'Denying my Existence' - a piece by Mary Harrington

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Mary Harrington's world view has very clearly been revolutionised by her having become a mother, hence her interest in, and focus on, the effects of socialised childcare in 'Feminism Against Progress' and here, in this piece, on the postulated effects of maternal deprivation on developing identity.

As ever, speculative and exploratory - but certainly interesting.

https://open.substack.com/pub/reactionaryfeminist/p/denying-my-existence?r=clsg2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Funnily enough, focussing on early mother-child bonding and taking on intensive time investment "hunter-gatherer" strategies like baby wearing, cosleeping, and even "elimination communication" (remember that?) were all features of the super-crunchy mothering approach of almost 20 years ago now, all a reaction to the Gina Ford routines-and-sleep training approach that was fashionable before that. I had a foot in both camps - I was into routines, but also into reusable nappies.

I remember that very well, though in my memory the attachment parenting obsession predates Gina Ford. There was a woman called Deborah Jackson who advocated co-sleeping, carrying your baby around in a sling etc. Her book Three in a Bed was published in 1989 (just checked). She was very much in vogue for a while. Not sure what happened to her.

Interesting but speculative. I found the first comment far more perceptive. If someone is trying to convince the world that they are something that they are not then of course any tentative debate denies their existence. Their existence is fragile because it is a lie, not because their mothers looked at them too much or failed to look at them enough. Simple, obvious direct explanation.

i have 2 daughters spanning that age group - the older is 23, younger is 17. Both went to the same secondary school (all girls grammar).

Older one knew of zero girls at her school at that time who were trans; she knew of one in her wider circle of friends.

The younger one has 3 trans “boys” in her class of 28, plus goodness-only-knows his many “non-binary” kids. There are at least 7/8 “boys” in her year group of 145 pupils. Basically, that’s how I came to be interested in this whole topic - the difference in such a short time span is absolutely startling. When dd2 was at primary, she hung out in a group of 4 (that is, with 3 others). They all ended up in different secondary schools, but 2 out of the 3 are now “boys”. I knew these girls when they were 8, 9, 10, 11 and there was nothing remotely Tom-boyish about any of them at that point. One of them even stole one of dd’s dresses! I would say that both of the mothers of the girls who identify as trans now probably thought of themselves as “cool”, but there was nothing extreme there.

Dd2 reflected that of the girls who became trans at secondary school, the early ones did it more gradually - haircut, then trousers, then a nickname, then a new name. By the end there would be an announcement on Friday “I’m trans!” And reappearance on Monday with haircut, trousers, new name and so on.

The article seemed to end abruptly with no resolution. It is disgusting that American women are forced back to work within weeks of giving birth - whelping bitches have more legal protection in many states than women do - and the solution is easy. Workers rights and welfare.

And this is why so many second wavers were left wing. The solution to many of societies problems are community solutions, not hierarchical or libertarian ones.

'I am who I say I am and if you don't agree I cease to exist' is a characteristic of a narcissistic meltdown.

https://psychcentral.com/pro/exhausted-woman/2017/01/five-ways-a-narcissist-comes-unglued#1

''Narcissists may also have different values than non-narcissists, such as status and image as opposed to compassion and authenticity.''
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/narcissism-demystified/202106/13-common-behaviors-and-values-narcissistic-people

Plenty are like that - DS went to two in London that were very outdoorsy. One had hens, FFS.

The other was a German immersion nursery that basically moved fully into the garden between Easter and October, for meals and everything, assuming it wasn’t pouring with rain (they had a big sunshade). Outdoor play every single day, in full rain/snow gear if needed.

Most people in this country are not that outdoorsy - we go out every single day, because we are outdoorsy (and also our flat is small and cramped), but a lot of DS’s friends are inside watching tv for the whole of the school holidays. How many families live in the countryside and never go for a walk?

Hear, hear. I am genuinely trying to pull my eyebrows out my hairline at the idea that the answer to women being vulnerable after birth is to push women back out of the public sphere and into the private home for their own good. Is this a middle class thing? My grandmothers worked outside the home, they just got paid very little because it was expected their husbands made the real money.

I wonder if the reason why Harrington is running with this is because according to modern conservative thought, today's kids are actually over-mothered (ie spoiled) and need a good deal less soft motherly attachment and good deal more pull-your-socks-up and learn-to-fight-to-be-number-one? Wrapping a softer approach with traditional womanhood will land much better with her audience than telling them to stop howling for harsher exam marking/telling most teens to forget bettering themselves at uni.

