Did becoming a mum increase your interest in feminism?

[damselindedress]

Just that really, although I recognised the inequality and was very much in the women have to support each other camp, I hadn't explored in much depth feminism ...until I got pregnant.

All of a sudden my sex was of huge significance. What I went through at work and with my physical and mental health whilst pregnant was a huge eye opener. I have a daughter and being her mother has made me analyse how I was raised and the influences I absorbed from society about what it was to be female and I can see how damaging so much of that was to how I understood myself.

Same with the trans debate, I hadn't given it much thought until I recently I just thought sure people are who they say they are without examining the various point of view it in any detail. I've since explored it in more depth (inc on here) and my views have become much more nuanced.

With regard to the particular issue I've noticed it's my friends without children who think JKR is transphobic and haven't actually read her essay. In general they also don't seem to have explored feminism in much depth. Just an observation.

I'm wondering if that's a common experience and that for many motherhood is what brings these issues into focus?

More embarrassingly, my mother had even told me about all this, but not in a way that I understood, because until an embarrassingly late age I saw her only through mum glasses.

“The pill was life changing”. Except not for her because my parents are not sexual beings.

“Of course we had to give up work when we had children”. But having children made up for it!!

“Something something pregnancy care, high blood pressure”, but it was worth it all because of me!!!

The point I’m making is that it’s often difficult for women to talk to their daughters about the negative impacts of sex.

... becoming a mother was a real eye opener on that score.

Yes, absolutely.

I have a daughter and a son and I want them both to be aware of all the tacit invisible ways in which the world favours males and holds females back.

My daughter is pretty fierce and my son a much gentler soul so it's going to be interesting watching them make their ways out into the world.

Yes although I was pretty much a feminist before.

It's been a massive shock for me just how dependent on a man I am, now that I have a small child. I don't earn a bad wage but if I had to survive on my own with a child we'd be a poverty.

I feel massive pressure to go back to work full time to make sure I'm not overtaken by bright young graduates who are eating up all the interesting projects.

How women with small children are effectively discouraged from public space less they be an annoyance to everyone else. How this been framed as entitled.

How discussions about the difficulties of motherhood are always shut down with 'you chose this' 'dont you know how lucky you are' in a way that they definitely wouldn't be if they were centered around men.

How appalling it is that women's healthcare and reproductive rights are being stripped back because no one should be forced into raising a child.

That maternity services basically depend on you being a good little woman and doing as the Dr says. Antenatal classes said everything would be centred around consent and choice and it couldn't have been further from the truth. I was a piece of meat who was told what would happen.

My mental load is massive, all the mental load wifework to make sure everything get done. My DH never gives most of this a second thought.

I see of toxic gender roles are for both men and women. Already my boy is being laughed at for liking pink, being called a sissy for being a late walker, discouraged from having a toy baby.

@GettingUntrapped

I have become more aware of feminism, definitely as a result of motherhood. I can now see more clearly how the patriarchy has us tucked away with children, a mostly boring and personally unfulfilling position which they have sold to us as the ultimate happiness state of women. We don't even dare admit it, sometimes even to ourselves. Meanwhile, they have agency to go out into the world while we play the role of support system.

Absolutely all this.

Definitely. I still would have described myself as a feminist but having a DD and wanting the best for her future has increased my interest. As did seeing the horrifying conditions on the postnatal ward (in my case), total disregard for my welfare, crap mat leave pay and disrespectful comments by colleagues when I returned. I had always been a hard worker but never had my second been of any significance until I got pregnant. Then it was all that I was seen for apparently.

Yes absolutely for me. Not just how women are treated differently to men on an individual day to day level but the deeply ingrained and pervasive way women are viewed and treated in every aspect of society. Also 1 million times worse if you are also from a BAME background.

Oh and seeing the disturbingly high rates of and insipid nature of abuse in a lot of friends relationships as well as the how they have been fobbed off, unsupported or told to stay because of the DC, finances, his MH, the cat etc.

Absolutely. The inequalities were far less obvious to me pre children. But the expectations of me compared to my husband despite us both working full time and me on a higher wage have left me in no doubt about how far we still have to go. The reading and thinking this led me to then opened my eyes to a lot of the other stuff that is still around but I didn't really notice it before.

