families

Women’s history month has led to the predictable school project in my home: interview a woman you admire.  I’ve reflected cynically about the value of such work in the past, but this year I’m taking a different view by thinking about women’s history on a smaller scale, within the course of a generation.

My mother, Louise Kimmich, is a retired teacher.  She stayed home with me, my brother, and sister until my sister entered kindergarten, and then she returned to work.  I remember her telling me many times about her limited professional options—teacher, nurse, and secretary—as a way of encouraging me to have big dreams about my own career choices.

But my mother modeled those ambitions, too.  She returned to graduate school while working full time and taking care of her family, earning Master’s degrees in early childhood and special education.  She took a page from the feminist activists’ playbook and went on strike at home, effectively engaging me and my siblings in taking care of some household tasks.

So here’s my own women’s history month project, an interview with a woman I admire.  My mom, Louise Kimmich, helped pave the way for me and all the daughters of feminism.  Her reflections illustrate how much feminism has achieved in a generation; they also point to some shortcomings that I’ll address in future columns.

Meanwhile, GWP readers, how do you take stock of feminists’ achievements and its unfinished business?

AK: Tell me about some of obstacles you faced as a woman.

LK: It was really the dark ages of womanhood if you were growing up in the 1950s!  You had a certain stereotypical set of occupations you could enter: teacher, nurse, and secretary.  You really weren’t encouraged to do anything else.  If I had it to do over again I don’t know if I would enter education.  I would probably choose something less stereotypical.

AK: How did feminism affect you?

LK: During the civil rights movement, I saw that people had the opportunity to participate, and make a difference.  It was an awakening.  I also remember Title IX.  I was a wife and mother by then, but I realized what had been missing for me in terms of high school sports.

AK: Tell me about a woman you admire.

LK: I admire all the young women of today, pursuing their dreams due to the feminist movement.  I also admire Hillary Clinton, who is my age, for rising to Secretary of State.

AK: What is an accomplishment of which you’re proud?

LK: My proudest accomplishment is being the mother of three wonderful adult children who are educated, responsible, kind, and caring adults.

Before I’m accused of self-serving pandering by including our last exchange (and really, she said that without  prompting from me!), I would argue that my mother’s reflections on the value of motherhood highlight an area where feminism has dropped the ball.  But more on that in the future.

This past week you might have noticed something different around here.

In addition to a guest post from Andrea Doucet (author of Do Men Mother? and a forthcoming book tentatively titled The Bread and Roses Project: Breadwinning Moms and the New ‘Problem with No Name’) about whether dads are facing discrimination on the playgrounds and a well-earned celebratory announcement from Veronica Arreola (go SCIENCE GRRL!), a number of regular GWP writers devoted our monthly columns to various aspects of historian Stephanie Coontz‘s new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.  Coontz’s book is a biography of Betty Friedan’s iconic book.  A forum about book about a book?  Sounds rather…discursive.  So why did we do it?

As “crossover” scholar type peeps, we think the way conversations about feminism play out in public, in this case the cultural conversation about a second-wave feminist text, are important to track.  As a generation, we’re indebted to Betty Friedan for her classic.  And we’re  indebted to Stephanie Coontz for reviving a conversation about the journey this book helped launch–not only for women at the dawn of the 1960s, but for those of us striving for egalitarian marriages and humane workplaces and raising our children here in 2011.

Here’s a recap:

To kick it off, Virgina Rutter (NICE WORK) asked two dear friends, one born in 1935, the other born in 1940, to tell her their experiences around the publication of Friedan’s TFM in 1963. The kicker: they’re both men.

Fueled by Coontz’s analysis, we cleared up some myths about TFM and encouraged readers to Test Your Feminine Mystique Cliche Quotient. In a Review of ‘Stirring’ Reviews, we offered a reading of the initial reviews of Coontz’s book appearing in in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, Salon, Ms., Bitch, and feministing.

