Mothers For Women’s Lib

TRIGGER WARNING: This article may cause some upset to survivors of rape and sexual violence. It may cause some upset to all readers.

Womankind is currently in support of PHSE of becoming part of the national curriculum.
“This is an exciting and excellent opportunity to get lessons on healthy relationships, gender stereotypes and violence against women into the school curriculum. To ensure that young people receive education to prevent violence against women. It is really important that there is a positive response to this consultation. (Apparently there have been 16,000 negative responses!)”

Hannah White
UK Policy Manager @Womankind

(There is an online questionnaire for this, so if you want to show your support in on young people having PSHE, here’s the link: https://qca.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/qca.cfg/php/enduser/doc_serve.php?&5=46)

An example of why we need Personal Social Health Economic Education in schools? Here you go.

Dispatches: Rape In the City – Anybody watch this? It was on Channel 4, Monday 22^nd June, at 8pm.

I watched it, I had to. I wanted to get a glimpse into the teenage world, and learn a little more about what they are facing.

Gang rape and lots of it.

I was horrified by this. Not because I had no idea such things happen, but because I didn’t realise to what extent. Girls are being ‘punished’ by boys through rape and sexual assault. Also, let’s not forget the part some girls play in encouraging these boys to rape.

Young girls are threatened with knives, beaten and gang raped, sometimes for hours, sometimes recorded on mobile phones. Young girls organising rapes to fit in with gangs, and also out of fear the same might happen to them. The attitudes the boys had towards girls and sex were appalling to say the least. One girl had been invited around to a friend’s house; on the understanding they were going to watch a DVD together. Instead, she had found he had invited round some friends who then raped her. She was tricked.

Another girl witnessed a gang rape at a party, but walked away because she was scared it might happen to her. She said “There was just loads of boys and the girl’s tights were ripped up, like, she was bleeding as well, because I think she was a virgin, and they were just taking turns on her basically, and she was crying, and I didn’t get involved because I thought if I get involved they’re gonna turn on me.”

According to some of the girls interviewed for this programme, teenage boys don’t understand what rape is.

This is not the first time I have seen something like this.

On the F Word blog earlier this year was the following: http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2009/01/sexual_bullying

And this:  https://mail.bswaid.org/go/http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2009/02/slut_shaming_in

Who is to blame here?

Teenagers? Well they have to learn such behaviour and attitudes from somewhere, surely? And it can’t be about what they are wearing, wearing a hoodie doesn’t make you a rapist.

What about parents? We can only teach our children what we can, but we can’t always control what they learn when they are out and about, can we? Our children can be just as affected by society as we are.

Or school? Shouldn’t PSHE involve some form of sex education, and maybe something about respectful relationships?

We need to be making a difference for children and young people. It frightens me that this is something my daughter could be exposed to or experience, as this is her generation. It frightens me that if I have a son, he might think this behaviour is acceptable, because his friends say so. Teens hurting other teens in this way is incredibly wrong, and it has to stop.

Colleagues of mine deliver a domestic violence programme in schools, as part of PSHE. They talk about domestic violence, good and bad feelings, positive relationships, bullying etc. They deliver this programme in primary schools and secondary schools, teaching through activities which encourage all to take part. They also go in at break times, giving children the opportunity to come and speak to them in a ‘safe surgery’ about anything that might be worrying them. Disclosures are made, and my colleagues work with teachers to make sure any necessary steps are taken, and the child is safe. This is for domestic violence, and it works well.

Now, the same awareness needs to be raised on sexual violence.

Schools need to teach our children about sexual violence and sexual harassment. They need to know what is and isn’t acceptable. They need to know what rape is. They need to know what sexual assault is. This is important for both girls and boys. Boys need to know that it is unacceptable to treat girls and young women with such disrespect. Girls need to know this isn’t ‘normal’ and it is not acceptable to help organise something which harms another person in this way. It isn’t something you ‘allow’ because you want to be popular. That isn’t a real choice, surely?

