“Never
until this very historical moment,” the late sociologist Jesse Bernard wrote in her treatise on the future of motherhood, “have
women rebelled as many are now doing against the very way we institutionalize
motherhood.”
They are daring to
say that although they love children, they hate motherhood. That
they object to being assigned sole responsibility for child care.
That they object to having child care conceived of as their only
major activity. That they object to the isolation in which they
must perform the role of mother, cut off from help, from one another,
from the outside world. For the first time, they are protesting
the false aura of romanticism with which motherhood is endowed,
keeping from young women its terrible “hidden underside”
which “is hardly ever talked about.”
Bernard continues: “A group of women, basing their conclusions
on their own experiences as participant observers— or rather
observant participators— note almost point for point how the
way we institutionalize motherhood is bad for women. They call on
women to organize ‘to fight those aspects of our society that
make childbearing and child rearing stressful rather than fulfilling
experiences.’”
Considering that these observations were made over
30 years ago, the litany of grievances Bernard recorded— and mothers’
resolve to “to fight those aspects of our society that make
childbearing and child rearing stressful rather than fulfilling
experiences”— seem depressingly familiar. Bernard believed
the momentum of the mid-20th century women’s movement, coupled
with heightened concern about the depletion of the earth’s
natural resources due to overpopulation, would pave the way for
a more mother-friendly society, particularly for women who wanted
children but desired less child-centric lives. The key to all this,
she argued, would be forging a new “script” for 21st
century motherhood— a script offering an unsentimental appraisal
of the pros and cons of motherhood while promoting the revolutionary
idea that the well-rounded life of any mother involves more than
just mothering. Bernard predicted this seismic shift in cultural
consciousness would transform the way men and women share all the
necessary work of society— both paid work and unpaid caregiving—
and that policymakers would respond to the brave new order by implementing
a comprehensive system of social supports for working parents, including
paid parental leave, flexible workplaces, better options for part-time
work with good pay and opportunities for advancement, more educational
and occupational on- and off-ramps for women at all points in the
life course, and universal access to affordable, high-quality child
care.
Unfortunately, things didn’t exactly work out that way—
and here we are in 2005, still talking about the future of motherhood.
More importantly, some of us are talking about mobilizing an organized
social movement with the express purpose of shaping that future.
And while various groups claiming to represent the best interests
of mothers may envision this movement as a mothering movement,
a motherhood movement, or a mothers’ rights movement,
there is general agreement that a powerful confluence of unfavorable
social conditions— including cultural ideals assigning competing
values to the vital functions of public and private life, retrogressive
political trends, sex discrimination,; pernicious stereotypes, intransigent
workplace standards, and inadequate or outdated social policies—
lie at the heart of the contemporary motherhood problem. We’re
all aware of how this problem plays out in the lives of women who
mother— of how, despite dramatic increases in their level
of paid employment, mothers continue to provide a disproportionate
share of the unpaid caregiving work that supports our families and
economy, and how this limits their occupational mobility and earning
potential. Activist mothers know the time mothers devote to unpaid
caregiving significantly increases the odds they will experience
financial insecurity and diminished well-being over the course of
a lifetime. And we all believe something must be done about it—
sooner rather than later.
In fact, the diverse proponents of the emerging mothers’
movement are quite clear about what they want the next future of
motherhood to look like. We want mothers to have better lives with
less role strain and better options for integrating work and family.
We want respect and recognition for the social and economic value
of mothers’ work— both paid employment and the unpaid
care work mothers do at home. We want more flexibility in the workplace,
and we want equal pay for equal work. We want public policies that
respond to the needs of dual-earner couples and single parent women,
we want reasonable protection from economic hardships mothers may
incur due to their maternal status, and we want men to take a more
active role in child-rearing and domestic life in general. We agree
that an organized social movement— a broad-based grassroots
uprising— will be crucial to achieving this kind of sweeping
change. However, there is a lack of consensus among mothers’
advocates about why change is necessary. Is it necessary to improve
the lives of women? Or is it necessary to improve the lives of children
and create a more humane and sustainable society?
Ultimately, the answer is “yes” to all of these commendable
goals. But as a writer and activist who views the objectives of
the mothers’ movement through the lens of progressive feminism,
I feel compelled to add a word of caution: If we want both public
respect and support for the work of mothering as well as equality
for women— meaning full social, economic and political citizenship
for all women, nothing more, and nothing less— we have a duty
to pay close attention to not just what we're asking for,
but how and why we're asking.
