motherhood

Hey GWP Community!

A slew of interesting books “bridging feminist research and popular reality” (our tagline) are either just out or on the horizon, from Seal, Feminist Press, Demeter Press, and many more. Shoot me an email [deborahgirlwpen (at) gmail (dot) com] if you’d be interested in guest reviewing any of these–either individually or in a cluster–here on Girl w/Pen, with an eye toward the larger conversations, perspectives, and research they tap into:

Rebecca Hains’ The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls through the Princess-Obsessed Years

Stacey Radin’s Brave Girls: Raising Young Women with Passion and Purpose to Become Powerful Leaders

Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism, Second Edition

Babygate: How to Survive Pregnancy and Parenting in the Workplace by Dina Bakst, Phoebe Taubman, Elizabeth Gedmark

Sarah Granger’s The Digital Mystique

Melanie Klein and Anna Guest-Jelly’s anthology, Yoga + Body Image: 25 Personal Stories About Beauty, Bravery & Loving Your Body

Queering Motherhood: Narrative and Theoretical Perspectives edited by Margaret F. Gibson

Reconceiving Motherhood by Patricia Hill Collins

Feminist Parenting From Theory to Life Lived edited by Lyndsay Kirkham

Intensive Mothering: The Cultural Contradictions Of Modern Motherhood edited by Linda Ennis.

And of course if there’s a book you’d like to review that’s not on the list, please inquire within.

Yours in bridging,
Deborah

In honor of Mother’s Day, I ask readers to consider the ramifications of a new law about pregnant women which has dangerous implications for the health of mothers and babies. The author of this guest post, Chelsea Carmona, is a writer and drug treatment activist whose writing has been featured in major media outlets like Time, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Al Jazeera English. She works for The OpEd Project, a social venture founded to increase the range and quality of voices we hear in the world.

__________

Can you imagine being prosecuted and potentially incarcerated for taking an FDA-approved, legally prescribed medication – a medication both the World Health Organization and the Institute of Medicine agree is the most effective treatment for your affliction?

Starting July 1^st, this is a real possibility for pregnant women in Tennessee undergoing methadone maintenance, an evidence-based pharmaceutical therapy known among experts as the “gold standard” of treatment for opioid addiction.

The bill, signed into law on Tuesday — despite avid opposition from addiction experts, reproductive health advocates, and virtually every major medical association — authorizes the arrest and incarceration of women who use illegal drugs while pregnant.

The law does nothing to expand treatment options for addicted women, but proponents maintain the intention is to help pregnant women struggling with substance abuse get into programs. Considering only 19 of Tennessee’s 177 addiction treatment facilities provide any form of care to pregnant women, this is going to be a challenge.

Targeted women can avoid criminal charges if they complete state-approved treatment, but the Tennessee penal code doesn’t specify what constitutes an “addiction recovery program.” In 2007, the 9^th Circuit Court ruled that forced attendance in 12-step programming (Alcoholics Anonymous) is unconstitutional, but this model still reigns supreme in treatment today, leaving methadone maintenance highly suspect.

Advocates for pregnant women share concerns that the widespread ignorance of maintenance treatment could leave pregnant women on methadone vulnerable to prosecution, even though such treatment is widely considered the standard of care for opioid-dependent, pregnant women. The language of the new law does not specifically exempt these women from prosecution, making following doctors’ orders a potential crime.

Sadly, this can’t be surprising to anyone familiar with maintenance treatment. Although advances in science have helped us to establish a more comprehensive understanding of the disease, we have a deeply entrenched narrative of drug addiction in our culture. This new law, which will only scare women away from seeking the prenatal and addiction care they so desperately need, is the result of this misguided and moralistic view.

Opponents of the law also worry that it will result in disproportionate jailing of poor pregnant women and pregnant women of color, particularly those living in rural districts where there is significantly less access to treatment. And they are right to be concerned.

According to The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, even though women fare just as well in treatment as men, 92% of those in need do not receive it. This is in large part due to practical reasons: Women are more likely to live under the poverty line and therefore less likely to be able to afford costly inpatient programs and the childcare services that may be necessary for them to attend.