The Dispatches programme mentioned teenage girls agreeing to oral sex with two or three boys, and then ordered to ‘have sex’ with six or seven. Otherwise known as rape.

Maybe raising awareness of sexual violence in schools isn’t going to ‘fix’ the ‘problem’. But it’s a start, and it’s got to make some kind of difference.

I’m just doing some ‘housekeeping’ around here and am updating the sidebar links. I’m aware that there must be many, many more feminist-parent bloggers and relevant websites around, so this is an open thread for you to plug your own blog or website or the blogs and websites that you love that you feel are relevant to feminist parenting and would like to see featured in our sidebar.

I’m also thinking of adding a category there of simply ‘feminism’ or ‘feminism 101 or something – would people like to have a resource like that in the sidebar? If so, what websites/blogs do you think should be in it?

And finally, Mothers For Women’s Lib is always looking for new writers and contributors. If you would like to write a one-off piece or have written a post on your own blog that you would like to see reposted here, please email me with your post and a link if you would like it linked back to your own blog. If you would like to be a full-time contributor then again, email me and we’ll talk.

I received an email from Jess McCabe of The F Word this morning, which she has given me permission to reproduce here, as I thought the readers here might have some ideas for her.

Hi m’dears,

Just wondering if you’d be able to help – I just happened to be adding a book to the parenting section of The F-Word shop, and realised it’s a bit… err… woefully understocked!

Any recommendations on books/other resources it would be good to add?

This is what we have so far: http://astore.amazon.co.uk/thfwo-21?_encoding=UTF8&node=24

All the best,

Jess McCabe

I figured the readers (and writers!) here might be able to give some recommendations of books fitting the ideals of ‘feminist parenting’ – so over to you!

Welcome to the second edition of the Carnival of Feminist Parenting. It’s 11pm here so I’m just in time to post it on its due date.

There have been depressingly few (non-spam) submissions for this edition, which to me doesn’t bode well for its potential. If you’d like to see the Carnival continue, please be sure to submit those posts, be they yours or those written by other people! Although we are primarily a UK blog, the Carnival is intended to be international, so please do send in articles and posts from around the world.

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Stephanie Rosado presents Motherhood = Feminism = Activism posted at Mothering in the Margins.

“In reality, it wasn’t that I didn’t want a girl. I just felt some reluctance to raising a girl; not the child herself. This became clear immediately when I saw her on the screen during my sonogram. It was love at first sight. I was in awe of her and even more in awe that in a few short months I’d be able to hold and cuddle and talk to her. I immediately realized that my reluctance wasn’t to her, it was to my own ability to raise her.

On the surface, I knew that raising any child (but even more so a female child) was going to be more difficult as a feminist parent because of the societal pressures and reactions. It is the societal opposition that was indeed the problem and NOT my style of parenting or that she is a girl. So, why still the reluctance to raising a girl?”

Scott presents On Gendered Interests in Children posted at A Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land.

“Anyone who has kids has at some point found themselves trapped in a conversation in which the other person pronounces, often with great insistence, that “Boys like…” or “Girls play with…”.

I want to make a few observations about such statements and the phenomena that underly them. This includes an example from the life of L, my kid who will be six years old in a couple of months, that illustrates one way that such preferences get produced, as well as a few thoughts about how to relate to such phenomena.”

Kenzie presents Babies and the Cultural Performance of Femininity posted at Birthcycle.

“Babies are, according to our assumptions regarding what feminine is, remarkable feminine, and without even trying.

Now, on the one hand that says a lot about what women are expected to perform when they’re expected to perform femininity. Feminine performance is, to a certain extent, infantilizing for women.

But, on the other hand, it helps to explain to me why folks are so very caught up in making sure little baby boys are dressed up and recognizable as boys. Their essential  femininity must be masked.”

Elisha Webster Emerson presents Would you Like Sex with That Burger? posted at My Inconvenient Body.