Natalie Wilson (POP GOES FEMINISM) asked whether “Housewives” today are just as “Desperate” as in the era documented by Friedan and offers up pop-culture infused Thoughts on Coontz’s A Strange Stirring.

Finally, Deborah Siegel (MAMA W/PEN) waxed intergenerational and mused on How the Choices of Our Generation Are Shaped By the Last. (Your comments on that one are giving me–it’s Deborah here–tons of food for thought…!)

We hope you find the discussion of interest.  We’d love your feedback.  And if you’d like to see more of this kind of group forum, or would like to propose one yourself for the future, please do let us know!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are Dads Facing Discrimination at the Playground?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The reviews are out (more on that coming soon!).  While some give an apt assessment of this rich new look at a classic feminist text, some lapse into cliche about both Coontz’s book and Friedan’s.  Here are four myths–cliches, really–about The Feminine Mystique, and feminism the movement, as cleared up in Coontz’s book:

1.  MYTH: Betty Friedan was a man-hater, and The Feminine Mystique was anti-marriage.

REALITY: Friedan hated housework (and her willingness to say that was considered shocking in the early 1960s), but she loved men and greatly enjoyed flirting with them. She even suggested that her tombstone should read: “She helped make women feel better about being women and therefore better able to freely and fully love men.”

Friedan believed that marriages would be more harmonious and loving when wives were free to find meaning in their own work or community activities rather than seeking fulfillment through their husbands’ accomplishments. When wives have interests and skills of their own, she argued, they will stop nagging or belittling their husbands. Their daughters, seeing their mothers fulfilled instead of discontented, will grow up “sure that they want to be women.” And in fact, I interviewed many women who told me they had developed a deep suspicion of marriage and motherhood not by reading Friedan but by seeing how unhappy their own mothers were. They were able to commit to family life only after they were sure they would not be trapped the way their mothers had been.

2.  MYTH: Friedan encouraged women to put their personal gratification and career ambitions ahead of family or community concerns, leading directly to a “sex-in-the-city” individualism.

REALITY: Friedan told women it was a mistake to think that better sex or a new man would meet their need to grow. She argued that only an un-liberated woman would believe that more money or a bigger house would fill the hole inside her. She also said it was better to do volunteer work, if possible, than to take a job just for the money, insisting that women, like men, could find themselves only by developing their individual capacities in the framework of socially useful work, whether paid or unpaid. She would have hated “Sex in the City.”

3.  MYTH:  The entry of women into the workforce and their growing educational advantage over men destabilized marriage and doomed many women to a life of loneliness.

REALITY: Divorce rates initially rose as more wives went to work, but this trend reversed as people adjusted to women’s new rights. Today the states with the highest percentage of working wives generally have the lowest divorce rates. And marriages where one spouse specializes in housework and the other in paid work are now more likely to end in divorce than marriages where spouses share domestic and paid work.

Divorce rates have fallen sharply over the past 30 years for college graduates and for women who delay marriage while they establish themselves in careers. In fact, every year a woman delays marriage, up into her 30s, lowers her chance of divorce.

Marriage rates have been going down for all Americans, but women with Ph.D.s are the only group with a higher marriage rate today than in 1950. And while a highly-educated woman is slightly more likely to reach age 40 without ever marrying than a woman with less education, she is also much less likely to divorce. As a result, educated women are now more likely to be married at age 40 than their less-educated counterparts.

Three-quarters of female college graduates aged 40 are married at age 40, compared to two-thirds of women that age with some college education, 63 percent of high school graduates, and only 56 percent of women with less than a high school degree. And 88 percent of women aged 30 to 44 who earn more than $100,000 per year are married, compared to 82 percent of other women in that age group.

And here’s a win-win scenario for women who can take advantage of the new educational options for women: Educated couples with egalitarian views have the highest marital quality. Educated women who remain single and enjoy their jobs report nearly equal levels of happiness as married women. And a never-married college-educated woman in her 40s who wants to marry has twice the chance of doing so as a never-married high school graduate.

