The topic of motherhood is having a bit of a moment. In addition to several much-discussed books, the past six weeks alone have brought us Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, which explores the will-I-won’t-I decision all women face at some point or another; Angela Garbes’s Like a Mother, a feminist exploration of the science and culture of pregnancy; and Meaghan O’Connell’s memoir And Now We Have Everything, which gives the warts-and-all treatment to pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. In recent months motherhood has cropped up across various media, including film (Mother! and Tully), TV (The Letdown), and comedy (Ali Wong and Laurie Kilmartin).
Most surprising to me, as someone told by women’s magazine editors for years “we don’t cover motherhood”, is the fact that publications like Elle and Marie Claire appear to have lifted their long-standing ban on motherhood. Apparently, it is finally OK to talk about one of the possible outcomes of all that great sex women’s mags have been promising us for years.
Elle magazine published a scathing commentary on the economics of, in particular, single motherhood by Bryce Covert last year and just this month a critique from Sady Doyle on depictions of motherhood in modern media, pegged to the release of The Letdown on Netflix. Marie Claire began publishing on the subject more than once every three years or so last year as well. In coverage of Heti’s book, we’re even seeing a long overdue discussion of the impact our culture’s notions of motherhood, and valuing of women according to their reproductive capability, has on women whether they opt to have children or not.
It may surprise you to learn, then, that discussion of motherhood in feminist theory is, once again, verboten.
Feminism and motherhood have a complicated relationship. Radical feminist Shulamith Firestone articulated this most starkly in her argument that women would never truly be free of patriarchy until they were freed from the yoke of reproduction. She imagined wistfully a day when babies could be created in mechanical uteruses, freeing women from the physical subjugation of childbirth.
In contrast, Adrienne Rich argued that it was the patriarchal notion of motherhood, not the actual experience of mothering, that was the source of women’s oppression. Meanwhile womanists saw in this interpretation of motherhood yet another way in which white feminists were ignoring their experiences, oblivious to the history of eugenics and forced sterilization that played into how women of color viewed reproduction. While white feminists often painted motherhood as the ultimate apparatus of patriarchy, many activist women of color saw in motherhood not only freedom but also agency.
After a decade or so of inclusion in academic feminism, thanks to the likes of Rich, Patricia Hill Collins, Sarah Ruddick, Miriam Johnson, Alice Walker, and others I’m sure commenters will chastise me for forgetting, motherhood has once again become a bogeyman for feminists. The topic comes up in fewer than 3% of papers, journal articles, or textbooks on modern gender theory. Discussing it marks one as a “gender essentialist” in academia, a label that can end one’s academic career before it even begins. Andrea O’Reilly, the theorist who birthed “matricentric feminism” as a field of study, argues both can be true: “the idea that gender is a social construct – that women are not ‘naturals’ when it comes to mothering simply because of their biological sex– and the idea that mothering matters”.
What some theorists forget, of course, is that ideas and expectations around mothering impact all women, whether they have children or not. Those who are not mothers are not only asked about this decision regularly, but also often bear a largely unseen burden as part of the country’s general lack of support for working mothers. While working mothers are being stretched thin and asked to be all things to all people, women without children are quietly covering their maternity leaves or working unpaid overtime, expected to work evenings and weekends because they don’t have kids to go home to after all.
These are issues that, left unexplored, create resentment. The complexities of integrating motherhood into women’s identities do not go away simply because feminist theorists will it so. Rather, they pop up in cultural expressions that, while often moving, funny, or informative, tend to lack the sort of research and historical context we’d find in academic explorations of the topic.
Despite all of the advances made in the past 50 years or so for women’s rights and the culture’s general valuing of women (and there’s still plenty of work to do there, don’t get me wrong), motherhood is a still a sort of time machine, shooting women instantly back to 1950. In the same way that we need both cultural shift and policy changes to really improve and update American motherhood, we need both media and academic research on the subject. It may well be time for motherhood to have, as O’Reilly has put it, “a feminism of its own”.
- Amy Westervelt is a freelance journalist