Is it possible to separate women from mothering?
And do we want to? Is it disempowering for women to assimilate into male
political culture on the basis of equality?
In the conclusion of her book Women Strike for Peace Amy Swerdlow
addresses the ways in which the women of WSP use their class as mothers to
access power. She reveals the strategy in using their position as caregivers to
craft change. The method of strategic essentialism conflicts with the feminist
idea that motherhood is a constructed tool of the oppressor. In my last blog I
discussed what it means to be a mom and how motherhood limits the identity of
woman, in this blog I seek to ask questions about how motherhood is intertwined
with the conception of woman and whether that connection can be severed.
Towards the beginning of the semester
we discussed the idea of traits or rights that everyone should be free to have,
but that are typically withheld from certain people by the ruling patriarchy.
Women are subscribed as nurturing caregivers largely because of their
reproductive function as mothers. Kindness and respect of life are positive
traits that everyone should have access to, and although on an individual level
it may be possible to sever oneself from the characteristics of mothering, it
seems largely impossible to separate women and these traits. Women have tended
to have an innate desire to protect and serve those around them in a way that
differs from male desire to protect. Women have tended to be self-sacrificing
in their protection, while men are usually exhibiting power and authority.
While gender roles and expectations can shift, female will not be able to sever
itself from the life-creating process (unless we start producing babies Brave New World style) and people can
now use their bone marrow to create sperm (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6547675.stm).
In her conclusion, Amy Swerdlow
asks “Can an organization that builds on traditional female culture, even when
effective in achieving some reforms, actually contribute to world peace if, in
stressing the mothers’ role and rights, it reinforces female marginality
(234)?” Feminism currently seems to try to shift the foundation on which “women
stand in their resistance to patriarchy” away from the marginalizing maternal
language used by WSP. This leads me to want to ask a spin-off question from
what Amy swerdlow proclaims as WSP’s question to women’s history: Can women
build on traditional female culture to actually contribute to social change
without reinforcing female marginality? Is the role of traditional womanhood
actually bad, or is it the usage by patriarchal structural dominance that has
turned it bad? If it isn’t being enforced as a tool to suppress, can it be used
as a tool to liberate not only women, but men as well?
I am not convinced that the
characteristics assigned to women as a class by patriarchal structures are wholly
founded by structural dominance. People have an innate sense of preserving life
and protecting their children- perhaps this is evolution or biology to preserve
the species, regardless, it is there and it isn’t going away. Feminism too
often gets tied up in defining the ways that women can break free from male
dominance. If though, in breaking free, women are limited by resisting the
conception had of them, are they really freeing themselves? Are there really
choices implicit in that resistance? I suggest that there are characteristics
of mothers and femininity that women don’t need to be free from, but rather all
other people should be free to. It shouldn’t be marginalizing to be nurturing.
Is associating all women's movements with feminism a form of sexist? It's the same as an african-american assuming all white men are racist, or a white man assuming all black men are criminals or rapists. Why do we assign stereotypes to so many things in society?
ReplyDeleteSure, it's true that our brain organizes information into different categories in-order to better understand it and define it, but is that a flaw in our thought process? Or is it our own fault that we think this way?
Another example of unfair association is the WSP being called a communist group, simply because it has communist members in it's ranks. That is simply absurd. This is the same thing as pointing out a few atheist members in a movement and then saying the entire movement is anti-religion. It's simply absurd to think that way and generalize. So perhaps our unfair categorization of a group of individuals is partially what caused the problem?