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Stay-at-home, breast feeding, “naturalist,” and/or cloth diaper-using moms, be forewarned: the old guard feminists have it in for us, apparently. We’ve set women back decades with our hippie earth mother garbage, and at least one French Feminist, Elisabeth Badinter, is actually willing to say so publicly. In an article for Salon, Madeline Holler writes:
Sure, children have been ruining their mothers’ lives since we evolved from chimps. But what makes this snapshot in time so different, according to Badinter, is the fact that modern, emancipated mothers are so complicit in their own destruction. Lactating, co-sleeping, time off from work – that’s a bunch of “naturalist” mumbo-jumbo and a distraction from a woman’s duty to herself and a society that wants to see her as equal but can’t quite get past the milk stains on her blouse.
Men don’t need to keep us down, Badinter claims. We’re doing the work for them.
For my part, I throw my lot in with Holler and most sane people: What’s important is not what a woman chooses, but that she has a choice. It is the perception of most women and feminists my age that the choice was the reward object of our predecessor’s hard work, not the privilege of being castigated by them for taking advantage of it.
Where modern women do undermine themselves is the constant questioning of their choices and allowing for an onslaught of guilt. No matter what we do, it’s wrong in someone’s eyes – so why do we take any of this criticism seriously? Instead of doing as we please and moving on, as Badinter praises French women for doing, we do as we please and then punish ourselves with guilt.
Maybe the bottom line is simply that wherever two very equal options exist, we will always perceive the one that is more difficult to obtain as having greater value. Maybe old tropes about women are true: We just want whatever we don’t have.
Holler ultimately concludes, more or less, that this is just the circle of life. To us, our mothers are out of touch; to them, we are ingrates, intent only on doing the opposite of whatever they say, but ultimately, we’re just doing what we need to do in our time.
My mother and I both reacted to the demands of our time. In this book-length attempt to scold the young’uns for screwing up progress, Badinter, like others before her, fails to see that what her generation gave us were real choices.
She only sort of touches on the fact that it is currently more necessary to be a working mother than it used to be and that to be able to afford to stay home, not to have the privilege of venturing out into the world in a career, is the greater luxury.
Not at all subtly, as any mother who cannot afford to stay home will tell you, this is a pretty obvious class/income bracket issue.
The fact of the matter is that for most women, particularly those of the middle-middle class and below, giving birth in the current economy and job market where anyone with a job had better hold on to it for dear life, there still isn’t actually any “choice” between working and staying home and there never has been.
But this is seen as an economic, rather than a feminist, issue, and maybe that is the greatest travesty: Because actual choice exists for the microphone-wielding, yet not-technically-wealthy women of the upper-middle class (women like Holler), there is an illusion that the same choice exists for everyone. As such, feminism is increasingly convinced that except for the very poorest of social classes, there is little more to be done but to stop bickering amongst ourselves about which among her bountiful options a woman should choose.
I definitely don’t have the choice to stay home with my children, but if I did, I would do it in a heart beat – and they’re ten, not infants. And yes, this is about economics. To even be having this conversation implies that some sort of choice exists, and it doesn’t – not for a lot of us. Of course, I’m just repeating what you said.
From a feminist perspective…this isn’t about feminism. This is about the fact that I have a finite amount of time to raise my sons into men. This isn’t about me. This is about them. It’s a humanist stance, not a feminist one. If I could stay home with my boys and raise them and quit sending them to daycare and be more involved with their school and be there to feed them snack everyday when they got home – it would be good for the group and not for the individual (though, it would ultimately benefit me as an individual). To imply that you have to be selfish to be a proper feminist is ridiculous.
But, again, this is all moot because no such choice exists for me in the first place.
It would benefit the individual in the evolutionary sense. If your being home helps your kids to be safer, more well-adjusted, more understanding (and therefor appealing to) the opposite sex or anything at all that might help them to live longer and procreate more, that’s an individual benefit to you because it acts in support of the perpetuation of your genome. Or half of it.
In evolutionary (as opposed to psychological) terms, benefit isn’t a matter of feeling good or happy or fulfilled or anything like that. As far as evolution is concerned, our consciousness is just part of our genome’s human suit.
Well, it bloody well should, Gloria. I agree. This isn’t necessarily about feminism. I don’t care if it’s mum or dad making the snacks. It’s the fact that it’s not an option for so many people.
Brrr…brrr…brrr.
BRAD LOVES THAT SOUND.
HEY BRAD: BREAST PUMP. Moooooooooo.
Note to self: milk stains on blouse…not sexy.