Hasn't she simply reinvented the (wrong and cruel) 1960s "refrigerator mother" theory of autism there? Only now it's for genderism instead?

(And while obviously that maternal eye gaze thing is important developmentally, it's not got much to do with children old enough to walk in crocodiles.)

I've never found the "we can't talk about whether mass childcare is good for kids, because of what that might mean for women" very convincing. It's trying to make what is true fit into a certain ideological viewpoint, Or in this case, refusing to look hard at what might be true for fear of undermining an ideological position.

I'd agree that she is being very speculative, though she says as much herself. It really reads more like a private blog piece.

But I've really wondered myself about why young people now seem to be so unmoored from any kind of inner scaffolding. More so that I think has been normal for that age group. And weirdly, it seems like many adults and institutions aren't out to help them achieve that, quite the opposite, the keep propping them up and telling them they need external validation. And to be good people they need to validate others.

The logical question seems to be, how do children normally gain internal sense of self and groundedness, and it does seem like family life is a part of that.

I didn't really understand the article - it seemed a bit fuzzy to me. I do think for US kids the practice of mums returning to work quickly has not been great. We are allowed 6 weeks unpaid leave but even for that, there are limits, and some mums are only entitled to two weeks...unpaid. Not great for babies, even from a mere health standpoint as they won't have received initial vaccinations yet. Most daycares won't even take babies under 6 weeks old so a mum who has to return to work at 2 weeks will be unable to support herself at all if she doesn't have family who can provide childcare. The restrictions on leave (unpaid!) for new mums is partly because of small businesses that cannot afford to hold a place for a worker who takes time off. Many women-own businesses ARE small businesses, operating on very thin profits, so it's a case of how do you balance those different interests. There isn't infinite free government money to give to people to make these things work.

For me, the big issue about feminism is that I don't think it has improved the burden of unintended pregnancy for women - yes, there's the pill, but because of the pill people have more sex, especially more sex with people to whom they are not married, and when the amount of sex goes up, so does the likelihood of unintended pregnancy. And we can see from the 64 zillion threads here that when men have sex outside a marriage (and sometimes even within marriage), they often expect that any resulting baby is not their problem. There's an expectation that unless the man explicitly agrees to have a baby, the assumption is that the woman will provide sterile, burden-free sex. It has left many women in very difficult positions of having to decide whether to keep the baby, how to support the baby, etc. There is often an expectation from the man that the woman will have an abortion, and, I don't know, I find that expectation to be a rejection, by the man, of what a woman is. They want the beautiful, attractive body, without the annoying fact that our bodies tend to get pregnant. No wonder transwomen think we're the same. In our world, an attractive body that does not get pregnant is the perfect woman's body.

I think ultimately what bothers me about this is it's all on a male standard. Man is the default because a man does not get pregnant. A woman who gets pregnant has somehow broken her contract with society by her body doing a womanly thing (getting pregnant) rather than a manly thing (having fun sex without any burdensome pregnancy). She needs to accept all the burden of that pregnancy, whether it's having the baby with only a modicum of child maintenance, or having an abortion, because SHE is the one who broke the implied contract that sex will not result in a pregnancy. But the contract is designed on a male default: what the man wants, how the man is, what is normal is what a man does, etc.

The whole validation thing is straight out of Orwell. It’s not enough for Winston Smith to say 2 and 2 make 5, he has to really believe it.

If this agenda is being driven by shadowy elites like the Pritzers (I’m not saying it is or isn’t here) then it certainly wouldn’t be difficult for them to include the guidance that validation is absolutely necessary, and for that to filter down through the whole movement as an important central tenet.

Regarding the mother’s gaze aspect, about 10 years ago I was listening to a Woman’s Hour discussion on the rise of teenage mental health problems. One of the panel who counselled troubled teens said she felt that extended periods in nurseries from only a few months old could well be a significant factor in the increase, and thought it should be looked at in more detail.

Well, you would have thought she had just projectile vomited across the studio, there was a moment’s embarrassed silence and the conversation moved on.

However, it is important, the health and well-being of the next generation, what’s more important than that? Yet looking deeper into this is seen a political minefield and people are afraid of finding out the truth in case they don’t like it.