Oh gosh l read that and thought it said becoming a nun😂must go to the optician soon!! But yes l would say it has made me more aware of the gap between men and women and the expectations of both sexes. My dd is 9 and just this week, l got my biggest pay packet since she was born - am going to treat myself for sure. Dh is great but l feel like me earning more has balanced out things at home if that makes sense.

I think it starts with pregnancy & the act of childbirth. Women are often expected to be in pain & discomfort & just get on with it. Why?

I do think if you're younger & middle class unless you have a baby you don't see it.

It's interesting, I don't really connect my growth to birth/maternity etc. I felt very well supported throughout everything from conception (an all-female team involved in the embryo transfer ) to birth to my return to work. I work in the woke public sector but it is very female/parent heavy and I've been well supported in that. So on a personal level those things were not what affected me, although I can see how they would for others.

For me it has been seeing my children interact with the world and helping them try to navigate it. It throws into sharp relief the many inequalities and stereotypes in existence and opened my eyes to my own deeply entrenched misogyny.

@ParadeOfRemotes this is a very similar experience to my own.

No. But dealing with the family courts and learning that British fathers are permitted by the court to do sweet fuck all for their children and the fact that there are zero repercussions for their irresponsibility, has made me realise that I want my daughter to live in a country where her rights as a woman are truly upheld equally among the rights of others. I don't think women and children are as well treated in the UK as they should be.

Yes, it started when I was pregnant and noticed how differently people treated me, assuming I wouldn't be returning.

I work for a very "woke company", when I did go back to work I had to make sacrifices to my career to go pt, but men are encouraged to do so if it enables them to have a good work life balance. They are praised for going home to see their kids, but if I can't attend a meeting at pick-up time (outside of my working hours) it's a big inconvenience.

I have a boy and I would have thought it would have made me less of a feminist than if he were a girl, but no. I feel a huge responsibility to teach him to to not be an asshole respect women as equals.

Yes here, having a daughter and seeing the expectations placed on women today makes me worry.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s, no social media pressure to be perfect, no filters, girls looked like girls not minature women. No porn culture telling men that hitting and spitting and choking women during sex is totally normal and she should love it or she's a frigid bitch.

Now reading on here about girls wanting to get away from the male gaze and all that pressure. But instead of finding their own path and that there's no right way to be female; thinking now it means drugs and surgery. Having such anguish over their female form while their mental health gets worse and worse.

Right now she's my brilliant carefree little girl, and I just want that to last

My road to feminism has been long and twisting. I was born in the 60s, only girl with younger brothers and the only one who had to help with the housework because I was a girl. First in family to go to university and there I became aware of feminism, read Germaine Greer and others and counted myself a feminist.

A dozen years later I was a SAHM with a Dd and a Ds and living the most traditional, stereotypical life you could imagine. Not sure how that happened but I fear my internalised acceptance of the patriarchy played a big part.

My feminism was reignited when my Dd became a teenager. Seeing what she was going through in terms of expectations about how she should look and behave and seeing the way boys at her school behaved made me realise that very little had changed in my 5 decades. I started to read feminist writers again and talked to Ds about feminism and how society expects women to behave and be nice and make themselves small. We've also talked about the role of mother and all of the expectations that come with it.

My return to feminism was complete when I decided to leave my marriage and go it alone. I'm still working my way through that one but finding this board has really helped me. It's so nice to read the thoughts of intelligent and independent minded women.

I suppose becoming a mother didn't make me feminist in itself but being the mother of a teenage daughter brought me back to it.

Yes, in that I believed that feminism was just obvious - why wouldn't people treat women like actual humans in this day and age? It was the 90s and before that as a child there was a Queen and a female Prime Minister so the idea that I shouldn't wear or do something because I was a girl seemed laughable to teenage me. Girl power and all that.

I was always critical of gender and gender stereotypes but I suppose I saw feminism as all sorted, thanks very much and I'm able to do what I want just like the boys because of that feminism and 'old blokes' that think otherwise are deserving of nothing more than a teenage eye roll.

Pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding were all things that seemed obviously female and therefore 'unequal' but I'd never really considered that parenting was still so gendered so I suppose that was one of the things that made me more feminist. Also the expectations of personality and behaviour of my children based on their sex, when to me, they were pretty much the same as babies and toddlers either way.

But it was when I noticed myself having those same assumptions based on sex that I realised that my thinking that I was somehow immune to gender stereotyping and sexism because I was aware of them was utter bullshit and that this conditioning is ingrained in us.

