Just posting from Radfem 2013 with the MN feminists - couple of interesting comments :-)

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I'm just posting because I'm at a conference with a few MN feminists. We've just been to a panel about feminist parenting, and the others are chatting with other feminist mums.

I've been listening in on the discussion mostly on account of not having any children - which is why I'm posting on MN instead of talking - but a couple of women mentioned the old stereotype of MN being full of anti-feminist middle-class white mothers who only talk about nappies. And a couple of FWR regulars were saying that we're actually quite nice. So, I am hoping maybe people who were at the conference will come to check out this section.

Or maybe they won't, but if they do - hello! :-)

[Blistory]

Then again, educating me WAS obviously a complete waste of time given my spelling and missing punctuation in my post above.

[MalenkyRusskyDrakonchik]

Oh, sure, it's not a tenable proposition in our current society, it is just an ideal. I think what annoys me is that so often, if you act as if you are anything but cravenly grateful that abortion exists, you're painted as being pro-life or massively entitled. And really I do not quite see why it is such an enormous privilege to go through that. It's great relative to what it was like for women before abortion was legal, sure, but it's not great in itself.

I completely agree about the madonna/whore thing. I think one of the things Caitlin Moran did do very well in her book was put her case for abortion being one of the things that made her a good mother. That is still something that seems very taboo to say.

[MalenkyRusskyDrakonchik]

Oh, lord, if we're judging spelling and punctuation we'll be here all night!

I've given up on mine.

[AmandaPandtheTantrumofDoom]

I rather liked what Caitlin Moran had to say on the subject.

I also liked (iirc) that she argued that you could believe that some form of life began at conception and still believe absolutely that women had the right to decide whether to continue a pregnancy.

That was something I'd always found difficult. I don't believe it's just a bunch of cells or a potential life (though nor do I believe it's a baby). It's on a very wide spectrum of life and I believe that the woman should have control over whether it continues to develop.

But for a long time that was very taboo to say as a feminist.

[Blistory]

So do you think that in order to prevent abortion from being necessary, women need to be able to control sex, especially PIV sex ? I can't see how anything else would work.

And men stop women from having that control by rape, coercion, being the decision makers in so many ways.

It such a fundamental thing that underlies all the other inequality that I'm can't help but be pessimistic about our chances of achieving true equality. Maybe I'm missing something.....

[MalenkyRusskyDrakonchik]

Yes, I thought that was a good point too, amanda.

blis - yes, I do think that. And I do sometimes feel pessimistic but I think that is because we are so immersed in the reality of how life is now, we find it hard to see how it could be different. I know I do, anyway. But I think it must have seemed equally impossible that things could change before the pill was developed.

[Hullygully]

I think abortion is difficult because we are all so mad about sex. I mean have mad attitudes. There should be condom machines everywhere, endless adverts about safe sex, a recognition that sex is great and fun and do it/don't as you wish but use a condom. And that abortion is sometimes better if the alternative is an unwanted human being.

[FreyaSnow]

Blistory, I don't think it is an option for the vast majority of mothers to never work on any task other than looking after children. It just seems a straw man argument.

I think probably the exact opposite of you. I think misogyny is created by two issues - the essential human problem of finding ways of making somebody else do more work than you (so women do the majority of the world's work so men have to do less). That isn't specific to men and women because lots of other ways of categorising people have been invented so some people can do less work than others.

The second issue is motherhood. I think men know mother and baby is the basic building block of society, and they are peripheral to that. A vast amount of social effort is put into a. us all making out that some thing done almost exclusively by men is amazing, special and important so they don't feel pushed out and b. allowing men to control which women are allowed to have children, when and under what circumstances. Most extreme male anger and control of women is around these issues.

[Blistory]

Freya, apologies, perhaps I wasn?t clear.

Obviously reproducing is essential to the survival of the human race. This involves women and men only in the initial creation. Thereafter I agree, from a survival point of view, men aren?t necessary except to contribute to the next round of reproduction.

So men are pretty pointless in terms of Mother Nature other than the supply of sperm. This doesn?t mean that they don?t then contribute but there is nothing about their contribution that can?t be done by women. So men need to find a role and in creating a patriarchal society, they?ve given themselves a role, as provider, protector, ruler, etc etc.

In order to appease women, and particularly in recent times, when women have started to question why men hold this apparently dominant role, the response has been to tell women that their role is motherhood. That?s it. There is nothing else that women were good for. So that role has been embellished to an extent. Women are told that motherhood is their role, that men aren?t as naturally good at parenting, that because motherhood is so wonderful and fulfilling, women don?t need any other role. Nice guilt trip they?ve laid on us.

The concept of motherhood as being everything that a woman is about, is to my mind, very recent. Women weren?t historically so invested in their children for their own sense of purpose. They had larger families, children frequently died in infancy, they were more accepting of the ?village to raise a child? mentality. Children were treated as a further source of income and labour, through necessity. I?m not for one minute arguing that modern day children shouldn?t be cherished and valued, but look at the way in which modern women regard their children. It?s almost like an extension of themselves, they have ownership of children in a way that is a relatively new phenomenon. You can?t criticise a child otherwise you?re criticising the mother. There?s still a widely held perception that only a woman can really truly understand the needs of a baby and infant child. And yet society has a much better idea of child development and the only specific things that a woman brings are pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding. There is nothing else in raising a child in modern day UK that a caring and involved father can?t do as well.