Women were actually mobilizing to advocate for feminist-based solutions to the problem of addiction as early as the late 1960s, but locating and gaining access to effective treatment is still infuriatingly difficult. Few treatment programs have separate women-only programs, and even fewer offer programs for pregnant or post-partum women.

With the shrinking gender gap in addiction, it’s time we take into account the gendered experiences that occur throughout addiction and cultivate a more compassionate, comprehensive perspective, one that is actually conducive to helping women achieve sobriety.

For example, detailed, individual aftercare is a critical service for all addicts, but it is particularly important for women in using relationships. Women are often introduced to drugs and drug using rituals by a significant other, and rather than causing conflict, the use becomes a way to strengthen the bond. Although treatment stresses the importance of social networks, the loss of a using companion is always difficult — sometimes much more difficult than the loss of the addictive substance itself. By providing feminist-based aftercare — like housing-assistance, vocational counseling, and community development programs — recovering female addicts are much more likely to sustain sobriety and achieve autonomy.

No one supports the use of illegal drugs among pregnant women, nor does anyone wish to see a newborn show signs of neonatal abstinence syndrome, but incarceration isn’t the answer. Instead, politicians should be forming natural alliances with feminist scholars and health advocates so we can collectively address the basic needs of newly sober women. These are the ways to truly celebrate Mother’s Day.

Heather Hewett’s December 5^th blog post on Girl w/Pen, “What’s a Good Mother?” hit a nerve. My daughter Amy was born in 1970, the same year Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex and Robin Morgan’s anthology, Sisterhood is Powerful were published.  Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique had already become part of my daily conversation. I read Firestone, Morgan, Germaine Greer, Our Bodies, Ourselves—everything I could find on ‘women’s liberation’.  It all made so much sense.  My husband and I agreed; we would share parenting. Our family wouldn’t follow the usual gender patterns, we’d be equal partners and we’d steer our daughter clear of sex stereotyped toys, clothes, and expectations.  A huge cultural shift was underway; we’d be part of it.

We have been; but not in the ways I anticipated forty years ago.  Children complicate lives in unexpected ways. Amy was born with a variety of disabilities, some immediately evident, others less so. She tested our facile feminism; we chose different answers. I am a single parent.

Parenting a child with physical and developmental challenges is a politicizing activity. Mothering such a child alone is a radicalizing one. Mothering a child with disabilities requires not only the culturally sanctified female roles of caregiving and ‘traditional good mothering’, but aggressive independent action. You must lobby the legislature, pressure the school board, argue with the doctor and defy the teacher. And, oddly, while these ‘unfeminine’ behaviors might, in other contexts, be deemed deviant or too aggressive, performed in the context of mothering a child with special needs they are considered appropriate, even laudable.

But for a single mother, even this culturally permissible deviance is insufficient. My life with Amy is different from the lives of most of my colleagues and friends. I could not provide emotional, physical and financial support for Amy without re-envisioning motherhood. Amy and I  have lived with a shifting assortment of male and female students, single women as well as married women with children. Work for me is not possible without round the clock care for Amy. This is true for all mothers and children, but it is a need that is normally outgrown. Not so in our case. Amy fuels my passion for feminist solutions; not simply for childcare, but for policy issues across the board. I know first hand too many of the dilemmas confronting women, from the mostly invisible, predominately female workers who care for others in exchange for poverty level wages to successful business women struggling to be perfect mothers, perfect wives and powerfully perfect CEOs.

While there may be no individual solutions, there are individual decisions. As a mother and a feminist, I long ago made the decision to work toward a society in which power and responsibility as well as independence and dependence are equally available to women and men.

But it’s a lovely winter day, snow is sparkling on the pine trees, and across the street children are sledding. To talk of the challenges of motherhood without sharing the lessons in joy Amy offers is only a part of the story.

My particular good fortune is in Amy’s special way of seeing the world. Oliver Sacks in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat writes about people he calls ‘simple’. “If we are to use single word here, it would have to be ‘concreteness’ — their world is vivid, intense, detailed, yet simple, precisely because it is concrete, nether complicated, diluted nor unified by abstraction.”  Amy never misses a sunset, a baby or a bird. She notices and she insists that others notice.

“Mother, come here! Now!”

“Amy, I’m busy, I’ll be there in a minute, OK?”

“No, not OK, red bird will fly away, come NOW!”

