parenting

There are rare moments when I read an article or listen to a recording and can’t form words to respond. Today is one of those moments and it is because you really should just listen to this recording for yourself. It’s that perfect.

The NYTimes invited four women who are at the top of their respective fields of science in for a roundtable discussion. They shared their thoughts about:

Differences between men and women in science:

TAL RABIN: Even when we do make it to the conferences, I think that there is still something different about the way that we promote ourselves.

I remember standing next to one of my co-authors, and he was talking to some other guy, and he was telling him, “I have this amazing result. I just did this, I just did that.” And I was sitting and thinking there, what result is he talking about? Until he got to the punch line. It was a joint result. It was a result of mine also. I would have never spoken about my result in the superlatives that the guy was speaking about it.

MS. KOLATA: What would you have done?

DR. RABIN: I would have said, you know, “I have this very interesting result, and we achieved very nice things.” But not “This is the best thing since we invented the wheel, and here it is.”

Having a family:

MS. KOLATA: It must be exciting for your children to grow up with a mother who has such passion for what she does.

DR. APRILE: It depends on the child. The second of my daughters used to say, “Mommy, why can’t we have dinner at 6 p.m. like everybody else?” They finally accepted these crazy hours that I had to live with.

Asking where the women are going:

DR. KING: I think the choke point is going from a postdoc to an assistant professorship to a tenure-track position. In my experience the largest remaining obstacle is how to integrate family life with the life of a scientist.

What they would say to their daughter about going into science:

DR. RABIN: The truth is that I feel differently. I think that the life of a scientist is a fantastic life. I think it is exciting because every day there is something new that you can go and think of. There are challenges, no doubt, and the times when you can’t solve things. So I think it is all a wonderful life. And not to mention even things like time flexibility, traveling around the world, meeting a lot of exciting people. I think that these are fantastic jobs.

This is the type of conversation I would have KILLED for as an undergraduate. The one faculty member I tried to have this conversation with rebuffed me. She was pretty old school, couldn’t go to Harvard with the men and it took me awhile to figure out why she wouldn’t address the gender issue. I don’t blame her either. When you build up a defense mechanism, it is hard to let it go.

What I love about the conversation are the differing opinions. As I tell my students, there are no firm answers. You gather up all the data you can and make the best decision you can. From this conversation, one can see that difference decisions all lead to some awesome science making.

Guest poster Amber Cantrell is a student at the College of Charleston, majoring in Women’s and Gender Studies.  The research project she discusses is partially funded by a Student Undergraduate Research Fellowship from the College.

Although this might be somewhat disappointing, rather than Alison Piepmeier authoring this blog post, it is in fact her undergraduate research assistant. However, I am writing a lot about her, so perhaps that will be a small consolation prize. My name is Amber Cantrell, and I’m a junior at the College of Charleston eagerly benefiting from working with a feminist scholar like Alison.

This summer Alison and I are working on a project about prenatal testing. Initially, we’d thought prenatal testing was going to be one chapter in Alison’s book project about the intersection of feminist disability studies and parenthood. As we’ve begun to explore all the different topics that Alison and I find interesting about prenatal testing, the information gathering stage seems to have exploded rather than becoming focused and topic specific. As the person who is primarily doing the research that Alison requests, I have delicately pointed out that this chapter on prenatal testing may really a book project on prenatal testing.

Our plan for the summer was to talk with parents of children with disabilities, particularly Down syndrome, because we wanted to hear their stories. How did prenatal testing function as part of their pregnancy, if at all? How did these prospective parents make their decisions about prenatal screening, diagnostic testing, and potentially terminating their pregnancy?  In particular, what sorts of narratives—stories from their doctors and families, stories from pop culture—shaped their decision making processes?  These questions are intensely personal and potentially upsetting to those who might have chosen to terminate a fetus that they had anticipated with excitement until they found out about a particular disability. Alison and I hoped we could secure 12 interviews, but we thought this might be ambitious; we thought that perhaps only a few people would consent to talk about their stories.

When Alison contacted some of her own friends and acquaintances as well as posted our interview request on her blog, we received 9 responses in the first 24 hours. Within the next 12 hours, we had our total of 12 people who had contacted us with their desire to participate in this project.  And people keep responding.  People who Alison has never even met have agreed to be interviewed—people from around the country, some who are living happily with large families, some who are dealing with the death of a child with disabilities, some who are pregnant again and considering testing from a new perspective.