Why
feminism still matters
There is a certain mistrust
of feminism among leaders of the new mothers’ movement based on a shared perception that the priorities of second wave activism
left lower-income women and women with caregiving responsibilities
in the lurch, and the widespread impression
that, politically speaking, feminism is something of a non-starter
for the average American mom. But before we relegate feminism to
the scrap heap of dated ideas, I think it’s important to take
a closer look at the reasons Jesse Bernard’s bold predictions
about the future of motherhood missed the mark.
There’s no question the climate for motherhood has changed
since The Future of Motherhood was published in 1974—
the real problem is it hasn’t changed enough. The feminist
agenda to promote women’s economic independence was moderately
successful in clearing the way for women’s participation in
the professional and skilled labor force, which opened up important
work/life opportunities for mothers that never before existed.
Unfortunately, the full-scale invasion of male dominated professions
by highly qualified female workers was not enough to rehabilitate
deep-seated cultural attitudes about women, children and family.
Despite the fact 65 percent of American children live in households
where all parents are employed, today’s high-performance workplaces
are still structured as if every wage earner can rely on a full-time
caregiver to pick up the slack at home. And since traditional attitudes
about appropriate roles for men and women still exert a powerful
influence on the way we organize our families and workplaces, mothers
are much more likely than fathers to find themselves squeezed out
of full-time employment. Thanks to our cultural obsession with the
lives and lifestyles of affluent urbanites, high-profile media reporting
tends to concentrate on the work-life predicaments of exceptionally
well-educated mothers in upscale occupations. But the grim reality
is that the overall lack of workplace flexibility and the miserly
provisions of U.S. policies to support working
families take the heaviest toll on lower-income parents.
And if that’s not bad enough, we’re still stuck with
the myth of the omnipotent mother— the absurd (but tenacious) notion that children are perfectible, and mothers are
the only ones who can perfect them. It’s comforting—
not to mention politically expedient— to cling to the belief
that the optimal development of children depends solely on their
exposure to a specific quality and quantity of maternal devotion,
as if families’ access to resources and general social conditions
had no real bearing on children’s prospects. Regrettably,
both conservative and liberal thinkers have gotten away with advancing
the preposterous theory that if the nation’s errant mothers
would simply buckle down and do the job of motherhood the way it was meant to be done—
meaning a married, child-centered, resource intensive, selfless
sort of way— the country could substantially rid itself of a host
of pesky social problems, such as poverty, crime, substance abuse,
obesity and moral decay.
The idealization of conscientious mothering as a kind of universal
salve for what’s gone wrong with society has tremendous appeal—
both to those who benefit from the social and economic subordination
of women, and to mothers themselves. It’s immensely gratifying
to think the more mundane aspects of caregiving— the cooking,
the cleaning, the endless rounds of delivering and retrieving our
children from their assorted educational and recreational activities—
add up to something more than a sum of their parts, and it’s
reassuring to imagine that we have more control over the events
and encounters that shape our children’s lives than we probably
do. It’s uplifting to believe that all the work we put into
keeping our children safe and sound helps us cultivate specialized
skills and sensitivities we can use to change their world for the
better— either through our own direct actions or through the
positive contributions of our mindfully-reared children. It’s
wonderfully affirming to hear that mothers are irreplaceable, that
motherhood is “the most important job in the world,”
that diligent mothers acquire a deep and abiding wisdom about the
essential nature and needs of children— not just their own
children, but all children, everywhere— that those lacking
maternal experience can never hope to match.
When I’m in one of my gloomier moods, I tend to think of
the reflexive veneration of motherhood as a sort of consolation
prize— even though we live in a society that systematically
discounts mothers and the work they do, at least we have a reason
to feel good about ourselves. But I also appreciate that mothers
reprise these conventional sentiments because they genuinely feel
true to us— and because when it comes to expressing the depth
of our emotional attachment to our children and the personal meaning
of motherhood, it's the only type of language and logic our culture
is prepared to validate.
