childcare

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post for The Forward titled “Occupy (Working) Motherhood, Anyone?“, which generated a, shall we say, interesting comment.  The post began like this:

Susan B. Anthony was born 192 years ago today; we share a birthday. I am 43. The late great suffragist once said: “Our job is not to make young women grateful. It’s to make them ungrateful so they keep going.” Much of my Jewish practice these days is about gratitude. But in light of our shared birthday this week, I’ve decided to dwell on some serious ingratitude.

I grew up in the 1970s listening to “Free to Be You and Me,” and singing joyfully that “Mommies Are People.” Who would have guessed, now that I’m one of those people, that the dilemmas my own working mother struggled with would become mine? In middle school, when I’d call home sick my mom would try to talk me into returning to class, so that she wouldn’t have to leave work or find a sitter. I’m pretty sure that’s what I’d do, too….

The post ends with the following birthday wishes:

1). Affordable quality childcare, paired with a change in the cultural expectation that women’s careers are expendable. That ingratitude is owed to President Nixon, who vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Bill. That piece of legislation would have provided a multibillion-dollar national daycare system that would have circumvented much of our struggle.

2). Workplace structures and a society transformed to allow for the fact that workers have families, too. Though we’ve made progress, we’ve still got a ways to go. Ingratitude to employers who put paternity on the books but support a culture that makes The Daddy Track anathema to all but the bravest men. And why does it have to be a track, after all? Haven’t we learned that the women who opt out eventually, in various ways, opt back in?

3). A future so bright on the work/life satisfaction front that neither my daughter nor my son will have to write this kind of post.

(You can read the full post here.)

The comment in question was in response to the wish for more affordable (meaning, yes, subsidized) childcare.  It went like this:

“By ‘affordable,’ I assume you mean ‘subsidized by others outside my family.’ Thanks, I’m spending enough on my own kids (and my wife chooses not to work outside the home) without having to subsidize your parenting choices.” -morganfrost

Now, there’s nothing I appreciate more than when, just as I’m considering a response, the perfect retort pops up in my Inbox.  In this case, a number of folks emailed me comments directly, though they experienced technical trouble posting them on The Forward’s site. Here’s what some of them said:

“‘Affordable’ means ‘subsidized by all of us.’  We need to have a society where people can have children AND careers without having to face too many impossible choices.  My career isn’t optional–it’s what pays the bills in my family.  The same is true for my husband’s career.  So we must have childcare, and we’d prefer that it be quality childcare, because our child–like EVERY child–deserves to be well cared for.  This should be a value that our entire country embraces and will help to support.” -Alison Piepmeier

“Susan B. Anthony did her job well. I’m glad you make the point that childcare should be subtracted from parental income, not maternal income, one of my pet peeves.  what matters most in a relationship, I think, is not necessarily that domestic/parental tasks be divided evenly but that each partner respect the other’s contributions, whatever form they take.  That’s harder in a society that, for all its talk of ‘family values,’ makes childcare the responsibility of individual familes.@morganfrost, relax. We’d like fewer predator drones and bank bailouts, not a crack at your piggybank. And keep in mind that your wife has a choice that many do not.” -Ashton Applewhite

YEAH.

And hey, morganfrost’s comment also inspired a wonderful post by Cali Yost over at Forbes, titled “Think You Don’t Benefit Directly from Childcare? ‘WIIFMs’ That Will Change Your Mind”.

So thank you, morganfrost.  You inspired some great stuff.

And thanks Alison, Ashton, and Cali.  I get by with a little help from my friends.

What Would Simone de Beauvoir Say? Bringing Up Bébé by former Wall Street Journal reporter Pamela Druckerman is the latest addition to books that highlight our cultural obsession with motherhood, or the failings of American mothers.  Even if you haven’t read the memoir you probably know the gist of the story given the raft of media coverage: after some time spent living in France where she gave birth to two children, Druckerman concludes that French women are superior mothers because they have time for themselves and their children are better behaved compared with her American counterparts.

Plenty of critics have taken aim at Druckerman’s argument but few have spent much time discussing the differences between French (read “extensive and nationalized”) and and American (read “few and individualized”) social supports for mothers and families aside from a quick mention before they move on to tackle other aspects of her narrative.

