In my previous post yesterday, I talked about the first season of American Horror Story and its reliance on two female archetypes – the femme fatale and the overbearing mother – in its construction of the monstrous.
The spoiler warning, again, goes here!
Today, I’m going to talk about reproduction, so if you want to sing that song from Grease 2, you better get it out of your system now. Ready?
Mothers are, in the world of AHS, a danger not only to their children, but also to the others that touch their lives. Pregnancy, with its easy symbolism and suitably melodramatic and gory end bit, lends itself to Horror. But it is not just the obvious that is made an object of fear.
Vivien, the walking womb-ded
As I said in part one, Vivien and Ben are a married couple facing difficulties. She’s had a miscarriage, he’s had an affair, and their relationship is in tatters. I think, I think, that we’re meant to be engaged with this crumbling marriage.
But while Ben is a rounded character – full of hope and regret, sweetness and cruelty, passion and inertia – his wife is driven only by her desire to save her marriage, which in turn is driven by her maternal desire.
Like Nora, the basement abortionist’s wife, Hayden (Ben’s deeply sexual and manipulative mistress), and Constance, the terminally abusive and neglectful mother next door, Vivien simply has uterus, will procreate.1
Vivien is little more than a vessel, a womb with bouncy hair. She is Shroedinger’s Uterus, forever pregnant or not pregnant, host to a foetus that is alive or not alive, evil or not evil depending on the requirements of the plot in any given episode. Viven’s role as incubator is underlined when she dies in childbirth – her role is complete, so we need nothing more from her.
Vivien’s pregnancy is unusual. Hers is a product of heteropaternal superfecundation – she’s carrying twins with different fathers. One is her husband’s, the other is the result of her rape by a psychopathic ghost.2 Let’s not even go into the fact that her husband doesn’t believe she’s been raped – there’s something much worse than that on the horizon.The show’s mythology tells us that a child born of a ghost and a human will be the antichrist, and we all know what that means: apocalypse.
Just in case the implication of that isn’t clear, let me put it in slightly different terms: Vivien’s vagina is the muggletuppin’ Hellmouth.
Here’s where we get into the really juicy feminist theory
Much of what I’ve said so far owes a debt to Barbara Creed’s theory of the monstrous-feminine, and in particular the abject body; the demonisation, defilement and objectification of the female body in Horror.
Vivien’s labour and delivery is presented as particularly sanguinary; a festival of blood and sweat. It’s a burlesque of the natural; a grotesque, pantomimic affair attended entirely by a gorily deceased medical staff provided by the house.
With neither the clinical intervention of the modern birthing experience nor the cleanliness of the body innocent, the birth plays on both classically Freudian and modern germophobic fears. It is, from both perspectives, unclean.
The point of Horror, if there must be one, is to walk the line between desirable and undesirable; to cross or threaten the boundaries that separate stability and chaos. Childbirth, as a triumph of the primal over the civilised and the inner over the outer, is a natural exemplar of this. It’s naturally yukky and generally unstoppable, and that makes it pretty frightening. Here we’re treated to close ups of Vivien’s sweat covered forehead, wide overhead shots that emphasise the claustrophobic urgency of the scene, and heavy blood-loss.
Horror films that depict monstrous births play on the inside/outside distinction in order to point to the inherently monstrous nature of the womb as well as the impossibility of ever completely banishing the abject from the human domain. […] The womb represents the utmost in abjection for it contains a new life form which will pass from inside to outside bringing with it traces of contamination – blood, afterbirth, faeces.
– Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993)
Childbirth places us on the side of nature, outside of patriarchal order. Flesh is torn, blood is spilled, the sexual organs begin to resemble a wound. The imagery is graphic, base: abject. Vivien’s affinity with uncivilised, feral nature invoked, her threat to patriarchal law is cemented. The birth of Vivien’s twins is a threat fulfilled, a boundary crossed. From the abject comes the ruin of the world.
Vivien is threatened not just by the hell-spawn she’s carrying, but also by three of the ghosts that share her home. Nora and Hayden, who have lost their own children, and Chad, who has never had children, each desire ownership of Vivien’s child and conspire to steal the baby once it is born.
