This recurring feature, curated by Pilgrim Soul, directs Harpy readers to important feminist thoughts and concepts as spoken by some of her favourite feminists on and off the web. The appraisal of the value of these snippets is, of course, entirely Pilgrim Soul’s, and does not necessarily reflect the views of other Harpies. Feel free to discuss in the comments here.
Today’s Feminist Food for Thought is a bit of a repeat – we’re back to bell hooks. It’s not that I have exhausted all the feminists available. It’s just that I often, lately, have seen women misunderstand what the feminist critique of motherhood is all about, which is to say they misunderstand it as a critique of mothers. Because some mothers find a lot of comfort in the patriarchal conception of motherhood as the ultimate fulfilment of female purpose, I guess one can see why they see all criticism of the modern cult of motherhood – yoga mommies and whatnot – as personal.
At any rate, bell hooks elucidates the problems associated with the elevation of motherhood quite concisely in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center:
Early feminist attacks on motherhood alienated masses of women from the movement, especially poor and/or non-white women, who find parenting one of the few interpersonal relationships where they are affirmed and appreciated. Unfortunately, recent positive feminist focus on motherhood draws heavily on sexist stereotypes. Motherhood is as romanticized by some feminist activists as it was by the nineteenth-centry men and women who extolled the virtues of the “cult of domesticity…”
The resurgence of interest in motherhood has positive and negative implications for feminist movement. On the positive side there is a continual need for study and research of female parenting, which this interest promotes and encourages… It is also positive that women who choose to bear children need no longer fear that this choice excludes them from recognition by feminist movement, although it may still exclude them from active participation. On the negative side, romanticizing motherhood, employing the same terminology that is used by sexists to suggest that women are inherently life-affirming nurturers, feminist activists reinforce central tenets of male supremacist ideology. They imply that motherhood is a woman’s truest vocation; that women who do not mother, whose lives may be focused more exclusively on a career, creative work, or political work, are missing out, are doomed to live emotionally unfulfilled lives. While they do not openly attack or denigrate women who do not bear children, they (like the society as a whole) suggest that it is more important than women’s other labor and more rewarding. They could simply state that it is important and rewarding. Significantly, this perspective is often voiced by many of the white bourgeois women with successful careers who are now choosing to bear children. They seem to be saying to masses of women that careers or work can never be as important, as satisfying, as bearing children.
We’re all childless here; any Harpy moms want to weigh in?
See I kind of take issue with the notion that mothers are actually privileged in patriarchy. Motherhood as an abstract notion is held up as the true vocation of women, but actual mothers I think are on the bottom of the patriarchal heap, and reap few actual material benefits from it. In fact childless women like myself will be richer, more advanced in the workplace, and more independent from the demands of parenting. Childless women may face some judgment from individual family members and friends, but in the end they come out on top, don’t they?
I’ve never felt that bearing a child excludes me from active participation in the feminist movement.
I don’t actually know any feminists who think that women are inherently life-affirming, or that motherhood is a woman’s highest purpose. I do get defensive when motherhood is attacked, because no one likes to hear that their choices are wrong, but I don’t think my choices are right for everyone. I don’t know any feminists who think all women should have kids, or that all women would be fulfilled by kids.
Criticism of the cult of motherhood =/= criticism of women who have children. The craze over and worship of the secular madonna-and-child culture =/= the actual act of being a mother.
I certainly never felt as if I needed to tender my resignation as a feminist when I was pregnant, and I don’t feel as if my desire to be a mother is something that puts me under attack from other feminists. I’m much more wary about how my choices are viewed by the patriarchy than I am about how they are interpreted by other women who disdain the fetishization of childbearing.
JD, I don’t know about childless women “coming out on top,” but I’m not sure how your comment relates to what hooks is saying. Unless it just doesn’t and it’s just what you think on this subject, which is obviously fine.
I don’t tend to use the word “privilege” in conjunction with motherhood for the reasons you set out. What I do think happens in the context of let’s say intra-feminist discussions on this subject is that mothers misunderstand critiques of the patriarchal conception of motherhood (i.e. as special, life-affirming, ultimate purpose etc.) as being, as Av0gadro puts it, women telling them they’ve made the “wrong choice.” In a patriarchy it is nearly impossible to talk about wrong choices, not least because they are not “choices,” in my book. Don’t blame the women, blame the patriarchy, etc. I do happen to think far fewer women would choose to have children outside a patriarchal framework than we currently see, not least because abortion/contraception would be freely available and stigma-free.
