Motherhood is a trap. Marriage is a bad deal. Feminist Corinne Maier on learning to be selfish

[IwantToRetire]

The French feminist provocateur’s ‘indecent’ insistence that women should prioritise themselves is jubilantly liberating

#MeFirst! A Manifesto For Female Selfishness has managed to work up even the famously laissez-faire French, with critics branding it “indecent” and “a mockery of devoted mothers”, and commenders heralding it “liberating” and “jubilatory”.

Maier is telling women to be “negligent, casual and lazy”, to “minimise the time you devote to others” – including “elderly family members” – to give up “trying to maximise your child’s potential” and “escape the role your mothers were trapped into playing”.

In #MeFirst!, she questions why, despite having worked through so many waves of feminism that no one knows where we are anymore, little girls still aren’t being taught “to get their claws out” in verbal terms: “How to have your say in a hostile environment, how to speak at length without being interrupted, how to take the lead in a group.”

“Remember that empathy,” Maier “is just one of the supposed ‘caring’ qualities we’ve had projected onto us. Qualities that happen to be very convenient for men.”

the chapters on husbands in #MeFirst!, the ones that point out how beneficial marriage is for men, and how detrimental it is for women on every level – right down to life expectancy.

Just some quotes from quite a long interveiw - see https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/corinne-maier-feminism-motherhood-marriage-selfish-women/

Full article can also be read at https://archive.ph/B1LmG

Motherhood benefits the whole of society by raising healthy happy kids who will rule the future. Many people don't see the huge amount of resources needed to do this.

We need both women who focus on caring duties, raising kids and women who focus on careers and push to the top and get those senior positions to support other women below them. We don't need more women that act like men and think only of themselves. Ideally, we'll have men thinking about all people in society, but that doesn't happen that much in practice.

Well, she's certainly right on one point. Some women don't like it when other women don't conform with regressive, gendered, patriarchal stereotypes. I found this out when I committed the very mild travesty of going by my own family name. But there's nothing much new here. Her tone of writing and the idea of rejecting marriage and family as agents of the patriarchy is simply radical feminism rebranded. It didn't work then and it won't work now, because a natural urge in most people - not women, people - is to have children.

The mothering/domestic sphere brand of feminism is as old as feminism itself. It's only one faction amidst a plethora of feminisms, because being mothers is only one facet of womanhood. The First Wave won a lot of ground politically, but the mothering/separate spheres issue was one they couldn't fix, and it has prevailed to this day. The woman citizen feminists and the domestic sphere feminists were at each other's throats then, too. Then came the 'wages for housework' campaign of the second wave. The exceptional theories of Nancy Chodorow in 'The Reproduction of Mothering' are the more interesting ones of the day IMO: an account of motherhood as a social discourse and the idea that caring roles are not one sex's exclusive responsibilities. There has been a shift towards a far more hands-on fatherhood since this time: a small shift nonetheless but a much-needed one.

The separate spheres/mothers vs. child-free discourse has, though, taken a back seat in fourth-wave feminism to more urgent concerns: the rollback of women's rights, and the prevalance of VAWG. Oddly, MN is one of the few places I still see the WOHM vs. SAHM discussed. It certainly isn't at the forefront of concern on other SM. And the endless treadmill to nowhere on SAHM vs. WOHM threads might be better expended on examining the underlying social reasons why we make those choices, or whether in different circumstances we'd have made different decisions for ourselves, rather than taking other women's alternative priorities as some kind of personal affront.

Maier is right that 'selfish' is one of the strongest social admonitions directed at women. My conclusions as to her article are probably boring and obvious. Parenting is a two-person job. Total selfishness on anyone's part isn't conducive to harmonious family relationships. The question for me isn't about women putting themselves first all the time, it's about not putting our own needs last all the time. It's about a shift in the expectation that we are default carers and support humans. The answer is too obvious and simple to be particularly interesting, but for me it's about compromise. That's an important word that seems to have been forgotten amid the navel-gazing, Me First, identity politics that have taken over the world to a pervasively tedious extent. Self-preoccupation is boring.

No woman will ever be able to make all feminism conform with her own ideas of what feminism should be. It doesn't work like that. Feminism has always been bitterly contested. Motherhood only forms one part of a broader set of rights, assumptions and discussions relating to what it means to be women.

Oh, and seemingly telling other women they are 'womanning' wrongly. Plus sa change ...