Recent Girl w/Pen posts—Stop the War on Pink—Let’s Take a Look at Toys for Boys by Tristan Bridges and CJ Pascoe, Who’s Afraid of the War on Pink from Girl w/Pen founder Deborah Siegel, and Girls, Boys, Feminism, Toys, a dialogue between Deborah and feminist author Rebecca Hains—all focus on how  ‘gender coding’ toys via color and sex specific illustrations harms kids of both sexes.  The discussion underlines how long feminist change can take. It also illustrates the popular influence of those who claim to be pro-child, but thread old, unfounded gender stereotypes throughout their public pronouncements and publications, promoting the notion that from birth girls and boys learn, play and relate in vastly different ways.

This makes it difficult to avoid letting discussions related to gender fall into a binary frame. As so many of us have pointed out for more years than I care to recall, these issues are not either/or, zero sum ones.  Much of the content and comments on the posts mentioned above have reiterated these points.  Yet hanging around in the public mind are ideas reflecting beliefs such as ‘helping girls equals hurting boys’ or ‘progress for boys is a set back for girls’ or ‘working on behalf of girls means ignoring boys’. Nonsense.  A gender equitable environment is one where assumptions of differences based primarily on one’s sex and/or gender affiliation are not part of the picture.  No serious feminist has ever argued otherwise.

In their post Deborah and Rebecca refer to Christina Hoff Sommers’ 2001 book, The War Against Boys . Sommers’ claimed that efforts on behalf of girls were a direct cause of much that was not working for boys in our nations schools.  I was one of the feminists who responded that actually, what was good for girls was also good for boys and vice versa.  Those of us, women and men, who shared this perspective, offered numerous examples: new methods of teaching science, better sex education, more physical activities for both boys and girls, a de-emphasis on traditional, option-limiting gender roles.

Of course, the hitch here is and always has been what is considered “good’.  If you want to continue the status quo, then you want to do all sorts of things that involve emphasizing gender differences— different toys, different teaching methods, different schools, different opportunities in sports and yes, even different signature colors.  This is a deeply conservative agenda.  It is an agenda that says,’ well, the roles of women and men have changed enough, we certainly don’t want anymore.’

It seems that the more  progress we make  toward less rigid gender roles, the more extreme the gender coding of toys becomes. Back in my December, 2012 post, Pink is for Girls, Black is for Boys, I noted that 2012 marked the fortieth anniversary of the best selling children’s record, Free To Be You and Me. Yet the Free To Be message—  everyone in our society needed a wider, less gender-specific range of choices and these choices should begin in childhood—was missing in the toy stores I visited.  The toys were far more color coded than four decades ago. Back then bikes, trucks, airplanes and even dolls sported a wide range of bright colors—red, green, yellow as well as shades of blue and rose.  The pink/lavender vs. black/ dark navy dichotomy is a division that, among other things, probably helps sales. Teach children and parents the color-code and you double your market.  What little brother will want to settle for his big sister’s pink tricycle?

But what may be good for sales is very bad for kids and ultimately for all of us. Rigid gender roles inhibit equality, limit individual flexibility, and rob us of our fullest selves.  Thank goodness for the Let Toys Be Toys Project and other similar efforts.

And lets not forget that whether the news media noticed or not, working for changes in gendered assumptions about male roles has been part of the feminist agenda for decades.  Change for women without change for men isn’t the change we hoped for fifty years ago and it isn’t the change feminist men and women, whether in the fields of women’s studies, girls’ studies, gender studies or masculinity studies are working for now.

In fact one of the great things about Girl w/Pen bloggers is that we span all these fields and more and we do so across traditional academic disciplines as well as generational lines.  When I directed the Wellesley Centers for Women, the sign on my desk read, “None of us is as smart as all of us.”   Girl w/Pen feels like my old office these days!

The other week, Girl w/Pen bloggers and masculinity studies scholars Tristan Bridges and CJ Pascoe called us to pause the war on pink and take a look at boys’ toys, prompting a response from media studies scholar Rebecca Hains (author of the forthcoming The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through the Princess-Obsessed Years) and a reflection from me on feminist history and popular feminist debate.

This week, I invited Rebecca to dialogue with me. Here is our exchange. And keep an eye out for some thoughts on it all coming soon from Girl w/Pen blogger Susan Bailey, too! You can learn more about Rebecca’s work here.

Deborah: In my post the other week (“Who’s Afraid of the War on Pink?”) I looked back at the history of arguing “enough about girls, let’s focus on boys,” to mixed effect. You make the thoughtful point that the ploy is not merely a harmless rhetorical effect. Can you elaborate?

