Global

By Roxana Cazan*

When the Russian court rejected Pussy Riot member, Maria Alyokhina’s request for a deferral in her prison term so that she can raise her son, I was shocked. Alyokhina pleaded that her son is too young for her to be removed from his side at this point, and that a sentence of years in prison would destroy the mother/son bond. She asked the court to defer her term until her son turns 14. The Pussy Riot punk team was arrested as a result of disseminating anti-establishment and feminist slogans and performing their politics in a Moscow cathedral. What drew my attention was the way in which the state handled Aliokhina’s request to mother, especially in a country where motherhood was upheld as one of women’s most important duties via Soviet propaganda.

This ideological and geographical site extends to Russia’s neighboring country, Romania, where the Communist regime that ended its totalitarian rule in 1989, imposed an intensive politics of reproduction to the detriment of women. Particularly during the last decade of Communism in Romania, the pro-natalist political program prohibited birth control, required women to procreate within patriarchal family structures, and employed women to labor outside the home, as Gail Kligman deftly argues in her 1998 book The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania.

The Pussy Riot court case received great attention in the US as did the Romanian rejection of Ceausescu’s pro-reproductive ideology right after 1989. In a way, this attention projected the two moments as standing in stark opposition. more...

I’ve been meaning to write about some of the books on my bookshelf for quite a while.  (As in, all semester!)  So here’s a quick roundup of a handful of 2011 titles relevant to motherhood globally:

Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh, by Lamia Karim (University of Minnesota Press).  If you’ve been following microfinance, often touted as a cure-all for global poverty, anthropologist Karim offers a more sobering look.  You can read the great review in the current issue of the Women’s Review of Books (WRB) here.

Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, by Mara Hvistendahl (PublicAffairs).  Hvistendahl is a correspondent for Science magazine, and her thoroughly researched (and deeply disturbing) book examines the gender imbalance globally. Amy Agigian does a fabulous job reviewing it in the same issue of WRB, although her essay (alas) isn’t available online.

The 21^st Century Motherhood Movement: Mothers Speak Out on Why We Need to Change the World and How To Do It, edited by Andrea O’Reilly (Demeter Press).  If you need to feel uplifted about all the social change brought about by mothers, look no further.  This comprehensive anthology includes articles about maternal activism from all parts of the world, including Australia, Ireland, Germany, Argentina, Iran, Russia, Canada, and the U.S.

Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality, by Rebecca Asher (Harvill Secker).  Journalist Asher examines the current state of motherhood in the U.K. and discovers that women are still left cooking the bacon and, um, pushing the pram.

Shadow Mothers: Nannies, Au Pairs, and the Micropolitics of Mothering, by Cameron Lynn Macdonald (University of California Press).  Macdonald, a sociologist, provides a fascinating look at the relationships of professional women with their nannies/au pairs.  Rosanna Hertz reviews both this book and Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare, and Caribbeans Creating Communities, by Tamara Mose Brown (NYU Press) in that same issue of WRB (enough already, I know.  But have you subscribed yet?).  Brown has also reflected on her own experiences as a mother studying nannies, which I wrote about here.

The Arab spring took a different turn in Saudi Arabia with today’s #Women2Drive campaign.  Organizing via Facebook and Twitter, Saudi women hit city roads in protest of the ban on women’s driving.  Many of them asked their passengers to film their drives and uploaded the videos to YouTube, following the example of Manal al-Sharif, a single mother who posted a video of herself driving solo last month:

Manal al-Sharif was arrested and jailed, but this didn’t stop other women from taking the car keys.  The New Yorker has aggregated several of the videos from today’s campaign here.

The right to drive is one of several rights denied to women in Saudi Arabia, the only Muslim country in which women cannot drive.  In a powerful opinion essay about this act of civil disobedience, Farzaneh Milani argues that restricting women’s mobility is about more than driving cars:

It is about dominating, excluding and subordinating women.  It is about barring them from political activities, preventing their active participation in the public sector, and making it difficult for them to fully exercise the rights Islam grants them to own and manage their own property.  It is about denying women the basic human right to move about freely.