Who does it suit better to continue with the belief that child rearing is all consuming, a process of maternal instincts, and the ultimate goal of all women ? That would be men. I really don?t think that it?s a coincidence. I firmly believe that our society has taken child rearing and made it solely the province of women in order to benefit men. And that to appease us, we?re apparently treated with a sense of wonder that we can reproduce, that only we know our babies, that we should be at home with them. I wonder how many women stay at home due to a sense of belief that it?s their duty and that they are less of a mother if they don?t and consequently less of a woman.

It comes back to choice ? very few women actually have the choice to be a stay at home parent or working parent because choice can?t exist without equality. I just think that the concept of motherhood holds some of the solutions to equality but it involves women breaking the taboo of saying that women aren?t naturally better parents than men, that having a child is wonderful and life affirming but it?s not all that a woman is about, and that you?re not less of a woman for not having a child.

In a nutshell, where you think that misogyny is caused by motherhood, I think misogyny created motherhood, or at the very least, created a false expansion of what motherhood is in order to bind women to a specific role.

[Hullygully]

I think there is a lot of truth in that blistoy.

[MalenkyRusskyDrakonchik]

Me too.

[GoshAnneGorilla]

However, not all women were allowed to have the "motherhood as ultimate goal". Authorities have frequent denied the motherhood of poor women, women of color, women with disabilities and so on.

For some women SAHMing has been a glided cage, whereas for others, it's been a luxury they've not been permitted and I think it's important to remember that.

[MalenkyRusskyDrakonchik]

That's true, too.

It goes back to what we're always saying on here, that women have always worked. There is the public perception of what women have done in the past, which is set up as the lovely ideal from back before we all got uppity with feminism, but it only describes a tiny proportion of women at one very narrow point in time.

[TunipTheVegedude]

Yes and no, re motherhood being less important (to those that were allowed to be mothers, as you say).
Childrearing was made less of a meal of but you would have spent a much greater proportion of your time pregnant and stood a greater chance of dying of it than now, so an ideology that elevated motherhood was important then too and I think it existed in many earlier periods.

[MalenkyRusskyDrakonchik]

But if this happened as blis says, and motherhood became elevated because men felt pushed out by biology, then it happened before recorded history. It makes sense that needing an ideology to elevate a really dangerous/ubiquitous experience was necessary too, but it'd be hard to know how those two things interacted.

I do find it really persuasive though, because I think something we're really bad at coping with as a society is the fact that we expect men not to care as much as women do about their children.

[Blistory]

The thing is, I don't know if women perhaps are the more natural parent but even if that is biologically so, I think it's a pretty poor excuse for the lack of involvement by men in parenting their children in modern society.

[MalenkyRusskyDrakonchik]

I've no idea, but my ignorant impression is that the urge to be a loving parent isn't gendered at all (or we'd never find men who had it, and I've spoken to two just today so it isn't that rare). So yes, pretty poor excuse.

[GoshAnneGorilla]

Also, childhood as we know it, hasn't always existed. Children would be working from a very young age indeed.

It's intriguing the way motherhood seems to swing from either being on a pedestal or viewed as the ultimate soul sapping drudgery.

[MalenkyRusskyDrakonchik]

I think a lot of people worked in the home, even until relatively late. Louis Braille ended up blind because he was in his parents' work room and he put an awl through his eye. Not that uncommon.

I wish I knew more about the industrial revolution. I think there's a MNer who works on relevant stuff - something to do with mothers in Lancashire mill towns, but I've forgotten who it was.

I think some very lucky children have probably always had a 'childhood' in the sense of being coddled and educated instead of working, and so on, but it's probably just as much a privilege as getting to spend time on the mothering.

[FreyaSnow]

Blistory, I never mentioned SAHMs. It's just another straw man argument. I don't think we need to look at historical examples to see that women all over the world work, often alongside their children.

'So men need to find a role and in creating a patriarchal society, they?ve given themselves a role, as provider, protector, ruler, etc etc.'

When or where are men the main providers? All over the world, women do most of the work. Presumably patriarchy was created to make women do the majority of the work.

'The concept of motherhood as being everything that a woman is about, is to my mind, very recent. Women weren?t historically so invested in their children for their own sense of purpose. They had larger families, children frequently died in infancy, they were more accepting of the ?village to raise a child? mentality. Children were treated as a further source of income and labour, through necessity. I?m not for one minute arguing that modern day children shouldn?t be cherished and valued, but look at the way in which modern women regard their children.'

I'm pretty much shocked by how offensive and callous that is. This isn't in the past! What you describe is happening now, for most women, all over the world. Why don't you go and ask the women this is happening to now what their purpose is in working really hard, all day, everyday clearing fields, carrying water etc. Go and ask them what their sense of purpose is, or read what they have to say in interviews online. They'll tell you it's because they are mothers and want their kids to be fed, and they will work as hard as they can to make that happen.

I feel pretty angry about this TBH, and after scorning social justice type people online I will now take one of their phrases. This thread - collection of first world problems.

[Hullygully]

that's true too freya

[Hullygully]

Lots of things can be true simultaneously for different reasons

[Sausageeggbacon]

So what happens in 4 years time (roughly) when a male contraceptive is available and men have more control over becoming parents? According to the test results 100% effective and I wilkl be encouraging both sons to use it until they are sure they are ready/willing to become parents.

In terms of feminism though as point out nature only requires men to donate sperm, after that anything that needs to be done we can do. Ifg men can deny us the choice of being pregnant or not at their will how will that affect women who want to be mothers?

As a mother fantastic for my boys but the implications of the control in hands men over parenthood worries me and I say this as someone who went through an abortion at 22 where my ex convinced me we couldn't afford to have a child.

[TheDoctrineOfAllan]

SEB, I think it sounds great. What is it that worries you?