I was going to blog about my mom yesterday (even though she reads my blog; I wouldn't have said anything bad anyway) but held off because I felt like I might not have enough to say. It would basically be a tribute to the fact that my mom and I don't have (and I can't remember having) any problems with her. (The link is to another woman's story of her mother. It's sad and so hard for me to understand, since my relationship with my mother is pretty much wonderful.)
Anyway, today I was reading a different blog, and came across another article (less personal) about mothers and homemakers. I like the blog a lot, but this article kind of pissed me off. Here is what pissed me off: "A lot of people, not just feminists, consider it hard work (just like being president, apparently), but we don’t consider it a real job for very good reasons." She's referring to being a homemaker. She's saying that being a homemaker isn't a real job, for whatever reasons. I understand her arguments. Many women can't afford to stay home. Men can care for children as much as women, and as well as women. And I totally agree with both those points.
But I can't see minimizing the care of children, whether it be a man or woman who does it. I was very happy that my mom stayed home with us; it forged a very strong bond between my mother and I. I don't think that moms who work, though, have any less of a bond. I don't think it matters, sometimes, what the situation is, as long as it works for the people involved. And I don't think that it matters, if a parent stays home, if it is the father or the mother.
And I don't think that my mom's choice makes her any better or any worse than any other woman on the planet. And I think it was a job. I know it was a job. I was there. We were a pain in the ass.
Denigrating a woman's choice is so fundamentally against everything that feminism is for me. Feminism is a fight for choice. It's a fight to choose the best options for you, whether that be at home with the children, or in the workplace, along with your partner, or while your partner stays home. Just because the right-wing constantly crows about how the proper place for the woman is in the home doesn't mean that women in the home are somehow guilty of something.
In the beginning stages of my discovery of feminism, I thought that any woman who would consent to being a prisoner in her home was not a feminist, and was bad for women in general. But I grew up, and I realized that for me, yes, the house would be a prison. But for some women, it is the place where they find the most happiness. And for some men, it is that as well. Talk about lack of choice. Most men aren't given the option to stay home, because, like it or not, women don't have access to most of the highest paying jobs. I probably couldn't support S and a baby with a job at the library. Most librarians are women.
That's the real fight. Fighting for access to jobs that pay well. Fighting so that jobs that women do are paid well enough to support a stay-at-home dad, if that's what the couple wants. Fighting to overthrow a system in which women often don't have a choice to be the "breadwinner" (and oh, how I hate that term), and men don't have a choice about it either.
I'm a feminist. I have identified as such for a long time, even on a campus where feminist was a dirty word. I fought hard for the right to make choices at that campus, and for that administration to allow women to make their own choices on campus. But part of my identity as a feminist means that I have to fight for a society in which all these harmful stereotypes, whether it be men as bad nurturers or women homemakers as harmful to women, are no longer as prevalent.
I have to fight for choice.
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