It is that straightforward, yes. Criticism of “motherhood” as a cultural story doesn’t mean tossing mothers off the feminist float, just as criticism of the cultural construct of “femininity” doesn’t mean dissing women or even barring femmes from our parade.
In other words, recognizing that the dominant culture paints and promotes a horrible picture of a thing doesn’t mean we’re fighting the thing. We’re fighting the picture and the culture.
@J.D.Regent is right — the patriarchy doesn’t revere mothers as much as it reveres motherhood. It reveres an impossible picture of motherhood, one that no person can ever actually achieve, and the system benefits from us wasting our time trying to achieve it instead of doing things that are actually in our best interests. (note the parallel with the airbrushed female body in advertising.)
I’ve become distinctly more radical in my feminism in the two years since my daughter was born. I don’t find these two hats I wear — feminist, mom — to be at all in conflict.
I do find, however, that I’m very uncomfortable when I talk to mothers who *do* strive to achieve the cultural-ideal-of-motherhood. I hear women my age talk about how they feel their primary purpose in life is to be mommy to their babies, and I just can’t relate. My primary *task* as a stay-at-home mom is taking care of my kid, but it’s far from my “purpose,” any more than filing cabinets were my purpose when I had a full-time job filing things. My primary purpose in life is to be *me*, with all the complexity, contradiction, and kick-ass-ness that entails.
I object strongly to the ‘cult of motherhood’ which I personally find slightly demented (and never more so I have to admit than in the US where there seems to be some sort of crazed competitiveness about how best to bring up your child).
That said I am curious as to why hooks asserts that choosing to bear children may exclude women from active participation in the feminist movement. Surely and on the most banal level if educating people about the patriarchy is all important than those who bear children are participating actively in the way in which they bring their children up?
Not that that would be the only means of participation but it just seemed a little strange to suggest that pushing out a baby instantly prevented women from actively participating in feminism.
Not that that would be the only means of participation but it just seemed a little strange to suggest that pushing out a baby instantly prevented women from actively participating in feminism.
Here in the USA (all Western countries really), there is this disturbing “you made your bed, now lie in it, bitch” social element to motherhood. Other mothers will help you when you become a mothers… but if feminism is heavily non-mother (i.e. statistically more non-mothers in the active feminist movement), then that often translates as GETTING LESS HELP than if you hang around non-feminists. Feminists talk a good game about “it takes a village” blah-blah–but few seem to want to help with child-care, unless they are also mothers themselves. The whole communitarian-collective thing just goes to hell. The behavior appears to be unchanged from the patriarchal reality: well, I didn’t choose to have children, YOU did; you made your bed, so…
And that means (examples) your kid will start wailing during the meeting/march, and you will have to break away from the march (never a good idea) to find a place to change her all by yourself, and nobody will accompany you… or you go to a feminist meeting 9 months pregnant, everyone glares at you, and you are actually forced to sit on the floor because nobody will offer you their seat. (It’s a wonder I ever got up again.) True stories from the trenches. I distinctly got the impression (admittedly, this was 25 years ago) that I was being exiled from feminism, and so, I stayed on the periphery for many years after that. This might also have been due to the generally politically-negative environment of the Reagan era… but you know, that is exactly when feminism was required, and rowdy ladeez like me would have been handy to have around. I felt so unwelcome, I wrote a whole article about it for a local alternative paper (no blogs back then) and created something of a feminist ruckus in my hometown. (I used the same examples as above, which is why I recall them so well.)
I really don’t see that it has changed. In fact, it maybe is WORSE–the cult of motherhood is such that when I wrote some harsh criticism of the modern breast-feeding obsession on a couple of feminist blogs, you’d thought I had just defended Joe Stalin or something.
(PS: Great topic, and I love reading bell hooks about everything!)
Well, Daisy, I don’t agree with asshole behaviour either, but I do find myself, and I admit that this is nothing other than a defensive reaction at times, being frustrated when a feminist discussion is overtaken by discussions of motherhood.
