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| ISBN-13: | 9781741158939 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2005 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 392 |
| File size: | 522 KB |
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Motherhood
How Should We Care for Our Children?
By Anne Manne
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2005 Anne ManneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74115-893-9
CHAPTER 1
Two paths to women's equality
Why we need feminism
I sometimes imagine that one can observe a precise moment and place when one age gives way to another. It often occurs in an out-of-the-way place, and often among quite ordinary people. I remember just such a moment in the feminist revolution. The place was a prosperous and respectable town nestled between the ancient hills that had given so generously of their gold in the previous century, a town with streets so quiet that one could hear the wisteria rustle, and where the bark of a dog might be an event. The time was early afternoon; the year 1970. There was nothing remarkable about the afternoon, just the quiet flow of ordinary moments as the people endured a great drift of heat that had sunk upon the town. In the local high school, drowsy from the heat, and, it must be conceded, the dreariness of the teaching, the students stared dreamily out of the windows at the darting movements of skinks among the peppercorns dotting the asphalt.
And then it happened. Suddenly, puncturing their reverie, came the headmaster's voice on the public address system. If voices have colours, his was blood red. He was angry about the untidiness of the yard, and reserved particular venom for the girls. 'What kind of housewives will you make, if you cannot even keep the schoolyard clean?' The girls, but not the boys, would remain behind to clean up the rubbish.
He was, I suppose, expressing an assumption of his own time — an ideal of womanhood as a cross between an angel and a housewife, as Isak Dinesen put it.
But the headmaster's time had come and gone. There was a moment of silence, and then a subterranean rumble, mounting to a roar, as a wave of female anger swept through the school. No girl stayed behind. What was once conventional thinking had become unthinkable. What was once an ideal had become an insult. The hour had struck.
We are in the midst of a social revolution: in women's roles, and in the relations between the sexes. This revolution has had many consequences. My book is primarily concerned with one of them. In 2002, the majority — 55 per cent — of American mothers with babies under the age of one were working. Similar trends can be observed in the increased employment of mothers of preschool children in many wealthy societies all over the world.
Social theorist Agnes Heller has described it as a break with all preceding societies, in so far as the subordination of women has been embedded in all previous social relations. These relations had other components, of course — a sense of complementarity and difference, and, from Christianity, a sense of the sacredness of the mother. Women in earlier times could have the emotional upper hand, of course, since those formal relations could be, and were, disobeyed — subverted by the wild card of sex, or softened by the power of love. But that complexity need not obscure the central truth: that in the great antinomies — light and dark, white and black, male and female — it is men who have always been more valued. And being valued less refracts powerfully still through women's lives.
The new order ushered in by this revolution is a movement away from a society in which a great part of one's fate was determined according to gender (what the dour English historian of the family, Lawrence Stone, has called a system of sexual caste), to a world in which freedom's many forms — contingency, possibility, opportunity, but also uncertainty, even chaos — all play their part. One of the most powerful emancipation movements of our time and of the future will not be socialism, but feminism. How we respond to these changes will shape how we live, and particularly how children will live.
The emergence of a radical second wave of the women's movement was, in some sense, inevitable. Why so? Second-wave feminism erupted from several cultural fault lines, from deeply embedded conflicts or cultural contradictions.
The first contradiction emerges from what de Tocqueville foretold as the central and remorseless movement of Western societies away from the old regime of heritage and hierarchy, towards democracy. If in democratic societies the legitimacy of hereditary privilege is shaken, the legitimacy of the age-old dominance of men over women will, over time, also crumble. If the deepest value of the democratic age is equality, how can one accept inequality between men and women?
The second cultural contradiction is thrown up by equal education. There was a painful contradiction between women's traditional role, which had at its centre the ideal of renunciation of self (Kierkegaard defined a woman's being as 'existence for something else'), and the central impulse behind equal education — that human flourishing comes from the discovery and development of one's talents. It is this exceptionally deep conflict — that women might spend the first part of their life discovering their talents, and then be expected after marriage and children to spend the next part renouncing them — which created the kind of bitterness and explosive anger so visible in books like Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, or Pat Grimshaw and Lyn Strahan's The Half-Open Door.
The third conflict concerns the social contract, which in liberal democracies derives its legitimacy from the understanding that opportunities, rights, the possibility of public office, the operation of the law, will fall equally to all citizens. Once women had the vote, they were admitted to the social contract. Here again over time another contradiction appeared. The common understanding of traditional roles was that a woman's domain was the private one, the man's the public realm. Was it ever possible, once women were admitted as equal participants to the social contract between the state and citizenry, to sustain the belief that one group of citizens — women — could only contribute to or participate in the private, while another group of citizens — men — could move freely in both?
