[I wrote this essay as a post at a now-defunct blog, back in 2009. So, in its world, I'm the parent of just one child, who is three years old.]
I’ve identified as a feminist for a long time. In other words, giving birth didn’t suddenly turn me into a feminist. But it did make feminism far, far more central for me than it ever had been before: more central to my personal understanding of my culture, background, and experiences, and more central to my scholarship.
My experiences of birthing and parenting have clarified the stakes of our culture’s system of gender, and the stakes of feminism both as a tool for thinking and as a movement for social change. They’ve shown me in no uncertain terms how deeply my body and my life, my husband’s body and his life, are embedded in and expected to conform to gender-based rules that we find, quite frankly, absurd. In many ways, birthing and the early stages of parenting moved me to greater engagement as a feminist.
As a highly-educated and independent young person with an open-minded and individualist family (by which I mean both my family of origin and my new little nuclear family) and very little interest in watching TV, I had never really encountered sexism in my daily life. At least, I hadn’t seen it as sexism. But visibly gestating, I suddenly became A Woman, and–more unsettlingly–A Mommy.
As a childless person, I didn’t even know where my cervix was (up in my vulva someplace, I supposed); as an obviously pregnant woman, I was asked by total strangers about its precise state: “Have you started to dilate? Is your cervix softening?” And I’m like, “Um … I’m just trying to buy vegetables …”
During my foray into reproduction, I’ve felt myself subject to gendered expectations and policing, but I’ve also had the positive experience of learning an enormous amount about my own body–learning which I could have done pre-childbearing but which simply never occurred to me as a potential pursuit. In retrospect, I realize that I totally bought into our culture’s distaste for women’s bodies, accepting that menstruation is gross, that underarms and legs must appear never to have grown hair, that we must not speak of vaginas and anything that happens in/near them–except, of course, penetrative sex. And so I really didn’t know much about (or think much of) the parts of my body that constitute my femaleness.
Together, these two issues–an unwelcome experience of increased gendering and a happy new appreciation of my female body–not only explain why childbirth deepened my feminism but also represent a really tricky tension, one I see a lot in the childbirth community (doulas, midwives, etc.) as well as the feminist community.
Many childbirth advocates are feminist in the sense that they have–perhaps because of their experiences with birth–a profound respect for the unique capacities of the female body: in other words, for pregnancy, birthing, and breastfeeding. This is the ‘women are so strong’ / ‘we’re all sisters’ / ‘women’s bodies are designed to give birth’ / ‘think of the millions of women who have done this before you’ model, a perspective focused on women’s specialness as women. Now, I think my cervix is super-neat and am still amazed that I created a person. Indeed, when I was pregnant, I often announced things like ‘I made a working human heart!,’ and when people compliment us on our son I still sometimes say ‘Thanks! I made him myself.’ I felt extremely privileged in being able to breastfeed my child, to offer him instant comfort in a way no one else (even my partner) could, because I have the luxury of mammary glands and lots of fantastic hormones. Contrary to the expectations pushed by sitcoms and movies, I also felt really lucky that I was the one who got to feel our fetus inside my body and to birth our child–how cool!
But, at the same time, I emphatically reject the notion that my body’s reproductive organs and secondary sex characteristics define my personhood or personality, or that my partner’s (or son’s) define his.
Well-meaning assurances that I was made to birth and care for my child (and, on a more general level, a certain brand of feminism’s insistence that femininity–meaning a cultural construct involving nurturing and collaboration and so forth–is so great) sit poorly with me. If life has a purpose, I believe it’s one that has nothing whatsoever to do with gender: We’re all trying to fulfill ourselves joyfully through love and creativity. For lots of us, part of that fulfillment involves the creativity and love of bearing and/or raising children, but childbearing is not the point (or, more personally, my purpose).
I’m happy to be a person with ovaries and a uterus and mammary glands, and (rather unrelatedly) to be a person who is raising a child–but I am consistently jarred by the dissonance of being treated as ‘a mommy’ or ‘a wife,’ as though my relationship with my child or with my partner defines me. Those are relationships between me and two other, wonderful people: things I do, not things I am.
