Is Motherhood a form of oppression?

[pinkfizzle]

women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article7070165.ece

I don't think so - and I get a bit sick of breastfeeding is oppressive - blah blah blah...

oh and how convenient that the author has a big stake in publicis - so is incredibly wealthy - so I'm sure she is really concerned about the wage and wealth gap between men and women.

I'm with you Mother, but I felt everyone else was a paragon of maternal virtue and that my feelings were somehow inappropriate. I now realise that I was perhaps no so much in a minority as I thought.

I too miss my pre-kids life. Frequently.

I just don't think there is pressure in France for women to throw away their old lives and become excessive, clingy parents with no freedom and no existence of their own. There is, perhaps, pressure to carry on living life as if you still had no children.

I'd be more interested in someone publishing analysis of real problems like the current French gvmt's plans to drastically increase the number of babies per staff member in crèches (from 5 to 8 babies per employee), rather than this hysterical stuff about how we are all oppressed by imaginary pro-BFing fanatics. I am still BFing DS2 after 11 mths, and my GP cannot get his head round the idea because it is so unusual. He always asks which kind of follow on milk I am using. Every single time.

Ah, from a UK perspective there is pressure to be Transformed with Maternal Bliss.

Especially in those early days when some f*cker will peer at you - a sleep-deprived deflating space-hopper, grey with exhaustion and stress - and tell you to 'enjoy it while it lasts'.

Auld, I'm always quite impressed by the effert of your current govtm to destroy the state education system. It reminds me of someone else... not very tall, beginning with B...

efforts

motherinferior! I agree. (mind you, I'd love to have a tiny new born...)

Where do you live AuldAlliance?

I'm in Paris and I have to say that midwives in the hospital I gave birth to DD were all for bf and all the doctors I ever mentioned to that I'm bf were totally unsurprised and my DD's paediatrician is very supportive of me bf DD at 13m.

Maybe I was just lucky.

I think motherhood can be oppressive, but then so are other things in life. Even if you adore your baby, you can get tired of being on call non-stop, of playing same games over and over etc. But then it's the choice we make and once we have the baby it makes sense to prioritize: if we feel bf is better for the baby or cooking at home as opposed to buying jars appeals more to us than we do that even if there are drawbacks to that, because as responsible adults we try to make the best decisions for our family.

I agree that if someone hates the very idea of bf etc they should not do it as it serves no purose to go sgainst yourself and being miserable, but I resent the idea of some woman with outdated ideas about feminism telling me that I am a slave because I refuse to ff my child.

Motherhood is a part of life and many aspects of life can be difficult and rewarding at the same time.

I just don't see there's any purpose to that book.

I've got to say though, I don't know any of these oppressed British mothers in real life. (Disclaimer: not suggesting they don't exist)

My friends and relations are/have all bf or ff depending on circumstances/preference; weaned in a variety of ways at a variety of ages; used jars exclusively/sometimes/not at all; work fulltime/part-time/work from home/sahm; use various methods of discipline including "unconditional parenting".

Everyone rubs along just fine, and if we all get a bit angsty from time to time about something or another, well that's the human condition. I don't know anyone (who doesn't have an underlying issue such as depression) who is permanently or even often troubled by their parenting choices to any serious degree.

cf. Obs mother-angst thread: the media (and to an extent talkboards) concentrates these passing thoughts about how we "should" do things and tries to pathologise them.

Or maybe I just know a lot of particularly laid back parents

I would argue that bf is actually empowering and not anti-feminist at all. Women are not biologically the same as men, we have the ability to grow a baby and sustain it nutritionally with our bodies, men do not - a biological fact. Imo it's all about choice. That we have free choice over what to do with our bodies is the most important thing.

Eg the whole "getting our body back" - for who? There was an interview with a page 3 model on gmtv (can't remember her name) and she said she wouldn't breastfeed because her breasts "belong to her husband". This is, imo, far more anti feminist.

To choose to breastfeed has many other points that liberate women apart from any health advantages- convenience, cost, less dependency on artificial substitutes, nourishing the baby with our own bodies.