Surely it’s not so easy to dismiss these massive differences and the social conditions they create for mothers in their respective countries.  As a feminist, I want to focus on these structural problems and solutions, not toss them into a “by the way” paragraph.  I agree with my fellow GWPenner, Deborah Siegel, who argues here that we still need to demand some form of national childcare and better work-life options.

Work v. Motherhood Again New research in Gender and Society finds that most moms would work even if they didn’t have to.  According to Karen Christopher’s findings, mothers said they found more fulfillment in paid work than in parenting, and most women (regardless of class, race/ethnicity, or marital status), said they would work even if they didn’t have to.

Mother-readers, does this ring true to you?  Don’t get me wrong: I love my work at the National Women’s Studies Association.  At the same time, I don’t want to have to rank-order work over my role as a mother.  To me this sounds like an either/or choice that we should refuse.

Feminist Ryan Gosling Okay, this isn’t about motherhood, but Feminist Ryan Gosling falls squarely into the “and Feminism” portion of my roundup.  I love Danielle Henderson’s take on “feminist flash cards.”  I also love that Danielle is a graduate student in Gender and Women’s Studies.  I think you’ll love her work and her sense of humor, too!  Check it out and then post a comment here.

This week I sent a video of my daughter Maybelle to a friend who recently had a child with Down syndrome. In this video, Maybelle—who’s almost three—is reading word cards, signing and saying the words she sees. My friend responded, “That’s pretty impressive. Is that uniquely Maybelle, or is there some sort of emerging sense that kids with Down syndrome read precociously?”

Of course I was delighted to answer this question for my friend, and I’ll answer it for you: Kids with Down syndrome tend to be good visual learners, so they can often learn to read fairly early. (Downs Ed is a fabulous group in England that’s been leading the research on this.) Kids with Down syndrome may have difficulty speaking effectively, but they can often read quite well–ahead of grade level, etc–if they’re taught to read. This “if” is important, as illustrated by another conversation I had this week.

One of my best friends is an occupational therapist. She just started working with an eight-year-old who has Down syndrome and is in the life skills class at his public elementary school. The life skills class, for those who don’t know, is essentially the class for kids that the school system has decided can’t learn. It’s a segregated special education classroom where kids aren’t taught the kind of academic subject matter you’d learn in second grade; instead, they’re taught how to get dressed, how to sit quietly, how to interact with another human being. As an example of the kinds of academic challenges that are left out of life skills classes, this child is eight, and he can count to three. To three.

Maybelle is almost three years old, and she can count to ten, say the alphabet, and read more than 100 words. I share this with you and with other people in the world not because it’s “uniquely Maybelle.” She’s not a prodigy. She’s a child with Down syndrome who has been given the opportunity to achieve, and—like most of us in the world—when given an opportunity, she rises to meet it. I don’t mean to suggest that she, or anybody, will achieve every opportunity that’s presented, of course. But it’s rare for any of us to achieve without being provided with the space, the support, and the belief that make achievement possible.

Maybelle is one hell of a reader. I am incredibly fortunate to have friends who are speech therapists, early interventionists, and scholars of Down syndrome. These folks told me about high expectations and helped shatter my stereotypes about Down syndrome. I think about the eight-year-old that my friend is working with. His parents probably followed the advice of the authorities at the school, who perhaps haven’t been doing their jobs all that well and haven’t learned that full inclusion in typical classrooms is almost always recommended for kids with Down syndrome. I’ll bet good money that, if given the opportunity, this child would learn to count, to read, to perform fairly well in an inclusive classroom with his same-age peers. But if he isn’t provided with that opportunity, he isn’t going to achieve.

Thirty years ago educators believed it was impossible for people with Down syndrome to learn to read (click here if you want to hear some of my reflections on this). It’s long past time for our false beliefs and low expectations to be sad relics of an era we’ve moved beyond.

Update from Alison: I very quickly got feedback from several people about this post that has made me want to apologize and clarify. I’m sorry to imply that kids–any kids, with Down syndrome or not–should be performing in a certain way if they’re getting the “correct” opportunities. All kids are unique individuals, and their strengths and challenges are going to be specific to them. This of course has nothing to do with Down syndrome: some kids are going to be readers, some kids are going to be athletes, some are going to have artistic sensibilities, some are going to have the knack for fixing things that are broken, some are going to be beautifully attuned to other people’s emotions. Etc. And these strengths will emerge at various times in their lives. I know about one kid who really didn’t read at all until the Harry Potter books came out, and then–as a teenager–he learned to read, and loved to read.

