Voices of the Women's Health Movement, Volume 1 by Barbara Seaman

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, “Pow! You’re dead!,” I feel I’m not getting through. And when he announces to our role-free household “Daddy’s the boss,” I’m 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: “That’s not fair! There’s nothing for me.” I told him we might get him something one day soon and asked what he’d like to have.

“A sewing kit,” he said.

Time and again when I lecture, I am introduced as a “wife and mother of three.” That credential precedes me to the podium like a disclaimer on the label of a dangerous drug—as though the audience could not tolerate a dose of feminist opinion without marriage and motherhood to make it palatable.

Isn’t it obvious that by categorizing one another in opposing terms such as “career gal” or “working mother,” we perpetuate the straitjacketing roles that limit women’s lives? When was the last time we heard a serious male speaker introduced to an audience as “husband and father of three”? Who calls a businessman a “career guy” or “working father”? Sexist semantics is the verbal shorthand for sexist institutions. It’s time we all kicked the habit.

I find it remarkable that traditional women’s groups only ask to know that I am a mother—not 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 women’s participation in social change. They would like some proof that I am special—more educated, organized, energetic, younger, older, calmer—so 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 “manage,” 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 don’t have the formula for perfect motherhood. I am only trying to work it all out for myself and my children.



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