Matricentric feminism - the need for feminism to recognise the experience of mothers

As I mentioned earlier, I had my first child when I was 17. I married his dad at 18 and was a SAHM for 4 years. I refused to be called a housewife (feminist inkling so even then, 30 years ago), if anyone asked what I did, I said I was a mum and that seemed to me to be a perfectly valid thing to be. We were skint - didn't even have a colour telly or a phone (used to go to the phone box up the road). I didn't volunteer but did go to playgroup, interact with neighbours etc. I enjoyed it at first but eventually got very bored. I had a few part time jobs and I was able to finish my education at evening classes (free I think), then went on to do a degree and a PhD. I feel like those routes out of poverty have been shut down by the cutbacks to further education and the introduction of tuition fees has made pursuing education much less attractive to mature students.
I wish more young mums were encouraged to think about what they want from life, rather than being written off.

GoldenWonderwall but no one is "simply " a mother.

SAHM is a huge misnomer- I don't know any SAHMs who do just that, stay at home attend to their children's basic needs and to nothing else.

Almost all SAHMs I know are interacting with others at a community level.

Maybe not running groups and volunteering, but chatting with other parents, having a coffee at the toddler group, allowing their children to explore their own community from a social perspective- meeting other children they may ultimately be going to school with, which makes that transition easier for other children, their parents and the school community.
It may just be chipping in a pound to attend a playgroup at a community hall or signing up to a baby massage class, but even simply attending these community events and giving support is ultimately giving support to others.
Just a listening ear for five minutes makes a world of difference.
And it's this glue that binds communities together.

Being a mother is not simply about navel gazing and looking inwards, it's about looking outwards too.

What do these things have to do with being a mother? I think being a mother should be enough. Other women doing loads of community work or setting up a business or whatever is great, but also being a mum should be seen of value too. Do people with nannies or childminders expect them to also be running the playgroup and volunteering for charity whilst they are being paid to look after children?

I can’t physically help the long lasting health problems caused by pregnancy and childbirth. In some ways it could be a great leveller. Even the Duchess of Cambridge was ill during pregnancy - you can’t privilege your way out of some of it. There’s a commonality to being a mother, it doesn’t have to be about class or money or anything else and I find it interesting that this particular thread seems to be about anything other than the just being a mother.

When I gave birth to my first child I was living a very rural area. I attended a local baby group hosted in the pre-school of a tiny (80 pupil) C of E primary school in a tiny, dispersed village (lots of homes were converted farm workers cottages or farm buildings). There were mothers at that group who were 19 or 20, had married at 18, had never lived anywhere else and were dependent on their own two feet for transport. The bus passed twice a day and the nearest town was too far away to take a tiny baby for a day. These girls were extraordinarily isolated and almost other worldly, so little did they get out or actually want to get out.

Women who do not live in poverty do not appear to have the remotest idea how isolating it is to be at home with children without transportation or access to the various things being taken for granted on this thread.
We all make lemonade as best we can but some of us cannot or could not afford the lemons.
I don't disagree Bewilderness
My dh doesn't have transportation and spends a lot of time browsing charity shops, at least partly for the social interraction.
But are you making a wider point?

I have friends who, aside from managing their households and children (often with a lot of paid help), “only” do yoga/barrecorre/hairdresser/dermatologist/shopping ie intensive premium self-care outside their family responsibilities. They wonder why their lives feel a bit depressing despite the material comforts.

The truth is that we all need to deeply embedded in community, helping others and having them help us, in informal ways in order to be fully human.

By "maternity work" I mean gestation, birthing, and lactation.

@chesterbelloc How can we, as champions of women, fight to diminish the impact of these things, without also diminishing their value and importance, to us personally as mothers, and to our children, and to society as a whole?

I would argue the opposite: that the fight to diminish the impact of maternity work is rooted in humanity's need for mothers to do this work, otherwise there is no next generation to care for us, build the roads we drive on, staff the hospitals etc when we are old. Maternity work is absolutely vital and the impact should be borne by the whole community, not just by the mother. Individually, motherhood is a choice, but if all women made the choice to refuse it, the human race would be in huge trouble. And this is coming from someone who (a) has made the choice to opt-out of kids and (b) believes a modest and sustained fall in global birth rates would be a good thing to reduce human impact on the environment. I can believe that we need fewer kids but still believe that the impact of maternity work should be spread across everyone.

I think that’s why more women than not end up doing stuff in their communities TBH. The isolation of actually staying in the home is soul destroying for most humans. Not many women thrive when limited to their actual home and children. Not every woman is engaged in formal volunteering but many are informally in their communities doing small things daily being aware of what’s going on around them.

‘Just’ doing your own house and kids is actually worth quite a lot at the market rate in any case!

I know women who have not done paid work and looked after their kids, and also not volunteered or looked after elderly relatives. And that is fine. I don't get the need for women to try and be amazing and do 1001 things.
I remember though a friend who has had two kids and does paid work, saying she found it much easier to go back to work after 3 months maternity leave which she had with her first, rather than after the years maternity leave she had with her second. And that because she lost so much confidence after being out of the workplace for a year.
And I have seen that. Women's confidence going way down.

Prior to the cuts my LA was very good at engaging poor folks, because being wealthy is an exception here. There were travel allowances, free childcare, they funded hotel rooms and train tickets for travelling to events, they used venues in the most deprived areas, we knocked on doors, delivered leaflets and did events on high streets etc etc.