I want us to live in a world with high expectations and lots of opportunities for all our kids. And I want us to appreciate our kids for their gifts, whatever they are, and whenever they emerge. You’re right to be skeptical of my assessment of the eight-year-old I haven’t met: a child’s ability to count, or speak, or read isn’t evidence of lack of opportunity. And it’s lack of opportunity that’s my concern, not the individual gifts and talents of any particular kid in the world.

Again, I apologize, and I appreciate the feedback!

There are rare moments when I read an article or listen to a recording and can’t form words to respond. Today is one of those moments and it is because you really should just listen to this recording for yourself. It’s that perfect.

The NYTimes invited four women who are at the top of their respective fields of science in for a roundtable discussion. They shared their thoughts about:

Differences between men and women in science:

TAL RABIN: Even when we do make it to the conferences, I think that there is still something different about the way that we promote ourselves.

I remember standing next to one of my co-authors, and he was talking to some other guy, and he was telling him, “I have this amazing result. I just did this, I just did that.” And I was sitting and thinking there, what result is he talking about? Until he got to the punch line. It was a joint result. It was a result of mine also. I would have never spoken about my result in the superlatives that the guy was speaking about it.

MS. KOLATA: What would you have done?

DR. RABIN: I would have said, you know, “I have this very interesting result, and we achieved very nice things.” But not “This is the best thing since we invented the wheel, and here it is.”

Having a family:

MS. KOLATA: It must be exciting for your children to grow up with a mother who has such passion for what she does.

DR. APRILE: It depends on the child. The second of my daughters used to say, “Mommy, why can’t we have dinner at 6 p.m. like everybody else?” They finally accepted these crazy hours that I had to live with.

Asking where the women are going:

DR. KING: I think the choke point is going from a postdoc to an assistant professorship to a tenure-track position. In my experience the largest remaining obstacle is how to integrate family life with the life of a scientist.

What they would say to their daughter about going into science:

DR. RABIN: The truth is that I feel differently. I think that the life of a scientist is a fantastic life. I think it is exciting because every day there is something new that you can go and think of. There are challenges, no doubt, and the times when you can’t solve things. So I think it is all a wonderful life. And not to mention even things like time flexibility, traveling around the world, meeting a lot of exciting people. I think that these are fantastic jobs.

This is the type of conversation I would have KILLED for as an undergraduate. The one faculty member I tried to have this conversation with rebuffed me. She was pretty old school, couldn’t go to Harvard with the men and it took me awhile to figure out why she wouldn’t address the gender issue. I don’t blame her either. When you build up a defense mechanism, it is hard to let it go.

What I love about the conversation are the differing opinions. As I tell my students, there are no firm answers. You gather up all the data you can and make the best decision you can. From this conversation, one can see that difference decisions all lead to some awesome science making.

Guest poster Amber Cantrell is a student at the College of Charleston, majoring in Women’s and Gender Studies.  The research project she discusses is partially funded by a Student Undergraduate Research Fellowship from the College.

Although this might be somewhat disappointing, rather than Alison Piepmeier authoring this blog post, it is in fact her undergraduate research assistant. However, I am writing a lot about her, so perhaps that will be a small consolation prize. My name is Amber Cantrell, and I’m a junior at the College of Charleston eagerly benefiting from working with a feminist scholar like Alison.

This summer Alison and I are working on a project about prenatal testing. Initially, we’d thought prenatal testing was going to be one chapter in Alison’s book project about the intersection of feminist disability studies and parenthood. As we’ve begun to explore all the different topics that Alison and I find interesting about prenatal testing, the information gathering stage seems to have exploded rather than becoming focused and topic specific. As the person who is primarily doing the research that Alison requests, I have delicately pointed out that this chapter on prenatal testing may really a book project on prenatal testing.

Our plan for the summer was to talk with parents of children with disabilities, particularly Down syndrome, because we wanted to hear their stories. How did prenatal testing function as part of their pregnancy, if at all? How did these prospective parents make their decisions about prenatal screening, diagnostic testing, and potentially terminating their pregnancy?  In particular, what sorts of narratives—stories from their doctors and families, stories from pop culture—shaped their decision making processes?  These questions are intensely personal and potentially upsetting to those who might have chosen to terminate a fetus that they had anticipated with excitement until they found out about a particular disability. Alison and I hoped we could secure 12 interviews, but we thought this might be ambitious; we thought that perhaps only a few people would consent to talk about their stories.

