Voices of the Women's Health Movement, Volume 1 by Barbara Seaman
Author:Barbara Seaman [Seaman, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-60980-445-9
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2012-02-14T00:00:00+00:00
Lady Madonna by Jeri Drucker.
When my son bullies his two older sisters, I sometimes question whether aggression may be inborn after all. When he points a carrot at me and shouts, âPow! Youâre dead!,â I feel Iâm not getting through. And when he announces to our role-free household âDaddyâs the boss,â Iâm totally baffled.
But there are times when he loses himself in painting or requests The Nutcracker Suite for his bedtime record or spends long periods playing gently with his infant cousin, and then I decide he is a well-balanced short person indeed. The other day I even had a glimpse of a brave new world in which children will choose freely what they like to do and want to be; a world where competence and interest are not sex-typed quantities but are uncensored expressions of the self.
I had brought home several new things that the girls needed for school: paraffin, notepads, some colored yarn. My son looked up from his caravan of toy trucks, saw the haul of packages, and whined: âThatâs not fair! Thereâs nothing for me.â I told him we might get him something one day soon and asked what heâd like to have.
âA sewing kit,â he said.
Time and again when I lecture, I am introduced as a âwife and mother of three.â That credential precedes me to the podium like a disclaimer on the label of a dangerous drugâas though the audience could not tolerate a dose of feminist opinion without marriage and motherhood to make it palatable.
Isnât it obvious that by categorizing one another in opposing terms such as âcareer galâ or âworking mother,â we perpetuate the straitjacketing roles that limit womenâs lives? When was the last time we heard a serious male speaker introduced to an audience as âhusband and father of threeâ? Who calls a businessman a âcareer guyâ or âworking fatherâ? Sexist semantics is the verbal shorthand for sexist institutions. Itâs time we all kicked the habit.
I find it remarkable that traditional womenâs groups only ask to know that I am a motherânot whether I am a good mother or a happy mother. Once assured that I am one of them, however, an extraordinary thing happens: they then insist that I be better than they. If they can believe that I am superwoman and supermother, then they can exempt themselves from what I may say about self-actualization, expanded options, and womenâs participation in social change. They would like some proof that I am specialâmore educated, organized, energetic, younger, older, calmerâso that they can deny our commonality. It is a crafty device to protect themselves from identifying with what I have to say.
But I refuse to play that game. When they ask me how I âmanage,â instead of how I feel or think, I point out that their question betrays something like my own tendency to make motherhood fit an abstraction. I tell them that there is no right answer; I am not special; I donât have the formula for perfect motherhood. I am only trying to work it all out for myself and my children.
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