Rebecca: In all honesty, the argument that we need to stop (“or at least pause”) the war on pink didn’t even come off as a rhetorical device to me. I’m sad to say that it just came across as ill-informed. There isn’t a war on pink; there’s a thoughtful, measured argument that while pink isn’t inherently bad, it’s limiting the play worlds and imaginations of boys and girls alike. So “Who’s Afraid of the War on Pink” reads, to me and my colleagues, like a straw man argument. The authors were conjuring up a nonexistent epidemic of myopic thinking, instead of engaging with anyone’s actual writing on the subject of girl culture and the rise of pink. I expect better from our esteemed colleagues in masculinity studies: if they would like to engage with those of us working in girlhood studies, and perhaps learn from our successes (we’re happy to share what we’ve learned), that would be terrific–they just need to demonstrate that they’ve read at least some of our work so that we can have a meaningful conversation.

Besides, straw-man arguments strike me as more problematic coming from a feminist academic blog like Girl w/Pen than, say, an anti-feminist source like Christina Hoff Sommers. (A case of “the medium is the message,” perhaps?)

Deborah: Tell us a bit about your book that’s coming out next fall, The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through the Princess-Obsessed Years (Source Books, 2014). Is there any way in which you think girls can be active agents in princess play? In what ways do you hope your book will steer popular debate? And what do you most want to change?

Rebecca: Thanks for asking. The Princess Problem is really a handbook for parents to raise media-literate daughters–girls who are able to think critically about marketing, the beauty ideal, gender stereotypes, and race representation. This is an important task for 21st-century parents: We must coach our children, guiding them to become critical viewers of media culture in general. And yet media literacy is not something that’s a mainstream concept yet in the U.S.; many other countries include media literacy in their K-12 curricula, but that’s not the case here. I’d like that to change.

I focus in my book on princess culture in particular because “princess” is so pervasive–it’s THE defining pop culture phenomenon in early girlhood. And it’s the perfect example to use in a text on raising media literate girls because the issues we need to discuss with our daughters so often differ from than the issues we would discuss with our sons. (For example, body image issues are a very different beast when it comes to girls and boys.) But the principles I teach in The Princess Problem could easily be extrapolated to raising media-literate sons, too.

And yes, I absolutely believe girls can be active agents in princess play. Kids are not passive victims of media and toys; they’re active consumers who regularly defy our assumptions. That’s a position I’ve espoused in some of my earlier work–for example, my study of girls and Bratz dolls.

It’s important to note, then, that in The Princess Problem, my goal is not to persuade girls that princesses are bad or to “de-princess” them; rather, it is to help parents help their girls reason become critical viewers who can see that there are many, many ways to be a girl.

Deborah: I loved your recent post at Sociological Images (“When Cowboys Wore Pink”), where you concluded, “Monochromatic girlhood drives a wedge between boys and girls — separating their spheres during a time when cross-sex play is healthy and desirable, and when their imaginations should run free.” Some of our Brave Girls Alliance colleagues have created incredible alternatives. From where you stand, what do you see as some of the most exciting challenges to the children’s industrial complex as we know it?

Rebecca: The Let Toys Be Toys movement is doing terrific work challenging the status quo in the UK. By calling for toys to be desegregated–grouped by theme or interest type, rather than by gender—they’re empowering parents and children to think outside of the pink and blue boxes that marketers have been placing children into. I’d really love to see a comparable movement here in the U.S. and Canada. With folks like Melissa Wardy of Pigtail Pals, Michele Yulo of Princess Free Zone, and Ines Almeida of Toward the Stars raising so much consciousness about the limitations that today’s marketing foists upon kids of both sexes, it’s the right time.

I’d like to see a movement that goes one step further, too, and challenges marketers to put an end to the incessant pink-washing. By “pink-washing,” I’m specifically referring to the instances where marketers or toy makers create a product that is pink for no reason other than to make it as girly as possible. After all, there’s nothing wrong with pink–it’s a perfectly nice color–but there IS something wrong when it’s a) promoting sex role stereotypes and b) basically the only color found in little girls’ worlds. They deserve a full rainbow of colors.

Pink-washing is unfair to our boys, as well: I just heard from a mom the other day whose two-year-old son wanted a toy shopping cart for his third birthday.  All she could find at her local Toys R Us was a pink cart. She bought it anyway–but she knows that the adult men in her family are likely to think it’s weird (which is a shame). But, come on; have you ever seen a real shopping cart in pink? I haven’t. I doubt they exist. Pink-washing toys that have no good reason to be pink–that would be considered gender-neutral if they were not–perpetuates so many retrograde stereotypes about sex roles, it’s offensive.

