My Facebook feed included this article by Erica Jong (from the Wall Street Journal) a few times this weekend, and I've not been able to sit down and ponder it until now. Let me open this post with a quote from Ms. Jong: "[Attachment parenting] is a prison for mothers, and it represents as much of a backlash against women's freedom as the right-to-life movement."
Ouch. Although I don't buy into its principles completely (in that, if they don't work for me and my family, we don't push it), many of the principles of so-called "attachment parenting" (based in part on attachment theory) feel comfortable and logical to me. They include extended breastfeeding beyond the 6-month minimum that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends, wearing one's baby in a carrier, co-sleeping if it works for the family, and using gentle discipline methods rather than corporal punishment.
So I guess I should consider myself imprisoned, according to Ms. Jong. Check out this paragraph:
"Indeed, although attachment parenting comes with an exquisite progressive pedigree, it is a perfect tool for the political right. It certainly serves to keep mothers and fathers out of the political process. If you are busy raising children without societal help and trying to earn a living during a recession, you don't have much time to question and change the world that you and your children inhabit. What exhausted, overworked parent has time to protest under such conditions?"
Well. I'll leave aside the irony of her penning this article in the Wall Street Journal, of all things--owned by Rupert Murdoch, espousing the values of unadulterated American capitalism ... nevermind that. As a mother who participates in some aspects of attachment parenting, I should be so exhausted and imprisoned that I wouldn't even know enough about politics to know who owns the WSJ, and what the Journal's politics tend to be. I call bulls--t on that. I have to imagine here that Ms. Jong is being vitriolic for the sake of stirring up page hits--either that, or she's profoundly defensive about her own personal choices and parenting philosophies. It surely doesn't feel like she's concerned about me as an American mother or a feminist.
(I took a break from writing just then to nurse and have a chat with Eli, thus erecting another couple of bars in my own personal prison.)
Here are some thoughts of my own (I'm shocked that I have enough energy and autonomy to think on my own anymore ... being an attachment parenting mother and all ...): First of all, keeping in mind that anecdotes are not data, I'll state here that many of the so-called attachment parents in my sphere are among the most politically active and aware people I know. They vote, always. They volunteer for campaigns. They consume news media from several sources on a daily basis. They are educated, passionate, reflective, opinionated and thoughtful.
Secondly, when did "feminism" get defined so narrowly? When did it become just about earning a wage and participating in the capitalist machine? Ms. Jong's logic seems to be this at times: attachment mother = stay-at-home mother = non-wage-earning mother = NOT A FEMINIST. Seriously? And being an attachment parent is what makes me succumb to the political machine of the right?! How about having a philosophy that defines one's membership in a social movement wholly on economic and capitalist grounds? According to this definition, I can vote against reproductive freedom, I can punch a clock and have no passion about my work, I can get my "news" only from the local channels before "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" comes on, and somehow I'm more of a feminist than an attachment parenting mother and she is tossing aside "women's freedom." It's as if one can only earn an Official Feminist Card as she exits a daycare after dropping her kids off. As if that's the only way that a woman can demonstrate her value.
My own personal feminism is different from all this. It's about a belief in a woman's bodily autonomy. It's about questioning "little girl" views of women that reject our adulthood and agency. It's about choice. It's about saying things like "Hey, our bodies work beautifully just the way they are" ad infinitum until we all start to believe it.
Surely there are economic aspects to feminism, and I'm not adhering to those right now. But that should be OK, right? Shouldn't that simply mean that I'm exercising my choice to follow a different feminist path? Shouldn't all feminists support that? But no, according to Ms. Jong, I'm a cog in the machine of the political right, a disappointment, and a detour away from true feminist ideology.
Nonsense.
12 comments:
Well said, kiddo. Of course, we ALL know that you are some sort of right wing tool down there in the PRAA. Amazing. I had more respect for her, even though I most always considered her very strident. I think Jong's probably just out of touch. At least that's the most polite take I can put on it.
Might be she needs to revert to a better grade of grass, now that I think back on it.....
I haven't read it yet, but another response to Jong's article said that her daughter (a stay-at-home mom to three kids) wrote a rebuttal. How'd you like it if Dawn took your whole lifestyle to task in the pages of the WSJ? Methinks that many $$$ have been spent on therapists in the Jong family...
Oh, and of course you rock. Excellent writing. I hope many people read it.
Well okay, now I've read Molly Jong-Fast's story. Not a rebuttal. An apologia. She even talks about the good money her mother earned so that she could see all the therapists she needed to. Lovely.