Now, people should be helping mothers and I don’t disagree with that, but I have a hard time understanding, personally, what my role is as a feminist who plans to be childless and who has no particular skill with children before they are old enough to discuss Anne of Green Gables. As I said, I would never be an asshole, and I have no problem holding feminism to the standard of always providing child care (HELLO, WAM!) at meetings and such. But it’s frustrating enough to be an invisible, disposable single childless woman in this world, who doesn’t have the refuge of a family. And so when I go into these feminist spaces and I am enjoying feeling the solidarity that is so lacking elsewhere, I can see myself getting somewhat lackadaisical. Which I want to correct, somewhat, but on the other hand I am really afraid of having the one space in my life where my coupled-upedness doesn’t matter coopted by “smug marrieds” or “smug pregnant women.” (Which is to say, not ALL married women, and not ALL pregnant women.)
That was rambly but I needed to say it.
I suppose I just don’t experience this phenomenon of “smug mothers.” Most of the moms I know just seem really really tired, to be honest. I think that is where my point about moms coming out on bottom is — however uncomfortable it may be to be single and childless, I really believe it is more uncomfortable to be constantly attached to and responsible for another (or multiple) children. Maybe it’s a case of the grass is always greener — I look at childless single women and am filled with envy at their independence (I don’t even have kids yet) and freedom. I don’t know, maybe this is not germane and I’m playing some sort of oppression olympics that doesn’t need to happen, but we’ve been having a lot of conversations on here about thin privilege, and other types of privilege, so maybe I am reading it in that context. You seem to see a sort of patriarchal privilege attached to mothers that I don’t see.
At the very least, I find that the set of “smug mothers” and the set of “mothers in feminist spaces” don’t overlap much, at least not off the internet.
And, yes, I still get the “well, *you’re* the one who decided to have kids.” Yeah, but that’s the same kind of choice that has you wearing high heels and pantyhose vs. getting fired from a job. The right answer, long-term, is to get sexism out of the workplace, but it doesn’t work for us all to drop out of the workforce until then. So the “your choice” thing really makes me see red.
Pilgrim Soul, how much of the “childless women vs. smug moms” phenomenon is a creation that keeps us pissed off at each other instead of working together, pissed off at the system? It feels like we’re fighting for crumbs, here, instead of insisting on a seat at the table for all of us.
Cheryl you make a good point about the silliness of seeing parenthood as a “choice” for most people, but I don’t think it is totally accurate to compare motherhood with wearing high heels, because we can imagine a world without high heels, and it is a glorious place (to some, to many). But it is difficult to imagine a world without parents, short of becoming Shakers — unless i just lack imagination? Maybe I am falling into my own patriarchal fantasies and fetishizing motherhood, but I do think it is necessary and should be valued, if not demanded of all women or held up as the only or ultimate way to be human.
Not that bell hooks doesn’t say this — she does affirm parenting as important and fulfilling. I suppose it is everyone feeling pretty alone and marginalized in all different ways by patriarchy.
@J.D.Regent: That’s kind of the point, though. I *can* imagine a world in which someone’s decision to work doesn’t drag in any of the misogyny one currently finds in the workplace. I *can* imagine a world in which someone’s decision to reproduce doesn’t require buying into to a particular set of myths about motherhood.
The people who say “hey, you’re the one who chose to have kids!” are the ones who are trying to set up reproducing as the same kind of choice as wearing high heels. I’m suggesting that reproducing is more the same kind of choice as working.
I’m don’t think that reproducing means I can’t complain about how the motherhood myth hurts women in general (mothers and not). I don’t think that having a paying job means I can’t complain about how misogyny in the workplace affects women.
I do think that the motherhood myth affects people’s decisions about whether or not to have kids. I do think that misogyny in the workplace affects people’s decisions about whether to work. (I do think that this parallel goes on and on and on …
)
I think that the “smug mothers” do, in fact, exist. I’ve run into my share of “smug fathers” as well. Overwhelmingly, the parents I know are NOT smug, but they are out there. I suspect that it is because parents, especially mothers, work so very hard and yet are so marginalized, that they grasp at the cult of parenthood — the idea that parenting is the most fulfilling thing a person can do, and that anyone who isn’t a parent has never really experienced love, fulfillment, joy, etc. — because it gives a semblance of privilege and power to a group of people who are actually pretty marginalized in patriarchal society.
