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

[EmilyDickinson]

mommuseum.org/aint-i-a-feminist-matricentric-feminism-feminist-mamas-and-why-mothers-need-a-feminist-movementtheory-of-their-own/

There's an interesting article in the Guardian today (I'll link in a minute) that refers to this more detailed article.

I agree Offred, but it is part of the rhetoric of - everyone on benefits is scum.

And I have read plenty of women on here saying stuff like - if I can't afford to stay at home and look after my kids, why should benefits pay for other women to do that.
I totally disagree with that. I think should benefits should be payable until children go to school, with no pressure to get a job. But there does not seem to be much support for that these days.

"Women breastfeed.

And the biological "morm" is to breastfeed for years, not months.
Combine that with several children then that effectively means that a woman is out of the workplace for years."

This is only the case if the "workplace" is set up in such a way that makes continuing feeding impractical. For me, feeding was well established at 9 months so it was easy to go back to 9-5.

But there's no reason it couldn't, if society was arranged differently, have been eminently possible to e.g. organise callcentre stints of a couple of hours at a time with an adequate break in between, sharing childcare with other parents. I know how callcentre staffing works and it would be perfectly possible to do that kind of thing if society thought it was important enough to organise around it. It doesn't really matter as long as you have the right staffing levels to deal with predicted traffic. Many other modern day jobs could be equally flexible if people cared enough to reorganise stuff to make it so.

Until money is not a central measure of success motherhood will always be seen to lack value.

Everything Offred said too. Also...

And no, fathers are not chained to the mothers... how many schemes targeting ‘absent fathers’ are there?

For all the moaning men do, the chasing of child support is useless if a father has the mind not to pay. The ex of a woman who comes into our foodbank first went self-employed so that he could avoid paying child support and then, when she pursued him at great length about that, fucked off to work in Spain for a year. In the end, it wasn't worth the toll on her mental health to keep chasing him. Then, after three years of that, she got caught up in that Concentrix tax credit scandal where HMRC kept accusing women of co-habiting, when they weren't. Then, after that nightmare, she had a change of circumstance and got migrated to Universal Credit, with all the horror that entails. Man and state have made this woman's life unbearable for more than five years now - and for no other reason than she is a mother.

Absolutely Offred
I also agree that the UC thing is totally wrong. Mothers should be able to be SAHM with state support until kids are 12 how it used to be. This is particularly vital for single mothers in terms of finances.

Plenty of countries women breastfeed and work. Because work is set up in a different way. Work in the west is set up for able bodied men, and everyone else has to fit around it.

Also want to acknowledge though that for some women breastfeeding is awful and they want to give it up. And that is fine.

The only scheme targeting absent fathers is a very poorly designed and virtually ineffective targeting of minimal amounts of money.

There are no special social systems targeting absent fathers as a social problem that I know of, no schemes which measure them as a ‘problem’ which requires state intervention to correct... If they leave they have left and are no longer tied socially to their children.

Well said Offred

Women’s lives are a cycle of chained to the state, chained to a man, chained to the state, chained to a man....

The principle of non-interference in private and family life has never been applied to women. Women have too many children or too few, they are too rich or too poor, they are bad mothers or good mothers, taking men’s jobs or not working enough... there are numerous state structures employed to interfere in women’s lives and shape their choices, hold them to standards whilst if you look at the domain reserved for men (work) we have out of control hyper individualism.

Women are collectively responsible, for men, for children, for all of society but society is not collectively responsible for us.

The entire system is set up to exploit women, and their reproductive capabilities. So the only thing really, is to get out of that system. Somehow.

Until money is not a central measure of success motherhood will always be seen to lack value.

Very true Posie.
It's the whole capitalist-patriarchy thing.

I'll go out on a limb here, and say ALL radfems are against it! :)

I remember Sakura and she was very influential to me.

Although it is a long time ago, the emphasis I took from her posts was less about the "power" of motherhood and more about the importance of motherhood, which should be honoured and supported. I did take on whole heartedly from her (and I differ from many of my friends on this) that any facilitation of fathers' parenting must NOT take away from our existing maternity rights.

