motherhood

This is the fourth 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, is a book that, as Coontz notes “has been credited—or blamed—for destroying, single-handedly and almost overnight, the 1950s consensus that women’s place was in the home.” In her new study of the book, its era, and its reception (both at its publication and over the years), Coontz doesn’t shy away from documenting The Feminine Mystique’s faults (chief among these, the limited view offered by its white heterosexual middle class author that not only silenced issues of working class women and women of color, but also framed homosexuality as a menace).

The faults of Friedan’s book have of course been extensively analyzed and debated over the years, constructing Friedan as what Rebecca Traister names “a revered and reviled feminist foremother.” Coontz current work goes far beyond this debate though, placing The Feminine Mystique within the context of its time and then expertly weaving in analysis of how many of its key arguments have resonated in the decades since. As Traister puts it in her New York Times book review, the text functions as “a timely contribution to the conversation about what constitutes progress for women (and for which women) in these days of mommy wars and mama grizzlies.”

The continuing “mommy wars” and their particular pervasiveness in the contemporary cultural moment makes Coontz’ book (and the book her book is about – The Feminine Mystique) incredibly relevant. As I read it, I could not help but picture the ways in which current females on the cultural radar – Sarah Palin, Angelina Jolie, Katie Perry, for example – STILL fit into the wife/mother-is –tantamount-to-a woman’s-identity model. Yes, Palin is a politician, but she and others actively highlight that it is motherhood and wifery that defines her. Yes, Jolie has famously said she will not marry Pitt until all people have the right to marry, but she is positioned by the press as a global mother, with news of her adoptions/mothering trumping her acting career. As for Katie Perry – she is not a mother, but her well documented marriage to Russell Brand (not to mention her bubble gum bright, salaciously sexy 50s era outfits) bring a sexed up cross between June Cleaver and I love Lucy to mind.

Another cultural zeitgeist – Twilight – similarly shapes women’s identities as dependent on their relationships to men, famiy, and the home, with the end goal (as it is for the series protagonist) to become an eternal wife and mother.

And – a show with a title that would fit very well between the pages of The Feminine Mystique – Desperate Housewives – has largely explored female identity as tied to what goes on in the home, between the sheets, and while chatting by the picket fences that populate Wisteria Lane, a block that, like Friedan’s book, is mired in white middle class heterosexual privilege.

In contrast, a show set in the past, Mad Men, is a much more valuable lens through which to view not only The Feminine Mystique but also changing gender norms (as Coontz expertly reveals – with many show spoilers – here).

So, what does it say that a show set in the 60s is more feminist, more astute about gender norms and the damage they do to both men and women, than too contemporary shows such as Desperate Housewives (and, I might add, pretty much all of Reality TV)? What does it say that current cultural icons such as Sarah Palin and Katie Perry (and yes, Bella Swan) would fit better in a 50s/60s world where women were presented as needing to be tied to the home on the one hand and beholden to the male gaze on the other? Are we, as I have heard so many discuss, heading so far into the backlash that soon the era Friedan and Coontz document will seem more liberated than our own?

I certainly hope not – and I hope this concern drives people to read Coontz timely work, a book that taps into something that should concern us a great deal – the continuing hold post-feminism and “enlightened sexism” has over our cultural imagination.

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?

I’m collaborating on a study of traumatic childbearing experiences, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the types of injuries that can occur as a result of pregnancies, labors, and different types of deliveries.  My research partner forwarded me a recent blog post on a board-certified urogynecologist’s website titled “Cesarean on Demand Does Not Eliminate Risk of Prolapse.”  This post highlights the findings of a 2009 research article published in the International Urogynecology Journal. In this research, three groups of women were studied: “vaginal delivery with sphincter tear (n = 106), vaginal delivery without sphincter tear (n = 108), and cesarean without labor (n = 39).” [The numbers reflect how many women were in each of the three groups.]

Now, I’m no urogynecologist, but I found it hard to believe that c-sections “on demand” (a.k.a. without labor) would not at least reduce the risk of pelvic floor damage, including pelvic organ prolapse (pelvic organs “slipping out of place” when the supportive muscles and ligaments are weakened or torn).  Prolapse can greatly impact the health and quality of life: for example, women with prolapse may suffer one or both types of incontinence and/or painful sexual intercourse.

I recognize that many medical practitioners, authors and laypeople have come to believe we have too high a rate of c-sections here in the U.S.  Research studies, such as the one celebrated in the recent blog post, call into question whether there are any health benefits of c-sections without labor.  As a medical sociologist who teaches research methods, I consider it to be of utmost importance to discuss research findings with the highest degree of accuracy.  No study is perfect: no study is without bias and no study is without limitations.  So, I read the complete research article to find out if it truly supported the blog author’s contention that these researchers “found NO DIFFERENCE in moderate prolapse between the three groups.” 