It is still irritating to me, as a childless woman, to have people imply that my experiences are worthless because they don’t revolve around my offspring; and I do get a whiff of this attitude, from time to time, from most of the parents I know. Not sure how to counter it without making the parents even more upset, which is I suppose why childless people sometimes get together and snark about the “cult of motherhood”. How else to deal with it?
“I find that the set of “smug mothers” and the set of “mothers in feminist spaces” don’t overlap much, at least not off the internet.”
That’s true in my experience. Most smug mothers tend to be pretty invested in patriarchy.
Oof, go to an appointment and look what I come back to!
First, JD: I believe I said privilege was the wrong word. But, let’s try this on for size: mothers and would-be mothers have the benefit of investing in the patriarchy when it suits them (i.e. when it elevates motherhood as the model of ultimate feminine fulfillment), and then trying to use that investment as a sword against women who are trying to model another kind of fulfilment. I’d almost argue you’re doing that in this thread by claiming single women will end up richer and less marginalized; maybe this is true of some highly successful white women, but IIRC from my old PIRG days, the most rapid and common route to indigence is when family ties begin to dissolve, because family-less people? are not viewed as people worth caring about. I don’t think it’s useful to sit around here and pretend that single women have no responsibilities, because in general, if they fall, there’s no one legally obligated to catch them. Ever. So it’s a different kind of responsibility.
Second, SarahMC and Cheryl, it depends what kind of “feminism” you’re talking about. I live in liberal smug mommy central (i.e., Brooklyn) and I see lots of women’s lib types in grey hoodies (“I have a Masters, but then I got married!” TM Sarah Haskins) blubbering over their babies all day long and looking at me with pity. So I get what you’re saying about being invested in the patriarchy as a prerequisite to smugness but… most people don’t even recognize the cult of motherhood AS investment in the patriarchy.
And Kari, yeah, I’d like to be able to snark on occasion, particularly as I do think this is a “if this is not about you, it’s not about you,” and single childless women need some kind of safety valve release for all the pressure place on them. And yeah, in those situations, I think moms need to just listen, be less defensive, and try to ensure they are not themselves accidentally policing patriarchal standards. Just like I have to be careful not to spend all my time evaluating whether x or y mom is a “good mom” and therefore a “good human being.”
Kari, you wrote: “It is still irritating to me, as a childless woman, to have people imply that my experiences are worthless because they don’t revolve around my offspring; and I do get a whiff of this attitude”
I agree with this but I would add it is extraordinarily irritating to me as a currently pregnant mother of one that childless women seem to presume that i actually want to talk about my children and indeed that I am unlikely to have any other topic of conversation.
I have absolutely no desire to talk about my daughter to anyone other than her dad and later on her teachers. I want to talk about the same things that I have always talked about books, films, politics, horse racing etc etc.
And to be honest I think, in the UK at least, the smugness can cut both ways – there was a time when you couldn’t move for articles by single women in the UK papers on how pointless motherhood was and how awful mothers were (some of which were admittedly very funny and well written) and there are many times when I wasn’t invited to things by people I had been good friends with because it was simply presumed that I a) wouldn’t be able go and b) would no longer be interested.
Oddly enough motherhood did not turn me into a pod person and it can be deeply frustrating for it to be perceived in this way. I suppose what I’m really arguing for is that we all, those with kids and those without, cut each other some slack and stop presuming that people must be a certain way just because they have kids or equally because they don’t want to have them. Right rant over. Sorry.
emilyanne, we can talk about books anytime. I promise to have about zero interest in your daughter or your pregnancy.
Pilgrim Soul: I have a question about the ‘if it’s not about you, it’s not about you’ school of thought.
I totally subscribe to this in most situations, but I think in a discourse on motherhood and feminism, it IS about mothers as much as it is about the experiences and perceptions of single, childfree women.
I tend to back away from these discussions because I’m wary of making assumptions based on my own experiences as a white, middle-class, pregnant working mother, which seems a bit counter-intuitive to me. I’m not sure if it is prerogative of the childfree to be the arbiters of this issue. I don’t know if I want to just ‘listen’, or worry that my contribution might be considered ‘defensive’. I am a mother, I am a feminist, I would like this discussion to reflect the realities of my situation, as well as the lives of many other women who are also mothers.
emilyanne, that totally happened to me too, the moment my pregnancy was visible. Ironically, quitting my job to be a stay at home mom meant I come into contact with more people who don’t assume that being a mother is the center of my existence. The women at work who began addressing me as “Mommy” once I had a belly should all be consigned to some section of hell. Seriously.