The trouble with this narrative of heroic motherhood is that it
flows from the exact same stream of ideology that neatly sections
the full range of human activity and emotional response into two
separate spheres— a great big one labeled “his”
and an itty-bitty one labeled “hers.” It’s part
of a carefully cultivated story that says women are particularly
well suited for caring work while men are better equipped for jobs
that demand strategy, strength and competition. And even though
we’ve finally reached a point in the history of human progress
where each side of the talent pool is willing to tolerate some incursion
from the other, we’re still operating from a worldview that
assumes the fundamental capacities of men and women are different
and fixed. This is why we just know women are better
suited to dependency, in all its variations, while men are made
for autonomy— and over the course of the last 300 years
(and probably very much longer) an exceptional amount of intellectual
energy has been devoted to explaining why this is and must always
be so. But remember, it’s just a story— one story out
of any number of stories we might tell about the nature of men and
women and how they live together.
When we talk about the practice of conscientious mothering in such
gendered terms, it sounds pretty good— good for mothers, good
for children, good for society. The major rub is that this timeworn
estimation of the innate abilities of the sexes underpins
a social order in which men still have considerably greater power
than women do, and this makes it practically impossible for women
to get the resources they need to preserve their own health and
well-being— and that of their children— without submitting
to some degree of subordination. Needless to say, this works to
the advantage of individuals and institutions with a vested
interest in retaining their present level of social power and privilege.
And clearly, it works to the disadvantage of women, children,
and everyone else who is excluded from the dominant group.
I’ll admit this analysis sounds disconcertingly theoretical
when the tender subject at hand is how mothers care for and about
their children. But it does offer an alternative explanation—
dare I say, a feminist explanation— for why mothers
work less, are paid less, and spend more hours doing unpaid child
care and housework than fathers do. Love and “choice”
may indeed factor into it, but I like to imagine that it’s
technically— if not politically— possible to create
a future of motherhood where women’s love and women’s
choices are fully compatible with women’s equality.
If the ultimate aim of the mothers’ movement is to advance
the status of women who mother, it will be counterproductive to
frame our appeals for policy reform in a manner that fails to challenge
traditional gender roles— or to demand better support and
services for mothers now and hope women’s equality will
“trickle down” later. When we valorize the work of mothering
as the most important job in the world, we inevitably reinforce
the same ideological system that devalues the work of caregiving
and limits women’s individual and political power— they
power they need to change the world for children or anyone else.
When we suggest the practice of mothering instills in all mothers
a refined moral sensibility or fundamental intuition about what
children need to thrive both at home and in the world, we relieve those other than mothers of the responsibility of ensuring
that our children inhabit a non-violent and caring society, and
we inadvertently strengthen distorted cultural assumptions about
who mothers are and what they do best. And if we truly want caregiving
to count in our society, we must be courageous enough to release
it from its secondary status as women’s work.
Why
motherhood is not a job
If we want women’s
equality to be part of the big picture of a mothers’ movement,
it may be necessary to start from scratch and begin to imagine new
possibilities for the meaning of motherhood, mothering, and caregiving
in our society. The task at hand is to build a legitimate case for
social change without resorting to sentimentalizing or idealizing
the practice of mothering, and without minimizing the social
significance and emotional complexity that motherhood adds to the
lives of women who mother. In seeking common ground for
collective action, we might begin by questioning whether there are any universal
aspects of maternal experience.
Based on my study of motherhood as a social issue and my experience
of corresponding with hundreds of mothers over the past few years,
I’m convinced there are a least two: Becoming a mother changes
you, although it doesn’t change every mother in exactly the
same way; and all women who mother are disadvantaged by the cultural
and social circumstances under which they must mother, but not all
are disadvantaged in exactly the same way, or to the same degree.
I’ve been accused of alienating potential supporters of the
mothers’ movement by suggesting that motherhood is not,
in fact, "the most important job in the world." And to be
perfectly honest, I don’t think it is. I don’t think
motherhood is a “job”— or a profession, or career—
at all, although there's no denying that mothering entails a prodigious amount of
mental work and physical labor. And when I criticize the valorization
of motherhood and magical thinking about women’s power to
change the world through conscious acts of responsible mothering,
some readers may find me unsympathetic and pity my poor children
for having such a hard-hearted mom.
To tell the truth, I have very deep and passionate feelings about
the meaning of motherhood in my own life and the lives of other
women who mother. That’s why I’m doing this work. It’s
also why I’m so forthright in my rejection of pre-packaged
narratives of motherhood that— based on both my personal experience
and the view from my critical eye— are contrived to conceal,
rather than reveal, the social and emotional value of motherhood
and mothering.