Baby-snatching is a common, well rooted trope in fantasy and horror, which usually points to the degeneracy of a group or being – a sign that they’re beyond redemption, truly inhuman. Infants are stolen for ingestion (as in Torchwood: Children of Earth), as revenge (like the Pied Piper of Hamlyn) or a sacrificial offering (the Buffy episode Band Candy) and occasionally, though rarely, to be raised as the kidnapper’s own. It is this which motivates the childless ghosts of AHS.
Each conspirator represents a different level of threat. Deceased interior designer Chad, constantly arguing with his (also dead) partner Patrick, is no threat at all. More concerned as he is with decorating than mending his broken relationship, he seems to think the baby will simply be handed to him. Nora, left to her own devices, is an unlikely threat – she’s narcissistic enough but ethereal and clueless.
But with Hayden, the picture is quite different. Hayden is wicked, determined and operating without fear of consequence – she’s dead, after all – and that’s precisely why she’s so dangerous.
The feminine is only established, however, if the wish for a penis is replaced by one for a baby.
– Freud, “Femininity”, New Introductory Lectures in Psycho-Analysis (1933)
The problem here is one of motivation. Now, I’m not saying there’s something wrong with wanting children. But there’s something wrong with wanting children to the exclusion of everything else. Hayden is a formidable woman brimming with agency and audacity, and, in a stunning display of the roles women play in our diverse society, she’s pregnant too.
When she dies, she’s contributing all her energy to winning Ben back, and then, bam! One blunt-force trauma later, her whole reason for being has changed. Now, I get that dying is the sort of thing that might emotionally scar a person, but COME ON. The child in her belly, previously presented only as a tool of emotional blackmail, will never appear, so she’s obsessed with replacing it.
And that’s the key to understanding both Hayden and Nora. They both want to replace children they’ve lost. It is a narcissistic craving; a desire merely to possess. The possibility of motherhood has stripped them of rationality, maybe even sanity, and turned them into objects of dread. Here motherhood truly is ‘the most powerful feminine wish’ (Freud again, in 1933), and it is dangerous.
In the eyes of AHS, women are to be feared. Female sexuality is aberrant if not abhorrent, and represented by crude Freudian symbolism (if you aren’t yet convinced, check out the suckling infant literally devouring his mother’s breast).
I’m with Simone de Beauvoir when it comes to Freud, but not so Messrs. Murphy and Falchuck; it’s like they’ve tried to dramatise Introduction to Psychoanalysis.
The second season of American Horror Story recently began its run on UK television (on FX, new episodes Tuesday evening). So far it’s really pushing the boat out to hate women in a variety of new and exciting ways under the guise of a critical look at the pathologising of sexuality and historic attitudes to poor mental health.
It’s terrible. You’re going to love it.
- Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN, the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature. Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.
- In a worrying conflation of hetero femininity and queer masculinity, one half of the gay couple who also haunt the house is also constantly yapping about having a child.
- Who, by the way, IS WEARING A LATEX FETISH SUIT because that isn’t sex negative, kink-shaming douchery AT ALL.
American Horror Story is sexy.
No, let me rephrase that.
American Horror Story is SEXY. It emanates sweet tendrils of hotness, wisps of decadent, lustful sexual deviance and sultry taboo, while trotting apace through a veritable phalanx of horror tropes and borrowing heavily from the classics of the genre. I love it. It is also, in the words of the hilarious Is This Feminist? tumblr, PROBLEMATIC.
And who’s surprised, really? Ryan Murphy’s work is characterised by its casual misogyny (yo, Nip/Tuck, Glee, I’m looking at you) and so is horror as a genre. So not me, no. I’m not surprised, Mr Murphy, I’m not even angry. I’m just disappointed. Maybe you should go to your room and think about what you’ve done.
Now, don’t get me wrong. AHS is, by any critical standard, a terrible, terrible show. It’s fractured and bombastic and desperately wants to be, like, profound. But it’s not. It’s… y’know. Crap.
But luckily, I’m not a TV critic, so I bloody love it. And I’m allowed to love it because cognitive dissonance. This show is simply dripping with things that ought to make me hate it. And I do. I spit expletives at the screen. I rage against the covert anti-abortionism and the exploitative male gaze. And then I rewind and watch it again. Because, like I said. Cognitive dissonance.