I think some of the smug mommies I know are smug because they’re trying to justify how small their world has gotten. My sister has a masters, used to work at a wildly successful internet company in a executive position, and was a millionaire before 30. Now she’s a SAHM. I think the cult of motherhood is, for her, a survival plan. When you’re used to running a 50 person international department, you have to put a whole lot of effort into your toddlers before it feels at all comparable.
afteriris: Does it help if I say I am not arguing for the childfree to be arbiters of any issue other than their own blowing off of steam, so long as they are careful not to directly burn you in the process? I mean, to me, critiques of the cult of motherhood, as I’ve said repeatedly, have not much to do with actual mothers absent those that subscribe to them.
I’m not saying feminism should be a childfree zone, in short. But we need to be careful about balancing all the ways in which women might engage in work and not privileging any of them.
Pilgrim Soul: yes, that does help! Like JD Regent, however, I have rarely/ never found my status as a mother to benefit my working life, or observed other women reaping the rewards of parenthood in their workplace. I find it pretty frustrating,if anything.
Having said that, it is defnitely true that childcare provision/ maternity benefits seem to be top of the agenda when it comes to women’s “issues”, especially in terms of government intervention, legislation etc (I’m UK based, btw)
pilgrimsoul, excellent – did you see by the way that there’s a biography of Elizabeth Taylor just out – it’s had great reviews in the UK? (And that’s my only off comment topic)
arrgh offtopic comment but you knew what I meant.
@Kari:
“It is still irritating to me, as a childless woman, to have people imply that my experiences are worthless because they don’t revolve around my offspring; and I do get a whiff of this attitude, from time to time, from most of the parents I know.”
It’s still irritating to me, as a woman, to have people imply that my experiences are worthless. I do get a whiff of this attitude, from time to time, from most of the people I know.
That’s because they’ve, we’ve all been indoctrinated by the patriarchy to devalue women’s experiences. So women who reproduce? Feel judged. Women who choose not to? Feel judged.
The trick is to recognize where the judgment comes from — the culture — and not get upset with women who have, just like all the rest of us, not managed to flush all vestiges of the patriarchy from our subconscious.
Oops! I just re-read what I wrote and noticed something I don’t think I made clear.
When I say:
“So women who reproduce? Feel judged. Women who choose not to? Feel judged.”
and suggest that comes from the bits of patriarchy that are buried in all our brains, I don’t want to suggest that it’s all in our heads. The self-judgment in my head dovetails with the judgment that comes out of people’s mouths. But in the end, the culprit is the culture.
(no matter how many times I reread and re-edit, there’s always something…)
@Pilgrim, @JD —
I think that when we start talking about privilege as it comes to women and childbearing/rearing, we’re starting to talk about “passing.”
Conversations between people who are passing and people who are not are always fraught. Anecdotally, it seems like the benefits of passing are generally underestimated by those of us who pass, and overestimated by those of us who don’t, and that seems to be true whether we’re talking about race, gender, sexual orientation, whatever.
Oftentimes, I look for all the world like a straight white supermom. I’m none of those things, but I should not deny that the patriarchy gives me cookies for passing. In return, I expect that the people I interact with not pretend that just because I (often) pass, that my life is all wine and roses. Reality is something in between.
My co-worker was pregnant last year (we travel together for work sometimes and do a lot of projects together) and she often complained that once she was visibly pregnant, people treated her like a pregnant lady rather than the individual woman she had always been. I saw how frustrating it was for her; people thought she was only capable or interested in talking about baby names and nurseries.
I think JD’s first comment gets it right about one thing: mothers are not *actually* treated well under patriarchy. In fact, once a woman is in charge of a baby or two, patriarchy mommy-tracks her in many ways, and that’s not cool at all.
So on one hand those of us without children see the way patriarchy scolds us and tells us we’re not doing our “jobs” as women and are worthless for not fulfilling our destinies, etc. But it is only doing that because it knows that once we become mothers it can deny us promotions and pressure us to stay out of the public sphere and police our every waking moment even more strictly than it otherwise does!