I hurry to see red bird.  What kind of silly person would think it reasonable to miss a cardinal in the snow?

This is only one of many joys my daughter has taught me.

It’s the Christmas season, a time of hope. Lately life has begun to look bleaker each day as we  move further  toward a nation of haves and have nots; but today I choose to believe in hope. Someday, not so far away, women and men working together will beat the odds. We will succeed in creating a more just and equal world.

Among the many things I had planned to do before the birth of my first child, one was post a review of Lisa Catherine Harper’s first book, A Double Life: Discovering Motherhood.  Now over the initial shock of transitioning into motherhood, I realize all the more how valuable this book was and still is to me, as Harper precisely chronicles a life divided by “before” and “after”— in this case, having a child.

Harper presents the idea that the deep divisions that women experience — specifically around pregnancy, gestation, childbirth, and then the encounter of a child —sunder women physically and emotionally in ways they are left to existentially and practically reconcile.  Her book is categorized into three states of being: “Inside,” which begins with the conception of her daughter and follows her pregnancy; “Inside/Out” which chronicles her labor and birth; and “Outside” which tracks her entry into motherhood as closely as it does her daughter’s new experiences in the world.

Harper holds a PhD in English with an emphasis in feminist theory and research and her book includes meticulous research as she alternates exploring the science behind what is happening to her (with information about how pregnancy alters virtually every system in a woman’s body) and the emotional resonances she feels on a deeply internal level. She also chronicles her reactions to others’ responses to her physically changing state.  At times the tacking back and forth between the more didactic writing to the lyrical can seem abrupt, but the model reflects her commitment to knit understanding of the logical and mysterious, of fact and emotion, the science and the poetry of her experiences. Although I enjoyed Harper’s sensitivity to the physical processes of pregnancy and childbirth so much I gave a copy of her book to my Ob/Gyn, what I later appreciated more was Harper’s willingness to connoiter her new role as part-time professor with fulltime mother.  In this current moment of Lean In rhetoric and new iterations of the perennial “have it all” debates, Harper is disarmingly clear about her own situation, asking, after her daughter is born: “Why didn’t motherhood matter?  Why was the home still a separate, unequal sphere? Why were mothers and children still so isolated from those things that really mattered to the childless, to the world outside the home?  Why did we talk endlessly about stupid things like Cheerios and diapers?”  And to the crux of her book: “Why did I feel so fractured?”

Searching to locate meaning in the time she spends caring for her daughter, beyond a circle of other mothers, is the axis on which identity, cultural value, and priority all spin for Harper.  Scholar that she is, she turns to the volume The American Woman’s Home, written by Catherine Beecher (sister to Harriet) who called for “a revolution in domestic arrangements” and Harper says is the “precursor to all the contemporary lifestyle magazines, TV talk shows, blogs and Websites that have reinvented the domestic arts for the post-millennial home…” Harper recognizes that for Beecher “the created home is a political act” and she wants it to be for her as well, not by redecorating it, literally or otherwise, but by having it hold broad, and real, cultural value, something I think is happening.

Harper writes, “the life of the home had to be remade… it had to matter in real and consequential ways.”  She is critical of the “modern feminist movement,” as she broadly labels it, as one that has decided to “map power where it already existed” i.e. outside the domestic sphere, while neglecting to elevate the work women (largely) do inside the home and keeping this devalued.  In order to support women’s work outside the home, Harper argues, the domestic and childrearing work so many women do needs to be legitimized and legalized, in part to help support women working outside the home.

It’s an argument whose point I see, but I think oversimplifies. While it’s clear Harper’s goal isn’t to go into detail or depth, the idea that the feminist movement, broadly painted, has roundly devalued domestic work to the elevation of work outside the home seems too one-note to me. While not necessarily her point, Harper doesn’t raise the issue of shifting the expectations of gender roles or equal parenting.

Her daughter teaches her how much “to work inside the home is a worthwhile occupation,” Harper writes, although this realization leaves her at odds with her education and expectations of the professional working world. She writes, “I belonged in neither world: much of my energy was invested in raising Ella so I couldn’t fully claim my professional identity, but neither could I identify what seemed to me the petty concerns of motherhood. I loved my daughter and I loved my home.  I did not love the stay-at-home culture of mothering.” Harper concludes that there has to be a future shift where the bifurcation into being a “work outside the home” mother doesn’t square off with “work inside the home” woman either — a “mommy war” reduction that I question as still legitimate.

