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

Offred
As a side note I also have some concerns re childcare as IME one need a small child has is for physical affection. Because of safeguarding it is not really possible for childcare to really meet this need.

Well I don't know.

I used to sleep next to my kids and extensively breastfeed all night repeatedly, as happens if you exclusively breastfeed. I talked with and reacted to my babies/infants.

They did go to the childminders nearby when i worked. The childminder was affectionate to an appropriate degree and looked after all my 4 kids over the years. I trusted her.

Some people are on their phones all day. What I'm saying is that you would know if your kids were getting enough affection. And act accordingly.

And the constant barrage of shit from men (namalt but way too many) in response to stuff like #metoo, shows that really, they don't give a fuck, they have no understanding of the things that women and girls are expected to put up with, and they dont' want to.

So many men took #metoo and made it all about them, and "oh I can't even talk to a woman any more" this is genuinely pathetic.

Men have never really done anything for us, to be honest. We have had to fight tooth and nail for everything, and there is constant constant pushback.

And they aren't comparable at all.

Feminism is a long standing gloabl movement that seeks to free women and girls globally from oppression, and while som like to say all is well in the UK, I don't think many can look around the world and say feminism has no work, with a straight face.

MRA is a recent movement that has come about as a reaction to some of the gains that feminism has made, and wants to reverse them. It's men reacting to a tiny loss of power.

For example, MRA is very big in India. Now India is a massive place and different in all sorts of areas but still, because it is >>over there, people can sometimes see the issues of women and girls more easily than when they are right under their noses. MRAs in India say, as they do all over the world, that men are under attack, that women's rights have "gone too far", that men don't know what to do with themselves any more.... None of this is resaonable. Not there, not here.

It’s not really the feminists who are the problem there though is it.... It’s the culture of masculinity that sees children as property and has created F4J. MRAs frequently attach the blame to feminism and women.

Feminists have been wanting men to actually be involved parents for an age, and you are right that this is where there may sometimes be an overlap, however there is no overlap when men view access to children as ‘father’s rights’ and the courts awarding primary care to the mother because that is how the parents arranged childcare prior to the split as ‘sexist family courts’. That’s simply the same problem of entitlement thinly veiled with ‘children’s rights’ language.

I do acknowledge however that it is difficult for men to overcome the socialisation to ‘be the provider’ when they become fathers and that it is difficult to overcome structural barriers to involvement in a child’s life due to the way the economy is.

However, this is simply not the case for most of the MRA movement, their narrative is that nasty women are being facilitated to snatch their children by the ‘sexist family courts’ even if prior to the split they were uninvolved as a result of deliberate choices. For those men it is outrage that women might care for children (their property) without their supervision. It is not concern about child development.

Feminists have fought for things that benefit children though and continue to do so

Drawing attention to child poverty, the disproportionate impact of austerity measures on children due to the fact that so many are teh responsibility of a woman and women were clobbered.
Drawing attention to the impact of DV on children
Refuges for women and children escaping DV
Loads of work life "balance" stuff which is backfiring on us a bit initially but hopefully we are turning a corner where men start taking advantage of this stuff (although I think for women it is a must, for men it is opt in - plenty of men at my work stay late to avoid bath / bedtime - because they can - so the men who take advantage of the longer leaves and flexi stuff will be the sort of man who wants to, I imagine many will still happily leave it all to the woman ot pick up and of course we do)

Thing is the MRA movement often comes off as immature and whiny. Like the man who did FFJ, I think it was him, he said he was a violent alcoholic and if he had been his partner he wouldn't have let him see the kids either. And yet, he did FFJ. They often seem to care more about the children as property piece, or as a mechanism to continue abuse of their ex, than anything else.

Anyway I doubt the 2 sides will meet. Although a lot of the ambitions of feminism would help men as well.

Brilliant posts as usual, Offred. Would type more but ironically am breastfeeding at the moment, so...

I’m sorry but this is where there needs to be a bridging between MRA’s like myself and feminists. There needs to be a cross gendered advocacy and activist group who protitize children and those who primarily care for them. Irrespective of wether it’s mothers or fathers.

Wider society often writes off both feminists and MRA’s as a bit fringe and extreme a lot of the time. I accept the antics fathers 4 justice don’t help my case, as if dressing up like batman when trying to advocate for something important makes you look anything other than ridiculous....