4.  MYTH: The feminist movement has hurt homemakers.

REALITY: In 1963, when The Feminine Mystique was published, only eight states gave stay-at-home wives any claim on their husband’s earnings, even if they had put their husband through school and then devoted themselves to raising the children for 40 years. The husband got to determine what was an “adequate” level of support, and if they divorced, the wife had no right to a fair division of the property. She could not even get alimony unless she could prove “fault” by a very stringent standard. Feminism has improved the security of homemakers as well as of employed women.

What are the cliches that come to mind when you think about The Feminine Mystique or any other classic second-wave feminist text–and more importantly, are they, or aren’t they true?

My daughter Maya turns 10 today.  You may not remember what it feels like to hit double digits, but take it from me: this is a big deal.  Maya might say that hitting 10 means that she is definitely ready for a cell phone (not that she has one, however).

Now that I can talk about motherhood in terms of decades (well, at least a decade) instead of just years, it feels like a big deal for me, too.

In fact, motherhood has been getting a lot of media play these days.  If recent coverage is any indication, we’re either too harsh or too self-involved.  Consider the controversy surrounding Amy Chua’s Why Chinese Mother’s are Superior excerpt in The Wall Street Journal and Judith Warner’s roundup of recent memoirs in The New York Times. Warner claims that in contrast with their own feminist moms, today’s mothers are turning inward and embracing home and family with a “deep desire for rules and regularity”

Neither the overbearing mother nor the self-involved ones hunkering down at home sound especially new to me (Freud, anyone, or Cinderella?).  But I am wondering where I fit into these public accounts of motherhood and how to define my own mothering.

For example, learning to ski would certainly have been low on my list of life pursuits before parenting despite growing up in the Northeast Ohio snowbelt.  Now as a steward of my kids’ (I have a 7-year-old son as well) health, I try to cultivate an active lifestyle and exercise habits that can serve them throughout their lives.  Thus the skiing lessons, which I have found that I love, and which allow me and my kids to learn something together.

And while I have given a lot of thought to teaching students about social constraints and feminist responses to them, I have also discovered that it’s altogether different teaching my children how to be change agents.  For one thing, I have my children for more than a semester, so if I get things wrong we can always try again!

Last year Maya ran for class representative and found herself in a runoff, which she lost, much to her disappointment.  Talking at home later she explained that she voted for a classmate in the first round because she “wanted to give someone else a chance.”

Although her generosity of spirit is one of her admirable qualities, I explained that it is sometimes fine and even important to pursue what you want.  That is, if you want to be class representative, vote for yourself.

This year, I’m happy to report that Maya was elected class representative.  But before you congratulate me for offering a successful lesson on assertiveness, I should add that Maya explained that she did not vote for herself in the first round of balloting: she voted for a friend, and the friend voted for her.

That same friend and Maya spent their Martin Luther King Day “on” by selling “Cocoa for a Cause” at our local sledding hill and donating the proceeds to an area soup kitchen.  They raised $47.

Sometimes working together is the best way to make a difference.  That’s not a bad vision for either of us to have as we enter double digits as mother and daughter.

And GWP readers, what’s your take on the latest mommy wars? Do you have favorite accounts of motherhood to share, and what does feminist mothering look like?

This month’s guest column* by Christine H. Morton, PhD, a research sociologist at the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative, draws on her research and publications on women’s reproductive experiences and maternity care advocacy roles, including the doula and childbirth educator. She is the founder of ReproNetwork.org, an online listserv for social scientists studying reproduction.

The ever-evolving history of the childbirth reform movement has new developments, which need to be incorporated into the older story which documents the shift from home to hospital birth; and the paradigm clash of midwifery and medical models of birth reflecting holistic and technocratic values, respectively. We need to incorporate the story of the doula, which I argue, is one of many efforts to bridge the divide – to provide, as Robbie Davis-Floyd has called it, humanistic care in birth, which is what most women desire.