Deborah: When GoldieBlox, a company initially celebrated for its creation of a toy designed to foster girls’ interest in engineering, ultimately disappointed many of us by slapping a princess narrative on it, it seemed challenging, at the time, to articulate a position that both acknowledged the step in the right direction and pushed for more.  (My feeble attempt posted here.) In the war between industry and better alternatives, is it always necessary, do you think, to choose sides? How do we measure progress in a world half-transformed?

Rebecca: I prefer to think of it as a dialogue rather than a war. I don’t want to fight companies; I want to hold them accountable and ask them to do better. Companies have so many stakeholders to work with that they often don’t realize that they are perpetuating gender biases. If they receive constructive criticism from enough parents and advocates, though, they can create better offerings.

Unfortunately, the world is indeed half-transformed in these matters, and it’s often a case of one step forward, two steps back. For example, we can look at Disney’s films and see that slowly but surely, their representations of race and gender have been improving with time. I believe that their efforts at racial inclusivity and empowered female characters signal that they’ve been paying attention to their critics over the years. The problem is that in a behemoth company like Disney, change comes very slowly; and their own Consumer Products Division isn’t keeping pace with the positive changes within the Studios division.

So when it comes to the toys, we’re seeing the same old stale ideas about what’s “princessly,” or stereotypically feminine–even when the products are based on innovative new on-screen characters. That was certainly the case with Disney’s Consumer Products Division’s horrible redesign of Merida last year: she was strong on screen, per Pixar’s wishes; but as her look didn’t “fit” with the existing high-glamour Disney Princess brand, Disney’s Consumer Products Division made several changes to Merida’s looks (see posts here, here and here), undercutting everything parents and kids loved about Merida. What a conundrum.

Deborah: It’s a conundrum indeed. Frozen, anyone? I’m already wondering how princessly those Anna and Elsa action figures will be.

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This month marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s declaration of an “unconditional war on poverty.” Over the next decade, Johnson and his successor, President Richard Nixon, initiated a series of government programs and policies for raising Americans’ living standards. Yet this month also marks over a quarter century since President Ronald Reagan’s 1988 announcement that the war on poverty was over, and that poverty had won. The next decade produced a retrenchment in federal anti-poverty programs culminating in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, which shifted government priorities toward promoting married couple families as a solution to poverty. To mark the anniversaries of these very different approaches to the government’s role in poverty reduction, the Council on Contemporary Families circulated two briefing reports that put poverty reduction, poverty rates, and policy responses to poverty in perspective.

Reviewing anti-poverty efforts over the last 50 years in “Was the war on poverty a failure? Or are anti-poverty efforts swimming simply against a stronger tide?”, University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen examines the many early victories for the War on Poverty. Poverty fell significantly in the first decade of the program, with the most dramatic and long-lasting victory being the reduction of poverty among the elderly. Poverty rates of the elderly were more than halved in the first 15 years and have remained near record lows since then. By contrast, after falling throughout the 1960s and 1970s, poverty rates for children began to rise again in the 1980s, and are now near the high levels of the early 1960s when the War on Poverty began.

Cohen argues that these setbacks are the result of manufacturing sector and unionization declines that have been driving down wages for less-educated workers and increasing income inequality since the mid 1970s. These trends were reinforced by social policies that slashed funding to cities, cut back on investments in infrastructure, suppressed growth in the minimum wage, and reduced some important sources of assistance for low-income families. The outcome? Today the United States’ rate of child poverty (even after adjusting for frequently unmeasured government benefits) is 18 percent — much higher than any comparably rich country.

Many politicians blame the resurgence of poverty on the spread of unwed motherhood and conclude that promoting marriage among low-income individuals would do more to reduce poverty than government investments. But a companion piece to Cohen’s report, “Promoting Marriage among Single Mothers: An Ineffective Weapon in the War on Poverty?” by Ohio State University sociologist Kristi Williams, suggests that the reality is more complicated. Williams summarizes new research indicating that efforts to get impoverished single mothers to marry are unlikely to make much of a dent in poverty rates and may even have some harmful outcomes for mothers and children alike.

Stephanie Coontz, historian and CCF co-chair, heralds these reports as a useful corrective to two myths about poverty. “The first myth is that government can’t do anything about poverty. Cohen shows us where government programs have been uniquely effective in reducing poverty, even over the past three decades of poverty-producing economic trends, and where government could do much more, as many other governments are in fact doing.”

