'Denying my Existence' - a piece by Mary Harrington

[NotHavingIt]

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

I’m responding to what people are posting on the thread. Is that allowed?

Personally, I never grew up wanting to get married and have children; it is not how I pictured my life - as a girl growing up in the 1960s and 70's. It was only through relationship with men that wanted children that I had children. I had my first child at 19, and two more before I was 30.

The maternal instinct did not kick in until after having the children; though I recognise that some women are always sure that they want children and the men involved are almost incidental.

i had home births. These were profound and empowering experiences for me; created confidence in my sexuality and in my 'womanhood' - which then became a very central and defining experience. 'Womanhood' lies in the body.

They weren’t in the home to do child care is my point

Before t he industrial revolution the family was largely a unit of production tied to the land and to the home.

@RayonSunrise Mary has talked publicly about an online Mums' group that she was -and still is-part of, and how that community was a great source of support and friendship, as well as a window into different parenting styles.

I'm also part of the same group and have met Mary in person on a few occasions. I would not say anything on here that would betray her or the group's confidentiality, but what I will say is that Mary never seemed to me to advocate strongly for any particular parenting style. We all dabbled in different approaches with varying degrees of success at different stages of our children's development and the discussions were always very non-judgmental.

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 can see this if it were true that all families were lucky enough to live like this before 1980. In the book, The Way We Never Were" by Stephanie Coontz in 1993, she debunks a lot of the halcyon world of a single earner nuclear family.

I’m not surprised your maternal instinct didn’t kick in til birth - you were a teenager! And agree that pregnancy and birth are very powerful physical events that only women can experience (appropriation of womanhood by transwomen really grinds my gears).

but unclear how any of this relates back to what we’re talking about?

If women want to be top surgeons, they are more than welcome to do that. But it does not benefit women as a group,

Absolutely false. We just recently learned that women have an almost 30% better health outcome of their doctors are female! We absolutely lose out if women aren't top surgeons.

It related to the piece on maternal instinct that someone posted.

I do think that maternal instinct is a powerful thing, that differntiates men from women, to a large extent, when it comes to parenting. Of course men/fathers can feel fiercelly protective too - but it doesn't seem quite so physical/elemental.

^^Fathers/men seem to have more of an instinct to protect the mother/child dyad/the family group itself. My husband said becoming a father motivated him to earn money to enable the family unit to be more secure.

My husband said becoming a father motivated him to earn money to enable the family unit to be more secure.

Becoming a mother did the same for me though….

How far back before are you going? Because it sounds like you are going back to ye darke olde days of serfdom which was before even the Renaissance.

And I think it no coincidence that a higher % of female leaders of European nations have coincided with seventy years of peace within the continent.

Of course your husband did that. It’s what he’s socialised to do! Which is the whole point. Again, research shows that fathers in the workplace get promotions because “they need to earn money now they’re fathers” whereas women are overlooked because “their priorities have changed now they’re a mother”. All pernicious social conditioning.

and for you - in fact you have a very very traditional set up (not surprising given you were a very young mother who can’t have had much life and job experience before you gave birth) - which is great, but surely you can see your experience is far from universal?

Well exactly. Medicine is actually one of the areas where it can most clearly be demonstrated that lack of female participation has negative health outcomes for women. As a class.

Agree with @PomegranateOfPersephone

Interesting article and thread. Thanks OP!

This was a pretty longstanding pattern, up until the industrial revolution.

The IR really screwed with family life for many people, and it led to some pretty shocking awful conditions for women and children in particular.

That being said, there were many areas where the home unit continued to be a means of production, particularly in rural areas, but also among the artisan class.

In some ways the middle class housewife was the last bastion of the home as production unit, where the husband had been sent out to sell his labour for the benefit of the capitalist and the home was often an expense rather than a source of productive wealth.

The housewife, where there was one, in this scenario worked for the home unit, with the full benefit of her labour went to her family or sometimes the local community, rather than to benefit an employer.

One of the interesting things that happened in the early 20th century was an increasing recognition that women needed protections because this left them financially vulnerable, and there were some attempts to provide this, through for example mother's allowances, widow's benefits, and in some places divorce laws that gave women more entitlement to support.

For a variety of reasons this fell out of favour as an approach, an important one being increasing mechanization in the home, and the real lack of productive capacity for most people in their homes, which meant that domestic work was less of an economic contribution than it had been, and was also less satisfying. But it should never be overlooked that a really significant reason is that it was part of the inexorable creep of captialism, trying to bring every part of human life under it's wings. With the large-scale entry of women into the workforce it not only increased the number of workers earning for capital, it meant that childcare, and sometimes other domestic tasks too, became part of the market - something to be bought and sold.

But in any case - when the home was a productive unit, or the farm, women tended to keep their infants with them much of the time, and even quite small children worked in the shop or on the land with their parents.

Anyone remember the nursery rhyme "Rockabye baby on the tree top"? Refers back to the practice of women who needed to work in the fields swaddling their babies to cradle boards which they hung on a tree branch to bob in the breeze. There is a fascinating book (possibly out of print by now) called "Dream Babies" by Christina Hardyment, which is a history of child care practices. Highly recommended.

Historically, the vast majority of women have always worked outside their home. They were not “housewives” in the sense that they stayed home and did childcare. Breastfed babies were carried and taken with them to work.

Childcare of weaned babies to older toddlers was left largely to unmarried adolescent girls while the women went out to the fields, to the shore to process fish, to the dairy, to the flocks of sheep/geese. Once children were around 6-7, they too started to work full time.

