Mothers For Women’s Lib

In my last post I talked about why my husband often fails to do basic housework tasks and why I end up doing much more than my biology dictates.

To give me a break from thinking about it, I decided to pop to my local supermarket and buy a toy or two for my little boy.

I am pretty skint at the moment, so the “pocket money toys” really appealed.

Imagine my surprise when for just three quid I found the perfect toy for him. He loves doing what the big people in his life do, just like all young children, and I saw a dustpan and brush set which firstly he would love and secondly it would stop him using the adult broom like a lance heading dangerously in the direction of the television.

Unfortunately, it was bright pink and in a box marked “the little princess playset”.

Now obviously, I bought it for him.

But I thought, how many Mums are actually going to buy these for their sons, no matter how much they might enjoy cleaning up like the grown ups? How many Mums are rather going to walk on by until they get to the cars and trucks and other “boy” toys?

I’m not saying there’s anything inherently wrong with cars and trucks. My little boy is also obsessed with pickup trucks and will not let me on the computer for very long before he comes up to me and informs me in no uncertain he wants to look at pictures of pickup trucks.

But when they’re the only type of toys we buy for boys, they miss out on essential role play (which children love) and also they’re told their role is to sit around and play while the women work. That housework is only fun if you’re a girl. And it looks like often this pattern continues into adulthood.

I knew I’d forgotten something yesterday!

• Feminist Mothers – “Renewed feminist vigour at this life stage is not just anger at not being able to ‘have it all,’ as those who fear feminism would have us believe. Actually, it’s coming in contact with the body-hating language of obstetrics and wanting to fight for more woman-centred birth choices. It’s having salespeople ring during the day and ask when your husband will be home because they assume that you can’t make financial decisions. It’s the judgements complete strangers make about the rightness or wrongness of using childcare (or not). It’s hearing friends and strangers praise your husband for ‘babysitting’ but look expectantly at you if your child makes an inconvenient noise. And for me, a lot of it is about breastfeeding.”
• Father’s Rights Activist Assholes – “Oh, yeah, the mom should have set up shit for the kids. Not the dad. He had to get another woman pregnant. Of course, the kid should only wear raggedy, cheap clothes and used shoes. It’s so cheap to raise a kid. God, these women drive cars! Those bitches! The kid should walk or hitchhike. The mom? That conniving bitch should crawl. It’s like these assholes don’t think about how you can’t separate the kids’ expenses from the mom’s. The kid’s food, obviously, should be for the kid alone. The mom should starve. The electricity? The gas? The heat? Well….let’s just ignore that. It’s just too inconvenient for dad to think about anybody but himself.”
• Raise The Change – Raise the Change is committed to respectful and open discussion about political and cultural topics that affect us as women, mothers and global citizens. Our worldview is liberal and progressive.
• Taking Octuplets Away Not the Answer! – “But there are millions of people all over this country receiving some sort of financial assistance — disablity, welfare, you name it. And many of those families continue to have kids (gasp!). The difference is, they have them one at a time, falling under the radar of the rest of the country. There’s nobody outside their door (or on national television) calling to have their kids ripped from them.

  “She couldn’t possibly give them all the love they need.” If you are a person who has uttered the above statement, come closer so I can slap you. Have we forgotten that in countless cultures around the world, it is customary for big families to all co-exist under one roof? Are we going to seek out all of them and pull them apart, just because it doesn’t seem to fit what we think is ‘normal’?”

• Start ‘Em Young – “I was so pleased when I found this list of primary, targeted words guaranteed to widen every little princess’s vocabulary just enough for her to play with and absorb these crucial messages which will help her form the limits of her intellectual boundaries in years to come.

  Thank goodness the set excludes any complicated words like Doctor, or Car, or Career, or heaven forfend: Reading. We don’t want our little ones to get silly ideas in to their heads. The right social conditioning from as early as possible will present the world with compliant, self absorbed, distressed, depressed and anorexic teenagers who are all the more willing to spend, spend, spend on hopeless diet cures, makeup, hidden, guilt ridden chocolate (one of the special words placed here!) and anti-depressants which will really make life worth living.”

• Babies Having Babies – “Because let’s face it: While girls becoming mothers at age 13 is frighteningly frequent, boys becoming fathers at that age is considerably more rare. Usually the father of a 13 year old mother’s child will be older than her – and very often he’ll be so much older that it was rape in the eyes of the law. ut somehow that’s not an interesting story. Young mothers isn’t really what this is about, is it? It’s about the young fathers. Note the focus on Alfie Patten’s oath to be a good dad. What newspaper would report that a 13 year old girl made such an oath? I can’t think of one. But I can think of plenty who’d suggest she did it to get welfare, and that she’ll be a Welfare Queen for the rest of her life probably with an additional 5 children in as many years. In Alfie’s case Social Services are merely quoted as “keeping an eye on the kids, and standing by to help should it get necessary”.”
• Motherhood and Identity – “The construction of identity fascinates me, all the more so because I don’t fully understand it, even in myself. We communicate as much about ourselves by what we leave out as by what we include. Some women are entirely in favor of equality, of fighting sexism, of women’s liberation… and do not identify as feminist. I am a woman who spends the day more or less at home, engaging in the unpaid and largely unsupported employment of raising my child, while my male partner works outside the home to make money for us to have a food and a house and health insurance… and I do not identify as a SAHM. There must be some connection there, something to help me promote the feminist movement, but bugger me if I can make it today.”
• Woman Centered Vertical Birth – “This beautiful ritual to celebrate the beginning of life not only affirms the significance of caring for the mother but has “helped reduce Caesarean sections from 18 to 8 percent at the hospital.” and “The hospital has an infant mortality of 7.8 per 1,000 live births, less than half the national average, which stands at 19 per 1,000.”