And while The New York Times reported that today’s protest was hardly earth-shattering—apparently only several dozen women drove—I prefer to think of them, as Milani does, as freedom riders heralding future change:

the women defying the ban on motorized mobility are in fact demanding an eventual overhaul of the entire Saudi political system. They want not just to drive but to remap the political geography of their country.

I would only add that I’m not surprised that Manal al-Sharif is a single working mother. You go, global mamas!

Seems like quite a few other folks have been reimagining the possibilities of Mother’s Day as well!

• In “Mother’s Day is more than a greeting-card holiday,” Karen D’Souza also returned to the origins of Mother’s Day and wrote about how Julia Ward Howe imagined a day of peace.
• Nicholas Kristof urged readers to celebrate by “saving” a mother and in a separate essay, pointed out that investing in family planning worldwide would result in 94,000 fewer women dying in pregnancy each year.  (Full disclosure: I’m not a fan of the rhetoric of “saving”—it’s something we spend a lot of time critiquing in my Transnational Feminism class—but I deeply appreciate how Kristof continues to remind everyone that women’s “issues” are indeed newsworthy.)
• Also in The New York Times, Stephanie Coontz observed that “it’s too bad that nostalgia for a golden age of motherhood that never existed still clouds our thinking about what’s best for mothers, fathers and their children.”  At Ms., Laura Paskus urged readers to honor all mamas—including “immigrants, single, young, queer and low-income” mothers—on Mother’s Day.  And over at Strollerderby, Rebecca Odes drew attention to all the nannies who help mother children, and who should be a part of Mother’s Day as well!

In the spirit of infusing new meanings into Mother’s Day—and in keeping with the Mother’s Day Challenge I issued to myself and interested readers—I did two things.  Right after eating brunch, and sending flowers to my mom (about whom I’ll write more later), and right before going on a family hike, I gave to two organizations:

Mothers’ Day Movement.  Founded by six women who were “shocked to learn that $14 billion was spent in the US in 2010 on Mother’s Day celebrations including flowers, cards and meals,” they selected Shining Hope for Communities, a Wesleyan student-founded organization working in Kibera, Kenya, as the target of their 2011 fundraising efforts.  (The co-founder and president of SHOFCO, Kennedy Odede, grew up in Kibera.)  I am totally impressed that college students founded SHOFCO, and I remembered well the insightful opinion essay, “Slumdog Tourism,” written by Odede in The New York Times last August.

Save the Children: Every Mother Counts campaign.  They have a midwifery training program in Afghanistan, which ranked as the worst place to be a mother in their Mothers’ Index.  I like the emphasis on training.

I didn’t quite make it to writing any letters to my political representatives as I had planned… but I figure that Father’s Day is around the corner, and I’m planning on pitching a surprise to my husband after I serve up his brunch: co-authorship?

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!

The Women’s Studies Program at the State University of New York at New Paltz will host a one-day conference on Saturday, April 30, titled “Green Feminisms: Women, Sustainability and Environmental Justice.”

This year’s conference focuses on the particular dangers that environmental degradation has posed for women throughout the world and celebrates the women who have been struggling against it. The keynote panel features Beverly Naidus, Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at the University of Washington; Joni Seager, Professor of Global Studies at Bentley College; and Karen Washington, President of the New York City Community Garden Coalition.

A wide range of workshops will bring together activists, farmers, researchers, writers, educators and artists. Sessions will address a variety of subjects including the work of women in the past who have written about the environment; women’s involvement in movements against hydrofracking, mountain top removal and other threats to the environment; women’s involvement in green construction and community sustainable agriculture; and women’s efforts to sustain food sovereignty throughout the world.

