Feminism and SAHM

[samoa]

Can a woman be a feminist and a SAHM by choice?

My feeling was totally the reverse, much more along the lines of "thank goodness I can escape from this".

I think that being a good parent is incredibly important, both directly to our own children and indirectly to society, but I also think it can be combined with having a satisfying and worthwhile career. Not all jobs contribute to consumerism, and for me money has never been the primary reason I work (although having more than enough money is certainly liberating, whilst not having enough is incredibly stressful).

Sakura - I thought the "wiping-bums" comment was more about acknowledging the nitty-gritty of child rearing and the need to have the less fun bits of it picked up as much as the more appealing. Just this week we've seen several media pieces about how fathers should be involved by play with their kids but women are so much better at the actual caring (by which they mean wiping bums and getting up in the middle of the night).

I am personally a bit horrified to see feminism aligned with the idea that child rearing is all that's important. Even without consumerism and the patriarchy I'm looking for a way to see myself as something more than a continuer of the species.

What a telling dichotomy, scottishmummy.

I don't know what Loose Women is - I presume it's a television show (I don't watch TV in any language). I do, and have always done, lots of reading (in several languages - so much is never translated) but think book learning is meaningless without relating it constantly to one's own concrete experience of life, in multiple cultural contexts.

sakura - I do not try to "glorify the SAHM role" and I dispute the implication that I do. I don't think your points are different to mine other than that you are more resentful than me of men! Probably because I became a mother much later in life than you and had had a lot more experience first - makes one more sanguine.

SP you are right what you said about how my 'wiping bums' comment was meant.

This thread is really interestingbut Ive made all my points now so dipping out. Thanks women of MN for a proper SAHM debate rather than the shallow bo11ocks on the subject on AIBU etc

nooka of course it can be combined with a satisfying job. WOmen must use their intellectual and creative gifts to the best of their ability (if they have the luck to be born in a class and country which allows them to do so)

Thinking about this thread, I know I didn't articulate what I meant properly when I said "childrearing is all that's important*

WHat I meant was is that it should be valued and it emphatically is not. Other work, any other work has more value.

I have just written a post on a religious thread, but it's relevant to the point I'm (clumsily) attempting to make here:

" Feminists were the first to point out that women weren't created as opposites to men, that they should not be defined in relation to men. Society and patriarchal religions regard whatever men do in the positive, as absolute, the prototype human, and therefore whatever females do is (like it or not) seen as other, and even negative.
A great example of this is pregnancy. From an objective POV, pregnancy is the ultimate positive. It is the creation and nurturing of a new life. There is nothing more powerful and more positive.
ANd yet, in this fucked up world made by men, they have managed to create a frame of thought that places pregnancy in the negative, because it is the furthest from the male that is possible. Pregnancy is therefore devalued, seen as ugly, something women "do" ."

My point was that no-one told me
No-one told me that the baubles and trinkets, and even the architecture and the science, the art, are all extras.
FIrst of all, none of it is alive. It's all dead. You could always find more beauty in a forest. That's because a forest is alive
But the patriarchal mind-fuck is to glorify certain aspects of life, and to devalue other aspects. And boy, is pregnancy and birth devaluated.
And I'm not talking about putting mothers on a pedastal like patriarchal religions or certain cultures do (even ours, especially with celebrities). I'm not talking about that at all.
I'm talking about re-evaluating the way society views the world because right now certain work (generally done by males) is way way overvalued, and other work (done by females) has been devalued to the point where the women who do it have become a slave or servant class to society, propping up the capitalist system with their free labour.
Putting more men in the slave/servant role can only help up to a certain point. There are lots of "spare" men, and men bandy together to keep the power in their hands. Under the current system, there will always be women for whom selling their body is a viable economic option. It needs an overhaul, and it's not just pessimism to say that joining the system and adopting patriarchal values is not going to help women in the long term

ANd history has shown that when women begin to do work previously done by males, the instrinsic value of that work drops (teaching, medicine)
SO I've no doubt that if more men take on the child-rearing role that society will begin to place more value on it.

BUt from a feminist POV, can't anyone see the irony of this???

Anna, I wouldn't say I was resentful of men, more that I value women.

sakura - are you sure you don't resent men? You sound so angry in those last posts.

I don't feel society or anyone around me devalues pregnancy and childbirth, or child raising. Maybe I'm lucky? Maybe I have engineered my life path to be in a place where the things that I value about myself are valued by those around me? Maybe I just like children a lot and get a lot of recognition for what I do for them (not talking about my own DD but all the other children I do things for)?

Some really interesting arguments and ideas here which are particularly thought provoking for me because I have just finalised the decision to terminate my contract at the end of my maternity leave; I will then officially be a SAHP.

I haven't intellectualised this thought really at all but I feel that if mothering as a full time occupation has become anti-feminist then really we're completely fucked aren't we? As a society and as women? I'm sad that anyone feels I am less of a feminist because of my choice here (although I agree that the 'choice' argument is a poor one).

I certainly don't feel in any way that our new division of labour means that dh has control over me and if I did feel that then I surely would have married the wrong person rather than made the wrong choice at this point. That's clearly not the case for all women but that has little bearing on this decision surely?

" I feel that if mothering as a full time occupation has become anti-feminist then really we're completely fucked aren't we?"