It only takes awareness re the needs of people in poor places and funding to meet those needs to get people involved IME.

One thing poor folks generally don’t need to be made aware of is the value of community. If the structure removes the barriers to engagement then, as it was before the cuts in my LA, the engagement ends up pretty representative apart from one aspect; WC folks would usually nominate MC minority to chair because their perception was they ‘knew more’. We got around this to some extent by having a rolling chair and funding training.

Women who do not live in poverty do not appear to have the remotest idea how isolating it is to be at home with children without transportation or access to the various things being taken for granted on this thread.
We all make lemonade as best we can but some of us cannot or could not afford the lemons.

Yeah, valued by the people doing it. I’ve had similar experiences but valued by society I mean. Benefits systems force women to stop this stuff (and any volunteer work that might lead to a career) in favour of getting low paid zero hours shitwork.

Not undervalued by everyone.

Before I started a small business as a SAHM I ran two local toddler groups, trained and worked as a breastfeeding counsellor, sat on various NHS and other committees in my capacity as a breastfeeding counsellor, even sat on a government steering group which saw new legal rights for women and public breastfeeding.

None of that work was paid- but I felt totally valued for it.

I’ve said before I hate the term ‘SAHM’ because it is demeaning. It’s what people say to dismiss mothers but I have never met a woman who is raising children who actually ‘stays at home’ there will be some but women raising children might be starting businesses, caring for the elderly, active in their communities in various important ways and most of these women have contributed more to society than they would have done in waged work.

The problem is unless your particular way of contributing is setting up a business and this business makes money your contribution remains totally unvalued and invisible.

The system is screwed, there is no doubt about that.

I have said before I conformed, became a SAHM, I had a very supportive husband who valued my contribution to out family.

I jacked in my career, but I was far from broken from the experience.
As money was tight in the early days I started to look at ways of working from home to support the family budget.
Small amounts to start with, but by the time the kids were at school I was earning £700 a month profit- not a great deal of money, but enough to pay for the fun things.
I tried various work from home ventures and now 15 years later I make more money than my OH - and I still work part time from home.
As we approach retirement age I have no plans to retire- and OH will split his time doing some contract consultancy and also work for me.

I never did follow my career- and thank goodness I didn't - because I am in a far better position than I would have been if I had carried on in that 9-5 in a man shaped job.

And I don't think my story is that unusual.
My 5 closest friends all have similar stories to tell. All gave up their career, all now running small businesses.

Surely the whole entire point of this discussion is that no-one should be broken physically, socially or economically by having children. If it can be avoided it should be.

I believe the vast majority of this is avoidable and I also believe that it’s not good for children to have a broken primary carer. I don’t think being broken and still doing it is a badge of honour or anything inherently female.

People who do care of all kinds get broken by the poor conditions of the work and this usually detrimentally affects the care.

Speaking of my own experience, having children broke me physically and in the world of work. Someone else can wipe an arse or tell a nursery rhyme but would they give up their free mobility and earning potential for my dc? Or even their sleep?! It’s so complicated imho and ime and my dh being a great dad doesn’t negate all the other stuff that I go through trying to be a good mother.

It’s great you’re supporting mothers in the workplace, sarah I hope very much to be back there myself one day

That sounds perfect Offred. My df was a typical male for the 70s and my world revolved around my dm. I was quite young when i realised the inherent vulnerability of this situation and began to dwell fearfully on the possible death of my dm night after night.

Wouldn’t it be good if you could be cared for by both your parents, and your father helped support your mother to recover from birth for at least the first 12 months!

Ha ha! I do!

I also think it is a massive problem to have this one parent only model (because the other is providing) in practice even when it is not a single parent family. Much is made about children needing two parents by some of the MRA stuff (and the problem of single mothers by the state) but they don’t actually expect this to actually mean a father being a parent to a child.

"The sing song voice, the little rituals around telling them he loves them, the physical affection, the constant verbal input, the creative planning of activities, the thought put into the lunch box, the listening, the coming down to their level, the discipline, the hair plaiting, the endless loads of washing, the sitting with them while they do their homework, the reading with voices....you get the idea"

I do. I'm a bit envious TBH. My DH didn't really do those things, they were still down to me. Although, my mum wasn't a very hands on parent either. I got a lot of that think from my Dad (when he got home from work, DM was SAHP). Which, if you think of it is very good evidence for being good at parenting having more to do with your personality than your sex. I have also self-diagnosed DH with ADHD and possible ASD (I know, I know, shoot me now - but I bet you'd agree if you met him), so I give him a certain amount of leeway on the basis that he struggles to relate to people in general, not just his son.

On balance, I think there is a lot to be said for being cared for by your mother in the first year, where possible and after that, whoever is best placed/suited to the job.

A large part of the problem is the low societal value placed on caring roles. They should be respected and properly supported, whoever does them.

Then there is this added dimension: If my ds is neurotypical he will seek to emulate his father more than he will me. So ends male socialisation and toxic masculinity with this family. Actually that's a massive exaggeration as obviously he is also seeking to emulate other men and boys as well but you see my line of thinking.

I think lots of people see them as entirely feminine and something men are incapable of but like you I find that idea immensely sexist.

I find it hard to believe anyone really believes those things are not learned behaviours TBH.