“The second myth,” Coontz contends, “is that getting more women married would solve poverty. But non-marriage is often an outcome of poverty as well as a contributor to it. And Williams shows that in some cases, marriage is actually risky for a woman who is already a single mother. Williams suggests alternative strategies that in combination with Cohen’s proposals may be more helpful in reducing poverty.”

Cohen’s report identifies specific government policies that could immediately decrease child poverty. Using analysis from the March 2013 Current Population Survey, Cohen shows how reducing payroll taxes on poor families would ease poverty by 1.6 percent. Reducing work-related expenses such as child care and transportation would decrease poverty by 2.6 percent. And eliminating out of pocket medical costs for poor families would cut poverty by 3.1 percent. The remainder of poverty reduction, according to Cohen, involves improving minimum wage and shifting jobs policies. He points us to the success of Great Britain, which has managed to almost halve child poverty over the past 13 years.

Williams identifies a government policy that does not work: marriage promotion. Williams’  briefing report, “Promoting Marriage among Single Mothers: An Ineffective Weapon in the War on Poverty?“, examines the conventional wisdom on single mothers and marriage promotion (get ’em married to solve poverty!), and demonstrates that promoting marriage has been an ineffective way of reducing poverty among single mothers and their children. She suggests that a more effective approach would be to focus on decreasing unintended or mistimed births through public education, increasing sexual and reproductive health resources, and providing early and comprehensive sexuality education.

I’ve been struck lately by the polarities that sometimes infuse popular feminist debate around gender, childhood, and toys. On multiple fronts.

CJ Pascoe and Tristan Bridges’ post here last week, controversially titled “Stop the War on Pink—Let’s Take a Look at Boys’ Toys,” sparked a minor bruhaha in popular feminist circles. In their title, and in their post, Pascoe and Bridges used a rhetorical technique that my colleagues at The OpEd Project call “the refocus.” While it seemed to me that their stance of “enough about pink already” could be read as a foil, and a way into their argument, others, like media studies professor and author Rebecca Hains, rightly took issue.  “Does the ‘War on Pink’ Need to Stop for Boys’ Sakes? No, and Here’s Why,” the title of a post by Hains, in response, stated.

Ultimately, as a brief exchange over at Facebook made clear, all parties stand on the same side of the issues here and believe boys and girls all deserve a wider rainbow of options. We agreed a forum didn’t make sense, since it would consist primarily of head nodding. We may disagree on the effective use of certain rhetorical tactics. But we all agree on a similar flavor of change.

Still, it stayed with me. As someone obsessed by the way feminist history repeats, it got me thinking about the past.

There’s a long history to the so-called boy versus girl advocacy in the popular realm. When conservative critic Christina Hoff Sommers came out with The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men in 2001, the very title made me cringe. While willing to be persuaded that boys, in fact, had problems, I saw zero correlation between their issues and “misguided feminism,” however one defined that phrase. Sommers maintained that the so-called “girl crisis” (her term) had led to changes in schools, politics, and parenting that had a horrible cost for boys, who allegedly became even more at risk, as a result.  Interestingly, the book was reissued in 2013 with the “Feminism” of the subtitle changed to “Policies” instead.

But back in 2001, egged on by Sommers’ barb, feminists took the bait. Many responded with what seemed to me the wise yet obvious retort that the war for healthier childhood was not about the girls versus the boys, and that feminists (doh) were not to blame.  I was as indignant as the rest that Sommers, who registered as a scholar, had stooped to such a ploy. I remember thinking, did she really believe some of the things she wrote and said? Whether she did or whether she was using rhetoric to magnify her point, for all the attention given her book, it was an effective, if maddening, ruse.

Much has changed in the 13 years since Sommers’ controversial title first made waves. The field of girls studies has grown exponentially, built on an incredible foundation laid down by the field’s early architects (Girl w/Pen’s own Susan Bailey among them). The field of masculinity studies has deepened and widened, too.  In 2014, those advocating for boys and those advocating for girls are no longer in opposition.  Or at least, we shouldn’t be. Right?

As is often the case on the Internets, a forum as enriching as it can be problematic, when I find myself agreeing with both “sides” of an alleged debate, nodding “yes” to parties who somehow find themselves on opposing divides, my instinct is to bring them together.

