why “feminist”?

At least for the purposes of this site, a feminist approach to pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting:

• challenges the strong gender norms and biases that are so central to mainstream birth and parenting culture–and often to ‘natural’/alternative birth culture as well,
• honors the immense range of individual experiences, values, needs, and situations rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach,
• seeks to empower individuals and families to make truly informed decisions on their own terms,
• and is sensitive to and questioning of dynamics of power, including issues of privilege, injustice, and authority.

• see fundamental problems in our culture and the larger world–problems in the basic ways in which we’re taught to think about the world, in our most obvious-seeming assumptions and categories–and believe that we urgently need to engage in utopian thinking–by which I mean not la-la-happy-wishful-thinking the way ‘utopian’ gets employed as a synonym for ‘unrealistic’ or ‘immature’ but radically new and different ways of conceptualizing our lives and social structures (the ‘radical‘ part)
• perceive gender as a socially-constructed system that supports various kinds of domination and subordination and deeply harms both women and men by placing us in limited, unfulfilling roles. So, the kind of feminism that interests me tries to understand and work against A) gender as a system and B) those intertwined structures of domination and subordination, including heteronormativity (aka setting up heterosexuality as the norm and everything else as deviant), class structures, constructions of race, and so forth (the ‘feminist‘ part)
• believe that our class structure is exploitative and cruel; that capitalism is an arbitrary, irrational, and inefficient way to organize resources and work; that what gets sold as ‘free market’ capitalism never in fact involves a free market, instead using legal and social constraints for the benefit of the powerful; and that the consumerism that makes this system possible and is an ongoing effect of it is deadening to human joy, creativity, fulfillment, and above all love–which I consider the greatest possible goods (the ‘socialist‘ part)

It’s possible that you’ve read what I’ve written here and are thinking, ‘So why do you call yourself a feminist, if you’re talking about so much more than women’s rights/issues/oppression?’ I’m actually not super pepped up about the word ‘feminism’–it’s not what I would make up from scratch if I had the chance–but it is the word that encompasses what I mean here and places my commitments within their broader history. Because I am concerned with gendering and its effects on people of both sexes, I sometimes find the word’s exclusive focus on women sort of off-tone for me. Because I believe that women and men are not ‘naturally’ distinct categories of humanity–that our differing reproductive organs don’t make us different sorts of humans (any more than I think a woman who’s had a hysterectomy is no longer a woman)–I wish words rooted in male/female/feminine/masculine/etc. were simply unnecessary and strange. But they’re not. In our culture, the history of people recognizing the oppressive and arbitrary nature of gender as a system is the history of women and men recognizing women’s oppression within the particular patriarchal system of the United States and other nations; our insights into a broader sexism are the fruit of many people’s struggles against the restrictions and expectations placed on the direct victims of sexism as we practice it (in short, women). And indeed, while both men and women are tragically slighted and distorted by sexism, females do remain the ‘second class’ in our world–it’s okay for girls and women to wear ‘masculine’-coded pants but not for boys or men to wear ‘feminine’-coded skirts because masculine=powerful and feminine=weak (“sissy,” “girly,” etc.); women get paid less to do the same work; even in the academic world, where we think we’re so thoughtful, we see a ‘Mommy penalty’ and a ‘Daddy bonus’; mothers are overwhelmingly considered primarily responsible for their children’s well-being and for home/kitchen work even if they have careers as well; a woman who has multiple sex partners is ‘slutty’ while a man who does the same is unremarkable or even admirable; etc., etc., etc. So, obviously, women are a lot more likely to feel oppressed by our system–and act up against it–than are (cis-gendered, heterosexual) men. (For a couple other why-still-use-’feminism’ perspectives, try this Salon piece and this post at The Ginja Ninja.)

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. 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 …” So, 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 (by the way–have you seen this midwifery student’s photos of her own cervix though a cycle?) 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 (while, for 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.

And when you start learning about childbirth, observing debates over the very personal choices involved in selection of care provider and desired level of medical intervention (and seeing those debates dismissively framed as ‘the mommy wars’), hearing horror stories from individual women, noticing the ways in which popular culture represents birth (as inherently an emergency, as an opportunity for normally-strong and normally-kind female characters to go apeshit crazy and scream at their comically befuddled male counterparts, above all as a situation in which doctors and not birthing women are the active forces and decision-makers), etc., etc.–well, it’s hard not to think, holy crap: I’m trapped in a disaster of a patriarchal system! My family had a fantastic birthing experience, but we had to educate ourselves and swim against all sorts of currents to get to it, and we’re coming out of a position of privilege that facilitates that kind of getting-what-we-want. I know very well that many women aren’t so fortunate.