Wow I feel like I’ve had an epiphany.
@J.D. Regent: The women who come out on top are the ones who are happiest with their lives. Childless women who are richer and more advanced in the workplace only come out on top if being rich and advancing at work are what they value. For those of us who see money and work as a means to an end—with the end being a happy family that spends time together, and a partner you love, and children who you raise to be good citizens—being in a position to make more money doesn’t automatically equate to coming out on top.
Yeah, it absolutely cuts both ways. When I see the judgement that is heaped on mothers (and fathers), and how nasty and personal it can get, I absolutely cringe. I’m trying to keep an open mind and remember that, as Cheryl Trooskin-Zoller points out, the smugness and snark on both sides comes from dysfunction in society and does no one any good.
@emilyanne: For the record, I always ask friends/acquaintances who are pregnant or already parents about non-parenting aspects of their lives. I imagine that when people assume being your child’s keeper is the only thing that defines you, it’s as aggravating as when people assume that my childlessness defines me!
Yeah, it absolutely cuts both ways. When I see the judgement that is heaped on mothers (and fathers), and how nasty and personal it can get, I absolutely cringe. I’m trying to keep an open mind and remember that, as Cheryl Trooskin-Zoller points out, the smugness and snark on both sides comes from dysfunction in society and does no one any good.
@emilyanne: For the record, I always ask friends/acquaintances who are pregnant or already parents about non-parenting aspects of their lives. I imagine that when people assume being your child’s keeper is the only thing that defines you, it’s as aggravating as when people assume that my childlessness defines me!
Oops…forgot to say great post! Looking forward to your next one.
Motherhood is as romanticized by some feminist activists
Harpies I have a question for you. Are there links or do we know who specifically bell hooks is referring to?
If it’s the smug Brooklyn mommies of the comments, that’s less interesting to me. If it means some (possibly insincere) attempts at feminism by bishops in the RC Church, that’s something else again.
Or, is the reference is to some other published, feminist person discussing feminism who seems to romanticize motherhood? That’s most interesting to me. Who would that be?
In this anonymous forum I’ll say that I love my kids to death but raising them, for ME, is NOT satisfying enough to occupy all of my attention.
Rodriguez, Heart does, at the blog “Women’s Space”–not linking due to her insistent transphobia.
There was a romanticizing-motherhood element of the Second Wave, which was known as “cultural feminism” at the time. It was basically an attempt to reclaim the work women historically had done (quilting, gardening, mothering, canning vegetables, knitting, etc) as more valuable than what men had historically done, a feminist challenge to conventional history and re-centering of women’s experience.
I am not sure if my previous comment was taken positively or negatively (some of this discussion seems to be going right over my head, which isn’t unusual), but my apologies if it was regarded negatively–that was not my intention. I was just relating my own experiences.
Yeah Daisy I think the cultural feminist movement/ethic of care business is probably what hooks was reacting to too, and I really see that as a separate kind of issue from yoga mommies or whatever upper class white woman phenomenon people are talking about, and I think cultural feminism is not as ascendant as it once was.
I think that feminism needs to focus more on the challenges of motherhood. Rather than ostracizing women who have children (or who don’t), I think we need to be honest about its challenges: how it influences education and career decisions, how having a baby changes your relationship dynamic (if you’re in one), how having a baby changes your career, etc. While I definitely think there is something to arguing that what women do (including mothering) is valuable, I think ignoring the negative aspects does nothing for the project of feminism. We need to focus more on the challenges and coming up with viable solutions.
I worry a lot about how having a child is going to affect my career, my relationship, my individuality. I’ve read so many studies and articles that say even with families who attempt to be equal, women end up doing the bulk of the child-rearing and work around the house. While I look forward to having children, I do not look forward to a lot of the problems I know will come along with it. I know I’m not alone on this. This is why we need to have a serious conversation about this, about the actual challenges, not just theoretical suppositions about what motherhood is and whether it is good or bad.
What bothers me about the over emphasis on motherhood as woman’s truest vocation is where does that leave women who have aged out of the ability to bear children or who for whatever reason beyond age cannot conceive? Its as if society/misguided feminists are saying women are only useful if they are young and/or able to be a mother.