using the desire for women’s equality to advance the cause of the free market. And they would both be right. In embodying that contradiction, Sheryl Sandberg would not be alone and isn’t so new. For the last two centuries, feminism, like evangelicalism, has been in a dance with capitalism.
Which brings me back to this recent post… Capitalism both accelerated women’s liberation and exacerbated inequality and there is no feminist analysis of anything in our lives without consideration of that fact. I seem to continually find myself writing articles about the tensions between work and family and apart from the fact that I might be a bit repetitive I also think this stuff is at the very heart of what feminism is trying to reconcile.
Previous posts on this blog on the topic include:
Some women want to stay home with children and feminism needs to make peace with that
The real reason why you should be careful in your discussions about mothers
David Willets – yeah kinda, but not really
Workplace flexibility is a feminist issue
Why we should be careful taking ‘maternity’ out of parental leave
What does feminist motherhood look like when black mothers are defining it?
There is a valuable critique of Fraser’s piece here that your readers might be interested in: http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/10/21/white-feminist-fatigue-syndrome/
It picks up on some of the points you note in some of your pieces above (especially “what does feminist motherhood look like when black mothers are defining it?”). Reminding everyone to pay attention to all the work that has been done by feminists of colour and in anti-racist and anti-colonial work.
I agree that the entanglements between work, capitalism and motherhood are core issues for many forms of feminism right now.
Thanks for the link, that’s great.
Just read it.. and yes, agree.. my own path to maternal feminism led me very quickly to black feminism/womanism writing because yes, something those women have been reconciling much better than white feminism has.
Wow. Wow. Wow. Did I say wow? Thank you Blue Milk, thank you Susan Faludi, thank you internets.
Great piece. Love this bit: ” the strike was “made possible because women had come to form a ‘community’ of operatives in the mill, rather than simply a group of individual workers.” An actual community, that is—not an online like-a-thon.”
Such a nice piece of write..Thanks for share.
http://thedangerlands.com/.
[…] lots of good stuff in this essay, most of the main themes I’ve highlighted on this blog before so I won’t repeat them in this post. But there’s something new in this essay […]