“Sure, sex sells to adults.  That’s nothing new.  In fact, it’s about as old as advertising itself.  Tom Reichert’s The Erotic History of Advertising traces commercial sex images as far back as the 1850’s, when naked women sold mostly men products from tobacco to beverages.

And very quickly, the progression becomes clear:  selling the sex-image to men (old as advertising, older) —> selling the sex-image to women—-> selling the sex image to children?”

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This was nearly a very short carnival, but for the fact that there have been a few posts and articles I’ve read over the last month that I’ve saved to share with you today.

Kristin at Work It, Mom asks Why do single moms have to ask permission?

“As a single Mom, I’m deemed the Permission Asker. I don’t ever “tell” my ex I’m going away for the weekend, nor do I assume he’ll assist if Nolan needs to be taken to the Doctor, or kept home from daycare if he’s feeling under the weather. If I need a slice of time for work, my friends, myself – I need to ask permission and hope I’ll be granted it. It’s not a given, not as simple as a phone call to say: hey, I’m going away for the weekend.

I’m not an anomoly: every single Mom I know is in the same boat. Their exes can float in and out at will, taking time for camping trips and week-long vacations, while Mom is left holding the bulk of the responsibility. If she wants a camping trip – she’s going to have to plead a little – and even then, it’s not a given. I wonder why this is.”

Cara at The Curvature writes about Pregnancy As a Sign of Intimate Partner Abuse.

“It’s a part of the reason why I so strongly feel and regularly advocate that anti-rape education needs to be a part of sexual health education. Of course, sexual violence is a sexual health issue. But from a strictly practical level, you can’t teach kids how to use condoms and expect that to be enough to prevent pregnancy and STDs on the whole. The current model, the way in which we teach teens (and adults!) how to use condoms and other contraception, almost always supposes that consensual sex makes up for all of the STDs and pregnancies they’re attempting to prevent. And it just plain doesn’t, as much as we wish it did.”

A couple of articles on the disturbing trend in USian (and possibly UK?) obstetric care of “Pit To Distress”, one from Nursing Birth titled “Pit to Distress”: A Disturbing Reality, and another from Unnecesarean titled “Pit to Distress”: Your Ticket to an “Emergency” Cesarean?

“‘Pit to distress.’ How have I not heard about this? Apparently it’s quite en vogue in many hospitals these days. Googling the term brings up a number of pages discussing the practice, which entails administering the highest possible dosage of Pitocin in order to deliberately distress the fetus, so a C-section can be performed. Yes folks, you read that right. All that Pit is not to coerce mom’s body into birthing ASAP so they can turn that moneymaking bed over, but to purposefully squeeze all the oxygen out of her baby so they can put on a concerned face and say, “Oh dear, looks like we’re heading to the OR!”

Mindy at Hoyden About Town asks for Advice Please.

“I have a three year old daughter. She loves pink, she loves dresses, she loves shoes. I have no problem with this. I think she is adorable and very much her own bossy little person. I do have a problem with her only saying that she is beautiful when she is wearing a dress or a particular t-shirt with a little frill on the bottom. I do have a problem with her saying that she doesn’t want to eat from the blue ‘boys’ bowl, she wants the pink ‘girls’ bowl. This isn’t coming from me. It’s not coming from her Dad or her big brother. I don’t think it’s necessarily coming from daycare, at least not directly because they are pretty progressive. More importantly how do I stop it? How do I tell her that she is beautiful whatever she is wearing, or running around in the narky-noo? How do I tell her that colours are for everyone?”

Abby O’Reilly at The F Word writes about recent news that there are now more stay-at-home dads than ever before.

“While these results are said to represent the dissolution of traditional gender roles in Britain, the nature of this as a report specifically analysing the role of fathers suggests that the stay-at-home dad is still considered an unusual phenomeneon.The subtext to the media coverage it has been given also suggests that men who do favour domesticity should be praised, despite the fact women have been staying at home and caring for their children for generations.”

Bust Magazine has an article about Another Decision You Can’t Make For Yourself.