A feminism that avoids properly engaging with family motherhood etc is not a great feminism given that

most women in the world have babies
for many women in the world it is not an entierely free choice (social / family pressure) or indeed not a choice at all (forced marriage, lack of access to birth control abortion etc)
women are the default carer of children in all soceities in the world (i am sure) and there are reasons for this. children are going to be had, and they need looking after. trying to delink as well also leads to things like surrogacy as the same as any other form of paid work which is not a helpful stance for women
our oppression is based on being memebrs of the sex that usually has the capability to bear children - we need to address the oppression, not say women shouldn't have children, women who have children are anti feminist etc. Women are not going to stop having babies any time soon....

There is also the fact that men want babies and they want the babies healthy and cared for (usually) just quite a lot of them feel like really it's not their responsibility. That is an issue that feminism has been going on about for years.

I am a member of a few online feminist groups and you do get women occasionally who seem to really hate mothers.
Oh that reminds me, so an example might be Julie Bindel who is good on prostitution obviously but wrote a really nasty article about mothers, and also I was at a talk with her once where a girl maybe 12 got taken out by her mum (content was very upsetting I'm sure her mum hadn't realised) anyway the expression on JBs face really shocked me, she looked really pleased.

So - no women are great on all fronts. There is a strong strand of feminism which is anti mother which to me seems utterly ridiculous. And anti children too which is just, well, nasty.

I just remember my DTS being outraged that his preschool key workers wouldn’t kiss his knee better when he fell off the slide!

Re puberty - obviously it’s not necessary that it is even a parent at all but it’s the sharing of sex that children often feel is important.

As a side note I also have some concerns re childcare as IME one need a small child has is for physical affection. Because of safeguarding it is not really possible for childcare to really meet this need.

My daughter who is 16 has told me she will not have children because she is aware doing so will prevent her achieving what she wants.

I am secretly quite pleased because things are not changing fast enough for her to be able to rely on an understanding workplace or a partner who will support her fully.

I would rather she lives a life that is full rather than one that is full of regret. Sadly, due to circumstance, having children was for me, wonderful but tinged with regret and that's not a nice way to feel.

YY, there is a graded separation between biology and culture re motherhood that I think is just never dealt with properly because it is often treated as a black and white issue.

We have some measures in place re actual pregnancy and the post natal period but biological issues re bearing children don’t just end when mat leave finishes;

• mothers may not all be BF, for example, but if a baby is being BF (with tiny exceptions) it IS the mother who does it, because biology.

• the physiological demands of pregnancy and actually giving birth impact on a mother’s health, sometimes for many many years after. It involves recovery time which may be relatively short or very long but there is always a recovery period and having been pregnant can increase the risks of poor health for a lifetime in some cases. Fortunately maternal mortality is not the issue it once was. It is always the mother impacted by this. Fathers may struggle with adjustment but this is different.

These things are rarely considered except by people who want to justify paying women less in waged work.

Then there is the cultural expectation that it must be, or should be a mother’s role to meet the child’s developmental need for consistent and responsive care during the first three years, this has no real inherent basis in biology since it simply requires that a person consistently respond to the child’s needs and this could be anyone theoretically. Biology may impact on this part, particularly if the baby is BF because feeding is need that needs to be responded to and so there is logic there that the best person for that job (if it must be one parent) may be the BF mother. If the baby is FF there is no significant justification for the mother being the best person for the job (taking out how the economy is structured). It is also true that there is no reason why both parents shouldn’t be involved in building an attachment bond during this period no matter how a baby is fed.

That is where some feminists get the idea that all babies should be FF and in nursery but I think mandating FF is actually an example of ignoring the best interests of children as a group re feeding (that’s not a criticism of individuals who FF rather a criticism re mandating FF) and socialisation, as surely a child would benefit from bonding with both parents rather than just one or neither? Also, no matter what childcare is always going to have turnover of staff (also what is the point? If it is to benefit the mothers re economic inequality then we should assume the same economic inequalities will mean the nursery workers will be paid peanuts and it will be the same tired old thing of some women having careers and other women facilitating it).

Then there is age 3-5 where the child has formed an attachment bond but is not yet in school and is quite dependent still. Stability matters here so if you’ve been trapped into being ‘the one’ already this is likely to continue and there is also a child development logic to it continuing. I think this is a good age for children to be in childcare providing it is not long hours and is high quality. I don’t believe this should be about improving educational standards though as there is no evidence the improvement is maintained in the long run and I feel it is just a prop for the treadmill of standardised testing later on. Children should be learning naturally through play at this age.

Then from school age there is absolutely zero justification IMO for mothers to be considered to be anything different to fathers.

Then at puberty a child often needs support and reassurance re sex and biological changes and the parent that shares the child’s sex may be more important for these things.