When Alison contacted some of her own friends and acquaintances as well as posted our interview request on her blog, we received 9 responses in the first 24 hours. Within the next 12 hours, we had our total of 12 people who had contacted us with their desire to participate in this project.  And people keep responding.  People who Alison has never even met have agreed to be interviewed—people from around the country, some who are living happily with large families, some who are dealing with the death of a child with disabilities, some who are pregnant again and considering testing from a new perspective.

Their generous willingness to talk about their experiences is something that Alison and I are finding overwhelming (in a good way).  Why do so many people want to be a part of this project?  We think this is evidence that we haven’t developed a cultural space for women and their partners to talk about prenatal testing, which many have come to consider an inherent part of pregnancy. As a society, we need a space to grapple with the implications of choice and what it means, especially when statistics show that upwards of 85% of pregnancies with Down syndrome are terminated.  Alison and I are both pro-choice feminist scholars, but we recognize that although the word “choice” implies something easy—a quick decision—in the case of prenatal testing and disabilities, the process is anything but easy or quick.

We’re eager to hear these stories, to start collecting and examining the complexities and paradoxes that these parents are sharing.

Just in time for Mother’s Day, Save the Children has published its twelfth annual State of the World’s Mothers Report.  This report includes the Mothers’ Index, a ranked list of 164 countries around the world.  Like last year, Norway tops the list for the best place to be a mother.  Afghanistan is worst.  The U.S. fell three places, to number 31 on the list.

In other words, the U.S. ranks closer to the bottom than the top of the 43 developed countries examined in the report.

Of course, as the report reminds us, the numbers don’t always tell the whole story—an individual mother’s situation can vary greatly within the same country.  Nonetheless, national-level comparisons do suggest trends and provide overviews that can provide a valuable framework for digging deeper.

For those of us living in the U.S., these national numbers should give us pause.  Why didn’t mothers in the U.S. fare better?  And why are we falling in the rankings instead of improving?  These startling numbers complicate the rosier picture of motherhood and family that many Americans tend to hold.

The first reason for our low ranking is our maternal mortality rate, an issue I wrote about last month for Girl w/Pen and Ms.  As the State of the World’s Mothers Report points out, the U.S.’s rate for maternal mortality is 1 in 2,100—the highest of any industrialized nation.  In other words, a woman in the U.S. is “more than 7 times as likely as a woman in Italy or Ireland to die from pregnancy-related causes and her risk of maternal death is 15-fold that of a woman in Greece.”

Other reasons for our low ranking include the under-five mortality rate (forty countries beat us on this one) and the percentage of children enrolled in preschool—only 58%, making us the fifth lowest country in the developed world for educating young kids.

Finally—surprise, surprise—our country lags in supporting working women with children, and in creating pathways for women to political office nationally:

The United States has the least generous maternity leave policy—both in terms of duration and percent of wages paid—of any wealthy nation.

The United States is also lagging behind with regard to the political status of women. Only 17 percent of congressional seats are held by women, compared to 45 percent in Sweden and 43 percent in Iceland.

This report made me feel a lot of different emotions about the state of motherhood in the U.S. as well as globally—shock, anger, outrage—not to mention gratitude. I’m fortunate enough to have healthy kids and privileged enough to be able to pay for things like health insurance and preschool. Given the state of things for many mothers, this is no small potatoes! And yet, the more I thought about this report and my reaction to it, the more I began to think about how important it is to use feelings to propel us to something more—understanding, wisdom, action, and working together.

This view of motherhood lies at the origins of Mother’s Day.  Long before Hallmark made sentimentality synonymous with Mother’s Day and restaurants began the tradition of the Mother’s Day brunch (neither of which I plan to reject come Sunday!), Julia Ward Howe imagined a very different kind of occasion.  In her 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation, she called for a day when women could come together and work towards peace.  In the aftermath of the violence and carnage of the U.S. Civil War, she called for women to

…meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means

Whereby the great human family can live in peace…

After grief, counsel.  After sorrow, solidarity.  After remembrance, action:

To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,

The amicable settlement of international questions,

The great and general interests of peace.

