Feminist mothers

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It’s a curious fact that many women find motherhood is one experience which galvanises their feminist spirit. Whilst completing what might seem to be decidedly non-feminist actions in their daily lives, a lot of mothers are thinking. A lot.

Women my age were raised by parents who wanted us to have education and paid work. We were told by mathematics and science teachers that girls could do these subjects too – as if it weren’t to be taken for granted. And some of us, arriving at university, were bewildered by the prescence of fixtures such as The Women’s Room on campus, or the vociferous Womyn appearing at student rallies. Some couldn’t understand how these things were relevant to us.

And so if young women have managed to avoid, ignore or transcend sexism in education and the workplace and in their relationships with men, the realities of motherhood can come as a pretty rude shock. I’ve seen a woman boldly search for employment while pregnant and be slowly beaten down by it until she had no choice but to acknowledge that her opportunities are restricted by her biology. I know women who have cried themselves to sleep at night because working the hours required to keep up with male counterparts has meant missing one too many school concerts. I know women who have believed their workplaces to be breastfeeding friendly only to discover that the place provided to express milk is the toilet. I have had many, many conversations with friends about how finances and social expectations and biological imperatives and even sometimes vestigial patriarchal leanings have turned us into stay-at-home mothers when we never actually set out to be this. How, a friend once exclaimed, did we become housewives?

Now insofar as I am able to freely choose, I have chosen my lot. So I’m not just having a whinge here.

But I have been thinking about how becoming a mother has brought into sharp relief what I think I have known all along: we cannot move forward without acknowledging that we are bodies as much as we are minds. We need to take our biology into account. And in order to be able to do so without suffering unfairly because of it, our social structures need to change. Babies need to be breastfed: women need time off work to do this well. And yet career trajectories are meant to be linear. They reflect male bodies. This is worse than anachronistic because it robs women and men of choice and it is to the detriment of families and children and also, to be frank, employers themselves. Workplaces lose when women choose to stay home indefinitely.

I’ve not attempted to juggle paid work with parenting, yet. But I can’t imagine I’ll be overwhelmed by a proudly mollified sense of justice when I do return – at least, not until employers expect fathers to take as many sick days as mothers do to care for ill children, for starters.

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.

Rachel Blair says it pretty well in her book ‘Breastfeeders Anonymous’: Breastfeeding feminists…fight to achieve changes that allow women to maintain individuality and pursue careers while still successfully breastfeeding. They recognise that ‘mum-work’ is real work. They battle for a woman’s right to breastfeed herchild wherever, whenever and for however long both mother and child desire. They acknowledge that breastfeeding is a way for females to reclaim their bodies from the patriarchal arena that often exploits breasts and women as merely sexual objects. Breastfeeding is also a way to stand up against the commercialisation that tries to brainwash women into believing that a substitute is better than the milk their own bodies specially manufactures.

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Tags: birth, breastfeeding, feminism, gender, lactivism, marriage, motherhood, parenting, pregnancy