And because gender difference is seen as structuring and maintaining male dominance, many feminists seek to downplay and disavow anything that marked this difference; the main one being of course motherhood.

Only if downplay and disavow anything that marked this difference is understood to mean talk about it and write about it year after year while working to change laws, traditions, and regulations, that penalize women with children.
I never quite know what to think about writers who take Feminism to task for not doing what Feminists have indeed been doing right along in order to lecture us about how we are doing Feminism wrong.

Offred yy

I am very very uncomfortable when the solution to inequality is suggested to be long nursery hours for children/infants. I have also seen the suggestion thst BF is bad for women because it makes it harder to go back to work etc

The most amazing feminist i have ever met IRL was an independent MW

We need to value the things that women do more.

Anyone who is interested in this area should be aware of Andrea O’Reilly, who set up ARM (now defunct) MIRCI, their journal (JRM) and the Demeter Press. I’ve been to a couple of her keynotes at UK conferences in the past, and always order books from Demeter Press. As well as an academic research group in this niche area, and a regular journal, they do a lot of work outside the academic arena supporting women in their local community.
As far as specifically mothering goes, they are the only academic feminist niche that I have found so far. I’d love to hear of others.
motherhoodinitiative.org

Their website is terrible, but their work is great.

From the original lecture:

"motherhood is seen as a patriarchal institution that causes women’s oppression, and thus the feminist ‘solution’ to such is avoiding motherhood both in theory and practice. Relatedly, because feminists are uncomfortable with anything that suggests gender essentialism –i.e. men are naturally this way; women naturally this way– motherhood becomes highly problematic, as motherhood, more than anything else, is what marks our essential gender difference; only biological females can biologically become mothers. And because gender difference is seen as structuring and maintaining male dominance, many feminists seek to downplay and disavow anything that marked this difference; the main one being of course motherhood. Thus for many feminists, to talk of motherhood, to acknowledge women’s specific gendered subjectivity as mothers, to develop a mother-centred feminism, is to play into patriarchy; acknowledge and affirm that is which is seen as marking and maintaining gender difference and hence the oppression of women."

This is a good analysis of the negative gut reaction of most feminists to the subject of motherhood/maternity, I think.

I also totally agree with your points about the rights of the child being ignored in the larger discussion of women's right, Offred.

Both my sister and I have spent long periods as full time working mothers with a partner being a sahd. It is not an experience I would like to repeat. What happened in my case was that I would get home to utter chaos which I would have to deal with, along with all washing etc and sole responsibility for all infants from getting in to going out while he had a rest. It was more like having a baby sitter than a sahd. In my sisters case the sahd thing has carried on not just into secondary school, but even now the kids are adults. I know some women don't ever work after having kids but, as well as being full time mothers, they make a career out of homemaking for their working husband and older children. What I'm saying is that there is a particular breed of male chauvinist pig that will use the sahd role to basically live the life of Riley. There is one job these types love to do, and that is pick up the kids from school. All the other mothers then think the sahd is so wonderful.

And it’s so pervasive and attitude. Night shift mum I mentioned on the class analysis thread, well she earns more than her husband who is a self employed plasterer... It’s his job that is considered ‘the main job’.

We shouldn’t be assumed to be resoponsible but feminism definitely needs to acknowledge that that is the reality.

And no matter what your arrangement society will assume that it is the mother who is responsible for the child’s development... like when I got told to do a parenting course and teach my ex husband what I learned after he was caught being EA to my DD and when he dropped the twins off last week and my DTD was ill but the teacher told her ‘tell your mum not to send you in if you are sick’ and how even though we have written the days the kids are in each place on the contact file they have, more than once called my phone on H’s day and left a number of angry messages re why am I not picking up but never bothered to call him (I was seeing clients in my volunteer job and had specifically written I would be uncontactable on that day every week).

As soon as we could afford it, my DH resigned and became a SAHF.

My DH spent 4/5 years as a SAHD - albeit working some part-time hours - because a) I earned slightly more than him in our full-time positions and b) perhaps more importantly, he was able to earn considerably more than I could doing some very short part-time hours.

Yes,Offred!

For me the pressure of motherhood has been particularly about balancing my child’s emotional and developmental needs. The world of work is not set up to cater for the needs of young children without one parent sacrificing career. This is particularly so for parents who have no family close by who can help with some childcare. Everything falls to us.

What Offred said, regardless of typos!

I still can't get over the early days of austerity, when warnings about the disproportionate impact on working class mothers were met with not all women are breeders remarks by supposedly left-leaning media feminists.