Watch for a dialogue between me and Rebecca Hains–-as well as more Manly Musings from CJ Pascoe and Tristan Bridges–all coming to this space very soon.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter @deborahgirlwpen, join me on Facebook, and subscribe to my quarterly newsletter to keep posted on my coaching workshops and offerings, writings, and talks.

by C.J. Pascoe and Tristan Bridges

As feminist parent-scholars we’d like to call for an end to (or at least a pause in) the seeming incessant focus on rejecting all that is pink, salmon, rose, coral, blush, and flush. As much of nation recovers from the frantic collective shopping spree that characterizes the end of the year, we’d like to make the case that the denunciation of all things pink should not really be our primary focus if we want to move toward a more gender equal world for girls and boys. Instead, we suggest that we begin to turn our attention to expanding the acceptable range of boys’ toys and their colors.

Many of us who think about gender and childhood toys are by now familiar with the debate about GoldieBlox, a toy company that sells products encouraging girls’ interest in engineering.   The company’s commercial depicting girls deploying a Rube Goldberg-type setup with the typical girl toys—princesses, dolls, teacups, and oh-so-much pink—was seen as both inspirational and problematic.  Commentators both celebrated the fact that girls were being encouraged to engage in engineering and critiqued the fact that that the products marketed by the company are still firmly framed in terms of girl culture.

The cultural process of “pinkification” (as Gwen Sharpe refers to it) is a way in which toys and forms of play which may have been historically associated with boys are rendered acceptably feminine.  Indeed many, us included, are concerned with toys marketed to girls that are a larger part of a socialization process that encourages girls to be nice, passive and relationship-oriented. As Ellen Seiter notes in her book Sold Separately, “advertisements for girls’ toys have undergone fewer changes than other toys in the past fifty years because they continue to depict girls’ play as a miniature version of their mothers’ domestic work” (74). Luckily Pottery Barn simply leads with this sort of gender stereotyping in its toy section (placing gender “neutral” toys at the bottom of its boys and girls pages), even as it divides up its offerings by gender.

We find it a little concerning, however, that this discussion is so focused on girls. What would this discussion look like if we examined boys’ toys? What might this conversation look like if we focused not on getting rid of pink, princesses, or housekeeping toys, but on making these toys acceptable for everyone to play with. After all, as others have pointed out, this “pink is for girls” thing is a relatively new development. In her book Pink and Blue, Jo Paoletti details the historic transformations involved in gendering these two colors.  While a brief look at JeongMee Yoon’s The Pink and Blue Project vividly illustrates the extent of this transformation, there’s no reason that color coding toys by gender couldn’t undergo future evolutions (especially with consumer pressure).  Indeed, organizations like Let Toys Be Toys are fighting to get retailers to stop promoting toys as “for girls” or “for boys” and some toy stores are starting to try to make changes.

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A new book, The Polyamorists Next Door: Inside Multiple-partner Relationships and Families (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers), takes readers beyond the myths to explore the true lives of real families.  For this month’s column, I had the chance to find out more from the author, sociologist Elisabeth Sheff, Ph.D., an expert witness, educator, speaker, and consultant on polyamorous families with children who also writes for Psychology Today.

Adina Nack: When I think of non-monogamy I think of pop culture portrayals of polygamy or men with some sort harem. Is it a common assumption that non-monogamy is simply an excuse for one man to have many female sexual partners?

Elisabeth Sheff: The media rarely portrays the full variety of non-monogamy. I study polyamory, a style of openly conducted non-monogamy that emphasizes emotional intimacy, honesty, and negotiation. In polyamory, both women and men can have access to other partners, which is very different from polygyny, the most common form of polygamy in which one man can have several wives. In contrast, polyamorists, with intentions of creating emotionally intimate relationships, differ from mainstream swingers who emphasize sexual variety with emotional exclusivity. In fact, many couples who swing set boundaries that expressly prohibit people from developing strong feelings for someone outside of the committed couple. Then, cheaters have non-monogamous relationships but lie about them or keep them secret, which runs counter to the polyamorous emphasis on honesty and negotiation.

AN: It sounds like polyamory is a very different experience, especially for the women?

ES: Yes, poly women say that they relish the opportunity to have multiple partners. The equality of allowing everyone access to multiple partners, regardless of gender, means that polyamory has a significantly different impact on women than polygyny. Women in poly relationships tend to be highly-educated and able to be financially independent if circumstances require – a significant departure from women in polygynous marriages who are typically denied education and access to paid work. Poly women generally chose the relationship style as adults, rather than entering arranged marriages as adolescents who may not have even been consulted about their wishes. Results of this gender parity are evident at the community level, in which most of the high-visibility leaders, activists, writers, and researchers are women.