We don’t have to assume that it would result in a backward step for women (hollow laugh), if taken seriously it could even result in far better childcare for new mothers in the work force.

As a personal and completely non-scientific and anecdotal piece of evidence I would add that my DM was left with various relatives during the war, her father was away fighting and her mother had to do war work elsewhere. She carried mental scars from this ‘forced’ abandonment for the rest of her life.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-midwives-cauldron/id1523178579?i=1000613335945

This podcast covers topics related to this thread

I have never thought 'returning to work' was any form of liberation, though it suits capitalism. A world in which women are coerced to leave their children with others is not a world that values women.

Very true. Mind, at 24 I was an advocate of 24-hour childcare - I had no children and no interest in them. When I was twenty-eight I had my first child (aged prima gravida) and would never have put DS into childcare, he was with me nearly 24/7 until he was three (playschool) and we enjoyed that time, though he did not care much for the arrival of DD (put her in the dustbin, mummy). I went to work when DS was ten and DD nearly seven, part-time. Both are normal people who know who they are, went through teenage angst and serial relationships and are settled. DGS and DGD were both cared for by ex-Dd-in-law at home, both ok though upset by divorce, of course. Babies of 2 weeks in a nursery, while mum goes to work, does not sit well with me - and how does one breastfeed ffs?

This. Exactly.

Children are certainly a lot more mollycoddled now. In the 1970's I played out on the street or went exploring my neighbourhood from around the age of 7 or 8. In the school holidays we would be told to " go out and play" - which we did

We weren't driven to 'play dates' or organised activities, we made our own way there, either walking or on the bus. We jumped over walls, climbed trees, hunted for tadpoles, played hide and seek, made perfume from rose petals.....

Resilience, autonomy, and independence in kids were certainly miles away from what they are now. Leagues, really.

I know a lot of modern parents think they are allowing their kids to have that, but in a safe way, but in most cases, they really aren't. Somthing like adding a cell phone into the mix so your kid can't get lost on the bus changes the whole scenario at a basic level. Chores and schoolwork aren't the same as a job.

Not that anyone really has the option of doing thing the way they were in the 70s now, you'd be arrested, and some things, like traffic, really are different in many places. (Mind it is always worth paying attention to what kids in less protective places are able to do.)

I was talking to my friend who teaches at the university yesterday, she mentioned how safety focused everything is there now. No smoking anywhere on campus, because it's not "safe" for the students. They are basically treated like children, huge amounts of funding going to people who keep them "safe" and stepping into the parental role. Extra mental health services, extra sexual health officers, extra sexual assault officers, extra residence officers. My old college of about 1000 students now has two full time positions related to sexual assault and sexual health.

As someone with a child heading to that same college next year, and the rather shocking cost associated with that, I am wondering why these kids need so much coddling at an age when I had been working for over five years, my mum was living on her ow, and two of my aunts were married.

Even this could be connected.

I had this experience of freedom too but, I think mothers of the past felt more relaxed about it because mums being able to be home with young children meant that streets belonged to women and children when men were at work. A large number of houses were occupied by mothers and housewives, eyes on the street.

In any given area you would have known that you and other mums were keeping an eye out, looking out of windows at intervals, standing in the front garden or on the doorstep chatting, scrubbing the step, doing the front garden etc etc

Women at home created community and a sense of safety.

It used to be that a mother could stay home to care for her children until the youngest was 16 and receive income support, by which I mean the state did not expect her to be in paid employment because at that time the importance of mothering was recognised.

When mothers began to work the term “latchkey” kid was coined to describe what was seen as a deprivation which lead to behavioural problems.

Things have changed fast. Values have changed fast. I think that certain academic and career women bought into an ideology which suited them and as it happens capitalism, they pushed this idea that it liberates women to be forced to work rather than be home with children, they probably didn’t have children of their own for the most part.

When middle class women started shifting to the workplace instead of being home en masse house prices went through the roof (1990’s) now as a result of the costs of housing very few women have a real choice about whether they are in paid employment or home looking after their children.

Many residential areas are deserted in the daytime, mothers home with newborns feel isolated, the elderly feel isolated, stay at home mothers with older children are afraid to let them out alone, there is no one else around. Capitalism gains by selling back play in the form of activities, indoor play centres, etc we have no idea who our neighbours are, children aren’t making friends with the geographically closest age mates, mums have to organise play dates with friends met through activities and clubs and drive to see them, families have complicated schedules, mums become the family social secretary.