Their generous willingness to talk about their experiences is something that Alison and I are finding overwhelming (in a good way).  Why do so many people want to be a part of this project?  We think this is evidence that we haven’t developed a cultural space for women and their partners to talk about prenatal testing, which many have come to consider an inherent part of pregnancy. As a society, we need a space to grapple with the implications of choice and what it means, especially when statistics show that upwards of 85% of pregnancies with Down syndrome are terminated.  Alison and I are both pro-choice feminist scholars, but we recognize that although the word “choice” implies something easy—a quick decision—in the case of prenatal testing and disabilities, the process is anything but easy or quick.

We’re eager to hear these stories, to start collecting and examining the complexities and paradoxes that these parents are sharing.

I started talking with my 8-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter about sexuality as soon as they started to ask questions like, “How are babies made?”  From my point of view, books have all the answers, and I turned to It’s So Amazing: A Book about Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families by Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley as a starting point.

But recent news has me wondering how and when to initiate other, more difficult conversations about sexuality and power.

For example, my neighbor and I were talking over our 10-year-old daughters’ heads at the bus stop on Monday morning about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund who has been arrested and charged with sexually attacking a maid.

Our conversation went like this:

Neighbor: “Did you see the news about Dominique Strauss-Kahn?”

Me: “Yes, it really does show that incidents like that are about power.”

Neighbor: “That’s for sure.”

My daughter Maya hovered nearby, sensing that we were discussing something juicy, but not entirely understanding.  She interrupted us with a question about school, and we changed the subject.

And then yesterday the news broke that Arnold Schwarzenegger fathered a child with one of his household employees.

I admit to turning the paper facedown on the kitchen table.  I would have found a way to talk about the Schwarzenegger story, of course, but I wasn’t eager to have the conversation.

As someone who jumped in early with the “sex talk,” I wonder why I’m shying away from talking about sexuality and power.  Maybe I want to protect my children from linking sexuality and violence when they still want to believe the best about people’s intentions.  After reading Veronica Arreola’s great post, “Can We Whistle Stereotypes Away?” I think I might be doing a better service to my kids if I’m honest in acknowledging that some men abuse power over women.

GWP readers, what do you think?  Is there a right time for the other sex talk?  Do you have advice about how to navigate this topic?

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.

The peculiar drama of my life has placed me in a world that by and large thinks it would be better if people like me did not exist. My fight has been for accommodation, the world to me, and me to the world.

–Harriet McBryde Johnson, Too Late to Die Young

I’m gonna sit at the welcome table,
I’m gonna sit at the welcome table one of these days,
Halleluia!
I’m gonna sit at the welcome table,
Sit at the welcome table, one of these days.

–Traditional spiritual

“The Welcome Table” is a song that my daughter has been able to sign along with for months now. As many readers already know, Maybelle has Down syndrome. She was born in 2008, into a cultural moment that was ready for her in ways it would not have been even a few decades earlier. In one of my classes recently, a student shared that forty years ago, her sister was born and her mother was told to institutionalize her. A few decades later, shortly after Maybelle was born, I was told, “The College of Charleston is starting a college program for people with intellectual disabilities!” It’s a very different world.

And yet it’s still a world in which many people have a hard time seeing my daughter as fully human, and a world in which many people believe they ought to have prenatal testing so they can be sure their pregnancies won’t result in the births of people like Maybelle. As Harriet McBryde Johnson notes, it’s “a world that by and large things it would be better if people like me [and Maybelle] did not exist.” I know that the stigma surrounding—and, indeed, creating the meaning of—disability persists. I’m aware of it now in a way I wasn’t before Maybelle entered my life. Watching her sign this song recently, I felt how much I want Maybelle to be part of a community where, as one young feminist scholar puts it, “We [can] bring our whole selves to the table.” I want her to sit at a table where she’s welcomed, recognized as a valid and valuable person, and fully included.

I’ve just finished teaching Johnson’s memoir, Too Late to Die Young. Every time I read this book new parts jump out at me, and as I prepared for class last week, the passage quoted above got caught in my head and hasn’t left. Johnson explains that her “fight has been for accommodation.” She makes this point as she recounts an extended dialogue with Peter Singer, a philosopher who argued—kindly, but distressingly and persistently—that people with disabilities, people like Johnson, live lives that are “worse off” and therefore they should be eliminated before (or shortly after) birth, or allowed to commit suicide later. When many of Johnson’s activist cohort criticize her for talking with Singer, she notes that he’s not any more a monster than most of the people she encounters in her life.