AN: With more gender equality among poly people, how does this impact the division of labor in households?

ES: Even though poly people are often liberals who try to avoid sexism, their families tend to be surprisingly traditional when it comes to the division of household, paid, and emotional labor. Some of this is because the gendered wage gap that makes it easier for men to earn enough money to support a lower or non-paid worker.

AN: What are the experiences of children in polyamorous families?

ES: Children in the poly families who participated in my 15-year study are generally in great shape: they were articulate and intelligent, precocious and thoughtful, poised and self-confident. Not that kids from poly families are perfect – they can be just as obnoxious, defiant, and irritating as children in other families. Even so, kids from poly families are a strikingly robust group, in part because their parents’ racial and class privileges give them advantages in life. Having all of the extra attention and resources that come with multiple-adult families helps as well.

AN: During different ages, what are some of the experiences that tend to be common for children growing up in poly families?

ES: Young kids, up to 7 or 8 years old, who are growing up in poly families often don’t even question their family form, partially because little kids generally take their families for granted as the norm anyway, and also because the adults save the sexual interaction until the kids are in bed. In families with openly polyamorous parents, tweens from 9 to 12 are often more aware that their families are different and will frequently ask their parents what is happening. Parents who are divorced or fear losing custody of their children for some other reason (surveillance from in-laws or authorities) if they are outed as polyamorists tend to either dodge their children’s questions or hide their sexual interactions so the kids think their partners are “just” friends. Poly parents who are not worried about legal threats generally respond to their kids’ questions with truthful and age-appropriate answers, avoiding oversharing by waiting until the children ask for clarification before providing more information.  Teens are generally aware that their families are polyamorous and, in true teenager fashion, tend to be defiant against outsiders who scorn the family style. Very few of the teens I interviewed had decided to be polyamorous themselves, most often because they felt they were too young and inexperienced to make that kind of decision.

AN: How do kids in poly families talk to their peers and other people about their families?

ES:  Because divorce and serial monogamy are so common, many kids have multiple parents which allows kids from poly families to simply blend in. If children from poly families did not correct their peers’ and other adults’ assumptions, then they could pass as “normals” fairly easily. When the kids from poly families have close friends they can trust, they will often tell their friends about their poly families. Sometimes poly kids would use ‘filter’ questions — asking friends what they thought about same-sex marriage or some other issue pertaining to sexual minorities — to gauge the safety of disclosing their poly family status on the basis of friends’ reactions to these questions.

AN: Thanks for taking the time to share more about your research. During the holidays, there’s a lot of focus on “the family,” and your book is an important addition for those who want to better understand and support healthy families who may deviate from mainstream norms.

“I am like a car that does not go faster than second gear, so I can have moments of incredible frustration” explains Caren McCaleb, one of the four women featured in director Mary Trunk’s astounding documentary Lost in Living.  As she says this, she is sitting in the front seat of her car, constricted, as she works on an art project while her toddler daughter naps in the back.

The necessity of making art in the margins — of the car, within the day, in the liminal edges of one’s mind — is portrayed in high contrast with the powerful ambitions of the four subjects profiled within this film.  The title phrase comes from Merrill Joan Gerber, one of the featured artists, as she takes the viewer on a tour of her overflowing study and speaks about reconciling the desire to make art, in her case, writing, with the other roles she inhabits as mother, spouse, and homemaker.  This could serve as the most simple distillation of this film’s premise, but its brilliance is that it keeps revealing, through unexpected intimacy and crystalline honesty, the dimensions of a paradigm almost never acknowledged, if even explored.

Watching this film reminded me of the childhood trick of using a microscope to burn a hole through a leaf.  The invisible power of light is suddenly revealed to have a concentrated, incendiary force.  So it is for these artists who recognize they are living within a culture that doesn’t reward either mothering or creativity and makes their pairing a particularly difficult embrace.  Large themes are illuminated within deeply telling moments, literally, as Trunk tracks these four women over seven years.  Trunk frames the blurry moments when each subject tries to reconcile opposing pressures — the need to maintain a sense of identity as a working artist paired with the keen sense of loss — of time, energy, and focus — that having a family also brings. Taboo-tinged discontent rises to the surface alongside other usually disallowed themes — resentment of interruption, fury at being discounted, despair to feel the prioritization of the self erode away. The need to be witnessed, (in all of these contexts), to have a true self be known, is another theme that most women, artist or not, are often not allowed to voice. This is remarkably explored, alongside the desire to be valued. Often portrayed in high contrast to the many mundane tasks each woman performs even as she questions what conveys value — broadly and personally — one of the film’s most gratifying aspects is the presentation of this as a hunger alongside any other basic human need.