I was struck by significant methodological flaws and limitations which, while acknowledged by the authors of the original article, were glossed over or flat out ignored by the author of the blog post.  I found myself asking several questions:

Question #1: how healthy were the women before this childbearing experience?  No one knows: the researchers admit, “our findings cannot be attributed with certainty to delivery method, since some women may have developed prolapse before delivery or pregnancy and prolapse was not assessed prior to delivery in this population.” 

Question #2: who were the women who participated in this study?  The women for this study were recruited from prior studies performed through the Pelvic Floor Disorders Network, specifically from the follow-up study to their CAPS Study (which focused on “fecal and urinary incontinence after childbirth”).  How can we rule out a self-selection bias of those women who said “yes” when they were recruited to this initial study?  Could it be certain women who had C-sections, perhaps those feeling some pelvic/vaginal discomfort immediately following delivery were more likely to say “yes” because they saw value in being interviewed about incontinence?

Question #3: did the researchers recruit enough women for each of the three groups to be able to answer their main question?  No.  The authors wrap up their article by noting that “further research would be required to determine whether cesarean delivery before labor reduces the incidence of pelvic organ prolapse.”  So, this research doesn’t actually determine anything about what they claim as their primary research question.  Why not?  The short answer is that they never got enough women to participate.  The authors claim that they would have needed 132 women per group in order to test the statistical significance of the difference in rates of stage II prolapse between those women who had C-sections without labor and those women who had vaginal deliveries.  While they got reasonably close to their sample size goal of 132 for the two vaginal delivery groups (106 and 108), they only got 39 women to participate in the C-section group.  Is this acceptable?  Statistical significance is key to evaluating any study because it means that the results are “probably true (not due to chance).”  The researchers finally own up to the likely irrelevance of their study towards the end of the published journal article: “Furthermore, our sample size was not sufficiently large to exclude a significant difference between groups.”  In plain language: they didn’t study enough women to know whether or not there are not real differences between the health outcomes for women who have c-sections without labor and those experience other types of labor and delivery.

Question #4: can the researchers say anything definitive that might help improve women’s health?  Hmmm.  The only factor they definitively connect with less pelvic floor damage is lower birth weight: I’m betting that it won’t surprise many to find out that smaller babies causes less damage.  But, what are we supposed to do with this finding? 

The author of that recent blog post dares to call it a “beautifully executed study,” and that’s why I had to wrote this post: to help those of us who are not medical researchers better understand what we should value and what we should question when it comes to research studies that can impact women’s health.

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?

Please go read the moving post Deborah Siegel put up over at She Writes, “Words for the Littlest Victim.”  Read what others are saying, and post your own thoughts if you are so inclined.

I was going to write about Christina Taylor Green earlier today, but I’m a little relieved I didn’t, as Deborah did way more justice to the topic.  Christina is the latest victim of gun violence in a nation, and a world, in which too many children die. At the core of my feminism is the vision of a world where peace reigns, where children can thrive and grow to the fullest of their potential.  A world where we live a politics of peace.  In our country, but also in all the countries that struggle with the violence and weapons that have proliferated beyond reason.  How can we come together to make this vision a reality?

As many of you have noticed, Global Mama has been on vacation.  It wasn’t really a planned vacation, more of a hiatus in a busy life.  But she’s back!

Truth is, I have been off doing other things this past semester.  For one, I had the privilege of being on pre-tenure leave from my teaching job, and boy oh boy, did I have some projects to work on.  And I did get a lot of work done.  Of course, not everything I might have wanted!  But then again, I never do.

You see, I tend to have big eyes.  I dream up projects and get terribly excited about them and then, somewhere between making dinner and driving my kids to ice hockey and working full-time and sitting down to a long conversation with my husband and trying to squeeze in phone calls to dear friends, I realize that I simply don’t have enough time.

In the past, I have compensated with one of two methods: not sleeping at night, and working during the weekends.  Frankly, #1 makes me irritable and cranky (I am a solid 9-hour-a-night sleeper) and #2 is no longer acceptable.  Weekends are for play, and my kids are no longer babies who take long naps and simply come along for the ride.  They can play by themselves and with their friends, sure, but it also turns out that we are a high-energy family who likes to go places and take hikes and play sports and spend time with one another.  Which means that working during the weekend not only makes everyone else (most of all my husband) irritated—it makes me cranky and feeling like I am missing out on all the fun.

So I made a very conscious decision to live my life with balance this past fall, and guess what?  I did.  I worked, but I also played.  I wrote in my journal.  I read books that have been on my reading list for years.  I took Spanish lessons so that I could help my daughter with her homework (she’s in a dual-language program, a topic that I wrote about here).  I went to all of the school events: the Halloween parade, the winter concert, the gingerbread house art day.  I even (horrors) found myself on a school committee.