“Tarrah Seymour is 21 and pregnant with her second child. She and her husband, Adam Sylvester, who is 23, know they don’t want to have any more children, so they asked the OB/GYN, Dr. Kayode Ayodele, to perform the sterilization during Seymour’s planned C-section. He refused because of their ages, claiming Seymour might ‘’get involved with someone else down the road and regret her decision.’’ He flat out won’t perform the procedure on anyone under 25.”

Jeremy at Daddy Dialectic writes his answers to Blue Milk’s 10 questions on feminist motherhood.

“At the start, I saw participating in infant care as being the most important thing I could do to make my fathering profeminist, and maybe that was correct—it had the merit of being a pretty straightforward mission. I did my best.

And that’s a fundamentally different framework than the one an anti-feminist or non-feminist father brings to fatherhood—for the best of them, fatherhood involves an uncomplicated commitment to breadwinning above all else, which, whatever its shortcomings, is definitely an important role to fulfill; for the worst of them, fatherhood becomes another opportunity to dominate women and expand their egos.”

Cara at The Curvature has a post titled Organization Pays Addicted Women to Undergo Permanent Sterilization.

“What we’re looking at here is the exploitation of a vulnerable population of women. (While the program is open to men, less than 1% of those who have taken the deal have actually been men.) Because I don’t know about you, but I don’t know a whole lot of people who aren’t currently interested in permanent birth control who would suddenly become interested for a rather lousy $300. I can only imagine, in fact, that someone would take such a deal only if they were incredibly desperate for money (and not only because of addiction, but also because of unbearable living expenses, etc.).”

And finally, Arwyn at Raising My Boychick puts out a call for feminist-parent guest bloggers.

“I’m not looking for perfection: sometimes the best opportunities for learning or teaching come when we mess up. And don’t worry about it being “good enough” in either feminist content or writing quality — I’m not going to judge the former, and I can help with the latter. I’m just looking for a picture, big or little, of some way you try to enact womanism/feminism in your life as a parent, and raise the next generation more aware of and less enslaved by kyriarchy/patriarchy.

I’d especially like to get the perspective of parents (“regular”, step, adoptive, birth, and to-be or hoping-to-be) who are not male-partnered, white, able-bodied, middle-class, American women — though even if you are all those things don’t let that stop you from submitting.”

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That concludes this edition. I really hope you’ve enjoyed it! Remember, this carnival can not exist without participation from you, the readers. Submit your blog article to the next edition of the Carnival using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page or the carnival home page.

It’s an often used phrase and something of a cliché that it “takes a village to raise a child”.

Alloparenting is, if I recall correctly, a term first coined by anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (yes, her of “there is no maternal instinct, except, well, maybe it’s prolactin/oxytocin, but even then, who knows”.)

Hobo Mama wrote an amazing article about alloparenting here.

But I want to extend it a little. To me, alloparenting, in this day and age, is simply realising how tough it is to be a parent (usually mother); how badly the world as a whole treats children and why this is unfair and dangerous, and wishing to do something about it, for everyone’s sakes, by small individual acts.

I want to tell you about what it’s like trying to do a few normal, everyday tasks as an able-bodied single mother in the UK. And then I’m going to try and convince you why it’s everybody’s job to make these tasks easier for me, for my child, and for every other parent (single, partnered or whatever) and child out there. Finally I’m going to suggest a few ways in which to do this.

So bear with me please while I start part one. There may be some ranting.

[Full disclosure - although I'm technically not "single" in that I do have a girlfriend, she lives in the USA and currently can only visit rarely.]

Supermarket shopping and other delights

I’m a babywearer, so I don’t have the full joy of pushing a buggy with one hand and a trolly with the other. I don’t have to choose between leaving my buggy parked outside where someone can grab it and putting my baby in the shopping trolly. He comes with me, usually on my back, but sometimes he prefers to sit in the trolly.

