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?

Having two girls certainly made me more determined and vocal about my feminism.

I was raised by strong women who defy stereotypes though.

I'm so sorry Coco That's awful - deeply insensitive and completely untrue. How dare they invalidate your experiences like that.

Yes, I have 2 daughters so I’m interested how transwomen going in women’s toilets and changing rooms will pan out.

I don’t have children and have always been a feminist, but becoming middle aged has made me see the cumulative effect of all the drag of women vs men over their lives. In my case it’s seeing how often very comptetent female colleagues a few years older than me have been marginalised as “a safe pair of hands” and get assigned to bread and butter projects while transformational career profile ones go to younger, less competent men. I should note that these men don’t think there’s anything wrong, they naturally assume they are better than the woman with 10 or more years’ experience over them.

I’ve always thought of myself as feminist but I think I’ve been very lucky as I don’t think I’ve really been affected and neither really has my daughter. I was aware of inequalities in other countries and that some men were chauvinistic plus some things had to be taken to court etc but I had thought we were well on the way in the UK. Until now.

The first step for me was moving to the UK. I'd always thought feminism had basically done what it needed to do, and that was that. Then I moved here and got more comments from men. I worked for a FTSE-100 company and that was eye-opening.

And then I had children and it solidified things for me. We have three daughters. I started lurking on this board and have learned so much, and I'm a bit embarrassed by my former naiveté.

I'm also very thankful that DH gets it too. It would be so hard to bring up children with someone who didn't understand the GC position.

For me it was teaching in an area where the culture is generally very sexist. Parents who will refuse to shake my hand at parent's evening but will shake the hand of the male student teacher who has been sitting in on the discussion. Men who are fluent in English while their wives speak hardly any at all, despite having lived in this country for years, because the women are expected to stay at home and exclusively mix with other stay at home mums. Little girls being required to cover their hair in public from their first period onwards. Being asked by a nine year old if she has to get married and have babies when she grows up. Having the female element of a class of five year olds tell me, in a discussion about what they want to do when they grow up, exclusively that they either want to be a mum or a teacher, presumably because those are the only two jobs they've seen women do. Honestly, the list goes on and on.

I’ve always been a feminist but was ignorant of so many things. I went to girls school and was always taught to aspire high and work hard.
I know it sounds silly but I didn’t really realise how girls/women were treated so differently until I started uni and part time work. It was also then that I started to feel vulnerable.
It was all a bit of a shock but it never hindered me.
Having children made me more aware of the socialising of boys and girls. I always took opportunities to speak about things like when ds once asked if men could be teachers as there were none in his school.
Dd hasn’t felt restricted yet and has always wanted to be a scientist, dr or shopkeeper.
My niece is a teenager now and it makes me so angry when I hear how she’s treated or spoken to by boys in her college. Some of them are downright disgusting. Especially because they don’t handle rejection well. Why should girls have to put up with feeling uncomfortable at school or college when they’re just trying to get an education?
So yes, having children in my family has made me more interested in feminism.
Also more interested in racial equality and fairness in society. That’s a different thread but for me, it all goes hand in hand.

Yes definitely. I've always been a feminist but the way I was treated as a pregnant woman and new mum fueled my feminist rage to new heights. It was also the final nail in the coffin for my attempted belief in twaw and the idea of 'cis' women. I hated being a breastfeeding mother to a newborn so so much, and this is when it hit me that I don't 'identify' with womanhood, it is biology pure and simple.

Motherhood definitely radicalised me. I went from being blissfully ignorant of how much society expects women to step back, shut up, and put everyone and everything before my own needs to having it shoved in my face.
My inlaws were clearly unimpressed that I expected their son to join me in trying to balance childcare and work (I should have stepped back and let him focus on his career, apparently), I discovered that some male colleagues also expected me to withdraw from promotion opportunities, and only a few years ago I interviewed a young male applicant for a tech role who unblinkingly told me that his final uni project was so easy to use "even mothers could use it." (Er, read the damned room, kid.)

Motherhood definitely cured me of "fun feminism."

I'm a mid 80s baby who grew up in a fairly liberal home and there was definitely a sense that equality had pretty much been won

The 80s and 90s were good years in general for women, but in the 1990s I was researching women in the twentieth century in Ireland and found that there had been good times followed by extremely bad times for women. So many of us took the gains of the late twentieth century for granted.

@Singasonga

Motherhood definitely radicalised me. I went from being blissfully ignorant of how much society expects women to step back, shut up, and put everyone and everything before my own needs to having it shoved in my face. My inlaws were clearly unimpressed that I expected their son to join me in trying to balance childcare and work (I should have stepped back and let him focus on his career, apparently), I discovered that some male colleagues also expected me to withdraw from promotion opportunities, and only a few years ago I interviewed a young male applicant for a tech role who unblinkingly told me that his final uni project was so easy to use "even mothers could use it." (Er, read the damned room, kid.)