Fundamentally, Harper wants the halves of her life to join, primarily by feeling each sphere is validated — the life-changing experience of motherhood co-existing with the intellectual and professional ambition she realizes, for her, has been more valorized. She concludes that insisting on motherhood and the home as generative space is an almost radical throwback to Beecher’s nineteenth-century insistence on the importance of these activities and demand for their recognition. It’s an interesting argument, in some ways provocative for its potential to twine conservative strands of thought with progressive ideals. Figuring out how child-rearing and the domestic life matters to her personally, and how to reinvent its meanings within a larger context, politically, is another parsing that Harper negotiates well in the last chapter of her book.

While driving through Los Angeles a few months ago (what else does one do here?) I listened to a new release of a song by a band called The Head and the Heart.  The tune was catchy, but what lingered in my mind was the band’s name — calling out the division of the body and the symbolic resonances each part holds.  The central tenet of Harper’s explorations remains joining what has been sundered into separate spheres: mother/scholar, domestic/public, former self/present self and the million ways identity is fractured, constantly, daily, even moment-to-moment, and the intentional work it takes to keep rearranging these pieces to make a whole.

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...

Talk about irony: the same week that Rock Center with Brian Williams aired a story about a growing “concussion crisis” in girls’ soccer, I also got the curriculum for my 11-year-old daughter Maya’s soccer practice: “Heading (attacking and defensive situations, being brave).”

I definitely watched the Rock Center story with concern. Research shows that girls report twice as many concussions as boys in sports they both play.

The report aired Wednesday, and Maya practiced heading on Thursday. On Sunday we sat on the sidelines watching Maya’s team face off against a northern New Jersey opponent. The girls fought to control the ball, with neither team clearly dominating.

Then, as if in slow motion, I watched the ball sail through the air toward Maya at midfield. She stepped into the ball, leaned forward, and headed it toward the goal. Of course, she was fine. I’m sure she felt pleased with herself for putting the new technique into play in a game situation. To be honest, I was pleased myself, although anxious at the same time.

And here are the questions I’ve been turning over since the game: is this “crisis” one that should change the game of youth soccer for girls? Should heading be banned? One expert in the Rock Center story, Bob Cantu, the director of sports medicine at Emerson Hospital in Concord, MA suggests that it should, because “girls as a group have far weaker necks.”

Naturally I take concussions seriously and would not want to do anything that could jeopardize Maya’s health. But I’m not sure I buy this so-called crisis.  For one thing, the research draws on data from high school athletes.  How much can we generalize from that population to the nearly 1.5 million girls who play youth soccer in the US every year?

What’s more, is this thinking about girls’ weakness that much different from earlier arguments suggesting women shouldn’t be educated because our brains are smaller than men’s? Or that women shouldn’t walk alone at night because we face the threat of rape?

It seems to me that ideas about “protection” are often a guise for social constraints on women and girls.  What athletic opportunities would we curtail in the name of “safety” for girls?

For now, at least, I want Maya to practice “being brave,” and if that means heading the ball, I’ll be cheering her on.

But GWP readers, what do you think? How do you think about “risk” and “safety” for your daughters or sons?

Greetings – we are Annie Howell and Lisa Robinson, guest bloggers for Mama w/Pen. We’re here because our film, SMALL, BEAUTIFULLY MOVING PARTS opens Friday, May 11 in New York City, then moves on to over ten cities nationwide. It’s a story about technology and self-expression, love and major life changes. Here’s the synopsis:

When technophile Sarah Sparks (Anna Margaret Hollyman) becomes pregnant, her uncertainties about motherhood trigger an impulsive road trip to the source of her anxiety: her long-estranged mother living far away and off-the-grid.