The day will conclude with talks by LaTosha Brown, Director of the Gulf Coast Fund for Community Renewal and Thilmeeza Hussain, Deputy Representative for the Maldives at the United Nations on the global leadership of women on climate change. Highlights of the day include Trailer Talk, a live performance about hydraulic fracturing, and an Educational Market of local CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) and other farm projects, alternative energy projects and environmental organizations.

All food served will be sourced from local Hudson Valley farms.

Come join us! You can find more information, a complete list of programs, and registration forms at www.newpaltz.libguides.com/green_feminisms.

Women’s History Month should be a time of celebration.  Sadly, when it comes to maternal health, there’s not a lot to celebrate this year.

Just one year ago, this wasn’t the case. In April 2010, maternal health was making headlines—with an encouraging story.  Research published in the medical journal The Lancet found glimmers of hope in the downward direction of the global maternal mortality rate.  Though certain parts of the world had experienced rising maternal mortality rates (including eastern and southern Africa, due to HIV-AIDS), the overall picture looked promising.  These trends were supported by data in another report, Trends in Maternal Mortality, researched and written by the World Health Organization, the United Nations Children’s Fun, the United Nations Population Fund, and the World Bank, which found that the number of women who died due to complications during pregnancy and childbirth had decreased by 34% between 1990 and 2008.

In 2011, the Republican budget in Congress is targeting women’s health programs at home and abroad for deep cuts, with serious consequences for mothers and children.  How much money will these proposals actually save, and at what cost to the lives of women and girls?

Let’s revisit recent history.  In 2000, world leaders came together at the UN to adopt the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which identified eight anti-poverty goals to be accomplished by 2015.  The fifth goal was maternal health: to reduce by 75% the maternal mortality rate, and to achieve universal access to reproductive health.  In 2010, while much work remained to be done, the data suggested that most maternal deaths can be prevented, and that the safe motherhood movement was truly making an impact.  Celebratory headlines in newspapers like the one in The New York Times declared “Maternal Deaths Decline Sharply Across the Globe.”  This article quoted The Lancet’s editor, Dr. Horton, explaining that the data should “encourage politicians to spend more on pregnancy-related health matters”:

The data dispelled the belief that the statistics had been stuck in one dismal place for decades, he said.  So money allocated to women’s health is actually accomplishing something, he said, and governments are not throwing good money after bad.

At the same time, U.S. activists were becoming increasingly alarmed at rising domestic death rates.  Amnesty International issued a report, Deadly Delivery: The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the U.S.A., that raised concerns about the two-decade upward trend in the numbers of preventable maternal deaths.  Amnesty International observed that “women in the USA have a higher risk of dying of pregnancy-related complications than those in 49 other countries, including Kuwait, Bulgaria, and South Korea” and called for a legislative agenda that made maternal health a priority.

Who could have guessed that one year later, we would be retreating even further from making maternal health a priority?

Most of us know about the proposed cuts to Planned Parenthood, which provides a wide array of sexual and reproductive health services to women, many of whom cannot afford to go elsewhere.  Proposed slashes in funding to global women’s health are just as serious.  Ms. blogger Anushay Hossain explains what’s on the chopping block globally, and why this is such a big deal:

House Republicans not only proposed to cut U.S. assistance to international family planning funding, they also want to completely zero out any funds going to the United Nations Population Fund, or UNFPA, the largest multilateral source of reproductive-health assistance in the world. The U.S. currently provides 22 percent of the UN’s overall budget, and UNFPA is the only agency within the UN that focuses on reproductive health.

At the recently concluded 55^th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women, the new Executive Director of UNFPA, Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, listed the three main challenges we must face in order to improve maternal health globally: empowering women and girls to claim their rights, “including the right to sexual and reproductive health”; strengthening health services everywhere “to deliver an integrated package of sexual and reproductive health services”; and ensuring “adequate financing.”  He also spoke about girls’ education as “the most important intervention to avoid maternal deaths.”  I was inspired to read UNFPA’s mission, which reflects an understanding of health in the context of human rights and equality:

UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, is an international development agency that promotes the right of every woman, man and child to enjoy a life of health and equal opportunity.  UNFPA supports countries in using population data for policies and programmes to reduce poverty and to ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is safe, every young person is free of HIV/AIDS, and every girl and woman is treated with dignity and respect.