One of the moments of real controversy to disability activists is when Johnson sits down beside Singer for a meal. This is during her visit to Princeton, and they dine with students who ask Johnson questions about, essentially, why she deserves to exist. At one point Johnson’s elbow slips, and she’s unable to feed herself. She needs an adjustment. She writes, “Normally I get whoever is on my right hand to do this sort of thing. Why not now? I gesture to Singer. He leans over and I whisper. ‘Grasp this wrist and pull forward one inch, without lifting.’ He looks a little surprised but follows my instructions to the letter.” Some disability rights activists saw this as a flawed endorsement of the humanity of a genocide advocate. Johnson, though, recounts this moment in her book with a kind of wry tenderness.

Interestingly, Singer himself reminisces about their meal, and about his assistance to Johnson, with a similar tenderness in the eulogy he wrote about her for the New York Times. He writes that Johnson’s description of their meal “suggests that she saw me not simply as ‘the enemy’ but as a person with whom it was possible to have some forms of human interaction.” And he identifies her as a person whose “life was evidently a good one.” What happened at their meal was that Johnson brought her whole self to the table, and by doing so, she endorsed Singer’s full humanity, as well. Having a meal together, sitting side by side at the same table, made that possible.

Early in my career at the College of Charleston, Johnson sent me an email, alerting me to the fact that the Women’s and Gender Studies Program I was directing was hosting an event at a venue that was inaccessible to people using wheelchairs. I was a good enough feminist that I recognized the need for a basic level of accommodation, so I made the change. It was a first step for me, a moment when I committed to spaces that were accessible: we’ll have plenty of tables for everybody!

Now, six years later, I’m moving beyond that initial understanding of accommodation. I want accommodation to mean that we are reimagining our communities in significant ways, that we are conceiving of our world as made better—richer—more wonderful by the inclusion of all kinds of diversity, including the diversity of physical and intellectual disabilities. I want us to bring our whole selves to the table, one table that everyone has the chance to sit at, a table where we’re all truly welcome.

Girl w/Pen friends — it’s been too long!  In keeping with today’s theme so wonderfully explored by Debbie Siegel, here’s my review of my shero Peggy Orenstein’s latest.  This review originally appeared on the Ms. Magazine blog and is re-posted with permission.  For more of Orenstein’s thoughts read my interview with her on SheWrites.

If you’ve been within 50 feet of a 4-year-old girl in the past decade, you can’t have escaped the fact that princess is a booming industry. From T-shirts emblazoned with “princess” to the fad for “makeover” parties to “princess potty seats”, there is no shortage of products with a tiara theme offered to girls. In her excellent new book Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Peggy Orenstein writes as a journalist, a mother of an elementary school-age girl and a former girl herself to investigate the explosion of pink “girlie-girl culture.”

Common wisdom would have it that the demand for pink is simply hardwired into girls. Orenstein evaluates this by consulting with neuroscientist and Pink Brain, Blue Brain author Lise Eliot, a proponent of neuroplasticity–the idea that “[inborn traits], gender-based or otherwise, are shaped by our experience.” Eliot’s research shows that, in fact, when kids are tiny, “[they] do not know from pink and blue.” She argues that children don’t begin to label behavior or toys as meant for girls or for boys until between ages 2 and 3, as kids come to understand there are gender differences. It’s also the exact time when they’re handed toys that are gender-specific. In other words, Orenstein writes, “nurture becomes nature.” Boys are blued; girls are pinked.

So if not nature, what’s the force behind all the pinking? The easy answer is money. As one example, the ever-more-present Disney Princesses line grossed $4 billion dollars in 2009. The “father” of that line, Andy Mooney, tells Orenstein, “I wish I could sit here and take credit for having some grand scheme to develop this, but all we did was envision a little girl’s room and think about how she could live out the princess fantasy.” A sales rep at the annual Toy Fair has a more direct answer when Orenstein asks if all this pink is necessary: “Only if you want to make money.”

But even if cash-hungry marketers are pushing pink to rake in profits, there’s another piece to the puzzle: parents who buy the toys for their kids. Orenstein has a deep empathy for the competing pressures they face. She herself doesn’t want to restrict her daughter from choosing her own mode of self-expression–even if that’s a poufy princess dress–but worries that all the marketing itself constricts her daughter’s choices. Instead of the entire rainbow, girls only get to see the pink slice.

Orenstein’s sympathy extends to parents participating in the most extreme “girl-ification”–the pageant parents portrayed on the TV show Toddlers and Tiaras. Visiting a pageant held deep in the hill country of Texas, Orenstein leaves the tiara-fest more ambivalent. She’s not ready to dismiss the parents’ oft-repeated credo that pageants boost their girls’ self-esteem and that it’s okay to tell your daughter that she’s special. She also sees how much much participating in pageants can mean to a family. But it’s clear from her observations that Toddlers and Tiaras is doing its share of harm.