Mothers are now doing paid work, housework and childcare but childcare is more complicated than it ever has been before because of all the myriad activities, clubs, far flung friends so mothers spend their evenings as taxi drivers.

Which brings me to cars, we are driving more than ever before, cars kill children, children can’t play in the streets because endless traffic or when it calms down speeding drivers. The extra cars are at in part a result of everything else I have described.

In the 80’s we had one car, dad used it to get to work, our local area was our social hub. I knew which houses I could go to for help if I hurt myself or needed a drink or there was a strange man acting weird because I knew people in my community and they knew me and my family.

My parents would say oh so and so saw you today with whoever. Human level surveillance.

So the consequences of denying mothers and babies/toddlers or even mothers and small children time together are further reaching even than the psychological impact on a generation.

I find it bizarre that you could describe mothers working as anything OTHER than liberation. It liberates you as a woman from being financially dependent on a man. I have witnessed many of my friends’ marriages breakdown - with a couple of notable exceptions, the women who work have navigated divorce far better than those who don’t (I mean emotionally and practically as well as financially) as they don’t have the stress of figuring out how to feed, house and clothe themselves. Plus in the couple of sad cases where the H has turned out to be abusive, they’ve just been able to LEAVE.

all this motherhood & apple pie harking back ignores the massive structural inequalities that women’s’ financial dependence brought with it. I am glad not to live in those times.

I think the main points being made by Mary Harrington are to do with re-assessing where we find ourselves now as a society, and looking fairly dispassionately at how well, or not, some of those changes have benefitted women/children/families/society.

Sometimes we do need to revisit past times - not to live in out in exactly the same way but to look and learn from the things that did go well and were of benefit. For example, we are now, as a society, talking about over-consumption and all of the things that come with an individualistic consumer lifestyle society ( often predicated on two full time wages) and how this all contributes to global warming.

in the 1970's we simply did not have the range and choice of goods and products; we ate more seasonally and simply; we didn't eat all of the fast foods we now eat; we didn't drive humungous big 4 x 4s; fly away on foreign holidays several times a years, and so on. On my xmas wish list in the 1970's was a pair of fluffy animal slippers....

People didn't have credit cards - and lived more within their means; we had more social and council housing, and house prices were not through the roof.

Fewer women are having children, or are putting it off until much older - because they fear how much having a child will cost, or how much it will impact upon their carefully cultivated lifestyle. women who would like to spend time at home with their children are unable to because they now have a lifestyle that is dependent on two full time incomes..... and so on.

But that’s my point - life was by and large not better for women & children in the 1970s. On almost any measure (health, wealth, pick one).

and was really responding to grammarnut’s point about a world where women work is not one that values women. I strongly, strongly, disagree - I don’t think you can give a greater gift to women that enabling participation in the world of work post kids.

I suspect that if research were conducted into the early infant experience of those fragile, un-scaffolded selves now demanding an institution politics of recognition you would find attenuated, interrupted or absent maternal relationships (for example via very early daycare) strongly represented.
In other words, that somewhere near the root of the gender-self-identification movement is a profound lack of early maternal regard.

I have long suspected that the political alliance of the religious right and gender critical strands would result in this- a TradWife resurgence. 😂

Women- stay home with your babies or they might turn trans! 🤣

Here is an interesting article which I think is related, although perhaps Mary Harrington would be against it, did I read somewhere that she is against romance 🤔 well I am not so sure this article is about romance as much as attachment and valuing human relationships so maybe not.

The podcast I linked up thread also explores attachment style and how the increase in people with an insecure attachment style may be connected to birth practices.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/insecure-attachment-avoidance-romance/674245/

I don't think we want to go back to a world where women were discouraged from working, or were unable to work after marriage/kids. But we also don't necessarily need to prioritise women reaching the tip-top of their professions, e.g. equalising the number of male and female corporate executives, top hedge fund traders, surgeons, university professors, Fulbright scholars etc. Those are ego-strokers for the particular women who reach those positions but for women as a class, I think more important issues are things like being able to go part-time while kids are younger than school age, to be able to shift in and out of the workforce as needed (without being edge out of your entire field of specialisation), to be able to trade salary for flextime etc. I think those are the things that act as protective factors so women don't get trapped in abusive relationships.