I think that this article is another prime example of how we (modern middle class mothers?) still cannot discuss these deeply felt issues without using language specifically chosen to alienate the "other side." I agree with several points in the article, the most profound for me being the notion that the expectations I and lots of mothers like me feel compelled to meet draw so much focused attention that it becomes all too easy to neglect the needs of my community and world. In other words, being my children's mother can become so demanding that I am less inclined to reach out beyond my front door and fully engage. I am an introvert. I also have two children who require a great deal of interaction, both physical and mental/emotional. That really does leave me feeling weary at the end of the day, and less likely to jump into the newspaper or head out the door to help out with a cause I care about. My out-of-the-house job, my kids' daycare, the formula that gives me occasional breaks from night-nursing, all of these things are modern conveniences/situations for mothers that have given me back some of my blessed mental/emotional space.
I think the author's point is this: if the *average* mother is expected to adhere to stringent AP behaviors (as she understands them), she is perhaps less likely to have the energy and mental/emotional space left in her life for civic engagement. This is true for me, and so I balance my life accordingly. Unfortunately, she cloaked this valid and interesting argument in anti-AP vitriol. As usual. Her assertion that this is a tool of the political right....what is it you said about generating hits to the site? :-) But it's certainly an interesting philosophical question, right? To some mothers it surely does feel like heading back to the dark ages, with the endless domestic tasks. And so then, who are we serving with all of this domesticity if not ourselves and our kids? Does it benefit anyone else if I'm mentally tied up 24/7 with my family, no time for anything else?
I feel that the problem with this article is the tone. Tone seems to always be the problem when the general WOHM v. SAHM issue arises. It's a shame.
Johanna, I agree with so much of what you write here! My experience in life is that all parents are improvising as we go, and I don't know of anyone who follows any parenting philosophy completely and exhaustively. That applies to AP parents, Ezzo-philosophy parents, James Dobson's supporters ... all of us.
I think the problem with Jong's article is misdirected vitriol. What are the REAL causes of parental exhaustion and guilt for so many of us? How about underfunded and low-quality day-care options? Or, ridiculously expensive high-quality options? How about no workplace flexibility? How about the industrialized world's worst parental leave policies?
It's so much easier, though, to direct the anger at individual or collective parents who are doing something different from you (Jong, that is). THEY'RE the reason the women's movement is floundering (if it is)--it's not the woman-unfriendly national policies and politics. I think that an article that prods our lawmakers towards more family-friendly institutions and policies has a snowball's chance in Hell of being published in the Wall St. Journal ... so this is what we get instead.
Boo.
I really appreciate Johanna's comment. I'm not a mother and have no plans to become one, so perhaps my voice isn't even relevant here - but I did find myself agreeing with Jong's broader points, once I put the vitriolic tone aside.
I wonder if she is responding, in part, to the Sarah Palin paradox - i.e., old-school right-wing conservative family values cloaking themselves in some kind of Mama Grizzly tea-party "feminism". Can there really be an infinite number of definitions of "feminism"? Is "feminism" really just about a woman's infinite range of choices? If so, we begin to face some of the same challenges embedded in extreme moral relativism...
But if so, if feminism is fundamentally about choice, it's high time for all upper-middle- and upper-class women - mothers and non-mothers, WOHMs and SAHMs - to get the hell out of the circular firing range and take aim, instead, at the political, institutional and especially economic structures that make such decisions so damn difficult in the first place. And recall that economic circumstances, in particular, make the whole idea of "choice" in these matters a moot point for too many women in this country; those who have the luxury of choosing whether they want to work or not, for philosophical and political reasons, are already a privileged minority. All of the finger-pointing and hand-wringing among these intelligent, passionate women becomes a little silly.
Couldn't all of this energy be focused in more productive directions, to the benefit of all families? Voting once every few years is nice, and volunteering a few hours or days for a Democrat or a Republican is nice, but Jong's broader point stands: as a nation, we still don't have a decent system of health care. (Medicaid, the only care available to poor families even under Obama's new plan, sucks.) We still don't have a living wage. We still don't have sufficient family-leave time from work. We still don't have access to high-quality, affordable child care. We still have a deeply problematic public education system in many parts of the country. We still have a credit-based economy that makes home ownership and higher education totally unavailable to most families without the accumulation of overwhelming lifelong debt. These collective problems pose challenges to EVERYONE, men and women and children, and they are only being exacerbated as the distribution of wealth in this country has become less and less equal in recent decades and the middle-class American dream becomes a more and more distant myth. These problems far outweigh any possible developmental consequences to the children of upper-middle class SAHMs vs. the children of upper-middle class WOHMs.