So, yes, our movie features a female tech-head protagonist, and that choice often has us thinking about gender and technology. The New Yorker this week features an article on youth hacker George Hotz, who at 17 was the first person to decode an iphone in order to use his existing data plan. George describes hacking as such to New Yorker writer David Kushner:

“It’s a testosterone thing,” he told me. “It’s competitiveness, but it isn’t necessarily competitiveness with other people. It’s you versus the system. And I don’t mean the system like the government thing, I mean the system like the computer. ‘I’m going to stick it to the computer. I’m going to make it do this!’ And the computer throws up an error like ‘No, I’m not going to do this.’ It’s really a male thing to say, ‘I’m going to make you do this!’ ” (“George Hotz, Sony, and the Anonymous Hacker Wars” by David Kushner, May 7, 2012.)

Is “I’m going to make you do this!” really, um, exclusively male? Granted this is one statement by one individual, but it’s reflective of an idea that’s clearly permeating our culture: that technology is more or less for the boys.

And on to film directing ….

In 2004 The New York Times ran an article by Nancy Hass that praised the number of women working in Hollywood as producers but included a sidebar about women directors that expressed some surprising assumptions. (“Hollywood’s New Old Girls’ Network” by Nancy Hass, April 24, 2005.)

The Dean of USC Film School, Elizabeth Daley, said this to Nancy Hass:

“There are talented girls who want to do this, but so far they haven’t done what the boys do – band together and sacrifice everything to make a small film,” she said. “It’s those films that eventually find their way into the hands of studio executives looking for the next hot young thing.”

And there’s more:

“Young women are less likely to get support, both financial and emotional, from their parents,” Ms. Daley added. “In my experience, parents of girls aren’t as eager to give them their life savings to make a movie,” she said.

A former studio head, who did not give her name in order to protect relationships, said: “The fact is that to be a director you have to be unbelievably ruthless…. They have a cold streak that most women I know don’t have and don’t want to have. They are both artist and commander, and they have a maniacal vision that precludes them from caring about anything but the film.”

Apologies, but denying all women the right to a natural-born cold streak, a maniacal spirit and the right to be, well, bossy – “I’M GOING TO MAKE YOU DO THIS!” — is only relevant if we allow these ridiculous stereotypes to continue to circulate.

Hack female style! And direct movies. We went to a film school wherein half of the class was female – and those women brought to their craft everything unique about themselves, and certainly got their movies made. Filmmaking is as varied in methodology as are the stories that any one individual wants to tell. Our story is about a woman and her love of machines … and how she comes undone in a transition toward parenthood. Watch the trailer here – and hope to see you opening weekend at Cinema Village!

—Annie Howell and Lisa Robinson, co-directors

SMALL, BEAUTIFULLY MOVING PARTS

Next weekend I have a unique opportunity to reflect on how I’ve grown since my graduation from Muskingum College—now University—in 1991. My husband Nikhil Deogun and I will be delivering the undergraduate commencement address.

Needless to say, it’s an honor and a privilege, but also a big responsibility. After all, we want to impart wisdom, right?

We’ve had fun thinking back on the people we were 21 years ago, and the unexpected paths we’ve followed. We want to give the graduates advice about how to navigate those unexpected turns themselves, about how to find love, follow their professional dreams, and make a difference.

For me, the question of making a difference has also come from some unexpected places. Here’s a sneak peak at some of my thoughts for the Class of 2012:

I’ve learned that through mothering I can make my mark on the world as much as—and maybe more than—at work. Let me be clear: I love my work at the National Women’s Studies Association and find it meaningful. Highlights of my working life include planning a yearly national conference that features cutting-edge feminist scholarship. I’m also a leader in conversations about women’s issues outside of higher education: in 2010, I organized a meeting at the invitation of the White House Council on Women and Girls to discuss how feminist academics could help shape policy initiatives, and I recently attended a Department of Education-sponsored discussion about applying classroom learning in community settings.

Yet I’ve discovered that motherhood can sometimes be richer ground for expressing my feminist values, and for cultivating parts of myself, than the workplace. Our children, Maya—who’s 11—and Sameer, who’s 9—really want to make the world a better place. More important, they take action to make a difference. For example, Maya teamed up with friends to sell hot chocolate at our local sledding hill to raise money for a neighborhood soup kitchen. Sameer has spent time serving meals in a Newark homeless shelter. Of course, they’re normal kids who sometimes spend too much time watching Teen Nick and absorbed in their iPods. But when they notice inequality they ask questions and they want to do something about it.