At the time I had very small children and so did many of my friends. Some of them (including me) had more "progressive" arrangements to do with fathers doing, or "doing" more childcare, although at the time maternity leave itself was for mothers only - there is a still a preschool period post-mat-leave when children need full time hands on care and several fathers volunteered themselves for this "cushy number". it was a shitshow in some cases - literally - two out of seven children (the ones with full time dad "carers") had undiagnosed encopresis for a while which required closer attention from a full time parent to identify and treat. (and arguably prevent)

(I was on my knees with exhaustion by working full time with a long commute and having patchily sleeping toddlers and a "partner" who dropped everything the second I walked in the door. I was so exhausted at work I posted desperately on mn about it one day and a central london dwelling stranger offered me a bed to sleep in at lunchtime

The importance of motherhood is really the importance of childhood IMO.

UK is very bad re the importance of childhood for a supposedly developed society.

Experiences in childhood effect the entirety of a person’s life.

That more attention isn’t given to this, given how much we know about it, is absolutely and profoundly shocking to me on one level but totally understandable if you look at it through the lens of capitalism.

And we are now at the point where assessments re parenting capacity now include value judgements re having a job... pure political ideology of capitalism... now you have a black mark re your ability to provide ‘good enough’ care to your DC if you are a single parent without a job... No help or support to get a job, no concern regarding whether you do or don’t want to have a job or why, no concern re whether the other parent has a job, no concern re whether it is appropriate for the DC for you to have a job... just no job=Black mark.

The thing is many women don’t see themselves in chains. They have power and influence with the people who matter to them.

They don’t want a career. Work is a necessary evil.

Yes, we had that on the class analysis thread but when it came down to it it was there in the form of having a male partner who supported the choice.

Many women do not notice that the important factor is not that they are making the choice they want but that if their partner had decided not to support their choice then they wouldn’t have been able to choose it.

I would like a career TBH. I’ve tried very hard to have one and I never wanted to have any children...

Not how my life has turned out!

But we support men's choices.

My OH would not have been able to do the job he does and be a parent without me being a SAHM.

Invisible chains still exist

It’s true that if men were supposed to be responsible for children, elderly relatives, neighbourhoods, communities etc that being a SAHM would be ‘supporting a man’s career’ but the reality is not that and much as women would like that to be recognised it isn’t.

If you wanted to stop being a SAHM then you would usually need both the agreement of the state and the agreement of the father of your children and you would need accommodations to be made by both to allow you to change your role.

All a man needs to do is keep working in his job or quit his job and by default the woman’s role is to accommodate that.

It’s lucky for some women that their choices are aligned with their circumstances it doesn’t mean women have the freedom to choose.

And I would also argue that doing the kind of job where it’s necessary to have either a SAHP or a live in nanny/au pair is more accurately described as ‘having children’ than ‘being a parent’.

Which is part of the problem... standards for ‘what counts’ re mothers and fathers are very different.

Which is why women who have those kinds of jobs are ‘bad mothers’ and why men make the mistake of thinking that ‘providing’ is parenting.

Until money is not a central measure of success motherhood will always be seen to lack value.

True yet the big elephant in the room is the cost of nannies. They do less than the job of a mother (only housework related to the children), but approximate what a mother would do (compared to a nursery). The nannies near me that I've met at baby group earn 35k plus per annum (plus pension etc now). In the debate about childcare and whether it's good for very little children to be in nurseries the fact that no rich people ever put their kids in nursery and always employ a nanny / nannies seems to always be conveniently ignored.

There are no special social systems targeting absent fathers as a social problem that I know of, no schemes which measure them as a ‘problem’ which requires state intervention to correct... If they leave they have left and are no longer tied socially to their children.

This is a major problem and reveals the sexist hypocrisy at the heart of government. If the benefit bill is such a big issue why not go after those absent parents (usually fathers) to reduce the benefit bill rather than penalising the parent that stays (usually mothers) in ways that actually harm children.