History is happening now. In addition to the emergence of the doula in the past thirty years, more recently, we see efforts underway in maternal health policy (Childbirth Connections’ Transforming Maternity Care), among physician and nursing professionals (most especially around maternal quality measures, and maternity quality improvement) and resurgence among, for lack of a better word, ‘consumers’ or childbearing women, who seek greater access to vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC). What are the goals of each stakeholder; how do they intersect and overlap, and come into conflict with one another? This is a big story, and we need to tell it!

I take a small slice of this larger historical backdrop to consider the interconnected history of childbirth educators and doulas, which will be the subject of my research presentation at the Lamaze-ICEA Mega Conference in Milwaukee.

To back up a bit, when I embarked on my sociological investigation of the doula role, I was interested in many aspects of this innovative approach to childbirth advocacy and support. What strategies and mechanisms enabled women with no medical training to insert themselves at the site where medical care is delivered to a patient in a hospital, and enact their self-defined role? Why did women become doulas and what did the work mean for those who were able to sustain a regular practice over time? How were doulas utilizing and leveraging the corpus of evidence based research which suggested their impact was as great, if not greater, than that of the physician, the culture of the obstetric unit, or the labor and delivery nurse? Where did doulas come from? What, in the history of childbirth reform, or childbirth education, or labor/delivery nursing, could help me understand how doulas emerged at this point in time in U.S. history?

Later, after learning that there were limited histories of childbirth education (by non-childbirth educators), and little research on the history of obstetric nursing, I had to take a step back and consider these factors as well. Why was the work and perspectives of women who support other women during childbirth an overlooked piece of historical research? Why did histories of women’s health reform efforts largely exclude childbirth reform? Why had there been no history of the women who were involved in childbirth education; in labor and delivery nursing; in the mainstream arena of birth care in the US? So as not to be accused of ignoring the scholarship that does exist in this area, I acknowledge my debt to Margot Edwards and Mary Waldorf; to Judith Walzer Leavitt, to Barbara Katz Rothman, Robbie Davis-Floyd, Margarete Sandelowski, Deborah Sullivan and Rose Weitz, Judith Rooks and Richard and Dorothy Wertz (I can make my full bibliography available to those interested). I have been inspired by these histories, but they focused less on the women (childbirth educators) who were making history and more on the larger cultural shifts in beliefs about medicine, technology, women’s bodies and reproduction.

When childbirth education per se was a topic of inquiry, the research focus tended to be on the primary sources of the male physician champions – Grantly Dick-Read, whose work informed the natural birth movement, and Ferdinand Lamaze (and his US counterparts – Thank you Dr. Lamaze author Marjorie Karmel and Elisabeth Bing) who formulated a method for accomplishing unmedicated, awake and aware childbirth. However, most of this scholarship makes unsubstantiated generalizations about what particular childbirth educators (of various philosophies /organizations) believed, and how they taught. There is surprisingly little in the way of empirical research – few scholars interviewed childbirth educators or conducted systematic observation of their classes over time.

So after completing my dissertation on the emergence of the doula role, I had the great opportunity to continue with my research interest through a research grant from Lamaze International to conduct an ethnographic investigation of childbirth education, with my colleague, medical anthropologist Clarissa Hsu. We talked to educators, observed their classes and analyzed our data.

We found that educators who were actively practicing doulas drew heavily on their direct labor support experiences as authoritative resources for stories and examples that supplemented the material they taught. Actively practicing doulas also included more curricular content on early labor than educators without such experience. Having real births to draw upon provided doula-educators a different type of credibility and authority than educators without such current labor support experience. These educators relied on other mechanisms to establish their authority, such as knowledge of the latest research on birth and use of more authoritarian teaching styles.