After our child joined us in the outside world, gender-based expectations were applied to my family with gusto. Our culture strongly suggests a particular role for Mommy and a quite distinct one for Daddy, and when you don’t act within those roles, people notice in weird ways. When my husband would take our young baby out into the world (to the bank or grocery store or wherever) while I was at work, strangers would regularly say things like–I kid you not–”So is your wife calling you every ten minutes to check how you’re doing?” or “Giving your wife a little break, eh?” People talk about fathers as babysitters, or at least as their equivalent; we used cloth diapers, and we noticed quickly that various cloth diaper sites describe the simpler all-in-one styles as good to have around for babysitters and Dads. (Amazingly, my child’s father can change any sort of diaper, as he has opposable thumbs and a brain!) Meanwhile, my partner is better-suited to being a primary parent than am I: by that, I simply mean that he is–as we have always known–by far the more patient and easy-going of the two of us, has had wildly more experience with children, and has always liked children-in-general more. (I love and enjoy individual babies and children a whole lot when I have actual relationships with them and/or their parents, but only puppies are appealing to me as an anonymous group. Well, and kittens and so forth.). Yet even our closest friends and family members have trouble accepting (not so much that my male partner is as much or more of a nurturer and day-to-day decision-maker as I am but) that that’s totally okay. I don’t mean they think our version of equally-shared parenting is bad for our child or that either of us is a poor parent; I mean, far more interestingly (and understandably), that they seem unable to believe completely that my un-mommy-ness and my husband’s very active parenting role don’t make me feel inadequate as a mother. If I allude to the reality of his greater inclination to certain mommy-coded activities or feelings, people almost uniformly respond with something reassuring like “No … you’re a great mom!” Yes–I am a great parent–exactly as I am, fulfilling my own and my family’s needs and desires even when I don’t fulfill society’s expectations of ‘the good mother.’ And it’s striking to me that it’s difficult for fantastic, well-meaning, brilliant people to reconcile that confidence and peace of mind with a nonstandard division of parenting labor.

And then, of course, breastfeeding is illuminating. I’ve been amazed to find that some people consider nursing offensive or at least discomfiting, a disgust/discomfort that unavoidably highlights our culture’s combined sexualization and shaming of women’s bodies/pleasure/love. People were extremely supportive of me as an exclusively breastfeeding and then child-led-weaning parent, and I have nothing but good things to say about that experience and my whole family’s attitudes toward it. But I’ve also heard enough of other people’s experiences and opinions, both in person and online, to realize with great clarity that for many Americans a woman’s half-exposed breast is normal and stylish and unobjectionable provided that there’s not a baby latched onto it. The same exposed flesh in combination with a happy baby somehow becomes unsettling, something to be compared to peeing in the middle of a restaurant or to be greeted with “Ugh! I don’t need to see that!” That was news to me, and it seemed pretty screwy. It makes one not know whether to exclaim “I’m not, like, a sex object” or “I’m not, like, a toilet.” Confusing!

Then there’s the experience of watching gendered expectations and values applied to our child, who has been approached more as “a little boy” than as “a person”–not only by advertisers (gee, why don’t we want him to watch TV?!?) and popular culture at large but also by absolute strangers in our community and even people we love and who love us. Most people comment enthusiastically on his every masculine-coded activity or inclination and simply do not notice or acknowledge all the feminine-coded parts of his experience and personhood. And once you enter a store, whoa. My mom was blown away when she went into a bookstore’s picture book section and inquired about what’s new for a three-year-old, only to be asked the immediate routing question: “Boy or girl?” (gee, where do gendered reading habits and, ultimately, academic interests come from?!?). My partner, our son, and I went into a children’s resale shop to find the inscription “Sugar and spice and everything nice” over the nearly-all-pink girls’ section. It’s suffocating.

For me, childbirth and parenting have proven deeply illuminative of the sexism that lurks in the fabric of my world. My body/life experiences of the past few years have invited me to an increasingly-committed feminism that has implications beyond birth culture. Childbirth and the surrounding issues/experiences offer a useful but underused analytic lens for looking at a huge range of other feminist issues, including but not limited to: the intersections of and interactions amongst multiple forms of domination and subordination; understandings/constructions of female bodies, female sexuality, and femininity (and of male bodies, male sexuality, and masculinity); family structures; body image and self-esteem; the ethical dilemmas of international interventions and of immense global inequities in maternal and infant mortality rates; healthcare access; medical culture and its approach to women’s bodies and choices; and, of course, the whole spectrum of reproductive ethics and reproductive rights (with regard not only to choices about not reproducing at a particular time or at all but also to choices about reproducing on our own terms: issues of genuine informed consent throughout the birthing process, free choice of place of birth and care provider, inequities of birthing options and quality of care across lines of class and race, all the ethical nuances posed by infertility and reproductive technologies, and so forth).

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