The “guilt” part of this is interesting. I definitely feel it. When people ask if I stay home with my kids or work, I always answer very rapidly, “I stay at home with them…but I work from home, too.” Somehow I find the need to explain that I am not *just* a mommy at home all day ankle-deep in playdough and diapers, as if that’s a bad thing. Truth is though, I’m often so scattered trying to do both that I do neither well. And if my answer was that I went to an office all day I’d feel guilty, too. There is no right answer for the American woman. Sad, really. Pah. I want to be French.
Well, right. Exactly. It’s a damned if you do or don’t situation. Mostly because, I think, it tends to be so one way or the other for most people.
Women find themselves in a situation where they’re either home all the time or at work all the time, just because practical considerations conspire to make it that way.
If you need day care at all, you need to make enough money to pay for it, so part-time work, which seems to me like it would feel the most balanced, is sort of self-eliminating.
Honestly, I don’t know if I could handle being home full-time. I’m not a super nuturing person (shocker) or someone who really gets off on the daily business of being a mom. But I do feel like the conversation surrounding SAHM vs. Working Moms is taking place on some other planet most of the time.
Some planet where all a women needs to do is CHOOSE to be home. Maybe sacrifice a mani-pedi or something. Shit, man. I’d have to give up eating.
I have much the same situation as Erika: I wasn’t clearing enough dough as an adjunct to pay for childcare for two wee ones, so I stay home and freelance my butt off to try to make up some of my lost income. I also do the same “I stay at home with them…but I work from home, too” hemming when people ask what I do.
Though there are problems with Badinter and Jongs clucking about Moms Today, there’s a fundamental point that I agree with. I watch a lot of moms here in Los Angeles obsess over parenting in a way that fills every nook and cranny of their inner world. I love my children ferociously and enjoy the many hours we spend drawing letters in the dirt or going to the zoo, but with equal ferocity I preserve my intellectualism and independent self. I do this with a lot of prepared meals from Trader Joe’s, an equal parenting buy-in from my husband (when he’s with my kids I neither henpeck him nor race to Facebook to post, “ZOMG! My kids have the best dad!”), and a refusal to pursue perfection or obsess over methodology. If you can shut out parenting rhetoric tightly enough, co-sleeping can become That Thing That Happens When Your Kid Prefers To Sleep In Your Bed and not a moral or class signifier. In other words, the problem is not Attachment Parenting, but Attachment Parenting message boards.
“If you can shut out parenting rhetoric tightly enough, co-sleeping can become That Thing That Happens When Your Kid Prefers To Sleep In Your Bed and not a moral or class signifier. In other words, the problem is not Attachment Parenting, but Attachment Parenting message boards.”
That’s so fucking funny! And so fucking true! That’s a mini-blog right there.
Extremely important points there, not just about the consequences of naming our choices (suddenly there’s an “us” people and a “them” people) but about the impact of “communities” (and the accessibility of such communities when the internet is involved) which easily (inevitably?) become cults or cliques.
I sort of wonder if this places an insurmountable roadblock to understanding between generations of feminists. Would be interesting to think more about that.
I’ve certainly found a great deal of information on message boards and been relieved they’ve been there in some of my more paranoid moments, but I’m also frustrated by it. 30, 40 years ago, I would have assuaged my fears with a call to my mother. Or a doctor. Someone who may represent just one perspective, or who may represent, mercifully, one perspective.
As a child psychologist and a mom, I’ve spent lots of time discussing what I think is “wrong” with our generation of parents (myself included). Here’s one of the biggest differences that I think exists and that is that we are the generation who have all been to therapy and blame our parents for our mistakes. So, when the table is turned and we have children of our own, we are terrified of “damaging” them in the way we feel our parents “damaged” us. I’m pretty sure this is responsible for much of what Badinter discusses in our current trends. I talk more about what is wrong with us here:
http://www.themommypsychologist.com/2012/02/26/whats-wrong-with-us/
I ummed and ahhed about this comment because I thought people might might feel I am ‘rubbing their noses in it’ and get mad. I’ll say it anyway… I feel very lucky to live in Australia when I read stuff like this. Our tax system is set up so that families on lower incomes can have one parent home, or at least working only part time. We have a family tax benefit, another ‘income’ if one parent wants to stay home. I know a few women who chose to work part time and quite a few who stayed home. As a single parent I stayed home full time – we get a pension here, but then I worked full time because the government of the time was talking about phasing the pension out and I didn’t want to be locked out of the job market it that happened.
Now my son is at school, I work part time. My partner also works part time from home. We drive a dinged up old car and buy second hand things, but it’s totally do-able. I know our minimum wages are much higher than yours – the pay-off is, we pay higher taxes and there are less jobs so we have much more of a welfare state than you guys do. A lot of the more right wing pollies want to get rid of this two-tiered system and drive the wages down – yes, we would have more people employed but life would be a whole lot shittier. So the situation you guys are in could so easily be us in a decade.