So here’s my Mother’s Day Challenge to myself this year: after enjoying whatever treats my family makes for me, and feeling lots of warm tenderness toward them (note to kids: you will be good), and making sure I have time to write in my journal, and calling my own mother on the phone—I’m going to do one thing, one action, toward addressing one of the issues raised by this report.  I haven’t decided what, quite yet.  But here are some ideas I scribbled down this afternoon, a personal list to start my brain juices flowing:

  • Write a letter to one of my representatives about some of the issues that really matter to mothers and families.  (Education!  Parental leave!  Women’s health!)
  • Send money to Emily’s List.
  • Write an opinion essay.  Send it out.
  • Go to a protest, like this one sponsored by Mothers & Others United in the Hudson Valley.
  • Find out more about the campaigns to connect kids across the borders of class and geography—the UN’s Girl Up and Save the Children’s k2kUSA are ones I’ve recently run across.  Think about how to plug my own family into these networks.
  • Find out more about efforts in my own backyard.  (I could start by actually reading all those items in my church’s bulletin!) Ask someone how I and my family can get involved.
  • Make a donation to one of these campaigns, or one of the many organizations working for women’s rights and healthy families.
  • Write down in my calendar that I will bring up all these issues up again on Father’s Day.

I invite anyone and everyone to join me in this challenge.  Share ideas and actions from your own list.  (And be sure to watch the video about Julia Ward Howe below, released from Brave New Foundation in 2009, which includes an inspiring reading of her Mother’s Day Proclamation.)  Happy Mother’s Day!

This is the fifth and final in a series this week from Girlw/Pen writers on Stephanie Coontz‘s new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, which is a biography of Betty Friedan’s iconic book.

I’m obsessed, you could say, with second-wave feminism’s legacy.   Questions like “How has feminism’s past shaped its future?” and “Why are battles begun 40 years ago so damn difficult, still, to win?” keep me up at night.  So when I first heard that Stephanie Coontz—a pre-eminent social historian, and one tremendously adept at translating feminist research for popular audiences via the New York Times op-ed page no less—was writing a cultural history of The Feminine Mystique, I nearly peed in my pants.

Foremost on my mind was the question I hoped would be addressed: “What’s the relevance of The Feminine Mystique—book and concept—today?” Coontz’s book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, did not let me down.  But I’m finding that in the wake of finishing it, I’m more than a little depressed.

As ever, the personal is political.  And vise versa.  I can’t help but read this social history through personal history—my own.  Last week, after a year and a half of equally shared parenting with both of us working part-time from home, my paid hours were cut back and my husband Marco, who got an unexpected offer, went back to a full-time, on-site job.  Overnight, I became Primary Parent, Emergency Contact, and Master Coordinator for our beloved 15-month old twins.  I wrote—bitterly, I now confess—about the first day of the new arrangement at my other blog.  The source of my knee-jerk bitterness?  Though still a working woman, I feared being swallowed by the feminine mystique.  Is this feminism unfinished, or undone?

The feminine mystique.  I’m here to report that its ghost is alive and kicking in the psyches of a generation whose mothers knocked down doors so that we could walk through them. I won’t go so far as to say we’re haunted the way children of Holocaust survivors are (Betty Friedan wrote about the home as a “comfortable concentration camp”–she also, of course, and as Coontz expertly rehearses, wrote SO much more), but let’s just say that the term “feminine mystique” conjures up a vortex that women like me—highly educated, high-earning potential—dread.

Granted, to cut back momentarily (and temporarily) on paid work is not exactly the same as embracing the feminine mystique, but mentally it’s a slippery slope. I think back to Charlotte from Sex and the City at the very moment she quits her job at the art gallery to stay home: “I choose my choice! I choose my choice!” she doth protest–too much.  That first shakey day at home, I spewed the opposite: “I didn’t sign up for this.”

After whining to my mother and counting my many blessings–battling the feminine mystique mirage in my head is a luxury compared to the real and punishing demons many single women with kids, for instance, face–I  came to my senses and realized that not much in my life had changed from the one day to this next.  Except that it had.  Because I had this revelation: it only took one day as Primary Parent for me to realize how tenuous the so-called battle lines between “Stay-at-Homes” and “Working Moms” really are.  At one point or another, we are each other.  And the reason for our resentment-filled (and highly media-fueled, let’s face it) fighting, apparently, is that we are largely unsatisfied ourselves.