I came to FWR because I heard on an AIBU thread that the women were really mean here (I know! On an AIBU thread!) and I'm nosy. And now I very rarely venture out of this board.

My dd is 9 and just this week, l got my biggest pay packet since she was born - am going to treat myself for sure.

Congratulations! I always thought my career was on a trajectory to success and that I would continue to increase my salary after brief pause to have children. How blithely unaware I was of all the factors that conspire against you. I now earn significantly less than I did before and having been the higher earner in our household we're back to a much more traditional set up. This is what the system achieves. I make no judgment whatsoever about women who wish to take time off to be with their children when they are young, but the reality is, the way things are currently set up, that you can be severely penalised for it if you also wish to continue with a career.

I think so. I was very interested as a teen and then I went into work - very male environment and got on with it.

Then Maria got clobbered at Hyde Park and I though - what the bloody hell is going on?

My MIL was a high earner & FIL a SAHP, he did all the cooking & cleaning. I think it's definitely shaped my DH & he's less influenced be trad gender roles. I try to be very mindful of the model we present to our dc.

Yes. One year in and I was totally and completely radicalised by Mumsnet

Yes definitely, it’s when the patriarchy felt like a tangible thing not just a concept.

Being left by xh, going through divorce, and now being a single mum has added even more fire to my feminism.

No. I was born in 1973 so grew up in a fairly sexist community. There were subjects at school I couldn’t study as I was a girl. There were subjects boys did not study (1 boy in our Home Economics class) because boys didn’t do that. The 80s challenged a lot but there was a huge amount of misogyny hanging around from the seventies. I started to wonder why I couldn’t relate to feminism when it became all “yay! Porn! Sex work! Empower yourself by taking your clothes off!” I was still fairly old school.

I didn’t have my daughter until I was 40 and I knew I wanted a girl since in my 20s when a friend said “if I ever have a kid I hope it’s a boy- girls are more trouble.” I disagreed then and that made me notice how few women were out and out saying they hoped for a girl unless they already had boys.

Watching what is happening now to women’s rights around the world and the shift to prioritise men in a movement that should be for women and girls makes me angry.

My story is a little different. Having grown up with an extremely feminist mother in the 50's who broke down barriers in my home country, and was quite famous as being probably the first divorced, single mother BY CHOICE (she left my father for not wanting her to work outside the home), I took my liberties and freedoms for granted, and actually rebelled against feminism in the 70's and 80's because the message back then was that babies are somehow blah-blah and only for stupid brain-dead women and you had to go to work and be like a man. I felt that feminism was taking over male values unquestioningly and I felt that were wrong. I wanted a society that honoured what we were as women, mothers, grandmothers, as I felt our contribution was every bit as vital as males, even if we spent years at home rearing our children, teaching them to be good humans. I felt we were better at this, in a different way, than men, and that it is essential work, just as essential as earning big money or having a top flight career.

Perhaps in a rebellion against my mother I was determined from the start to be a SAHM, and fought against the feminist idea at the time that you'd just be a boring old dogsbody if you did that. As OP says:

Yes totally this! The narrative is very much get back to work ASAP so you can do some proper work that actually matters to society. I found motherhood so hard and all consuming and just wanted to be with my baby most of that first year but I was constantly asked when I was going back to work and people said things like you don't want to be just a mum. I felt that somehow I was letting the side down. It made me see how the work of caring (typically women's is so looked down on by society).

I had my first child when I was 35. I was a single mother working part-time at first, but by the time my daughter came along five years later I was in a position to stay home with her. I had to constantly put up with remarks about my "brain getting rusty" or "going crazy at home" or "not doing real constructive work". I assumed that was feminism of the day and I rejected it. I was confident about being a SAHM and did not see myself as lesser in any way.

So I rejected the label "feminist" for decades, though at one stage I did try to be one (before I had children). In the late 70's I had a subscription to Gloria Steinem's monthly magazine Ms. But that too went more and more in the direction of rejecting any kind of hands-on motherhood. At one point Ms was discontinued, and instead they sent me the new title: "Working Woman", without asking. I cancelled my subscription immediately.

I did my thing and don't regret it in the least.

What made me a feminist in this day and age, and even reconciled me to the label, is Transideology and this forum. Yes, it was MN that radicalised me. I have two, soon to be three, granddaughters (no GS's) and I need to help clear the way for them.