We found that the intersection of doula practice and childbirth education has significantly affected how childbirth preparation classes are taught, and this new infusion of practice and ideology is worth exploring. I encourage you to explore this with us, and welcome your thoughts.

*Note: this column was originally posted on the Science & Sensibility blog.

Body Language proudly presents July’s guest writer, Laura Maffei. She is the author of the poetry collection Drops from Her Umbrella (Inkling Press 2006) and founder of the journal American Tanka. Her current project is a memoir called Girl with a Secret, or How I Tried to Hide Muscular Dystrophy with Tight Jeans and Makeup and she blogs about issues of appearance at lauramaffei.com.

When I was twelve years old, in 1980, I was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy. There weren’t really any visible symptoms yet, but the disease was progressive and eventually there would be. During the car ride home, my mother turned to me in the back seat and said, pointedly, “We’ll only be telling Aunt Nancy and Uncle Joe.” These were our closest relatives. What she meant was, we would not be telling anyone else. She was telling me to keep it a secret.

My parents made this decision mostly out of protection. This was, after all, long before the Americans with Disabilities Act, and they didn’t want me unnecessarily labeled at school. But there was another side to it. My family cared deeply about appearances, my mother in particular. None of us, my father included, were allowed out of the house for any reason without being freshly washed and combed, wearing freshly ironed and color-coordinated outfits. We were also expected to look dignified and graceful at all times.

There was one other layer. I was a girl. I think a boy would have been told to keep it a secret too, for general appearances’ sake and to avoid discrimination, but a boy, you see, could win his mate with his earning power, if he worked diligently enough. Which he would be expected to do (both work hard and find a mate), since we were a traditional and conservative Italian-American family with one foot still in the 1950s. When I was born in 1967, aunts, uncles, and grandparents all placed bets on what age I would be when I got married. The bets ranged between 19 and 24, with one uncle betting “never” because I’d be a career woman. One could not be both, because then how could you cook or clean for your husband and children? And yet one was definitely expected to marry.

And marrying required being attractive. While I was encouraged to study hard and go to college, it was always made clear to me that being attractive was essential, and that “attractive” meant very specific things: A slim figure with a flat stomach. A face covered in foundation, blush, eye shadow, and mascara. (From the age of 13 I was encouraged to wear makeup every day.) Certainly not a disease that would cause my lower stomach to protrude from weakened abdominal muscles and cause me to walk with a labored gait that made people glance at me when I went by.

I had to hide it as best I could, and for a while I found various ways, like super-control-top hosiery and lying to the gym teacher about how many sit-ups I did. I refused to answer questions about it, especially from men I dated. Because yes, insanely, I kept trying to hide having muscular dystrophy well into adulthood, long after it became ludicrous to try to hide the obvious fact that I had a disability, that my body wasn’t the perfect one I thought I had to have in order to be acceptable.

Which is why, even though my story is specific and a little bizarre, I see it everywhere. It’s the same old story, really: girls and women trying to conform to what the culture tells them is physically acceptable, and feeling shame if they don’t. I see it when a friend won’t take her cover-up off at the beach in 95 degrees. I see it when the students I teach totter across the stage during an awards ceremony in stilettos that are hurting them (and, in one case, fall down the stairs). I see it when a woman in a mirror in a public bathroom experimentally pulls her skin back tight from her face.

What is the solution? For me, two things helped somewhat: learning how to draw, and hanging out with a group of smart, funny, earth-worshipping Wiccans while I was in my twenties. The Wiccans showed me that everyone, EVERYONE, was perfectly acceptable whatever their face or body type. Drawing, with its requirement of intently caressing with the eyes every shape and shadow of a person’s face and figure, showed me that everyone is beautiful.

Not that I don’t still cringe at times, when I see myself unexpectedly reflected in a store window and I don’t conform to the image I was brought up to believe was the only one that was acceptable. We all have to keep finding our way, slowly, out of the morass of arbitrary decrees that tell us what we’re supposed to look like, and what we’re supposed to hide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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