As Coontz notes in the final chapter (“Women, Men, Marriage, and Work Today: Is the Feminine Mystique Dead?”), a chapter in which I found myself underlining every other word, wives who work paid jobs and those who don’t say they’d like to switch roles (according to a study conducted 10 years ago that is).  “In 2000 25% of the wives who worked full-time said they would prefer to be homemakers.  On the other hand, 40 percent of all wives without paying jobs said they would rather be employed.”  Those who work wish they could be working less—and that applies to men as well as women.

Why are so many men and women with families unhappy with their lot?

Because the job of feminism is far from done. Blinded, now, by the workforce ideal that “defines the ideal employee—male or female—as having no familial or caregiving obligations that compete with work” (some call it, as Coontz points out, the “career mystique”), our culture replaced one mystique with the next.  And no one, so far, has had the power to take this new mystique down.

The moment for Career Mystique warriors has come.  They are out there already, rattling our collective cage. Conversations at places like Role/Reboot and Daddy Dialectic and The Council on Contemporary Families and work+life fit and Viva la Feminista and Pundit Mom and The Motherlode lead us in the charge.  And in the meantime, books like The Feminine Mystique remain relevant—all the more so—because their missions remain incomplete.

*Title inspired by the last line of Lisa Belkin’s recent post, “New Fears of Flying” over at The Motherlode.

It’s my deep pleasure to introduce Andrea Doucet, who is a guest contributor for Global Mama this month. Andrea is Professor of Sociology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of the award-winning book Do Men Mother? and is currently completing research for her book, tentatively titled The Bread and Roses Project: Breadwinning Moms and the New ‘Problem with No Name’. She is delighted to be a contributor to Girl with Pen. (And we are delighted to have her!)

Are Dads Facing Discrimination at the Playground?

Are men being kicked out of playgrounds? Are dads facing playground or playgroup discrimination? These questions, and some answers, were floating on the blogosphere and twitterverse over the last few weeks. It all started with a conversation between three leading and admired voices in parenting – Dad Labs, Free Range Kids’ Lenore Skenazy, and Jeremy Adam Smith’s Daddy Dialectic – on fear and mistrust of men in public spaces.

The pace with which this discussion unfolded would make any slow-moving scholar’s head spin. A newspaper article, then a blog post, a tweet, the creation of an online survey and voilà: the results were up on Daddy Dialectic and on The New York Times Motherload.

I’ve had a 20-year academic and personal interest in male exclusion and surveillance on the landscapes of parenting, so I followed the discussion with great interest. It speaks to an important social dynamic, one that is largely absent from much of the current thinking on (heterosexual) couples working to reverse traditional gender roles.

Yet, as I sat at my desk, watching the words ‘playground discrimination’ and ‘stay at home dads targeted’ tweeting from my computer, something troubled me.

I think the discussion, thus far, overstates the issue of discrimination. It also underplays change over time and the growing acceptance of fathers in community sites. Playground discrimination? With all due respect to those who blogged and tweeted about this, I disagree. Only 3 fathers (4.5%) who filled in the ‘playground discrimination’ survey were asked to leave a playground.

What about the nearly 25% (18 men) who reported being refused entry to a group setting? We need to know more about why, when and where men were refused entry. Was it direct or implied? Was it in an infant group with breast-feeding moms or a group with older children? Was it recent or 10 years ago? Was the father a new or a long-time caregiver? Did the community know him?

As for the 55% of fathers who indicate that their parenting skills are criticized or corrected in a public setting, this does seem to be a recurring problem, especially for fathers of infants. According to the Daddy Dialectic survey and many recent media articles, fathers who are forced into primary caregiving roles during this man-cession, can still face those ‘looks’ and questions from friends, an elderly neighbor, and the ever-present ‘woman at the grocery store’.

I also see positive changes. Looking back 20 years, many stay-at-home dads and single fathers did face serious discrimination as they tried to navigate through, what one of the fathers in my book Do Men Mother? called ‘estrogen filled worlds’. That was long before daddy blogging and the daddy shift. Today, many caregiving men have the support of their breadwinning partners and/or kin networks, access to amazing dads groups, and an overwhelming litany of online and community resources. Like women who enter work fields dominated by the other gender, men are also actively creating their own networks (often through children’s athletic activities) – and their own playgroups.