Within this select and fortunate group, then, it looks to me (as an outsider) like six of one and half a dozen of the other. Once we discount the outliers (the extremes of over-protection/over-privilege on the one hand and neglect or abuse on the other), it seems to me that all "parenting strategies" have their strengths and their weaknesses. Whether we breastfeed or not, co-sleep or not, work or not, use day-care or not, home-school or not, our kids are going to be awesome in some ways and disappointing in others. They're going to be normal, average, complex people. We're going to make some mistakes, and they're going to need some therapy. And it's OK.
Which brings me back to Jong's final, excellent point: "Do the best you can. There are no rules."
And ultimately, then, to Dad's comment: we could ALL use a better grade of grass. Especially me. Right now.
Of course there are not infinite feminisms. It feels, though, that some "old school" feminists would like there to be only one: a feminism based on "equal pay for equal work" and abortion rights. The feminist movement seems to me largely bumbling and unsure of what to do about the fact that about 85% of women will become mothers sometime in their lifetime (that's a statistic from memory--I might be off about that).
We know that Erica Jong doesn't support Sarah Palin and her Mama Grizzlies because of their right wing politics. Now it's Attachment Parents--they're on her "bad for women" list, too. In my experience, AP parents tend largely to be more left-leaning in their politics. I wonder what group of mothers are going to be on her list next?
I know that this probably does seem "silly" when one considers the monumental issues that face us all as a collective. I agree with that wholeheartedly. But in a childish, schoolyard sort of way, I'll say "But she started it!" Ms. Jong, with her big name and big megaphone and big national newspaper essay, chose to go after a parenting style rather than an economic system. And I wish I could ask her why.
The responses to this article that I've seen written-out and heard about from my AP-leaning friends tend towards feelings of alienation and frustration. That's obviously what I felt. What's the point of that, Ms. Jong? Why use your soapbox in a right-leaning newspaper to alienate other parents?
Her last line is indeed lovely. But it's a crumb, it's nothing. What I ask is this: take the line "[Attachment parenting] is a prison for mothers, and it represents as much of a backlash against women's freedom as the right-to-life movement" and substitute "Attachment parenting" with something that you hold dear. Try "Working outside the home is a prison for mothers ..." or "Getting a graduate degree is a prison for mothers ..." See how that feels, and then read the line "Do the best you can. There are no rules." and see if it feels as hollow and false as it does to me.
I want to move on to the economic issues and structural problems that affect all of us and exhaust all of us. It's hard to do that, though, when individuals who are beloved by a movement that matters to you take it upon themselves to use a national spotlight to predict that the way you raise your children will someday be "quaint." Do you want to be SURE that you'll lose someone as an ally? Attack how they're raising their kids.
I am so, 100% in agreement with your last comment, Cara. It was that line (AP being a prison for women) that made my eyeballs roll so far back into my head that they're still recovering. I think you are dead on with the assertion that her "do the best you can" is hollow in light of her attacks on one parenting style. It might be true, but that's lost in light of the rest of her article. For her essay to end in step with how it began and proceeded, it would have to read, "do the best you can as long as it's not Attachment Parenting."
For what it's worth, I think this is in part a bit of backlash against the perceived holier-than-thou stance of the AP movement. I have plenty of friends who consider terms like "baby-wearing" etc. to be like "four-letter-words." The problem, of course, is that we so often feel like the only way to respond when we feel attacked it to attack right back. Instead of respecting your choices as your own and my choices as my own, we have to demonize those who we feel have demonized us. I have a sort of "ex-friend" who seemed less and less interested in friendship after learning that I cloth-diaper my kids and didn't circumcise my son (although this could be a coincidence!!). Those were careful and thoughtful choices that my husband and I made, and they seem to fall into the general AP/progressive landscape. And although I am deliberate about holding up in loving respect her choices as well as my own, I feel that they may have driven a wedge between us. Ugh.
Tangent. In summary, I agree. :-)
PS: Have you read this yet?
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/has-attachment-parenting-imprisoned-mothers/#more-16737
(Hope that link comes through - check out the most recent post on the NYT Motherlode blog, if not)
That's a great post on the Motherlode blog.
I had read that motherlode blog entry and have immediately adopted the phrase "zipless parenting." It made me cackle.
Clowns/jesters make fun of anything that someone holds dear, a la the clown in King Lear. Erica Jong is a clown. If she got us talking about all this and maybe discarding some old ideas, developing new ones and putting a little work into political actions that will make the world better for all families, then all to the good!
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