I know I have a finite amount that I can carry in my hands and also carry a baby home too. Taxis are expensive (and also unlikely to have an appropriate child safety seat) and the bus doesn’t run from the cheapest supermarket back to my house. I have to buy only what I know I can carry.

This means sometimes spending more on smaller, lighter items when buying in bulk would be so much cheaper. Shopping online is not really an option because of the delivery charge and other reasons. I automatically spend more because of this.

I carry my child around on my back or in the trolly and he becomes bored. If, in the rush to get him and me out of the house, I’ve remembered (and how many of us forget to take shopping bags!) a toy, I try to placate him with this. Otherwise I’ll let him eat a punnet of grapes or blueberries in the supermarket, preferably one with a fixed price rather than by weight, so I’m not stealing. Although I have still received glares for this.

Thankfully the majority of supermarkets have toilets with babychanging facilities. I don’t like the word “babychange”. I prefer “age appropriate toilet facilities”. Because when an organisation or company doesn’t have these, they’re effectively denying a person a place to go to the toilet based on their age.

If my child cries, I have to stop the shopping. If I choose to take him outside, I have to leave my trolley behind. There’s no one to stand with it, there’s no one to offer to comfort or soothe him; there’s just me. If he wants to be carried but won’t go in the sling, I have to carry him and push a trolly, or push him around while he’s crying, ignoring his cries.

Have you ever seen the looks you get when your child is crying in a supermarket? People blame you, and only you, for not shutting that child up. The glares, the tuts, the out and out anger?

No wonder the supermarket is the place where you see people hit, shout at and generally behave horribly to their children. I would bet that most of these parents aren’t at all like that at home but the constant looks, the feeling that the need to appear disciplinarian, that people are expecting them to do something to shut the child up – that’s what tips people over the edge.

I know I respond very differently to my crying child at home to how I do in a public place like that. I try not to, and I would never ever hit him, but I must confess I have shouted once or twice in a supermarket, despite knowing it absolutely isn’t his fault and it’s the most boring place in the world for him.

Then there’s the queue for the till; a hellish nightmare if you have just one screaming meltdown child. The sweets are all displayed temptingly just to force you to either buy them or say “no”. Even on the way out of the suepermarket, when you finally think you migh be able to get home, the foyer is often full of “ride on” toys, which are a minimum of 50p for one ride.

The walk home with heavy bags takes it out of you, but there’s no one in the house to put the kettle on for you, to help unpack, to let you take the weight off your feet while they get on with the tidying that needs doing. It’s just you. On your own. And you’ve a child to feed first, too.

Then, other public establishments like banks where it’s considered polite to be quiet – difficult if you’re a child – cafés (yes, mums do like to have a nice cuppa tea and a sit down) where again, unless it really is super child friendly, you’ve a fight on your hands if your child so much as makes a peep; public transport where your child not only has to sit down and be relatively quiet but also has to sit still; where age-appropriate toilet facilities are non-existent (okay, in fairness, there are no toilet facilities at all on buses for any age) and where, if you want to go to the toilet, you have to take your child with you in addition to all of your bags and shopping.

And there’s more, much, much more; this is only the tip of the iceburg. It’s exhausting. And then you have to go home and do it alone too. And possibly go to a paid job, too, and then you have to be up in the night, often, and… well, it’s a wonder we don’t just drop down into a heap from tiredness. If I could, I would. But I can’t. And let’s not pretend my child doesn’t suffer, at least a little, as a result.

Unless someone helps. Unless the kind server in the bank has a toy behind her desk to keep my child entertained while I check my direct debits. Unless someone offers to keep an eye on my belongings while I go to the toilet on the train. Unless someone smiles and gives me a sympathetic look when my child is crying in a café and says, you’re doing a cracking job love, it’s hard sometimes.

And more. These are the tiny things, the small acts of kindness that make a difference. And this is alloparenting, in my opinion.

In part two, I’ll explore what happens to parents and their children when they are left to go it alone, and why “but you chose to have a child!” is a ridiculous and disingenuous thing to say to a parent who is struggling.