That's what I think, Unruly.

Anna no, I don't resent men. Yes my post was angry reading it back. I thought I came across as thought-provoking, but ah well..
But I most certainly do resent the way patriarchy has always striven to distort the truth by sidelining or ignoring female experience and reality, and sidelining female achievements, while simultaneously lauding mediocre male achievements; or by usurping what is female in favour of the male, just because they hold the power and because they want to. LIke ROsalind Franklin not receiving the NObel prize for her work, and it was given to her two male colleagues instead. OR the need for the ORange Prize for fiction because female writers are persistently ignored in favour of males in mainstream. Female truth is annihilated. That's what I'm resentful about. Yes.
ANd the lauding of the men in the system at the expense of women-- I mean, really, I can't get over those bankers getting bonuses out of taxpayers money... Yes, I'm angry about that.

The Nobel prize is only given to people who are alive at the time it's announced, and Rosalind Franklin didn't live long enough to be considered for the prize for finding DNA. Would she have got it? We'll never know.

"I feel that if mothering as a full time occupation has become anti-feminist then really we're completely fucked aren't we?"

But mothering has never been a full time occupation - that's a very recent state of affairs. Mothers have always done much more than look after their children. It is a subset of the tasks women have historically done and removes them from a wide range of civil and economic roles - turns them into consumers more than producers, removes them from wide swathes of their peers and narrows their experience of the world. (All in a very general sense of the impact of the role, not in the sense of what individual sahms do).

Mothering doesn't involve production? Ha ha ha.

Quite apart from producing the baby itself, and all that milk to feed it, I am quite aware that I use a far broader range of production skills every day, week and month of my life than I did at work. In the last week I have produced meals, essay guidance, university application coaching, relationship counselling; single-handedly organised, hosted and question-fielded a school Q&Q session; drafted a written and slided report on the state of part of the curriculum at school...

No I don't agree that my experience of the world is narrowed - it's different certainly but not narrower than for e.g. that of a person who works in an office with ten others. I also think that that definition of producer is a narrow economic one.

I appreciate that you're generalising for the sake of argument but I still think that mothering has to be a central part of the experience of being a woman for many if not most women so how can choosing that role over economic productivity possibly be anti feminist?

suchprospects I think that is true but the context has changed, the end of the extended family living nearby and helping out has put a lot of pressure on roles
the care of children, elderly and infirm used to be the shared responsibility of the extended family, although it could be argued women got the lion share of it. But ever since these caring roles have been 'commercialised' for a want of a better word, families are more isolated and there are huge pressures put on the more nuclear family

X-post

I think it's wrong to think that mothers who don't go out to work somehow come into less contact with the world at large than mothers who do go out to work. Not all jobs are horizon-broadening, by a very long shot. And when you don't have the constraints of a job, you have a lot more freedom to do a variety of things with your time.

Unrulysun - I definitely don't think it is anti-feminist. I just have not found it to be a particularly feminist choice.

Agree with sfxmum that the context has changed. And I think that's a lot of why accepting a sahm role in this context doesn't seem feminist to me. The way the role has changed means that women are much more cut off from the rest of society than they would previously have been.

I'm not arguing that the ideal feminist act is to go back to paid employment outside the home the minute you physically can. I would like to see society integrate family life into the rest of life better instead. But I an wary of attempts to strengthen the ideal of one parent staying home with children as their sole occupation - especially when that parent is predominantly the mother. And I totally agree with Sakura's point that child rearing is under valued. But I don't think the sahm role does anything to lift the status of child rearing in our society.

Working at other things as well as being a mother doesn't mean you have stopped being a mother. You are still "producing" your children. It means you share that role and have other roles as well - more balance. This is typically what women have done (though the role of child rearing has been much more on female shoulders, especially early years).

Bonsoir that's a fair point about not all jobs are horizon-broadening. There is a bit of slack for people in that they aren't stuck in a single job, there is the possibility of doing something else. And the number of completely crap jobs is a big problem in our current economy.

However, I haven't found that without a job I have a lot of freedom - I just don't have the freedom of movement or scheduling to do a lot of the (non employment) things I could before I was a sahm. That is a lot to do with how anti-children our culture is, but I think that feeds back into the whole sahm role.

"And the number of" = " But the number of completely"

suchporspects I see your point but seems to be that that is the case for Sakura's argument
the extrinsic valued affecting the intrinsic value?
no easy answers and I always suspect completely entrenched views

But isn't that just adding to the 'having it all' pressure for mothers?

I have made an informed personal choice. I am lucky enough not to have had to think too hard about the economics of that decision when making it. I have been supported wholly by a partner who is, in every respect, my equal. My dd will benefit from this decision - I am confident in that. So why have a number of people IRL looked incredibly disappointed when hearing about this choice and all but said that it's a retrograde step? If I can't make a decision like this for myself then I can't see the progress to be honest. :(

Perhaps, though, that the freedoms you have as a mother are different freedoms to those you enjoyed before becoming one? I'm sure that the degree of freedom one enjoys as a mother is a lot greater in some places than others.

I suspect the freedom enjoyed by many women, be they Mothers or not, is highly dependent upon their economic status.

Absolutely Litchick which is where I recognise that I am lucky to have had a real choice.