Surely her point is wider than just breastfeeding. It seems to me she is saying that modern life is pretty incompatible with the what we believe a "good mother" should do and be like. That incompatibility makes it difficult for many women to make the decsion to have children.

I think she has some good points. We can go on and on about how liberating breastfeeding is (btw I bf ds for 2 years) but the truth is our birthrate is falling and I think a lot of that has to do with how difficult it is for many women to reconcile the different expectations we have of ourselves and that society has.

Many developed nations have a society and environment where:

• income is king - people who don't earn money or who earn less are less valued in our society than those who do
• many families are fragmented thus leaving little extended family support for mothers
• Breastfeeding has become something people are not used to seeing in public
• Children are not seen as a common good and a common responsibility but as the total and complete responsibility of individual parents with little back-up for those parents.

All the above are really hard to reconcile with what our ideas of a "good mother" are so I do think it can be a hard decsison to have children as a woman and unless you have a strong "broody instinct", I'm not surprised many choose not to.

I'm not sure I agree with everything said in this article but I do see what she means.

BTW , the falling birthrate in some more developed countries may or may not be agood thing with respect to the environment (a whole other argument). The argument in this article seems to be premised on the fact that it is a good thing to have more children then we currently are having.

I wanted my body back so I could wear my clothes again, actually. And feel like me. A separate person. I didn't want to feel that everything in my life had become something in Service Of The Baby.

There is nothing unreasonable in just wanting to look like yourself, in a pair of non-elasticated jeans.

Am not a parent yet, so probbaly not really qualified to comment, but I think she's definitely fallen down on the breastfeeding argument. Breastfeeding definitely seems easier to me as I am anti-faff and cant deal with the whole sterlising thing.

Nappies- jury's still out but i think i could cope with the new all in one types.

Also, pureeing- hasnt the woman heard of a Braun independent?- reduces anything to mush in about 3 seconds.

However, I do think that there is huge pressure to be a perfect parent and I think that a lot of this pressure is applied by women to other women. I am trying to accept that I will be non-perfect in advance- get the disappointment out of the way

"There is nothing unreasonable in just wanting to look like yourself, in a pair of non-elasticated jeans. "
myself wears elasticated jeans

motherinferior, you are misunderstanding - the point that breastfeeding is anti feminist is the one I am arguing. Not that it's wrong for a woman to want her body back for herself.

bumblingbovine - I don't disagree, and her point is definitely much wider than just breastfeeding, but I think its extremely difficult for a woman to make a choice, any choice, to do with mothering that's right for them at the moment. She is adding fuel to this by denouncing one way of doing things and I would argue that she isn't actually doing women any favours here.

Hasn't France the highest birth rate in Europe?
I didn't find bfeeding empowering. It was lovely the first months. Really lovely. It was great not to faff with bottles. I was proud that my dc kept on weight beautifully.
But at some stage my body started to sing "Freeeeeedom"

I am a breastfeeding counsellor because I am a feminist. It is deeply anti-woman to suggest that her body is no better than a manufactured product in nurturing the next generation.

And in any case, someone has to feed the baby - it's usually under-paid, often oppressed and voiceless other women. Why should I have my liberation while another, poorer woman, pays the price?

"Remember, you are not managing an inconvenience. You are raising a human being" ~ Kitti Franz

Yes, men should share the parenting and family-managing. This should be made possible, and allowed to be emotionally rewarding for men, women and babies.

In the initial months, this does not mean going 50-50 with the feeding, but they can do as much of everything else as they wish. After the initial months, even when bf continues, they can do the non-bf feeding.

I thought birthrates were falling in developed countries more because
1 - we have birth control options now that weren't previously available
2 - infant/child mortality has reduced significantly
3 - many women are waiting until they are older to start having families (probably linked to (1) above as well)

Thumbwitch is right. There are multiple reasons why the birthrate is falling. It's a feature of economic development. When comparing France and Germany, the author doesn't, for example, note that there are more Catholics in France, and Catholics tend to have larger families (that's just one example, but my point is that you cant point at breastfeeding and say "that's what's caused the discrecency in birth rate".