Orenstein mentions how exposés of the show have featured “psychologists who (with good reason) link self-objectification and sexualization to [a] host of ills previously mentioned—eating disorders, depression, low self-esteem, impaired academic performance,” often rebutted by the pageant moms, who then defend their actions. And within the book’s first pages Orenstein references the well-respected American Psychological Association’s Report of The Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls which offered hard evidence that an overemphasis on beauty and sexiness made girls vulnerable to problematic behaviors linked to self-objectification.

So how can parents balance these pressures in order to stem the tide of pink? Orenstein leaves the question open, which might frustrate some readers. She muses as she researches, reflects as she consults, and ends the book optimistic but uncertain about how root-level change can be achieved. On her website she’s just launched a “resources” section which offers suggestions of books for kids and parents, recommended shows and films, even a clothing line. Lisa Belkin of “Motherlode” in The New York Times has also responded with a solid list of suggested reading in her column “The Princess Wears Plaid.” Additionally, the Ms. blog offers a list of contemporary retellings of fairy tales and myths from a feminist perspective. All ask readers to chime in with further contributions.

Orenstein has a final, crucial piece of advice: Just say NO to the overpinking. That might seem pat to a frustrated parent–saying no reaches beyond appeasing a demanding child to refusing cultural edicts that seem to whisper and shout from every side. Awareness is your best line of defense, Orenstein insisted in dialogue with Lori Gottlieb at a recent L.A. talk, as she repeated, “You just say NO.”

Ask me five years ago and I’d have told you I’d be first in line to challenge gender stereotypes if ever I had kids myself.  I minored in feminist cultural studies!  I believe boys and girls are made, not just born!  But sixteen months into parenting my boy/girl twins, I’m starting to wonder how I’ll ever ensure that my boy grows up sensitive and my girl stays, as one of my favorite organizations has trained me to say, strong, brave, and bold.

It’s an unfortunate moment for complacency.  Children are boxed into hyper-gendered categories at ages younger than ever before.  Just last month, Disney infiltrated the delivery room.  New research shows that girls as young as three are internalizing the thin ideal.  As blogger Pigtail Pals reports, a study by Dr. Jennifer Harriger, published in 2010 finds that preschoolers are attributing stereotypes to others because of their weight.  The news is distressing.  Gender-aware parents can cleanse our daughters’ bedrooms of pale pink and defend a love for Tinkerbelle in our sons, yet the clutch of our pink-vs.-blue culture seems only to tighten its hold.  Why, we’re all asking, is this so?

There’s ample proof that since the utopian hope of “Free to Be You and Me” in the 1970s, as a culture we’ve slid backwards. As Peggy Orenstein documents so thoroughly and well in Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie Girl Culture (reviewed here this week by Elline!), things are far worse than they were when we grew up.  The hyper-marketing of gendered purchases target kids at an increasingly vulnerable age, and it’s enough to make any parent tired.

We can blame Disney and we can fight the princesses, but perhaps two additional reasons that a generation of parents raised on feminism feels like we’re losing the war is that 1) we’re confused and 2) we’re alone.

We’re confused by “science.” Fighting gender-based discrimination has morphed into dealing with science, which carries boldfaced authority—and many feminist scientists themselves are now fighting this fight too.  Sometimes I wonder about the effects.  Have Gen X parents grown convinced of children’s innate gender sensibilities?  Decades of media stories hawking the latest in neuroscience have emphasized the nature side of the nurture debate that second-wave feminism famously upstaged.  Have the things we’ve heard about gender affected a new generation’s parenting behavior?  “The more we parents hear about hard-wiring and biological programming, the less we bother tempering our pink or blue fantasies, and start attributing every skill or deficit to innate sex differences,” suggests neuroscientist Lise Eliot in her book Pink Brain, Blue Brain, (which argues, by the way, that social expectations—not biological differences—have the upper hand in shaping who our children become.)  Sensational, whiplash-inducing headlines tell us gender is inborn—no, wait, made—no, born.  Unless you’re steeped in this research, it’s often hard to know what’s what anymore.

But our biggest problem, I fear, is that when it comes to resisting the hyper-genderfication of childhood, we’re largely fighting it alone.

Over the past sixteen months, as my babies have progressed from a crawl to a walk and now to words, it’s slowly dawned on me how much the premise of my previous book, Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild, applies to my new situation: As parents, and especially as new parents, we don’t always feel plugged into a movement to change the larger culture in which we raise our kids.  Instead, we’re left to focus on ourselves—in this case, our familial microcosms—on our own.