And, as it turns out, being visibly pregnant invites the whole world to treat you like a big walking uterus. The first question ANYONE, even a colleague, asks you is suddenly about your reproductive organs, your body, your fetus. I don’t at all mean to imply that these interactions are bad or sexist–they just really, really forced me to consider the complicated relationships amongst my female body, my reproductive capacities, my personhood, and other people’s perceptions of and expectations regarding my behavior, appearance, personality, experiences, priorities, and so forth. And it is bad and sexist, as well as starkly illuminating, that people generally regarded this pregnancy and our newborn child as The Topic when interacting with me but as markedly secondary (often not even worthy of mention) when interacting with my also-becoming-a-parent male partner. Casual acquaintances and colleagues still consistently ask me and not him about our child, as though only my life is really affected by the baby.
[more later!]
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“I am consistently jarred by the dissonance of being treated as ‘a mommy’ or ‘a wife,’ as though my relationship with my child or with my partner defines me. Those are relationships between me and two other, wonderful people: things I do, not things I am.”
Have you read Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea? This quote of yours reminded me of a section I re-read just the other day in which she writes about, “[t]he desire to be accepted whole, the desire to be seen as an individual, not as a collection of functions…”
It’s an idea that’s been resonating with me a lot lately as my kids get older (my youngest is three), and I see on the horizon a chance to do something meaningful that doesn’t directly involve my children.
I also really like your assertion that, if life has a meaning, it’s something that transcends gender. That, to me, seems the root of feminism.
Thanks for all these thoughts! “I also really like your assertion that, if life has a meaning, it’s something that transcends gender. That, to me, seems the root of feminism”: what an interesting and potentially clarifying way to think about it. I’ll definitely ponder this further …
I know what you mean, and yet, I interpret those comments (about cervical dilation, or where you plan to deliver, or whatever) differently. What happens if you ask, “what is the person saying or thinking about her/his own experiences, with that comment? What kind of connection is she/he trying to make with me?” I always felt like the comments came from a well-meaning place, and from liberal feminists and conservatives alike. So what are they about? I think many Americans think of childbearing as an overwhelming, tremendously meaningful event that completely took over their lives for a few years, then disappeared into their personal histories. Now that we have small families, and we often live far from siblings, we are likely to not have spent much time with pregnant/lactating/baby-wearing relatives or friends before we had the experience ourselves, or afterwards, for that matter. And we separate so much of childbearing from the “real” world, by keeping babies in their own separate spaces. So the experience of childbearing is intense and highly meaningful, we are unprepared for it, and we don’t have a lot of opportunities to prepare for it or re-live it with those who are close to us. So instead, we try to reach out to strangers at the grocery store. I think those comments mean, “I know how intense this is for you, and I want to tell you I’ve been there.” And also, “Tell me how you are feeling — I want to re-live my own pregnancy for a moment.” They want to create connection around what they perceive to be a highly meaningful, intense, shared experience. Maybe the experience is less universal than they think, but it feels to me like a noble impulse, overall.
Now, is this embedded in gendered social and philosophical structures? No question. Childbearing might not be so overwhelming if we didn’t start with a Cartesian separation of body and mind, and put on top of it a Constitution (and constitutional interpretation) that construes “life” and “liberty” in ways that don’t accommodate the concept of a pregnant woman very comfortably. And, mostly, a feminism rooted in those theories of personhood and liberty as well. Perhaps growing a person in one’s body wouldn’t feel so overwhelming if it weren’t so conceptually alien.
Could people make their comments less gendered by addressing more of them to the pregnant person’s (male) partner? It’s true that the conversation can easily slide from cervical dilation to nursery decorating, and the pregnant woman is understood to be the person running the whole show. That piece of things surely needs some feminist adjustment. But on the other hand, I think it would irritate me if someone asked my husband all about our birth plan, if I were standing there (though not if I were engrossed in a political discussion or something). After all, the physical part of childbearing was all on me, and I felt that credit, support and decision-making ought to accrue primarily to me, not my partner.
I don’t feel like the meaning of life _must_ transcend gender. I don’t see why is has to have one meaning. And I’m not sure I would want to exclude bearing, and birthing, and nursing my babies from my Top Ten List of Why My Life is Meaningful. Yes, my husband gets to put child-rearing on his list (as do I). But actually bearing those babies felt pretty special to me. I think, to be feminist, I just need to believe that my Top Ten List isn’t supposed to be imposed on other people’s lives.