Mothers, of course, are also targeted with criticism, although in different ways (which Smith also notes). Some of the breadwinning mothers I’ve recently interviewed avoid those same playgroups that are turning some fathers away.

One of the best examples I’ve seen of radical change in daddy discrimination is a Canadian couple I’ve interviewed several times over the last 10 years. When Richard, a former mechanic, started staying home in 2000, he and his wife Aileen told me that “nobody spoke to him in the playgroups”. He kept going. By 2001, he went to three weekly playgroups as well as a library group. He also began caring for a few children in his home. Yet his desire to open his own day care was continually greeted with disapproval and rejection. The reason: he was male.

After four years of patiently waiting, Richard was finally granted a licence to open his daycare. In 2009, he told me: “The praise that I receive from the parents and the agency personnel and mostly the love I feel from the kids, make this the most satisfying job ever”.

Richard also captures the incredible change for men in community settings along with a subtle reminder that full gender parity on this issue remains a formidable challenge:

“Today my daycare is full with 5 kids and I have 8 kids on my waiting list who want to come to my daycare specifically. But I am not accepted by all. Some parents refuse to have a man as childcare provider. And I can respect that. But to many, it is an alternative they favor.”

Playground and playgroup discrimination, where and when it occurs, is undoubtedly an uncomfortable experience. The Daddy Dialectic’s survey was, according to Smith, meant to be a “catalyst for conversation”. I want to add a few questions to this ‘daddy discrimination’ conversation: What key changes are fathers observing on this issue over time in their own communities? What is supporting or inhibiting that change? What challenges remain, where and why? What can mothers, fathers, community organizations, policy activists and feminist scholars do to help facilitate more father-inclusion? Is it reasonable to accept some women-only, as well as men-only, spaces when it comes to caregiving?

The Intersectional Feminist proudly presents June’s guest writer, Jillian Schweitzer. Jillian is a writer and photographer, currently pursuing graduate work. She is working on a book of poetry and lives in Maryland.


Everyone has seen the media reports alerting us to the fact that feminists and the feminist movement is out to destroy families, cast children out in the street and encourage government handouts.

Safe to say that I was worried.
Then I picked up the latest from Seal Press Studies, Motherhood and Feminism by Amber E. Kinser. Kinser, a mother herself, sets out to debunk myths about feminism and motherhood and get the conversation started about mothers today. The book starts with the Industrial Revolution and continues up to present day, all the while describing how feminists have a long history of fighting for mothers and mothers’ rights, as well also helping mothers fight for themselves. Of course, feminism hasn’t always been accommodating to every mother, which is why Kinser also highlights many groups or individuals that sought to help everyone regardless of race, class, ability or sexual preference.

Motherhood changed dramatically with the start of the Industrial Revolution, with the “shift…from an agrarian and domestic economy to an industry based one.” Men went to work and women were at home; dualism between private and public spheres had begun. Kinser neatly divvies up the next two hundred years into easy-to-digest chapters, which includes Seneca Falls, Black Women clubs, both world wars, the oft nostalgic 1950’s (which, interestingly enough, was the decade with the highest rate of teen pregnancy to date), the Civil Rights movements, the bloated and consumer driven 1980’s with Reagan at the forefront, then moving into the late 20th century and finally, the blogging world. Her research is extensive, including many areas of intersectionality, such as race, class, ability, gender and sexual orientation. Admittedly, able-bodied privilege and LGBT issues are not mentioned as much as I would have preferred, but she does touch on them periodically throughout the book. While the book does mention activists and movements that range internationally, the book does have a Western slant to it, although admittedly it would be difficult to do a starter book globally about motherhood and its history.
The reader does get a good grasp on both motherhood’s recent history and how feminism has helped with the progression of the movement. One of the big themes in the book is how motherhood and the mothers involved challenged the aforementioned dualism between the public and private sphere to push for social and economic justice. In the later chapters, several organizations are mentioned, including United Mothers Opposing Violence Everywhere (UMOVE), The Motherhood Project, Mothers on the Move or Madres en Movimiento (MOM), INCITE! Women of Colors Against Violence, Ariel Gore’s Hip Mama community, Family Equality Council, and Mothers Ought to Have Equal Rights (MOTHERS). These are just some of the many groups advocating and providing resources for mothers and children.  