During the (unseasonably cold) first- and second-grade Halloween parade (I think the weather was hovering around 40 degrees), which consisted of the kids walking around the concrete parking lot in costume while the middle school band played what they had managed to learn in two months of school (the same medley, over and over…), my daughter giggled the entire time.  This despite the fact that we had rejected her idea of bringing a light saber to the parade (per the school’s detailed Parade Instruction Note).  Even without her weapon of choice, she proudly strutted around, showing off her paper-thin Luke Skywalker costume.  (Her flourish had been to pull her hair back into a low ponytail, so that she looked just like a boy.)

I turned to another parent and asked, “Do they always hold the parade on Friday?”  And when she nodded yes, I realized: this was the first time I had made it.  I had missed, all those other years, because I had been at work.  I suddenly felt empty and hollow inside.  I promised myself not to miss the next one.

Now, before I get too sentimental, I will also say that as I walked to my car, wishing I had remembered to wear a hat, I was thinking about a couple of other things.  For one, being a mom who obsessively worries, I could not help but wonder: how many kids will get sick after parading around for so long in their flimsy costumes?  For another, what about all the parents who have no job flexibility to attend a Halloween parade on a Friday morning?  A lot of middle- and working-class families live in our school district, a lot of them Spanish-speaking, many of them recent immigrants who are working very hard simply to survive.  (In fact, a lot of families are working very hard simply to survive.)  Should we really be holding all of these events that many parents can’t attend?  They are, after all, fairly impractical and, from an adult perspective, unnecessary.

This last semester taught me something else, though: having fun is really, really important.  Kids need to play, and you know what?  Adults do, too.  (And based on all my reading this semester, I might even argue that art is a sophisticated form of adult play… but that’s for another day!)

So I have also promised myself to keep the spirit of play alive, as I go back to the classroom this semester.  Maybe I can’t require my college students to parade around in costume, but I can certainly work on figuring out ways of keeping it fun for all of us.

On my other blog, I recently posted a review of the book Origins:  How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives (Annie Murphy Paul, 2010). I wasn’t particularly fond of the book.  It offers an overview of research being done in the last few decades to determine fetal origins, or the ways in which people are affected—perhaps for generations—by what happens during the time that they are gestating.  Despite the author’s good intentions, I found it to be a troubling book.  As I recounted in my review, even as a woman who isn’t pregnant, I felt uncomfortable reading, like I was being indicted for not being careful enough while I was pregnant, back in the day.  While Paul acknowledges the danger of this research being used to bolster already culturally prevalent “mother blame,” she frames her work in the hope that it can provoke broader cultural change and positive evaluation of mothering, from the point of conception onward.  I said I didn’t think it worked, and that I did, in fact, feel blamed.

What I wanted to talk about here is not my review but the comments it received.  I’ve had a number of responses, and the thing that’s interesting is that many have been lengthy.  Folks haven’t just been weighing in—”I disagree!”—but offering counterarguments or lengthy explanations of how fetal origins research is or isn’t valid.  Some have been arguments based in personal experience, others have been based in professional expertise (medical anthropology, for instance, or anesthesiology).

So my question is, why did this matter enough to readers that, in responding, they essentially wrote blog posts of their own?

I think the answer is that parenthood is a high stakes endeavor, particularly for the middle-class (overwrought?) parents cohort I belong to.  More specifically, motherhood is a high stakes endeavor—and I say this with all respect to my partner, who is an outstanding father to our daughter, but who doesn’t face the pressure that mothers routinely face.

All of us who are in the realm of motherhood—either as parents or as scholars of motherhood—know this.  The internet is full of jokes about “mompetitors” that friends regularly send me.  This piece from Salon maps out the topics you simply can’t discuss, and it’s not wrong:  breastfeeding, attachment parenting, the family bed, and crying babies are topics I’ve found to be so highly-charged that I’m incredibly careful about talking about them, even with very close friends.

The reason I read Origins is that I’m currently doing research into prenatal testing, and that’s another subject that’s so high stakes that many of us simply don’t talk about it at all.  When some of my friends have been pregnant, they haven’t shared the news until after they’ve had the amniocentesis that determined that this is a pregnancy they’re actually going to continue.  I’d hoped that Paul would discuss this aspect of our cultural assessment of the fetus, but she didn’t.  She did, however, share that many of the studies base their assessment of prenatal health on postnatal IQ scores, a fact that I found very troubling.

We’re raising kids in a culture that’s perfectionistic and that seems to believe, by and large, that we—as mothers—are always wrong.  If something “bad” happens involving our child (such as short attention spans, low IQ scores, or asthma), it’s our fault.  Since we’re already pummeled with this viewpoint, scientific research that says, “And it’s true while the baby’s in utero, too!” isn’t necessarily helping matters.  This isn’t to say that the scientific research is or isn’t valid.  I’m not a scientist, and my skepticism about some of the studies Paul reports on isn’t definitive.  What I’m saying is that this science is emerging from and feeding into a culture that has some very troubling, individualizing, and sexist views.  I think my readers are attuned to that culture, as well, and it makes all of us a bit defensive.

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.

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.