I’m going to handle AHS in two parts. Today I’ll be examining the show’s representations of women as lovers and mothers, before looking at pregnancy, birth and maternal desire in the next exciting instalment.
Before I go on, beware. Here be SPOILERS.
Predatory Women in the Male Gaze
AHS is not much more than your typical haunted house story. It begins and ends with the house, designated ‘Murder House’ by local legend and built by Charles and Nora Montgomery decades before our protagonists – we’ll get to them later – were born.
The Montgomerys run an illegal abortion clinic from the basement, providing discreet help to women in trouble and fuelling the God complex which eventually sees the ether-addicted Charles sew together a Franken-baby – known as the Infanta – for his wife to care for. If we were looking for a symbolic representation of threat to the constructed (read: patriarchal) order of things, well, it doesn’t get any more obvious than that. Like Dr Frankenstein, Charles blurs the boundaries not just between God and man but also between male and female roles by creating life, upsetting the proper balance of the house and setting in motion the events which follow.
Nora and Charles’ lives end in a murder-suicide at Nora’s hand. Thus, they become the first to haunt the house.The third post-human (‘ghost’ is such an oppressive term, right?) resident of the house is Moira. Let’s start her story with a little pop quiz:
You, the lady of the house, enter your home to hear a woman being sexually assaulted. You pick up a gun – because they’re totally safe to have around when emotions are running high – and enter the master bedroom to find your husband raping the maid. You point the gun and fire. Who did you just kill? Was it –
a) your husband, because he’s a rapey scumbag?
b) Moira the maid, because, er… um… she’s there too?
If you said b) Moira the maid, congratulations! You hate women as much as American Horror Story does!
To be fair, this woman scorned does go on to shoot her husband too, but that maid, well. She was probably asking for it, wasn’t she, all walking around in clothes and getting on with her job and having breasts. What a slut.
Regardless of her intention or her consent, Moira is now a sexual predator, in death forced to play the role perceived as hers in life, and becomes a Jekyll-and-Hyde figure. The women she encounters see her as a sexless middle-aged woman, while the men (who, it seems, see only what they want to see) see a young, beautiful and carnivorously sexual temptress, seeking to undermine, manipulate or overthrow men through the power of her sexuality. She is the virgin/whore dichotomy made flesh.
I could get into how heterosexist this is, but frankly we’d be here for days. The height of Moira’s sexual power comes with the literal castration of the man who most poses a threat to her. Dr. Freud, you’re needed in the Literalisation of Symbolic Acts ward. Bring a towel.
The newest residents of Murder House are Vivien and Ben Harmon, a Bostonian couple intent on running away and leaving their marital problems behind them, because that always works. Moving into their suspiciously underpriced new home with their adolescent daughter is their first step towards repairing the damage done to the partnership by Ben’s affair with a student named Hayden in the aftermath of Vivien’s miscarriage.
Just as Moira ends up dead for having sex and getting above her station, so does Hayden. Hayden’s not above throwing herself at Ben, turning up at his home in an act of seduction and intimidation to rival the fatal-est of femmes.
We’re encouraged into this reading of women as wild by the show’s insistent male gaze.
A complex mythology that rules whether or not the ghosts age ensures that we get enough young female flesh to look at. There are lingering shots of gartered thighs and softly rising décolletée, there are those close, oppressive, slightly-from-above camera angles that make you feel like you dominate the subject – and there are straight-up no-holds-barred crotch shots. All of these things make sure we know where, and how, to look.
These women are women as men wish (or as gay men think straight/bi men wish) to see them: willing harbingers of sexual pleasure, built in the eye of the camera from tits and ass.
They’re supple-breasted and conveniently bisexual, with sexuality so magnetic that Ben must masturbate furiously – crying all the while – to stop himself from giving in to them. Where women are concerned, perceived sexual immorality is a barometer for bad. They are debased, and they will hurt you.
The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world
Motherhood comes in for a bad rap on AHS. From episode one (where Vivien’s longed for-pregnancy is spoken of in terms of an unwanted visitor violating the sacred space of the home) to the monstrous child-delivery at the end of the season, childbearing is painted as a threat to patriarchal social order. I’ll talk more about that next time, but for now I want to concentrate on what happens once you’ve got a bleating infant in your arms.