To be sure, there’s a burgeoning movement out there. I’m a huge fan of initiatives like SPARK and the Geena Davis Institute and efforts to redefine girly like Pigtail Pals and of course the longstanding work of Girls Inc.  I voraciously consume every new book by educators like Lyn Mikel Brown to learn what we can do to resist (See Packaging Girlhood, Packaging Boyhood, and also the resource page at the wonderful Peggy Orenstein’s site.) But these initiatives aren’t as mainstreamed as they might be.  I can control my growing babies’ media consumption and control what comes in the house, but control only goes so far.  I fear that as a new mother, I’m long on feminist parenting ideals, short on ways to make them stick in the world outside my home.

I hear that change feels more possible once your kids hit kindergarten.  My friends there tell me that they feel successful in their attempts to provide a larger context in which it’s natural for their girl to love Star Wars and their boy to take ballet.  They feel effective.  They feel their actions span far.

In the meantime, we mothers of babes continue our preparations for the good fight by lining our children’s bookshelves with The Sissy Duckling and No I Will NOT Wear a Dress and painting our nurseries sage.  But short of a massive and visible movement—you know, like the political ones we see right now on tv—sometimes I worry.  Are we all just focusing on the equivalent of wardrobes and walls?

What do YOU think?  Do you see a new generation of parents taking on the battle against the hyper-genderfication of childhood in spades?  Is there a movement?  Or are we all basically out here on our own?  If you have strong thoughts on this either way, for a writing/blogging/thinking project I’m working on (The Pink and Blue Diaries), I’d love to hear from you.  Please email me at deborah@shewrites.com

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?

“For decades, Barbie has remained torpedo-titted, open-mouthed, tippy-toed and vagina-less in her cellophane coffin—and, ever since I was little, she threatened me,” writes Susan Jane Gilman in her article “Klaus Barbie.”

This sentiment towards Barbie, one Gilman describes as “heady, full-blown hatred,” is familiar to many females (myself included) – but, so too, is a love of Barbie and a nostalgia for Barbie-filled memories.

Feelings towards Barbie often lie along a continuum that shifts with life’s passages –as children, many love her, then as tween and teendom sets in, she is tossed aside, forgotten about for many years, and then later, when children come into one’s life – through mothering or aunty-ing, Barbie once again enters the picture. For feminist women, the question of whether or not Barbie is a “suitable” plaything for the children in their lives often looms large as they navigate the toy-fueled world of early childhood.

Daena Title’s “Drown the Dolls,” an art exhibit premiering this weekend at the Koplin Del Reio art gallery in Culver City, California, continues the feminist tradition of analyzing Barbie, this time with an eye towards “drowning” (or at least submerging) the ideals of femininity Barbie embodies. In the video below, the artist explains her fascination with Barbie as “grotesque” and how her distorted reflections under water mirror the distorted messages culture sends to girls and women about feminine bodily perfection.

Title’s project and the surrounding media campaign (which asks people to share their Barbie Stories in 2 to 3 minute clips at You Tube), has garnered a lot of commentary. Much of the surrounding commentary and many of the threads have focused on the issue of drowning as perpetuating or normalizing violence against women. For example, this blogger at The Feminist Agenda writes,

“When I look at the images… I don’t so much get the message that the beauty standard is being drowned as that images of violence against women – especially attractive women – are both acceptable and visually appealing in our culture.”

Threads at the Ms. blog as well as on Facebook include many similar sentiments. While I have not seen the exhibit yet, the paintings featured in the above clip are decidedly non-violent – they do not actively “drown” Barbie so much as showcase her underwater with her distorted image reflected on the water’s surface – as well as often surrounded by smiling young girls. As Title indicates in her discussion of her work, it is the DISTORTED REFLECTIONS of Barbie that captivate her – as well as the way she is linked to girl’s happiness and playfulness – a happiness that will be “drown” as girls grow into the adult bodies Barbie’s plastic body is meant to represent.

The reactions thus far of “drowning” as violent focus on the project’s title alone, failing to take the content (and context) of the paintings into account – they are not a glorification of violence but a critique of the violence done to girls and women (and their bodies and self esteem) by what Barbie represents.

To me, Title’s work is in keeping with the earlier aims of the Barbie Liberation Organization who infamously toyed with Barbie’s voicebox to have her say GI Joe’s line “vengeance is mine” rather than her original “math is hard!” Her work adds to the tradition of feminist work on toys, gendering, and girls studies – a tradition that is thriving and continues to examine new and old toys alike (as here and here).

The negative commentary regarding Title’s work as perpetuating violence seems to me a knee-jerk reaction – one not based in critical reading of her work. While maybe Barbie (and the bodily perfection her grotesquely ABNORMAL body represents) SHOULD sink, Title’s work – and the critiques of Barbie it is fostering, deserves to swim…

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.