The book wraps up with a long quote from theorist and feminist writer Patricia DiQuinzio, stating six concerns that the motherhood movement must contend with — readers will note that her critique, in a more broad sense, applies to contemporary feminist movements:

“Resisting the mass media’s tendency to use stereotypes of mothers that divide and pit them against each other… stretch the movement so that every kind of mother can fit comfortably… the movement must refuse to adopt a good mother/bad mother dualism… movement activists must work to bring young women into the movement… to be vibrant and promising movement, a mothers’ movement must forge alliances with mothers and others who do different kinds of caregiving work… finally, the mothers’ movement must support reproductive and abortion rights as part of the movement agenda.”

Kinser has delivered another great addition to the Seal Studies library, examining a history which many of us do not stop to consider as being important.  While feminist movements have certainly not been perfect or completely inclusionary, many activists throughout history have continued to make great strides for mothers.  Perhaps more importantly, these movements have helped mothers to make their own strides.  Motherhood and Feminism is an enjoyable and informative read and one that I would recommend.

At the end of December I learned I had a brain tumor. In February I had surgery to remove as much of the tumor as possible. In the time between those two events, and since, I’ve had an intellectual and emotional path to travel.

As I wrote about on Girl With Pen, one of the initial traumas of learning about the tumor was learning that it was located in the language center of my brain. The neurosurgeon was fairly certain that removing part of the tumor would affect my language skills. Numbers were tossed around: I could lose 10% of my language functions, or 20. I found myself agonizing over what those numbers meant, trying to connect them in some meaningful, concrete way to my own life. Could I write an academic article with 10% less language ability? Could I read the research written by my friends if I were 20% deficient? Would I be able to respond effectively to my students’ questions and comments in the classroom? One subtle undercurrent to this questioning was, Is it the right thing to do to have this surgery?

And then at some point in January, a plank I’d been standing on–let’s call it denial–dissolved beneath me, and I realized that the questions I’d been asking were important, but they were distracting me from the most important implication of this brain tumor: it’s fatal. If I didn’t have the surgery, I would die, and my daughter wouldn’t have a mother.

This realization quickly became all-encompassing. Maybelle is twenty months old–a baby, someone who still needs active parenting all day, every day. I started thinking ahead to other parts of her life: her first sentences, her discovery of what activities she loves, her best friends, her dating life. I want to be there. I can’t imagine not being there. But more importantly, she needs me there. The ambiguity disappeared. It became very clear to me that having the surgery was the right thing to do.

As I moved forward through this whole process, the intimate exposure to my own mortality made a number of things about parenthood clear to me. Before the diagnosis I might not have known this about myself, but I can’t tell you how grateful–powerfully, viscerally grateful–I was and am that I have the tumor and Maybelle doesn’t. Even pre-surgery, when all the fear was hanging over me, this realization was enough to add some buoyancy to my day.

I also discovered that I identify parenthood as a role–a commitment, a passion, a series of actions–and not as a biological category. It doesn’t matter that Maybelle is genetically related to Biffle and me; she’s our daughter because every day we are her parents. This was comforting, because I know that she is loved by many, many people, some of whom love her enough that they would step in to become her parents if she needed them to. It was a realization that also helped me to dedicate myself even more fully to my choice to be her parent. In the early post-surgery days, I could often only stay awake for a few hours, but I wanted those hours to be spent on the floor with Maybelle.

And yet recognizing my own mortality didn’t make my love for language disappear. In those early post-surgery days, if I had any awake time after Maybelle was asleep, I wanted to read and write, and I did: two days after the surgery I read my own blog, and two days after that I wrote a post. As it turns out, my language skills have emerged from the surgery almost just like they were before, and this is a great surprise and an unending source of joy for me.

So I’m not arguing that parenthood is the only thing that matters in my life. As I’ve told Maybelle many times before, and as I even told my neurosurgeon, I’m a much better mother when I’m working. I’m a better mother when I get to delve deeply into other life commitments and choices in addition to parenthood, and for me these are intimately connected to language. (The neurosurgeon responded, “My wife says the same thing.”)

I don’t have a neat summation here, an explanation of what I’ve learned and what this all means. My life has many points of connection to the planet, but whether I knew it or not, a few of them are more important than the rest.