  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if western hospitals could be this attentive to birthing women? And if everyone recognized birth as the time when life begins?”

• Failed Feminists Put Children at Risk – “More disturbing is Lewis’s baby fixation. She fantasises about being “in the kitchen with a baby on [my] hip” saying “children bring more happiness than work ever can.” Apparently, she hasn’t gotten the memo that children are not pets, or accessories, but human beings.

  In Lewis’s imagination a child would make her life perfect and happy and rosy – which terrifically wrong-headed. There is nothing inherently selfish about wanting to have a child. But there is something wrong with wanting a child to make you happy. It isn’t their job. And, purposefully or no, children have plenty of scope to make mums unhappy, whether they’re throwing up on an new outfit or robbing the family silver to feed a crack habit. People who can’t grasp that having children is risky business should keep out of the gene pool. And Lewis doesn’t.”

• US Group Lists Feminist Books Suitable For Kids Aged 0-18 – “If you’re shopping for feminist-friendly books for the under-18 crowd, the 2009 Amelia Bloomer list looks like a good place to start.

  The evaluated over 400 fiction and non-fiction books this year, selecting books suitable for all age groups. It’s broken down using the grade system in US schools, which can be a bit confusing, but it seems to start out with books aimed at the youngest age bracket and get older.

  They say:

  Exemplary books that celebrate the strengths of girls and women and nourish their potential are needed now more than ever. The Amelia Bloomer Project produces an annual list of books for young readers, birth through age 18, that contain significant feminist content. We need not just cardboard “feisty” or “spunky” female characters, but tales of girls and women who have broken barriers and fought to change their situations and their environment.”

• Sorting the numbers (and raising feminists) – “As for raising feminists – she already says she wants to be a feminist when she grows up. I’ve pointed out that she can be one now. But all the feminists I know are people with a strong sense of themselves, a sense that they can, and will, change the world, even if it is one teaspoon at a time. I can think of no better way to raise feminists than by helping them to have power and the ability to do things, right from the start.”

By Ruth Moss

(Rant alert).

The ever-brilliant Renee over at Womanist Musings recently wrote a post about how biology was not destiny. I can’t hope to explain succinctly so I suggest reading it yourself.

Thing is this. My biology does make me better at one or two jobs than my husband. He couldn’t have gotten pregnant. He couldn’t have given birth. He couldn’t have breastfed our baby.

But that’s basically it.

Now, I know there are one or two jobs that are “allied” with those things. So, for example, by being the lactating partner, certainly in much of the first year, it meant I couldn’t be apart from my baby for too long (unless I wanted what was for me extra, harder work in the form of pumping). This meant in turn, that it made sense for me to take as much maternity leave as possible.

(Aside: I am not anti the idea of “parental leave” rather than “maternity leave” at all but I do think discussions about it do need to take breastfeeding into account and often they don’t.)

That meant I ended up doing the baby-”duties” during the day when my husband was at work. Which again, I felt was fair enough.

It also meant I ended up doing the night feeds. Which again, I felt was fair enough. Until he got to about 16 months he couldn’t settle back to sleep without nursing, so I felt it was fair for it to be my job.

And that, my friends, is where it ends. That is the extent of the “destiny” to which my biology tied me.

We have: night-time nursing. Nappy changes whilst on mat-leave. Erm… that’s it. I even – even – accept that the fact I do paid work part-time meaning I am at home with my son part-time means I will be the one doing the tidying up after him, and the games we play together. I even may slightly, just ever so slightly, accept the guffins about prolactin and bonding, in the very, very early days.

What we do not have, what my biology has not tied me to, is this:

Washing and drying and putting away all the nappies. And the clothes. nd tidying the house from top to bottom. And washing the bath. And cleaning out the back yard of our dogs’ poo. And waking up every morning with the baby even if it’s five a.m. even if I’m working that day. And washing up after ever meal. And walking the dogs every day. And emptying the bins. And cleaning the kitchen. And doing all the “bits” shops. And sweeping up the dog hairs at least three times a day. And feeding the pets. And hoovering upstairs. And laundering all the bedding. And putting the bins out once a week. And… oh I could go on, but you get the picture.

And it seems to me, that herein lies the real problem, if you’re partnered with a man (and possibly if you are partnered with a non-lactating woman, too, but I have no experience of this). Because the truth is, there are some things your partner can’t do and only you can. Not many, but some. But it seems that it gets to the point where “you can do some baby things I can’t” = “therefore you should do everything else too”. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been told the only solutions are to either lose the first part of the equation (i.e. not breastfeed) or to somehow alter the first part of the equation (i.e. pump milk so partner can “share” the feeds, which conveniently ignores the fact that the work here is not equally split, and that the mother is still doing a job – pumping – which for some is actually harder than feeding direct in the first place!)

I realise I’ve gone and brought it all back to breastfeeding again and I have a habit of doing this. The fact is, to be quite honest, I think if I were bottle feeding I’d be in a very similar situation. I don’t believe that bottle feeding is this marvellous egalitarian solution to lack of shared parenting. I know many Mums who formula fed their babies only to find the promise of shared night feeds rapidly deteriorate under the guise of “but honey I’ve got to be up for work tomorrow!” (which funnily enough continued when both of them did paid work).

The problem is childcare is not paid and it is not valued in any other real, tangible way either. It is not appreciated and is certainly not matched with other work of equivalent value. I sometimes think about drawing up a table of every single activity I do during a 24 hour period and every single activity my husband does, and adding up who does more. My husband often says “but I do all the cooking! I do all the driving! (I can’t drive, and even if I could, we could never afford to buy or run a second car.) And I think, “yeah but I do x and y and z and a and b and c which more than makes up for these things…

Don’t even get me started on “I changed his nappy… for you“.

This was a rant, you were warned.