With regard to the cervix thing: I experienced that as invasive (I would actually prefer strangers leave me completely alone except for a smile or “beautiful day, huh?,” which they do a better job at when I’m not pregnant or toting around a tiny baby), in the same way I’d experience a random stranger asking how I’d sustained some visible injury as invasive, but more so because it’s a part of my reproductive system tucked away inside my body. And yet I *also* experienced the physicality of pregnancy and people’s interest in my reproductive system as useful and liberating, as a prompt to learn much much more about my own body. But absolutely, I agree that people say this stuff out of kindness, and there’s no really satisfying social script for expressing an openness to hearing about this big experience without sounding either invasive/universalizing or just plain odd. My point is definitely not that individuals are being bad.
I do want to clarify that I was writing about the idea of life (or of an individual) having a *purpose*, not a *meaning*. I object to the teleological and patriarchical impulses of “you were made to do this”–absolutely not to the idea that some people craft the meaningfulness of our lives (partly or wholly) from our relationships with our children and/or the experiences of reproduction. I guess I just don’t think “my purpose” should be defined in advance by which bits I have … and I don’t believe in a micromanaging God, which complicates the whole notion of a “purpose” anyway. My life’s *meaning* is largely up to me and mine, I think … but I would hope that it’s not about gender or reproduction unless that’s where I go with it.
Yes, I see now. That makes sense.
If you feel like adding some history to your reading list at some point, a couple of my favorite books put some of what you’re discussing in historical perspective, in very different (even contradictory) ways: Laura Gowing, Common Bodies, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives.
I am still thinking about the well-meaning people in the grocery store, and what it indicates about gender and reproduction in our historical moment. Gowing has chilling examples of the vulnerability of pregnant women’s bodies to touches from strangers in 17th c England; so are we seeing the same old thing? But the public persona of the pregnant woman almost disappeared between the mid 19th c and the 1960s. Its re-emergence feels more benign to me now, though I could be wrong. I think we are engaged in a new round of meaning-making around pregnancy and childbearing. The majority of Americans would not say that it is women’s sole (or even primary) purpose in life. Now, we “choose” to have babies. But why would we choose something that is exhausting and expensive and demands difficult trade-offs with other aspects of our lives? It must be because it is incredibly meaningful and rewarding, enough to sacrifice some other, pretty enticing, possibilities. So we invest even more significance in each pregnancy.
I’m not sure I quite have that worked out yet — I’m thinking out loud here. But I’ve been thinking hard about this for several years, as I work on my book about early pregnancy loss, and I do feel strongly that there is a confluence of historical trends at this moment that give pregnancy a special salience.
I was prepared for how pregnancy and childbirth would shift my feminism so dramatically. Preparing to get pregnant my partner and I were prepared for a challenge as two women in Ohio who were going to have a baby and instead we were met with some serious patriarchy. It was a surprise to both of us. It was probably naive of us but because we hadn’t ever though about it before it was jarring.
Plus in this part of the country for the first time I have found this topic to be a unifier for all types of women and families. That was a surprise for us too. It.has made me reconsider how to organize across difference as I begin to think of how to insert myself into birth activism.
Kim, that’s so interesting to me–the push and pull of what pregnancy/birth/parenting can feel like, running hard into “serious patriarchy” but also dropping into some unexpected sense of unity and maybe even openness. Even coming from a very different set of experiences, this is all so “yes!” for me.
*I wasn’t prepared for how pregnancy and childbirth would shift my feminism- that’s what I meant to write.
I have always been a feminist. Having 5 younger brothers raises your consciousness from early childhood. I became more of a feminist as the mother of 4 daughters. Becoming the grandmother of five (soon to be six) grandkids, give and under, has reignited my feminism in a way no other experience has. I have three granddaughters, 4, 3 1/2, and 3.
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[...] 2 of a 2009 essay; click here for part 1. FYI: I wrote this essay back in 2009. So, in its world, I'm the parent of just one [...]
[...] How Becoming a Parent Amped Up My Feminism Molly of First the Egg articulates so well how having a child can make you more aware of gender issues because “being visibly pregnant invites the whole world to treat you like a big walking uterus.” (Not looking forward to that stage of pregnancy; so far I love “passing” for a non-breeder.) I love how she reconciles a deep appreciation of the power of a woman’s body with a complete rejection of the idea that a woman’s entire purpose in life is to have children. [...]