Lastly, there was a change in the ground rules of marriage. Longevity and smaller families meant that much less of a woman's lifespan was spent on childrearing; in Alan Bloom's words, 'At forty-five they [women] were finding themselves with nothing to do, and forty more years to do it. Their formative career years had been lost, and they were, hence, unable to compete with men.' Most painfully, there was the liberalisation of divorce law. The old marriage contract — that a woman give up work to concentrate on her family, supporting her husband in his career — left many bereft, when in middle age they found themselves alone with children to support. Even finding work, let alone a brilliant career, was difficult. No-fault divorce laws have resulted in what has been described as the pauperisation of motherhood. As divorce specialist Leonore Weitzman has argued:
... the new laws confer economic advantages on spouses who invest in themselves at the expense of the marital partnership ... Implicit in the new laws are incentives for investing in oneself, maintaining one's separate identity, and being self-sufficient. The new stress is on individual responsibility for one's future, rather than the partnership assumption of joint or reciprocal responsibilities.
Alongside the struggle against racism, the movement for women's emancipation was one of the most powerful and important achievements of the twentieth century. At the heart of both liberation movements was a morally profound idea of justice. Liberation theory, as Jean Curthoys suggests, identified as 'the psychological key to power our ordinary and very pervasive assumptions of human inferiority — the simple idea that some people are more "important" than others.' Curthoys shows the kinship of that idea to the philosopher Simone Weil's insight that 'respect is due to the human being as such and is not a matter of degree'. This sense of the irreducible value of human beings was the key to the rebellion against the valuing of white over black, male over female.
Understanding the violation to human dignity involved when one person is considered less valuable than another, accorded less respect and therefore excluded from the constituency of equal rights and opportunities, is at the core of what is irreducibly valuable in feminism. In both pre- and post-feminist worlds there are graphic, shocking confrontations with the consequences of lower status as a 'less valuable human being'. It can be a matter of life and death. In contemporary Jordan, men who murder women in their family who have eloped or committed adultery or are even simply suspected of doing so — these are dubbed 'honour killings' — risk only a derisory six-month sentence, while the penalty for murder of other human beings is fifteen years. In China, the One Child Policy has caused not only a huge rise in abortions of female foetuses, but rampant female infanticide. So many female infants have been aborted or killed that according to Chinese government figures in 2005, 119 boys are born in China for every 100 girls. In some rural areas where boy preference is strongest, the ratio is close to 150 boys to every 100 girls. Within the next few decades it is estimated that there will be a shortage of female partners for as many as 50 million men.
Although Western women may not encounter female infanticide and honour killings in their own lives, their devaluation as the second sex is still deeply present alongside new forms of equality. As the social theorist Zygmunt Bauman reminds us, life in post-modernity exists in fragments. We have come very recently from a different world. In that world, women had no capacity to control their fertility. They had no rights against their body being used for sex against their will by their husband — for no law protected against rape in marriage. The old regime was a coercive one; motherhood was a kind of compulsory identity. A domestic life for married women was not a matter of choice but enforced by law: for example by compulsory resignation from work on marriage.
It was taken for granted that a woman's time and energy was at a male's disposal and that only time left over from tending to a family could be claimed as one's own. Lorraine Rose, one of the psychotherapists interviewed for this book and an early member of the Women's Electoral Lobby, grew up in a large Catholic family and remembers having to perform all her brothers' housework. If they slept in after a late night out, she had to cancel all her plans for the day and wait patiently for them to get up, in order to make all their beds. She was not allowed out until she did. It was unthinkable that her brothers — being male — should smooth out their own rumpled sheets.
My husband was shocked in the late 1960s to hear his English professor express the view that it was easy to improve the critical study of English literature — just get less women and more men to study it. So deep was the belief at that time — a mere few decades ago — in the intellectual inferiority of women that not even one of the young women present protested. Nor have such assumptions disappeared; they are often merely better masked. The British psychologist Oliver James cites recent studies which have shown that the same work is judged to be superior when participants believe a man, rather than a woman, has done it.
I remember as a child experiencing this belief in female inferiority as a primeval blow, like an axe struck into the very centre of my soul. Later, while some teachers acted as encouragers and mentors, others saw my intellectual precocity as problematic — properly belonging to the higher caste of males. A girl 'growing up clever' was sometimes made to feel like a small wrinkle in the universe in need of smoothing out.