Motherhood definitely cured me of "fun feminism."

Ugh, this reminds me of some "tone of voice" training we did when I worked in marketing and our company was rebranding. The trainer told us to imagine we were talking to our mothers when writing copy, and I was so irritated I spoke up for once, having been the kind to stay quiet. As if mothers can't have conversations with their children using complicated language.

The trainer was a woman, too.

@ValancyRedfern

Yes definitely. I've always been a feminist but the way I was treated as a pregnant woman and new mum fueled my feminist rage to new heights. It was also the final nail in the coffin for my attempted belief in twaw and the idea of 'cis' women. I hated being a breastfeeding mother to a newborn so so much, and this is when it hit me that I don't 'identify' with womanhood, it is biology pure and simple.

Yes if anything told me I was biologically female, it was having a bottle refusing baby clamped to me constantly for a year. Especially out and about, when it meant I had no choice but to breastfeed in public and be looked at like the lowest of the low.

Yes but also getting older and mumsnet.

Yes! In the summer of 2010 my baby girl was born. I had known I was expecting a girl and found FWR, Dittany etc. I wanted to know what she could expect as a girl and then a woman in the world as it was then and is today. I wanted to know the reality and truth, so I could prepare us both. I had no idea what a Pandora's box I opened. Do I wish I had never looked? At times. It can be painful beyond words to see how women and girls are viewed and treated. We hold up half the sky ffs.

No, not in the slightest. I've picked polar opposites from the thread. In the case of the first post, I agree except I would replace "my feminism" with something like "my attitude to life/ what I want out of life".

In the case of the other 2, I feel very sorry if that is what the poster thinks of herself but it doesn't ring any bells for me.

Rebecca
No. I think my feminism influenced the sort of mum I was and the sort of man I chose to marry

Hell yes! It taught me that I am nothing more than a good to fuck, a walking incubator and a servant - and that’s how society sees me

In other words I’m not a person, I’m a thing to be thrown in the scrap heap if my parts wear out/I malfunction

I think my feminism was revived when my oldest DD started puberty. The catcalling, the boys overtaking school discussions, the sexual harassment from boys in class being overlooked, the beauty expectations from social media...it all became so much starker to watch my lovely child bombarded with realizing that her treatment from the world was different just because of being female. It hurts to see it happening to your DDs and made me even angrier than I was when I discovered feminism at 20.

GrouchyKiwi, I've also had a young woman in my team try earnestly to explain to me why the old canard, "Not your Mum's...[insert whatever you've just made cool/interesting/sexy here]," wasn't actually both just a wee bit sexist and ageist, and therefore perfectly acceptable to use as a title for her case study. (Facepalming for days. )

Yes absolutely. I have three girls and I will raise my voice now if I feel something isn't right, for their future. I was always timid but now I know its important to speak up when things are unfair. I speak openly to my children as well about feminism and have kept many books that I would love for them to read when they are older.

Having my first baby radicalised me, so yes becoming a mum definitely changed my perception of feminism, what it means for me and why we need it still.

Pregnancy and motherhood changed my feminist perspective. I realized that my calls for equality were fundamentally flawed. We don’t need equality, we need a system that recognizes that pregnancy and breastfeeding are hard work, but essential to the species. Women also need financial independence and the ability to seek fulfilling work. Society needs to adapt to make both possible.

I've been thinking about this, and I think in a way it had the opposite effect.

Becoming a mum certainly opened my eyes in a very visceral way to the implications of women's reproductive roles. The ways in which our choices are affected, our bodies, how we become more vulnerable and in need of wider social support.

So my interest in women's issues became greater and it was at that time that I really increased my circle of close women friends (I had previously studied and worked in a somewhat male dominated environment.)

But my sense was really that feminism didn't have much time for mothers, basically saw reproduction as degrading, and had contributed to damaging myths that childbirth and becoming a mother had no inherent biological effects, only socialised ones. And also that it would always see children themselves as a kind of liability for women, so in a sense pitting their interests against each other.

Yes. I was born in the 1970s and have always been a feminist, very aware of some of the differences in the ways boys/girls and men/women are treated - though there were always others which (I now realise) I didn't see. Eg, I could never quite articulate the concept of mansplaining, despite being in academia and thus having suffered from this many times before quite recognising it as a gendered problem.

Still - being a mother added a whole new level of insight. I was the first in my department to take maternity leave and was treated like utter shit. My salary has never recovered from the discrimination I received in those years. It also enabled me to see that I'd received a lot of shit in academia before that too - I had put it down to the shit that you get when you're junior, but then realised that that I'd got a lot of that shit because I was female not just because I was junior. Motherhood also definitely forced me to rethink the politics of care work and financial inequality in new ways.

Mind you, mother or not - the recent shit coming from the transactivist movement and all this nonsense about avoiding gender specific words like 'woman', 'mother' etc. would have most certainly been sufficient to deepen my commitment to feminism!