This struck me as fairly comprehensive and visionary.  Yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen this picture of UNFPA in the mainstream U.S. media.  Nor have I seen the following question asked—or answered: how might the proposed cuts affect maternal mortality rates, at home and globally?  I would also like to see politicians address this issue.  I was glad to see Secretary of State Hillary Clinton detail the devastating effects of the elimination of funding to UNFPA; her testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Relations is posted on Feministing.  She observed that the quality of women’s health and empowerment in the developing world not only has an effect on their families and their communities, but also on our own security: “This is not just what we fail now to do for others.  It’s how that will come back and affect our own health here at home.”

As one of the truisms of globalization goes, we’re all connected.  Indeed—the security of women everywhere appears to be threatened by the proposed cuts and policies in the U.S. Congress.

Happy International Women’s Day.

Image via Wikipedia Commons.

A mere 3% of books published in the U.S. each year are translations.  An even smaller number of these books are written by women.  What are the obstacles facing women writers around the world?  What are their successes?  Given the different barriers surrounding literary production and distribution, how can U.S. readers find excellent fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and plays by women writing and publishing outside of the U.S.?

Read about the experience of Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur in the new column Jean Casella (former editorial director and publisher of the Feminist Press) and I are co-editing over at She Writes.  Jean’s debut post introduces readers to Shahrnush Parsipur’s story and her books, which include the novels Touba and the Meaning of Night and Women Without Men, recently made into a film by Shirin Neshat.

Imagine

1. A morning spent reading the newspaper and drinking coffee without constant interruption from the kids.

2. A newspaper filled with stories about the new global peace: no environmental disasters, no bombs exploding, no torture, no hate crimes, no war.

3. A house overflowing with peace (no screaming fights over Lego pieces, etc.).

4. Clean dishes. Even after pancakes.

5. Phone call from father-in-law acknowledging that nearly 20 years of political conversations have resulted in his conversion on certain points, such as the need for nationwide family-friendly policies (affordable childcare, paid parental leave, flexible work/life policies, universal healthcare, etc.).

6. A country with the political will to pass policies such as the ones listed above.

7. A world in which being born a girl is not a risk factor for malnourishment, hunger, neglect, discrimination, poverty, abuse, sexual violence, forced labor, trafficking, or death.

8. A world in which social inequalities are shrinking, and progress is being made toward the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.

9. Sufficient time to play with kids, talk with husband and friends, and care for self (read, exercise, shower, write in journal, and meditate).

10. Ability to do the above with a sense of abundance instead of stress.

And, last but not least:

11. No BlackBerry or iPhone. All day.

Yesterday I participated in a Women’s Studies Quarterly Symposium on their recent Mother issue. Among the many excellent talks and readings, I was particularly struck by a talk given by Tamara Mose Brown, a sociologist at Brooklyn College and author of the forthcoming book Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare, and Caribbeans Creating Community (NYU Press, Dec. 2010). Dr. Brown discussed her own experiences as a graduate student and mother of West Indian decent researching West Indian childcare providers in Brooklyn’s public parks (as well as some of the reflections of her WSQ co-author, Erynn Masi de Casanova). In her talk, she reflected on how her subjects defined motherhood, and how they viewed her–she was clearly identified as a mother, since she often brought her son with her to the parks–as well as how she tried to deal with their expectations of how she should be mothering.

Because many of these childcare workers were also mothers, they viewed themselves as “expert” mothers and frequently gave her “lessons” about good West Indian mothering. As she writes in her WSQ article, these lessons included ideas about what was “expected behavior for a boy”–such as the expectation that boys should not play with strollers or wear dresses. Although she herself did not subscribe to this view of gender roles, she found herself watching her son more closely when she was doing research at the park, to make sure he did not wander over to a stroller. Subconsciously, she found herself seeking the approval of her subjects.