Weil describes the idea of justice as 'so beautiful a thing.' It is only in confronting this powerful antinomy — male superior, female inferior — that one can begin to grasp why for many women, whether they pay lip-service to feminism or not, the ideal of equality of respect between men and women is an idea of radical beauty. Remarks like Weil's get us close to what, at its deepest, is at stake for women in the talk of equality. The idea of respect, that profound desire for recognition or being seen truly by others, centres on the existential cry from the heart of every human being: see me, value me, respect me, for who I really am, and not for my sex or colour, what I do, or who knows me, or the size of my house or bank balance. Equality of course also means the many practical forms of fairness like equality of opportunity. Yet those things are means by which justice is achieved, and not ends in themselves. That is why we may say of feminism what Raimond Gaita says of the anti-racist movement:
It can hardly be doubted that the world is a better place for it even though foolish things have been said and done in its name ... Like feminism, to which it has been aligned and compared, it has expressed a concern for equality, which cannot adequately be captured in talk of equal access to goods and opportunities. Treat me as a person; see me fully as a human being, as fully your equal, without condescension — these are not demands for things whose value lies in the degree to which they enable one to get other things. These are calls to justice conceived as an equality of respect, calls to become part of a constituency within which claims for equity of access to goods and opportunities may appropriately be pressed. It is justice of the kind often called social justice because of its insistence that our state and civic institutions should, to the degree that is humanly possible, reveal rather than obscure the full humanity of our fellow citizens.
On love, ideology and the unbearable lightness of being
If in important ways feminism is aligned with anti-racism, as my earlier example of female infanticide shows, that way of seeing also misses something important. Relations between men and women are also reciprocal relations based on love and sexual desire, albeit ones historically distorted in men's favour, all of which makes Lawrence Stone's rendition of the 'system of sexual caste' too crude. If love between a man and a woman can be based on power and not love, it can also be based on love more than power. Love can make the lover more attentive to the ways that inequality has denied not just women in general, but this particular, beloved woman, the equality of respect that recognition of her humanity requires.
There are further difficulties. All these changes touch most deeply not merely on the private realm, but on what Vaclav Havel described as our 'lyrical relation to life'. There is nothing within racism that means there is something of value lost if we overturn it. In relations between men and women, the matter is a little different. The feminist revolution concerns all those areas of deepest meaning to us, the most intimate aspects of identity and human life. Our sense of ourselves as male and female shapes and is shaped by what we feel constitutes love and sexual desire, of what it means to be a good mother or a good father, and the nature and mode of generosity and reciprocity within a family.
After the revolution, what will remain of our conception of what it means to be a mother? Will we settle for the notion that the mother can be replaced by professional caregivers providing a commodity service known as childcare? Will it become permissible for women to glory in a lover, but not in a child? What sense of mystery, complementarity, or otherness between the sexes will remain?
A male feminist friend who believed in the androgynous ideal once patiently explained to me that in future nothing would flow from being male or female: we would all just be persons. He paused, displaying with a gesture of the hand his imaginary Utopia. 'So you mean', I replied, 'that for all important intents and purposes, we would all be the same?' He beamed approval at my ready grasp of his vision. But as he said 'Yes!' a feeling flashed through me. I inspected it. That feeling was boredom!
There is another problem. The vices of the traditional world, of sharply delineated roles and the consequent limitations on women's lives, are inextricably tied up with its virtues — family stability, security, a sense of community, a system of care for vulnerable children, the sick and the elderly — via traditional female roles. The virtues of our own age — greater freedom, including sexual freedom, and a greater emphasis on the rights of the individual — are also tied intimately to its vices: a tendency for the deepest human relationships to be commodified and have meaning emptied from them, where people seek fleeting connection in a society of strangers, where the heart becomes a lonely hunter. As Eric Hobsbawm observes in Age of Extremes, the weight of the old rules, even unjust ones which bore down heavily on the human spirit and caused suffering, may be replaced not by something better but by no rules at all.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Motherhood by Anne Manne. Copyright © 2005 Anne Manne. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Prologue: Down among the children,Part One: Feminism and the 'problem' of motherhood,
1 Two paths to women's equality,
2 Equality as sameness: the loneliness of the postmodern cowgirl,
3 Meeting General Custer: maternal feminism and the ethic of care,
4 The invisible heart: the shadow economy of care,
5 What do women want?,
Part Two: Taking children seriously,
6 Inside the skin of a child,
7 First love: its light and shadow,
8 The dark side of the moon,
9 Electing a new child: truth, lies and the childcare debate,
10 The childcare wars ... resolved,
Part Three: Hard times: motherhood under the new capitalism,
11 Affluenza: the new ethic of work and spend,
12 The making of the New Capitalist Mother,
13 The McDonaldisation of childhood,
Conclusion: The gift of time,
Postscript: Up amongst the men,
Endnotes,
Bibliography,
Selected further reading,
Acknowledgements,