Here’s the lesson I’ve learned: while you’re busy building your career, don’t forget about opportunities at home, whether those come in the form of parenting or other non-work pursuits. It really is true what you’ve probably heard from faculty already: you want to be a well-rounded person.

Now GWP readers, what advice do you have for the class of 2012? What unexpected discoveries have you made looking back on your life over five, ten, or 20 years?

As the Presidential campaign heats up (what you think it’s hot now?) the rhetoric about the “War on Women” will continue to escalate. Even though the GOP will continue to replay Hilary Rosen’s unfortunate “Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life,” quote, we need to refocus on what I believe Rosen was trying to focus on. The fact is that Ann Romney has never had to worry if her paycheck would stretch to the next payday, if she would get assigned enough hours at work or if taking a day off from work would result in being fired. Those are the issues I would hope we focus on as the United States decides who will lead them for the next four years.

Back in the lab, mothers in science have similar issues to contend with.

In the recent issue of  “American Scientist” the married social scientist couple of Williams and Ceci offer up the theory that perhaps the reason why there are so few women in science and engineering is that women want babies. BABIES! Oh, those cute, plump little beings that bring women’s work to a standstill (well except for changing diapers, feeding, clothing, rocking to sleep, but that’s not work, work, right?).

The premise Williams and Ceci present is that most, if not all, institutional discrimination has been dealt with. Let’s go with that for the sake of non-argument, ok? Their hypothesis is that “the hurdles women face often stem from a combination of several factors, including the decision to have children and cultural norms that place the burden of raising children and managing households disproportionately on women.”

My first reaction (besides laughing, but I said let’s assume no other discrimination is taking place, right?) is that change does not happen this quickly. Even if we could say that equity had found its way to how women in science and engineering operate (fair shake in the grant, publishing and tenure processes) in the last ten years (to be generous), how quickly do we believe it will take to get a change in the landscape? Do Williams and Ceci believe that once the equity horn was sounded that women would hightail it out of the lab into the bedroom to start reproducing? That women who fled to other careers would run begging to be let back into their abandoned labs? Let’s give it a generation before we focus in on just motherhood as the root cause.

On the other hand, let’s go with Williams and Ceci. Let’s say that everything is hunky-dory except the whole mommy thing.

Let’s deal with why the mommy thing becomes the biggest challenge…

Sue Rosser recalls her own challenges with being pregnant and in graduate school. How people immediately expected less of her despite any decline in her work. She even reports that an adviser suggested that she have an abortion because her second pregnancy would interrupt data collection.

Rosser also outlines the systemic challenges to combining motherhood with a career in academic science – mainly paid leave after having the adorable career ending package, er, baby:

Although the National Institutes of Health offers eight weeks of paid leave to postdoctoral fellows who receive the National Research Service Award, recipients can only take the leave in the unlikely situation where every postdoc at the university is also eligible for eight weeks of paid leave. A study conducted by Mary Ann Mason of the University of California at Berkeley documented that of the 61 members of the Association of American Universities (the top elite research institutions), only 23 percent guaranteed a minimum of six weeks paid leave for postdocs and only 13 percent promised the same to graduate students.

Academic science is not your typical workplace. Experiments do need to continue, but much like a law firm, there are other bodies in the lab that can carry on the work. We just need a system that supports this model of respecting that scientists are human beings and as such we get pregnant, have babies, get sick and have to take care of our families.

Rosser ends her piece with some amazing advice for women and men who want to combine parenthood with a career in academic science. The one I repeat over and over to my students is PICK YOUR LIFE PARTNER CAREFULLY! This continues to be the biggest choice women have to make. Will your partner understand when you have to stay late to make sure an experiment doesn’t explode? That you do need a month on the open sea collecting fish? Or need to travel to Africa like Rosser?

In many ways, I wish that Williams and Cece were correct. That the question of why women aren’t staying in science is all about babies. Because we can fix that. We can build child care centers, we can pay women to stay home in order to heal from the birthing experience and bond with their bundles of joy. Sadly, I think it’s not the only reason. But maybe we need to start acting as if it is the reason and start changing the structure of how science is done. Because in the words of Ann Romney, we need to respect the choices women make and, for me, that means having institutions created that support women in those choices. Because it’s not much of a choice if there isn’t a way to act out that choice, now is there?