The two younger subjects, Kristina Robbins, a filmmaker, and McCaleb, a visual artist, film editor, and vlogger, are friends from college who have their first children within months of each other.  Another often unexplored theme is the vital necessity and sustenance of female friendship.  Their conversation about how critical their connection has been to each other’s development is breathtakingly real.  Later, when a distance opens up between them, their reconciliation is shared on film as they hash out the largeness of that loss.  Each calls the other a “soulmate,” breaking with conventional definition of the term, as the nourishment of their bond is frankly juxtaposed against the demands of mothering. Their narratives begin while each is pregnant and ruminating on the changes to come. In one scene, McCaleb practices drawing in short, timed bursts as a way to train herself for what she envisions can be productive, post-baby sessions. When Robbins leaves her son for the first time to work on a film, her anguish and sense of sacrifice is openly measured against her desire to not lose a worthwhile professional opportunity.

The two other subjects in the film, Gerber, and visual artist Marjorie Schlossman, interviewed in midlife when their children are mostly grown, reflect on the secretiveness artmaking required within their generation, and particular to their class structure, when one was foremost a mother, and other commitments were often considered extraneous. They speak eloquently, and poignantly, about the frustration of having their art unsupported and unrecognized, although both are extremely accomplished.  The gutting force of loneliness is mentioned, alongside its never distant shadow — depression.

The film’s Facebook page is a fount of useful resources, and generous clips can be found on Ma and Pa Film’s YouTube channel.  Trunk offers a “house party” kit with a discussion guide which seems apropos since while the film focuses on individuals, their dilemmas reflect larger, systemic issues worthy of discussion (nevermind change) around honoring ambition, the value assigned to making art, universal childcare, compensation, and more. 

The screening I attended had all four artists present and there was a lively Q & A post-film. One theme discussed was how, despite generational progress, many things (dishes, laundry, assumed responsibilities that are gendered) have stayed the same. Applause broke out when Gerber recollected how her husband offered to quit his job and take care of their new baby full time when she was awarded a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. Yet, after moving across the country to Palo Alto, they discover they are homeless since graduate housing is only assigned to men. Gerber is astute about the other forms of systemic sexism she encounters as a prolific writer in a time in which being “exceptional” was both lauded and cumbersome. Parallel to this is her keen understanding of the ways in which her fiction — largely about the domestic sphere — has been misunderstood or maligned within a canon that doesn’t necessarily value work centered around women’s lives.

Watching the arc of each woman’s career within the film’s span reveals the challenges of trying to achieve success within fields with no guarantee of remuneration, recognition, or even concrete gain at the end of a very productive day. “Making it” is another nuanced concept explored as the sacrifices of growing a career in the arts is measured against the collective affect on each’s family, knowing that, conversely, there is a deep, personal cost in not honoring this need.  

Interviews with the adult children of Gerber and Schlossman add more perspective, not always positively, on what it was like growing up with a mother who was preoccupied with more than just her family. In a poignant scene, Trunk asks Olive, McCaleb’s daughter, if her mother is an artist. “She used to be” is her straightforward, but wounding, perception. The subjects of this film ruminate on why making art is so necessary as they wash dishes, contemplate what is needed to sustain them as they fold laundry, and talk about the work they long to get back to as they make dinner. Their love for their children is clear. But each is equally ardent about keeping a burning passion within lit, however oppositional to conventional notions about mothering this may be, and how equally central this is for each, if not more so.

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.

The following is a guest post by Anne Ladky, Executive Director of Women Employed

Food stamps, slashed. Hundreds of protests over low wages, including one in St. Paul that ended with the arrest of 26 protesters—and plans in 100 cities for fast food strikes this very Thursday. A Wal-Mart food drive gathering Thanksgiving donations for its own underpaid employees. Even conservatives calling for a raise in the minimum wage.

Something is in the air. Whether it’s the generosity of holiday spirits or just people finally reaching a breaking point with the status quo, Americans are restless; we want change. And now, when people are paying attention to the plight of the struggling worker, is a rare opportunity to actually make things happen.

When I first joined Women Employed, there was a different kind of restlessness in the air. This was in the 70s, and women were getting fed up with those who outright opposed us getting into managerial and professional jobs. They said we weren’t capable, that we were only working for “pin money” anyway, and that we belonged at home.

