Happy Thanksgiving! In honor of millions of families gathering today for Thanksgiving, I've decided to take a short break from my quarks series to write about motherhood and our need for a new take on motherhood for the 21st century. Cheers!
21st Century Challenge: Redefining Motherhood on Our Own Terms
Katrin Bennhold did an interesting article on women in Germany in International Herald Tribune’s series “Female Factor”. In it, she cites a book published this year in Germany by Bascha Mika called, “The Cowardice of Women”. Apparently it has yet to be translated and so I have not read it, and am going to base my discussion on Bennhold’s coverage:
“…[Mika] thinks women have largely themselves to blame. According to her, they aren’t putting enough pressure on politicians, are failing to negotiate equal terms in relationships and often voluntarily retreat into a traditional mother role that spares them other hard questions about identity and purpose in life… [Mika says,] “we are collaborating with a system that reduces us to motherhood… we voluntarily choose to be powerless and adjust to self-inflicted victimhood. That’s cowardice.”
Indeed, German women who try to balance children and work are allegedly frowned upon societally and are highly challenged by social mores and lack of day care, etc. This I have read about in numerous works as well as hearing first-hand accounts of these types of pressure and difficulty. The choice of words of cowardice does not seem appropriate to the types of obstacles Germans have to overcome, especially coming from a woman who had to opt out of motherhood in order to pursue a career. That could be called cowardly too, but I’ll come to that.
Mainly, Bennhold’s article got me thinking about Mika’s ideas in relation to American, English, and French cultures and our strategies for self-realization and self-fulfillment.
First of all, I want to take issue with the notion of “retreat into a traditional mother role”. There is nothing simple about carrying what she calls a traditional mother role.
For starters, the “traditional” role hasn’t been quite so comfortable. Outside of aristocratic families, our current Western conception of mother role in which the mother is devoted only to the child’s well-being is as recent as the late 19th century. Women worked and have always worked. Aristocratic families may have at times carried this torch; Abigail Adams and her concept “Republican Motherhood” comes to mind, with which she pleaded women be afforded good education, et al, in order to better educate their sons… but aristocrats otherwise tended to their own social networks while help or servants cared for the children. Even in the 20th century, many “housewives” were everything but “mere” mothers, between the canning and the washing, the buying and the organizing, running a family could and still can be like running a small company.
In France, as well as other Western countries, stay-at-home fathers are becoming increasingly common. Their experiences are bringing to light what women have known for decades. Damien Lorton, who recently published a book called (if I translate loosely), “a father is a mother like any other”, about his experience as a “househusband” and how housework is relentless, with never a moment’s rest, but without the gratification of a paycheck. A second stay-at-home father has pointed out that socially it isn’t easy and that people’s disinterest can at times be hurtful. This is an experience corroborated by many women.
Objection #2: “retreat into a traditional mother role” is its total underestimation of what it means to be a mother today. It has become its own “rat race”. Judith Warner describes it well in her recent work, “Perfect Madness” in which she exposes a one-upmanship in which many stay-at-home mothers get entangled. This is a subject upon which I’ll later expound as there’s much change to make, but clearly, as of today, Warner’s study demonstrates the confines and the expectations of this ‘traditional mother role’ is not such an easy route to choose.
The other point Mika reportedly raises is that opting to be a “traditional mother” “spares hard questions about identity and life”. It’s a good question. Perhaps some do fall into the patterns of their mothers because of lack of day care or because that’s the way the country is set up or because they want to concentrate their energy on raising young children or maybe because their husbands have the means for them to not work… Maybe some really are just coasting. Maybe.
BUT. Reading articles and books from many Western nations, I have also seen a whole lot of women “sparing themselves hard questions about identity and life” by plunging into work and career.
In French it’s called “une fuite vers l’avant”. It isn’t only women’s lot but also men’s lot in this “accelerated” world we’re abiding (cf. Acceleration by German philosopher Hartmut Rosa). It happens quite naturally then ends up a spiral that’s difficult to escape.
And it’s becoming a societal phenomenon. Women working so hard that they skip out on relationships and children. And when their biological clocks hum the “last opportunity” in their early 40s, they discover that media’s discourse of the possibility of pushing back the clock isn’t a reality that can be generalized. In Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s work, Creating a Life, her study unveiled the great pain upon which some women stumble: the great frustration of spending tens of thousands of dollars on fertility procedures only to undergo miscarriages and other heart-wrenching experiences. These women have gone with the worklife flow... without pounding their fists on the table to make politicians and companies change the dynamic as Mika says should stay-at-home mothers.
BUT #2. Why point the blame? Instead of pitting ourselves against each other, why not instead push together for greater capacity to really get what we want. Putting our fists down for the real end goal: choice. Informed choice. Actually empowered choice. Which leads me to the next BUT:
BUT #3. Why be so disparaging of mothers and the role of motherhood? The propos illustrates the groove we have all taken to follow in men’s footsteps instead of calling our own shots and building our own version of work, motherhood, and life. Maybe part of Mika’s beef is that even the concept of motherhood has been defined in androcentric terms rather than being called by our own shots. As points out Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi in her great work Motherself, women have folded their pursuit of self-realization into “heroself myths”, individualistic quests for identity that leave no room for others and which wield only domination when it comes to relationships (think Greco-Roman myths, even if Rabuzzi bases herself on myths and tales from across the globe). What I appreciate about the points she raises is the fact that the “motherself” (pertaining to both genders and independent of whether the person actually has children) requires a self-realization that incorporates others. We have come to a point in our world, our societies, etc., in which such rigid, taxidermic-like identities are unsustainable and impractical:
- Longevity will weigh in on the number of lives we lead… meaning an identity quest at one point in an individual’s life does not exclude the need for further, ulterior “apprenticeship” quests. For me, this means reconsidering our ideal of “identity” as a springboard instead of a shield, in a way that can swing with life’s evolutions instead of societal clichés/snapshots (more on that in another entry).
- 84% of the world’s developed regions’ population and 66% of less developed regions’ populations will live in cities by 2050, implying restricted territory per person. For me, this means we need to reconfigure our interdependence and interrelations within our quest for individualization.
- Our common need is to ensure our survival as a species. Zero population growth, for me, should include the full diversity of representation. This means we can’t entirely accept the idea of no children among the women who have to spunk to have a grand career…
- …knowing that studies show that diversity, and most importantly a good balance of men and women, in a company is key for productivity and performance in most all sectors. For me, this means that we need to get a more comprehensive societal contract in terms of work-life balance (I’ll come back to this one because this entry is already too long to cover such a vast subject).
- …plus other studies show women’s empowerment, thus their education and financial independence, is key to improving the world. For me, this means that our children must be born into and raised by families/communities who are themselves educated and industrious.
But the real point is: we have to stop denigrating physical realities that are specific to women. We should reclaim the beauty, importance, utility, and necessity of bearing and raising lives (without, of course, creating a new requirement: of course we should have the choice!). Too often, childbearing is defined negatively within the workplace (with extravagant fantasies about absences due to children’s sick leave, problems due to day care difficulties, shorter hours because they need to go pick up the kids, mind divided by other priorities… they have all been named). I beg to argue that this capacity to bear life is ENRICHING (even for our companies and our added-value) and needs to be valued by our society instead of being dismissed as cowardly or traditional or proof of women being less implicated in their work (this too I will develop).
Let’s stop confusing victims, culprits, and heroes and get back on a more constructive track!
And on to next Thursday for a new installment about why we're like quarks: individuals needn't be singular
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