But work outside home for women was generally unpaid work. The Industrial Revolution only “fucked up” the family unit in the sense that late in the revolution women finally started to get paid for their work. Early in the Industrial Revolution, women and children worked but were not paid as they had no right to earn money.

The entire family went to the man’s work but only he earned wages on a performance basis. So his wife and children would go as unpaid assistants to up his production so he’d get paid enough to feed everybody. See pottery factories, mines, fishing plants, weaving etc.

Exactly, these were working mothers the only difference is that under capitalism women now get paid for their work.

I'm sure. I latterly worked as a teacher, but I didn't train for that until the children had started school. Many more women would like to have that kind of possibility too, but unfortunately many have to work full time in order to sustain their lifestyle, or even just to pay the bills.

Having the space to be home based during the early years can be a real blessing. I was not only there for the children, could take them out to play sessions, to parks and gardens, and to the houses of other children, but I also managed to create a garden from scratch and put a lot of energy into developing home making skills - all of which I enjoyed greatly and which benfitted everyone.

I had P/T jobs from the age of 12 ( like many young people did in earlier days), but then I actually left home at 16 to set up a peace camp outside of a nuclear base, and from then on was a political activist. I became a vegetarian at 16 too, and set up a women's group at my college. It was called 'One Mind' and was open to men who were interested in 'women's issues' - but alas, none of them seem that bothered. You live and learn.

I've had plenty of varied life experience: I spent time in a squatting community in London, did every left wing protest there was - and then after my daughter started school ( i was a single parent at that point) I finally went and did my degree - including a unit on 'Women's Studies' (which still existed in the 1980's). I've done the full rounds of the 'alternative' lifestyle community/festivals/camps and have trained in counselling.

I think people used to grow up more quickly in decades gone by; now youth is extended almost indefinitely, as people try to evade or avoid any sense of personal limitation. This is certainly true for more middle class people - as they go on to university, then do the usual travelling circuit, go clubbing, socialising etc until well into their 30's.

I'm not a conventional person at all, and neither is my husband, actually - even if we have managed our family life in what others might consider 'traditional ways'. We've both done what we have wanted to do - and I've had the space to do my own thing too - I have taken foreign trips on my own ( which i enjoy) and have done since the boys were quite young. Obviously we had family holidays together too.

What I’m saying is that motherhood did not motivate me to want or desire time at home with babies or very young children. It would not have been a ‘blessing’ for me, but a kind of hell because the urges I felt were urges to secure financial stability because no child of mine would go hungry or homeless. That was how my maternal motivation ran.

I fully understand that different women respond to motherhood differently, what I object to is Harrington coming out a baldly claiming that working mothers, especially those who use childcare are literally depriving their children and that this has negative consequences not just for these children who she claims are growing up with no identity of self and very confused, but also being the cause of encroachment on women’s rights due to the conflict between transgender rights and women’s rights. She is saying there is only one right way to be a mother, and that is to not work but stay home and do baby/childcare- she argues that the very fabric of our society and stability of future generations rests on women staying in their lane and not being working mothers, and most especially not using childcare.

This is value judgement and tearing down of working mothers is Tradwife misogyny.

I cannot understand why anyone would believe her article in any aspect. It is not new, it is not original. There are similar articles by so-called leading thinkers of their day where the same bad mothers cause is postulated for turning children communist, turning children gay, turning children into terrorists. It’s a cut and paste hatch job and I despair that such seemingly well educated and intelligent women are even giving it any of their time.

I think you are taking what she has written far too personally. I don't think she is about telling people what to do. Basically she's reflecting on her own experiences and then re-assessing matters in the light of experience.

It does seem to be a bit of zetgeist movement at present. There seem to be a lot of women coming out and saying similar things. These are not all downtrodden housewives, but intelligent, accomplished women.

As a side note , the recent fashion for old fashioned frilly, floral dresses ( which I refer to as 'Little House on the Prairie' dresses) seemed to me to refelct a subconscious desire/urge to experiment with more traditional male/ female roles.

There also seems to be a movement against the pill now - Davina McCall has moved on from menopause and is now on to the negative effects of the pill ( as is Mary Harrington in her book). Of course we've been there before - when I was younger I was part of a culture which rejected the pill, and over medicalisation generally, focusing on more 'natural' greener lifestyles - even as another group of women entered the corporate world and embraced pharmaceutical and technological developments.

My feeling is that the whole transgender movement, with its belief that there are no differences between men and women ( whilst simultaneously elevating gender roles and streotypes)has initiated a push-back response which says " Yes, there are differences between men and women".

The sort of feminism which is focused on equality in the workplace has tended to minimise or deny the differences because those differences are not looked upon favourably by corporate work cultures - and women have had to show that having children is not a handicap to being a successful employee.

I think Mary Harrington is simply reflecting on all of this and more. Observing social trends and movements and speculating about them. She's not trying to force a solution to anything.

This. Just this.

I’m not sure it’s a good thing that in previous years kids went out to work at age 6-7 (even if they weren’t accompanied by their mothers) or that people had p/t jobs at age 12. If we think that now kids “don’t grow up fast enough” as a result of that not happening anymore, I’m ok with that.

and I come back to this point again and again - even if women were not paid for their labour in the past, it is simply not true that the time was spent engaged in face to face time with kids. All the research points to exactly the opposite - today’s parents are far more engaged with their young children than in history - even working parents (mothers) who use childcare.

And for many women doing a garden from scratch (?) or homemaking would be an absolute nightmare way to spend time. There is nothing maternal about enjoying cleaning and domestic skills. Suggesting that there is some innate female drive to do so is just cod science.