WE was founded by women who wanted to change that world—and we succeeded. This year marked our 40^th anniversary, and we have plenty to celebrate. In the past four decades, women have reshaped the American workplace. Our progress can be seen in laws against pregnancy discrimination and sexual harassment, family leave policies, and the breadth of opportunities available to women today, especially those with college degrees.

But celebrating women’s progress all too often obscures the reality that many women are still struggling just to get by. Although the advances of the past 40 years have given women many more opportunities, not all of us have been able to take advantage of them; millions have been left behind.

One way to think of it is to imagine that women today live on two different planets. On the first planet, women work in professional, managerial, or union jobs and earn salaries high enough to support a family. We have paid sick time, vacation time, health insurance. And we think of that as standard. Things aren’t perfect—women still struggle with glass ceilings, bad attitudes, and pay issues. But there’s some flexibility to deal with the demands of work and family, and women with education and advantages are doing better than they ever have before.

On the other planet are the millions of women who work hard in jobs we all depend on—jobs in restaurants, retail, call centers, day care centers, and the homes of our elderly parents.  Their wages are far too low. 17 million women today—almost a third of the female workforce—are earning less than $12 an hour. They have no paid sick time or vacation time and limited, if any, access to benefits. They get little or no respect for the work they do, and their hard work doesn’t lift them out of poverty. Their struggles are often invisible or ignored, even though their poverty hurts our society’s children, our communities, and our economy.

This can’t continue. We have to say no to having one world of work for women with education and advantages and a vastly inferior world of work for others. We need to shine the spotlight on those low-income working women who work their days serving meals to others but can barely feed their own children, the women who take care of our bedridden family members but don’t get paid sick days themselves.

We’ve cracked the glass ceiling—in some cases, we’ve even shattered it. But we can’t just look up; we have to look down. We need to raise the floor. Fortunately, there are some specific ways to do this, and the recent movement to increase the minimum wage is one of them. If we just raised the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour over a period of years—a proposal that President Obama has just backed—we would generate an estimated $32 billion in new economic activity and an estimated 140,000 new full-time jobs. We need to expand the right to earned sick time—and make sure that current movements to block states from ever being able to mandate paid sick days are stopped in their tracks. We need to ensure that more workplaces have policies that guarantee equal opportunity, fairness, and respect for family responsibilities—not just for higher-ups, but at every level of employment. We need to create stronger career pathways by enabling low-income women to get the education and training they need to advance.

This won’t be easy. The fact that we’re still fighting some of the same fights as when WE was founded (read: the wage gap barely changed in the last decade) shows just how long-term this struggle is. But the last 40 years offers plenty of inspiration to face future obstacles. In the 70s, we were dealing with problems no one had even given names to—sexual harassment, gender wage gap, wage theft. Today, we don’t only have words for these things, we’ve put laws in place to protect women against them. Time and again, we’ve made history. But there’s plenty left to be made.

Photo source

One of the projects I’ve been working on lately has inspired me to dig deeply in my own backyard. I’ve long been a fan of the many feminist thinkers and writers who have unpacked the elevated (and at times impossible) expectations our culture places on mothers—standards I’ve often found myself internalizing, despite the fact that I should know better. So I’ve been thinking about what these expectations mean for those of us raising kids with food allergies, an increasing population (perhaps as much as 8% of all children in the U.S.) that continues to baffle scientists and parents.

In our case, our ten-year-old has multiple, life-threatening food allergies—something I’d never even heard of when I was growing up. Two months ago, I wrote about how this invisible disability challenges us to rethink inclusion in school for The New York Times Motherlode blog. Now I have a personal essay about the impact of good mother myths on those of us caring for kids with food allergies in the forthcoming book The Good Mother Myth: Redefining Motherhood to Fit Reality. (Girl w/ Pen founder Deborah Siegel has an essay in it as well.)

Editor Avital Norman Nathman is expanding the conversation and wants your ideas about the following question: what’s a good mother? The details are here:

I want to hear from YOU about what it means to be a “good mother.” The Good Mother Myth shares the stories of women across the country (and a few outside the US!), all breaking down the concept of the stereotypical good mother. But I want to hear more! With each voice added to the collective narrative of motherhood, we are one step closer to showing how rich and diverse motherhood can be. It is not a stereotype that can be boxed up and used to pit women against each other!

So, tell me – what does being a “good mother” mean to you? Write up your response (100-500 words) and send it along with a photo, 1-2 sentence bio and any links to your website/social media to TheMamafesto@gmail.com.

So please join the conversation with your thoughts about what being a “good mother” means to you, wherever and whoever you are.

Follow Heather on Twitter: @heatherhewett.