Her story resonated with me, a working mother who relies upon a Latina babysitter, L., to care for her children when my husband and I are at work. I like to think that in most ways I consider L. a co-parent as well as an employee. After all, I trust her with my kids; I trust her judgment and her ability to help us raise our children. Her daughter is much older than my kids (now in the dreaded teen years!) and L. has worked in a school, so she is “ahead” of me in this mothering job and thus an expert in ways that I’m not. And yet, I don’t consult her about certain ways that we’re raising our kids that may differ from what she herself has done. She’s very discreet, but I wonder what she thinks about some things.

For example, I’ve frequently wondered what L., a devout Catholic, thinks about the fact that we are raising our kids as non-baptized, non-Communion-participating Unitarian Universalists. Or what she thinks about the fact that my 3-year-old son loves to play with princesses more than my 6-year-old daughter. In general, I suspect she’s OK with all this; she’s tolerant to the core. And yet, precisely because she cares deeply for our kids, I do sometimes wonder whether she sometimes views our parenting choices as ones that aren’t quite right for our children.

I suspect that we might get a free pass on these issues; but I also wonder what L. thinks of the fact that I work. Dr. Brown noted that the West Indian childcare workers had very definite ideas about what defines a good mother and had this to say about their employers:

Motherhood means that you feed your children, you bathe your children, and you spend time with your children. These mothers go to work and don’t do anything for their children and then want the sitters or nannies to do everything; that’s not motherhood. See, you want to be with your children, feed them, give them a bath to be with them; that is a good mother.

— Child care provider in Brooklyn, New York, 2007 (Mose Brown and Masi de Casanova, “Mothers in the Field,” WSQ 37.3, 4)

When I heard this quote yesterday, it struck to the core of my anxieties! I don’t bathe and feed my children every day; most days, yes, but certainly not every day. It brought up the ages-old guilt about working, as well as the familiar anger: why do mothers still carry this burden? Why do they carry it alone? Why don’t we question the fatherhood of fathers when they are at work? For that matter, why don’t we question the absence of flexible work-life policies, not to mention childcare, at many of our workplaces? the absence of a national response to working families that might go a long way toward enabling mothers and fathers to work and parent? the frequent absence of childcare workers and their own families in these debates about work and family?

After all these anxieties subsided, I began to think about the historical, invisible, and yet very real forces that have created generations of West Indian nannies, caring for white children; and I began to think that one response, one way of finding self-empowerment and agency if you find yourself in this situation, might be to embrace the identity of expert mother who spends time with the children. There is some truth, after all, in what that West Indian childcare provider says. Not the idea that working mothers aren’t mothers, but the fact that there are probably some employers who ask a lot from their nannies. I am speaking here from experience: when you have a demanding job, and you have a babysitter, it’s hard not to ask. There are days when, exhausted from teaching and meetings all day, I really don’t want to come home and be a mother. On these days, while I am grateful to all that L. has already done, and even though I know that it’s my turn, I wish that she could stay. But L. has her own family to go home to, no doubt exhausted from mothering my kids, and perhaps even sometimes reluctant, herself, to contemplate the evening’s work ahead at her house.

More often than not, this is when the TV seduces me with its nearly impossible-to-refuse offer: Kids entertained! Peace and quiet! No 1,001 demands while I’m trying to make dinner!

But sometimes, too, I start talking with my kids, and they tell me about the adventures of their day, and they blow me away with their ideas, and they make me laugh with their wacky and idiosyncratic knock-knock jokes–and I realize that this is the best moment of my day.

As I write this, I also realize that having the resources to hire a nanny, babysitter, or other childcare worker is just that–a privilege–and while this relationship is quite accurately described as employer and employee, it’s simultaneously a unique kind of relationship whereby the employee can become part of the family. And with family, as we all know, comes opinions and ideas about how we should live our lives and how we should parent, not always reflecting the deeply-held decisions we’ve forged for ourselves and our kids.