My therapist (may a thousand blessings rain down upon her head)
has always insisted that motherhood is not a job— it’s
a relationship. And in my mind, thinking and talking about
motherhood as a relationship— rather than a system of social
reproduction, or a duty, or a vocation— is one way we might
start to compose a rich new script for motherhood, a script
that honors the possibility of complexity and variation in mothers’
inner lives, individual outlooks and aspirations.
If we locate motherhood and mothering in the context of relationship,
we can still talk about love, work, desire and obligation, but we
might be able to talk about these things in a more authentic way—
or at least without feeling as though there is only one right answer
to the question of what it means to be a mother. After all, interpersonal
relationships do give rise to the impulse and obligation to care, although the strength of the impulse and the intensity
of the obligation usually depend on the tenderness of the attachment,
and the nature of the needs of the person we’re attached to.
Because caring for others is not always easy or spontaneous, caring
relationships put us in touch with the intricacies of our own emotional
clockwork— and in this way, they can alter us. They can lead
to new awareness of ourselves and others around us; they push us
to grow. And this is just as true for the care-giver as it is for
the cared-for.
When we look at motherhood as a relationship, we have an opportunity
to weave a more mother-centric story to explain why becoming a mother
can be a profoundly transformative experience, and why it never
transforms every mother in precisely the same way— because when
we conceive of motherhood and mothering as relationship, we’re
describing an individual process, not a monolithic one. (Or as Jesse
Bernard suggests, “Motherhood may work miraculous changes
in women, transforming at least some of them into a close approximation
of the model, or a close facsimile thereof, but for the most part
women enter motherhood with the full complement of human virtues
and defects, as various as all other living beings, and they remain
different to the end.”)
Perhaps if we begin to think of motherhood as something other than
a job, we might discover a new way to acknowledge that motherhood
is an ending— the ending of a woman’s life as not-a-mother—
and also a beginning, not of a different life, but of a changed one;
a life that’s still full of open-ended and unexpected possibilities
as well as added responsibilities. When we start talking about motherhood
as a relationship, we— women, mothers— take ownership
of it. And by the way, fatherhood is also a relationship, not a
“role,” and it’s about time we started talking about
the meaning of that, too.
Our new narrative of motherhood-as-relationship might also be used
to articulate why contemporary mothers feel set apart from the rest
of society in both good and bad ways. For example, in addition to
divvying up our social world along gender lines, our culture also
breaks down the rest of human experience into a series of dualisms—
such as mind/body, public/private, productive/reproductive, competitive/compassionate,
rational/relational— and assigns competing values to each
side of the pair. The upshot is that behaviors and traits considered
ideal on one side of the set are usually considered negative and inappropriate
in the other. Such distinctions make our messy human lives seem
a little more orderly and manageable, but it’s important to
recognize that they are almost entirely arbitrary and culturally
defined. Many people, female and male, struggle with this disconnect—
because while it’s relatively easy to shift our concentration
and actions in response to different social situations, we can’t
split ourselves in two. We are always completely who we are every minute of our lives; we can’t conveniently shed selective
aspects of our rational and relational selves when we move into
a different setting. So if we accept that motherhood is a relationship
and not a job, it’s becomes clear there is no sliding scale
to being a mother— our motherliness isn’t based
on the number of hours we put into mothering.
But no matter how firmly we plant our feet in the competitive world
of free market enterprise, the emotional tethers of the private,
relational world are always drawing us back to the reality of human
feeling and need. At the same time, our aspirations may constantly
pull us outward, inviting us to walk on a different edge of our
lives. Everyone experiences this pull of opposites to some degree,
but since our present social system depends on women to maintain
the compassionate half of the world— and because the needs
of children are so urgently felt by children and the people who
care for them— mothers may feel the conflict between work
and family life most acutely.
When you add all this up, it becomes easier to understand why conforming—
or attempting to conform— to the prevailing cultural model
of ideal motherhood feels more “natural” to us than
resisting it. And the sensation Daphne de Marneffe describes as "maternal pleasure"— one of the emotional perks we
get from being in relationship with our children— is real
and palpable (Maternal
Desire, 2004). But mothering can also be unbearably frustrating,
depressing, unsatisfying, oppressive— because being a “perfect”
mother (or an “ideal” worker) usually means we have
to put a big chunk of who we are on hold. We need
a more generous and holistic model of motherhood to fit the fullest
expression of our maternal lives— and by describing motherhood
as a relationship, not a job, in our script for the new future of
motherhood, we begin to stretch the boundaries.
