| Mothering
and feminism are often considered ncompatible, and
it’s not too hard to figure out why. In the early 1960s—
when radical fervor was running high in the women’s liberation
movement— certain vocal feminists denounced marriage and motherhood
as instruments patriarchal oppression and blasted the “false
consciousness” of happy homemakers who failed to perceive the personal as political. Sentiments in the Women's Liberation movement shifted
rather quickly when it became obvious that revolutionary rhetoric
castigating women for their cherished attachments to men and children
was unlikely to foster a universal spirit of sisterhood, and feminist
theorist began the critical process of separating the social and
cultural construction of motherhood from the intimate relational
practice of mothering. As it turned out, homemakers weren’t
all that happy and the mainstream women’s movement ultimately
transformed wives’ and mothers’ expectations about what
constitutes fair and equal treatment at home and in the workplace.
But lingering doubts remain in both popular and academic culture
about what feminism has to do with mothering, and vice versa. Thanks
in part to the neo-conservative political drift of the last two
decades, American mothers (and fathers) may be tempted to think
that life would be easier if second wave feminists never muddied
the waters with their big ideas about economic independence for
women. In the academy, the challenge has been to get research and
scholarship on motherhood and mothering recognized as a legitimate
topic of formal inquiry.
As Adrienne Rich wrote
in the foreword to her influential book Of Woman Born,
“We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel,
than about the nature and meaning of motherhood.” According
to a background
brief from The Association
for Research on Mothering, scholarship on motherhood
has finally found a place in women’s studies, but “still
remains, in many disciplines, on the margins of scholarly inquiry.
Most maternal scholars can recall and recount an instance where
their motherhood research was viewed with suspicion, if not outright
dismissal.” Founded in 1998, ARM is the first feminist association
devoted to advancing interdisciplinary scholarship on mothering
and motherhood. The association currently has over 500 members worldwide
including scholars, writers, activists, social workers, midwives,
nurses, therapists, lawyers, teachers, parents, politicians, students
and artists. Through its conferences and journals, ARM provides
an essential forum for discussion and dissemination of research
on motherhood.
“When we organized
the first conference in 1997— on Mothers and Daughters—
we had an amazing response to our call for papers, although we’d
done very little advertising,” explains Andrea
O’Reilly, PhD, Director of the
Centre for Research on Mothering at York University in Toronto,
Ontario. “The women who attended that first conference shared
the belief that motherhood was an important topic worthy of serious
scholarship. I realized that these researchers wanted a “room
of their own” for motherhood studies, and many felt there
was an urgent need to create a community of maternal scholars.”
When O’Reilly founded
ARM, she assumed there were other academic centers for scholarship
on motherhood, and that ARM would merely be the first Canadian center.
“But I discovered that in 1998 there did not exist a single
association devoted to the study of motherhood— not one—
and that amazed me. The same thing was true when we launched the
journal— internationally, it was the first and only journal
devoted specifically to the topic of motherhood or that examined
the maternal experience from the mother’s point of view.”
Given the overall lack
of academic interest in mothering and motherhood, I asked O’Reilly
if she encountered any resistance when she made the decision to
promote the formal study of motherhood. “When I became a mother
unexpectedly at the age of 23, I reflected back on all the courses
I’d taken and realized I’d never had a single course
in which motherhood was discussed in a thorough way— and this
was coursework leading to a degree in Women’s Studies.”
To fill the gap, O’Reilly developed a course on motherhood—
the first course on motherhood and mothering in Canada, which is
still taught every year. “Resistance might be too strong a
word— it wasn’t even indifference, but more of a puzzlement
about why we were doing this, why we felt we needed to offer a course
on motherhood— it was more like, ‘who cares, don’t
women already know how to do this?’ People assumed I was
instructing women on how to be good mothers. They didn’t get
it, or they trivialized it as a practical course. Resistance would
have been more welcome— at least it could have led to a discussion
about how motherhood is ignored and devalued.” O’Reilly
says it’s not so much resistance or apathy that seem to undermine
efforts to advance formal scholarship on mothering and motherhood
so much as lack of support— “a kind of benign neglect”—
from the academic community that continues to limit the resources
and funding available to for maternal studies.
If the academy fails
to appreciate the value of research and writing on motherhood, there
is good reason to believe that a growing community of like-minded
women know exactly how crucial an informed discourse on motherhood
and mothering is to the process of social change. The
ARM Conference on Mothering and Feminism (held
in Toronto on October 22-24, 2004) provided a remarkable opportunity
for over 150 scholars, writers and activists to share critical thinking
on feminist mothering and the politics of motherhood. With three
keynote sessions and thirty-plus panels over a three-day period,
presentations covered a wide range of topics, including blogging
as a form of resistance, representations of African American mothering
in film, the politics of attachment parenting and the natural mothering
movement, motherhood in literature and memoir, feminist critiques
of advice to mothers, lesbian motherhood, mothering and third wave
politics, and maternal activism past and present. Speakers came
from Canada, the U.S., and Australia.