Also, a falling birth rate isnt necessarily a bad thing. The planet is under strain. It wouldn't hurt for there to be fewer of us. We just need to change our economic model so that we save for our own old age instead of casting the burden onto the next generation.

Winnybella, I'm in the South-East. The hospital where I gave birth this time around is utterly amazing, people come from hundreds of km away to give birth here, because they listen to the mothers, don't force them to give birth flat, with feet in stirrups, etc. Their approach to BFing was wonderful.

DS1 was born in a DOM, and I am prepared to believe that it is not representative of all of France, and that as with many other aspects of life, things are taken to an extreme there. But the nurses clearly couldn't have given a stuff about BFing.

I'm glad things in Paris are less restrictive.

However, I work amongst pretty well-educated women, with a fairly liberal and open-minded attitude to many things. None of them BF longer than 3 or 4mths, British or French. I was quoting my GP's reaction not because I am unhappy that he is unsupportive in any way, merely to show how unaccustomed a lot of people here are to anyone BFing for longer than a few months.

Franca,
There are a great deal of parallels between our diminutive, virulent Presidents.
Height and general ridiculousness aside, their attitude to public services is scarily similar.
And NS is trying to bring in new legislation to modify the way that big bosses who misuse company assets for their own purposes can be investigated, making it harder for them to be prosecuted.

(Not that this has owt to do with oppression of women, I know!)

Indeed Auld.
(well I think my diminutive prime minister knows a thing or two about oppressing women... )

Thumbwitch

Saying we have falling birthrates because we have contraception available doesn't really explain much. Contraceptives just give women the choice about having children. They say nothing whatsoever about the choices made by women as a result or the reasons for the choices.

Delaying having children is of course related to contraceptives as they have provided the means by which we can make that choice. However I think is is possible to argue that the "reason" that access to contraceptives generally leads to a drastic reduction in birthrate is that motherhood has the potential to be pretty oppressive for many women.

Motherhood can be opressive for very poor women who don't have access to contraception for obvious reasons. I think it can be oppressive to women in developed countries who have access to contraception for different reasons and this article explains some of them.

If motherhood didn't have the ability to be opressive to women then contraceptives would not have had the massive effect they have had on birthrates in the countries they are available in.

I think the author of the article did her arguments a disservice by her comments on breastfeeding. However I do think that the generally unfriendly environment for breastfeeding (in the UK anyway) along with the true but nonetheless guilt inducing message of breast is best etc leads to a feeling of opression for many women during the baby stage anyway.

I do and don't agree with you there BB - contraception provides choice, yes. But it still provides a reason for falling birthrates as well as no contraception meant no real choice, so women produced more babies, in some cases one a year - yes, I would consider this to be oppressive motherhood too if I didn't want to be almost constantly pg and there was nothing I could do about it.

Personally I don't feel oppressed by motherhood because I have been able to make choices.

I don't see how breastfeeding = opression. Scandinavian countries have high bf rates (something like 70-80% at 6 months iirc) and also have high levels of representation of women on company boards (e.g. in Norway it must legally be at least 40%) and in parliament. So bf clearly isn't incompatible with (progress towards) equality.

I didn't/don't feel oppressed by motherhood at all. But what did make me feel oppressed, was other people's views of how I should behave as a mother. I felt oppressed and judged when talking about breastfeeding, letting ds sleep in my arms/in our bed, demand feeding... I was made to feel that formula was a much easier/more sensible option and I should stop being a martyr.

One of the things I found interesting about the article was the final paragraph "Britain is somewhere in between, she says ? pulled by tradition towards the French model and by fashion towards a touchy-feely, child-centred future."

Since when did formula feeding become the traditional model? Surely breastfeeding is the traditional model? It's not about giving your baby what's best, it's about giving your baby the norm - the exact form of nutrition their stomachs are "designed" to receive. [disclaimer: yes, I am reading The Politics of Breastfeeding at the moment!]

Thinking about it, I think motherhood has been the most liberating experience of my life so far - and I have had quite a full and varied life. I had so many decisions to make - and being able to make your own decisions is very liberating indeed.