Amy Chua’s 2011 book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother caused quite a stir. Apparently it was also prophetic: one year later, U.S. readers have a new crop of books about how everyone else raises their kids. Everyone except Americans, that is: the Chinese, the French, the Argentineans, the Tibetans, the Polynesians… and so on.

The verdict? Let’s just say that in the Parental Olympics, the U.S. appears to be losing, and losing big.

Over the past year, the media has reported how the Chinese are raising children capable of crushing American students on standardized math tests. (When the parent in question is Amy Chua, one of those kids also turns out to be a concert pianist.) More recently, journalist Pamela Druckerman has filled us in on the superiority of French motherhood in Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting: a certain Gallic savoir faire seems to produce tots who eat everything and behave perfectly while their mothers take frequent smoking breaks. Later this month, we’ll be treated to a slightly different explanation about French maternal superiority, courtesy of Elisabeth Badinter’s The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women. Add to that the book I just finished reading, Mei-Ling Hopgood’s How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm: And Other Adventures in Parenting (from Argentina to Tanzania and everywhere in between), and even the most confident mama might begin to question herself.

As Allison Kimmich pointed out last month, these books “highlight our cultural obsession with motherhood, or the failings of American mothers.”

Even so, I confess to being fascinated by these books. I don’t know if that’s because deep down I’m insecure about my own mothering (and if I am, perhaps that’s as a result of all these books…?) or because I’ve always loved travel and the distance one gains from another cultural perspective. I welcome glimpses into other ways of doing things, particularly when it comes to parenting and family. I often wonder whether the “intensive parenting” practiced by many U.S. middle- and upper-middle class parents (mostly mothers) actually benefits kids—not to mention whether it places far more burdens on mothers and primary caregivers. (“Perfect madness” was how Judith Warner described it.) Other cultural perspectives can shed light on how we’ve constructed particular ideals of motherhood and family, and maybe even how we can change them.

Hopgood is the least judgmental of all of these writers. In fact, she goes to lengths not to judge (which can also be a problem if you forever wallow in cultural relativism, an oft-discussed topic in my Women’s Studies classes). Her book is a journalistic account of how other groups of people around the world approach various parenting practices: how the Chinese potty train early, how the Japanese let their children fight, how Polynesians play without their parents, and so on.

For example, did you know that Chinese toddlers are frequently potty trained by eighteen months, if not twelve? Or that Argentine children and their families regularly stay up until the wee hours of the night? How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm is full of tidbits like this.

If you’re interested in more detailed anthropological accounts of familial practices in other parts of the world, you should head straight to Hopgood’s bibliography, which contains some great sources. Or, if you’re more interested in a feminist critique of contemporary motherhood in industrialized nations, you should wait to read Badinter’s The Conflict. But if you don’t mind a breezy tour of what parenting looks like globally, mixed with Hopgood’s own personal reflections about her life as a transplanted Asian American new mom living in Buenos Aires, you should pick up her book.

Hopgood’s slightly more serious intention emerges in the final chapter. She’d like us to open up to other approaches to parenting, embrace a little more cosmopolitanism when it comes to family life, and let go of some of our judgment:

It’s unhealthy to enclose ourselves in parental parochialism, ruled by the plaintive, guilty insistence that there is a single, best way to raise children. We may or may not adopt what another family in another culture or place does, but we can take comfort in knowing that there really is more than one good way to get a baby to sleep, transport her from place to place, and feed her.

Kids are “amazingly adaptive and resilient creatures,” she writes. And there are “many ways to be a good parent in the world.”

One could certainly unpack “parent” to develop a more nuanced examination of how various cultural practices are gendered—or in some cases, how they might undo heteronormative, Western ideals of mothering and fathering. (Aka pygmy fathers turn out to be pretty interesting in this regard.) Come to think of it, Hopgood’s case studies might make some great material for my Women’s Studies students.

In the meantime, her book suggests some of the wide variations within the global landscape of parenting—as well as how parenting practices have morphed over time and continue to change today, from the U.S. to Argentina to China. And that raises an interesting question: if ideas about parenting are traveling across borders, like so many other things, is this global exchange altering how we think about what it means to parent?