Unfortunately, the motherhood-as-relationship model doesn’t
quite get us off the hook for gendered thinking, since by the time
boys and girls reach adulthood they’ve been thoroughly bombarded
with the message that women are inherently more expressive and attuned
to relationship than men— there’s even a school of feminist
thought that supports this notion. But if we want equality and justice
for women, we’ll need to figure out a way to counteract the
presumption of male indifference in our hypothetical script. We
might begin by suggesting that it’s shortchanges everybody when we assume that mothers get more out of being in relationship
with their children than fathers do, or that fathers’ level
of attachment to their children and the attendant obligation to
care for them is less compelling than that of mothers.
Even if the framework still needs some tweaking, looking at motherhood
as a relationship could shift the dialog in the right direction.
Unlike jobs, relationships aren’t results oriented—
they’re process oriented; they evolve. So instead of looking
at child-rearing as a project and children as blank slates on which
mothers inscribe the lines of success or failure, we can begin to
consider the ways children are active participants in their own
upbringing. Also, it’s safe to assume all relationships are
unique, since every relationship encompasses all the unique qualities
and personal histories each individual brings into the mix—
in other words, it’s unrealistic to suggest that all caring
mothers should and do feel exactly the same way about the same things,
even though they all share the experience of being in relationship
with children.
But what I find most attractive about this idea of motherhood-as-relationship
is the opportunity to bring our maternal experience back to a personal
scale, and to acknowledge that healthy relationships, including
the relationship between a mother and her child, are fluid enough
to contain a full range of human feeling— from the most profound
love to the deepest ambivalence. So rather than romanticizing motherhood
or reducing it to an outcome-oriented project, we might be able
to speak more freely about how emotionally complicated and variable
this whole business of mothering truly is.
So rather than falling back on the old script that venerates mothers
as protectors of children and the stewards of the caring world,
we might open up a world of possibility by starting to describe
motherhood as one of the most intense, important, and complicated relationships in the world— for both mothers and
children. Even if becoming a mother doesn’t align women with
a uniform sense of purpose and passion, perhaps the relational reality
of motherhood offers us an unparalleled opportunity to know how
it feels to be vulnerable, fallible, and utterly human. And as Cecelie
Berry, editor of Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on
Motherhood remarks, “if confronting the stuff of humanity
doesn’t bring us together, then, frankly, nothing will.
Back to
the future
The good news is that
a number of contemporary mothers are beginning to think and talk and write
about motherhood in ways that expose the complexity and conflicts
of mothering— both as a social experience and a private one.
In print and online, we can now find countless examples of mothers
peeling away heavy layers of ideology to get to the naked truth
of motherhood. Some dig farther down than others, but the work is
underway; a small but growing group of mothers is fully engaged
in “rewriting the script for the role of women as mothers,”
just as Jesse Bernard predicted in 1974. In this instance, the future
of motherhood is already here.
On other measures, however,
we’re still waiting for the future to happen. Despite her
faith in the inevitability of women’s equality, Bernard knew
the political tide had already turned on the women’s rights
movement when she wrote The Future of Motherhood. She describes,
in considerable detail, the defeat of bi-partisan legislation authorizing
federal funding for a comprehensive day-care system in the U.S.
When President Richard Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development
Bill in 1971, he cited concerns about the legislation’s potential
to accelerate the erosion of the patriarchal family. “For
the federal government to plunge headlong financially into supporting
child development would commit the vast moral authority of the national
government to the side of communal approaches to child-rearing over
the family-centered approach.” The campaign for universal
child care, which in the 60s and 70s was a centerpiece of the agenda of the National
Organization for Women and other mainstream feminist groups, never regained momentum.
Bringing the United States up to speed with other economically
developed countries in terms of a national program for job-protected
leave for childbirth has been another uphill battle. When the Parental
and Disability Leave Act of 1985— an early precursor of the
Family and Medical Leave Act— was introduced to Congress,
it included provisions for 18 weeks of unpaid parental leave and
26 weeks of unpaid medical leave for an employee’s own serious
illness, and covered all workers in businesses with five or more
employees. Staunchly opposed by an influential coalition of business
groups, the final version of the FMLA— which provides just
12 weeks of unpaid parental or medical leave for workers in businesses
with 50 or more employees— was not signed into law until 1993.
(A similar version of the bill was vetoed by George H.W. Bush
in 1991.) As Christopher Beem and Jodi Heyman write in Learning
from the Past, Looking to the Future (2002), the passage of
the FMLA was “an important milestone in American society;
both legislators and citizens demonstrated their awareness that
American’s working life had changed and our society needed
to respond to that change.”