Highlights of the conference
included a thoroughly entertaining but pointed presentation by Faulkner
Fox (Dispatches from a Not So Perfect Life)
on judgementalism among mothers and the challenge it presents to
feminist community-building (Fox’s essay will soon be available
on LiteraryMama.com),
a thought-provoking keynote by historian Katherine Arnup
on the potential of gay marriage to further complicate the social
and legal challenges of lesbian parenting, an evening of selected
readings by Hip
Mama’s Ariel Gore, and an exploration of the
paradoxical politics of the natural mothering movement by sociologist
Chris Bobel. Is the natural mothering movement
“viable as an effort to reform society, one family at a time,
or is a simply a form of narcissistic retreat void of impact beyond
the empire of the individual family?,” she inquired. Bobel’s
research led her to conclude that a successful “maternal movement”
will be one “that challenges, not bargains with patriarchy,
one that champions motherhood without essentializing it. We need
a movement that faces privilege and finds ways to make itself accessible…
Until then, we hazard maternal-based movements that fail to move
us forward, but simply keep us running in place.”
I especially enjoyed
a commentary by Mother Shock author Andi
Buchanan on the way maternal narrative and memoir are
reshaping ideas about the “real” experience of motherhood
in popular culture— despite an absurd lack of interest from
the publishing world. “I have learned,” Buchanan remarked,
“that it is assumed that mothers not only do not read books
or buy books or go to bookstores for readings, they also do not
write books very well.” Fortunately, as Buchanan noted, mothers
“are incredibly resourceful. So mothers who do not see themselves
in what they read or see on TV have begun to create their own narrative
and to publish it in a place where anyone with access to a computer
can find it: the internet.”
In a closing address,
Andrea O’Reilly spoke about the “possibility
of empowered maternity”— how might we transition from
a culture that values motherhood— an institution that constrains
women’s behavior for the benefit of a social order predicated
on male dominion— to one that respects and supports mothering—
the complex and variegated relational experience of women who mother?
O’Reilly explored the potential of “outlaw mothering”
to dismantle patriarchal motherhood as we know it: “An outlaw
mother does not necessarily have authority, agency, autonomy, authenticity,
but she recognizes that she is entitled to them and seeks to achieve
them.” O’Reilly was particularly critical of the cultural
mandate of intensive mothering— which, as she noted, The
Mommy Myth authors Susan Douglas and Meredith
Michaels have dubbed “the new momism.” “The discourse
of intensive mothering becomes oppressive not because children have
needs,” O’Reilly commented, “but because we, as
a culture, dictate that only the biological mother is capable of
fulfilling them, that children’s needs must always come before
those of the mother, and that children’s needs must be responded
to around the clock with extensive time, money, energy… I
believe it is these dictates that make motherhood oppressive to
women and not the work of mothering per se.” (For more about
outlaw mothering and the possibility of empowered maternity, see
O’Reilly’s introduction to the anthology Mother
Outlaws: Theories and Practices of Empowered Mothering, Women’s
Press, 2004.)
I presented a
paper on a topic central to my work for the MMO—
the
political and ideological grounding of the emerging mothers’
movement. I was gratified to discover that my core concerns—
about the child-centric tradition of maternal activism as opposed
to the woman-centric tradition of feminist activism, and where both
ideologies fall short as a framework for the new mothers' movement;
about the inherent problems with relying on the discourse of “choice”
to advance women’s equality; about the dead-end nature of
lifestyle politics; about the formulation of third wave feminism
and its capacity to sustain a full-scale social movement—
were echoed and expanded upon during a number of panel discussions
and private conversations over the course of the weekend.
Although one of ARM’s
primary objectives is to bring together maternal scholars, writers,
artists and activists, most of those who attended the Conference
on Mothering and Feminism were academics— and those who were
not confided that they felt some tension about their “outsider”
status (hint to scholars: the “Where do you teach?”
thing is a bit off-putting). Certainly there are academics—
especially feminist academics— who use their scholarly work
to elucidate the pressing need for social change. But since academic
culture tends to be frustratingly insular and highly competitive,
real barriers remain to forging productive links between formal
scholarship, popular discourse and social activism. ARM deserves
credit for what it has achieved in this regard— I’ve
attended other academic conferences dedicated to “bridging
the gap” between scholarship and activism where no one was
at all curious about my work on motherhood as a social problem—
in fact, the other conference-goers barely even spoke to me. The
wall between the academic enclave and everyone else who has something
intelligent and interesting to say about literature or social conditions
is a long-standing problem, and something both sides need to keep
chipping away at. As Mothers
& More Executive Director Joanne Brundage
remarked during the course of the conference, “We’ve
been hearing all about the social and economic disadvantages of
motherhood, but what are we supposed to do about it?”
Personally, I felt honored
and excited to be included in such a stimulating and passionate
discussion about the political dimensions of both “lived”
and “examined” mothering and the future of feminism.
And I came away with an even stronger conviction that a broad-based
grass roots mothers’ movement is absolutely necessary. We
need a mothers’ movement not only to change the adverse social
and cultural conditions under which women today must mother, but
also to ensure that all mothers have the freedom and power they
need to determine for themselves the authentic meaning of their
own maternal experience. We need a mothers’ movement to create
a more just and sustainable society. And since attending the recent
ARM conference, I can say with great confidence that I’m not
the only mother out there who happens to think so.
Judith
Stadtman Tucker
Editor, The Mothers Movement Online
mmo : November 2004 |
