Sad, but true. The Super-Woman myth is just that: a myth, a fairy tale. When women dare to have careers and families, something’s gotta give unless they are wealthy enough to have help — a nanny, perhaps an extended family of grandparents to deliver childcare, whatever.
What really needs to change, in my opinion, is SOCIETY’s support of women being in the wider world than just the home and family. Think of this: in tribal cultures, the whole tribe served as the support system for young women who were also mothers, and their families. There’s no reason we as a society can’t determine that because women make up over half the human race, because women have as many talents as men (and who knows, maybe more), and because women’s voices are desperately needed for their wisdom and to provide balance in the governing of any organization and especially of governments and whole nations/cultures, as a SOCIETY we will ensure that women will not either be held hostage and imprisoned in the home by her biology during those years her children require parenting (or grandparenting), OR be required to wait until her children no longer need her to exercise her own interests and contribute to the wider society. In other words: neither the woman nor her children will suffer from her participation in wider society, which is a benefit for society.
Society could decide that. We could insist upon it.
That could mean that commercial businesses — retail as well as companies where women (and men!) are there as employees — all have child care built in, and probably available for free.
That could mean that we re-organize our housing so that we live in something a little closer to what I think of as a real community, where people of all ages live near one another, many in shared housing offering differing levels of privacy, and our elders aren’t ghettoized and hidden away in retirement communities or nursing homes. Everything is built in circles, with a town hall in the center where frequent, even daily, community meals are prepared and shared. Everything you need most days is within walking distance.
And so forth. Come up with your own fantasies about how this new world would look (and by all means share them with me) if it truly supported women, supported childbearing, supported children. Two things for sure: it would be a lot different than it is now, and a lot more user-friendly.
I’m reminded of all this because of a piece Phyllis Chesler wrote about Alice Walker and her daughter Rebecca, who are apparently not doing well as mother and daughter. Mothering isn’t easy, parenting isn’t easy, and I have no doubt that most children grow up wanting something a little or a lot different from the lot they drew in the form of their parents. I know I certainly did. But Rebecca Walker doesn’t seem to separate her complaints about her mother from criticisms about 2nd wave feminism.
Dear Goddess, when I think back to how much we didn’t know back then, what new ground we had to forge, there should be no room for criticism of 2nd wave feminism during that era. Later, perhaps. But not those early days when the whole world was possibility but we didn’t have a clue how we could be. Suddenly, we could be anything, but what did that mean, what did it look like? I didn’t have any idea, not even of what I wanted personally. Most women looked to men IN business and government and academia — only because they were the closest (only!) role models. Some women still do.
And Goddess knows this 2nd waver wasn’t the mother my son would have preferred, but then I wouldn’t have been that even without 2nd wave feminism. 2nd wave feminism didn’t hinder me, it helped me by providing some focus for what to do with myself aside from full-time motherhood in the old traditional ways. Some women just aren’t cut out for that: and I was one of those. Feminism saved me, and did quite a bit for that son of mine, too. It’s healthier growing up with a slightly adequate but loving and sane mother than an insane woman held hostage by societal expectations and norms and straightjackets.
And yes, I’m exaggerating about all of it. But only slightly.
I think Starry Rift has it right:
And if you are lucky enough to be the child of a parent who maybe didn’t make nutritionally balanced meals and wasn’t around as much as you’d have liked, but who transformed this world and the people in it, think about this before you complain: think about how much bigger and more interesting your world is because of it. Think of how not getting the attention you wanted enriched you, even as it stung. Think of how your mother’s “failings” cannot be laid entirely at her door, but must be shared with your father and with every person in your life and in this world who expected the lion’s share of parenting to go to her.
Because the truth is that all our parents fail us, and none of them manages to always give us exactly what we need. And many, many children do not have the benefit of a mother who transformed the world. Many children, in fact, having nothing but human frailty to blame their parents’ failing on.
I am proud of the fact that I was one of those women who helped transform the world. Not in the way an Alice Walker did, but I was one of millions of women who stepped through those doors as they opened and kept opening and helped nudge others open by my very presence, and helped those poor men get used to the idea of sharing the workplace with competent women. And I’m proud of that, my small 2nd wave role. I’m proud to have been in that army of women who marched through and made history tangible and lasting and thereby changed the world.
And, oh, you should hear my complaints about my mother. And father. But just as The Starry Rift points out, it wasn’t nothin’ but human failings, plenty of human failings.