Yet for all the success,
even its most ardent supporters would acknowledge that the FMLA
is but a minor advance. Compared to Western Europe, our level
of support for those with work and family responsibilities remains
woefully inadequate. What is more, the hope that the FMLA would
be the first of many federal work and family initiatives has not
yet been borne out.
With the neo-conservative power base launching an all-out attack
on women’s reproductive rights and working to dismantle core
social programs and labor regulations even as I write this, it seems
unlikely there will be any “federal work and family initiatives”
coming our way soon. In fact, current opponents of the FMLA are
pressuring the Department of Labor to make changes that will make it more difficult for workers to take job-protected leave
when they need it. Advocates for expanding the FMLA and providing
paid sick and parental leave to all workers are currently focusing
their resources on what more can be done at the state level to support
working families.
Concerned mothers should be very, very worried about what the future
has in store. At a time when millions of mothers and children live
near or below the poverty line; when one out of every four woman
workers lacks any duration of paid leave allowing time off to
care for a newborn or sick child (and when over half of all mothers
with any paid leave have just three workweeks or less); when women
earn less than similarly qualified men in all but a small number
of occupations; when one-quarter of single-parent mothers have no
health care coverage; when the cost of quality child care for infants
and toddlers adds up to more than the cost of state college tuition
in some regions; when influential fathers’ rights groups are
pushing for state-wide reduction or elimination of child support
payments to divorced mothers; when only one out of five mothers
report enough schedule flexibility at work to meet their caring
needs, American mothers should be up in arms. We should be marching
through the streets and making noise. We should be banding together
to make it perfectly clear that women don’t “choose”
their way into the motherhood problem, and they can’t choose
their way out of it— unless, of course, they choose not to
become mothers at all, which, for the vast majority of us, is an
unthinkable alternative.
As Miriam Peskowitz points out in The
Truth Behind the Mommy Wars (2005), mothers and fathers are taking steps to relieve the
backward drag and social isolation women experience when they become
mothers by making changes in their households, workplaces and communities.
But on a larger scale, mothers’ activism— and women’s
activism in general— seems to be stuck in a rut. According
to Susan Faludi, author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against
American Women (1991), Jesse Bernard may have had more cause
for optimism than we do today. In a recent address on “Feminisms
Then and Now,” Faludi remarked that in 1974, “Women
were passionate about changing society. In comparison, we seem relatively
complacent— not the next wave of feminism, but the receding
trough after the wave has crashed.” But, she added, “American
feminism has always been a stop-and-go affair. No matter how often
feminism has been declared dead, it has always managed to come bounding
out of the coffin roaring with life.” (As reported by Ken
Gewertz, Harvard News Gazette.)
I sincerely hope the 21st century mothers’ movement will
be part of that revival. And I hope that, thirty years from now,
another generation of disillusioned mothers won’t be wondering
why the U.S. is the only economically developed nation in the world
that doesn’t guarantee paid parental leave for all workers -- or feeling outraged because America’s families still don’t
have universal health care coverage and access to affordable, quality
child care -- or discovering anew that the way we organize our workplaces
is fundamentally inhospitable to workers with caregiving responsibilities -- or trying to figure out what it will take to get dads more involved
in the nitty-gritty work of family life. I hope today’s mothers’
advocates will have the foresight, courage and stamina to keep pressing
forward, even when we’re moving against the headwinds of cultural
resistance and meaningful progress seems miles beyond our reach.
One thing is clear: an effective mothers’ movement is not
destined to be a short-term venture with limited goals. In fact,
the deliberate remaking of the future of motherhood may be one of
the most ambitious political projects ever undertaken.
In an essay on the ideal division of labor in postindustrial society,
political theorist Nancy Fraser provides an admirable blueprint
for a mothers’ movement that acknowledges the centrality of
caregiving to a humane and just society without compromising the
larger goal of securing equality for women who mother. She writes:
The trick is to imagine
a world in which citizen’s lives integrate wage-earning,
caregiving, community activism, political participation, and involvement
in the associational life of civil society – while also
leaving some time for fun. This world is not likely to come into
being in the immediate future. But it is the only imaginable postindustrial
world that promises true gender equality. And unless we are guided
by this vision now, we will never get any closer to achieving it.
That's my vision for our future. And I’m looking for others
who want to join me in making it come true.
mmo : may 2005
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