Another previous resident of Vivien and Ben’s home, and one of the few that is still living, is local Mommie Dearest Constance Langdon. She’s the self-appointed caretaker of the house, an amoral force of unfathomable intentions who appears to consider Mrs Bates and Margaret White her parenting role models.
Constance is a cruel, jealous single parent, abusing and using her children by turns. Unable to relinquish control of her brood as they age, and thus not allowing them autonomous identities, she ensures that dysfunction reins in the Langdon household.
She treats her daughter Addie, who has Down syndrome, as a sexual competitor. She imprisons both her daughter and her heavily-disfigured eldest son, the ironically-named Beauregard, in the home (sometimes resorting to shackles and chains as a demonstration of her sovereignty) and gleefully tells Addie that she’ll never be a ‘pretty girl’.1
Although all of her children are dead before they reach adulthood, the youngest remains as one of the fully corporeal phantoms haunting the Harmon household. Despite her treatment of her children, Constance is willing to kill to keep them together. The whole set-up screams narcissistic abuse.
Constance’s stranglehold over her youngest son, Tate, has prevented him from self-actualisation and produced an emotionally scarred adolescent, narcissistic and hypermasculine, who apes his mother in his desire for control over the bodies of others, raping and indiscriminately killing in order to exert his ownership. What a charmer.
Tate’s emotional state almost demands to be analysed as a reaction to Constance’s total control over the boy in the second stage of psychosexual development, which coincides with toilet training and in which autonomy is developed. Constance’s suppression of Tate’s self-actualisation has resulted in a rebellious, cruel, emotionally volatile adolescent who is so eager to please the woman he’s fixated on that he’ll commit terrible acts to gain her approval. It’s desperately clichéd.
Sexualised as it is, AHS’ regular female cast is not made up of victims in the great tradition of the genre: they don’t get cut up, and there’s no running through dark corridors in strategically torn clothing or fumbling ineffectually with locks that they could work perfectly well a minute ago.
This has caused some people to herald the show as a feminist buoy, bobbing about in the misogynist soup of Horror. Such is the jubilation at the thought that women might be allowed some agency, the flipside is missed. The show doesn’t victimise its women; it demonises them. In this world women are either maidens or mothers, either sexual or not.
And damn, they’ve got it in for you.
- You can now read Part 2!
- Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN, the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature. Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.
- Ed’s Tiny Note: For more on Addie and how she is portrayed and treated, there’s a critical look at her role at Fangs for the Fantasy. Down Syndrome Daily also has a roundup of US press reactions to the character, some of which I think betray ableist prejudice in themselves, and some of which make good points.
(The author recognises that the phenomenon discussed below is not, in fact, limited to people who are married and in love. I’ll get to marriage in romance novels some other time.)
[TRIGGER WARNING: Discussion of infertility and failed pregnancies below.]
[SPOILER WARNING: This piece discusses happenings from the first and third episodes of the new season of Doctor Who, as well as containing mild spoilers for Game Of Thrones.]
Last time on Hopeless Reimantic we talked about virginal heroines, and while I wasn’t totally positive on the topic, I will give the virginal heroine this: at least most of the time, she doesn’t stay virginal throughout the book. That trope has an expiration date, if you will. This next one is actually significantly more irritating to me – partly, admittedly, because it’s outside my experience in a way that I have no particular interest in remedying, but mainly because even if I didn’t feel that way I still think I’d find the topic clumsily handled and often just shoehorned in to make the romance more…legitimate.
Not everything has to be about babies, guys. Image by the illustrious Kate Beaton (http://www.harkavagrant.com), shirt by topatoco.
That’s right, folks: I’m talking about babies. Well, in brief. I suppose more accurately (and more vaguely) what I’m talking about is parenthood.
I suppose putting this column in second is kind of cheating, because it jumps to the end of the standard romance novel narrative – or, depending on how much edginess we’re going for, about three-quarters of the way through – and for that I apologise, but I promise you that the baby trope is all-pervasive enough that it’s not going to matter. An Extremely Standard Romance Novel, you see, goes something like this:
- [Play]boy meets [virgin] girl
- They deny their attraction to one another for a while (usually this consists of Mr Man insisting that our heroine is Just Like All Other Women and although she makes his dick hard he could never actually love her, and our heroine protesting any kind of attraction to Mr Man at all)
- Inevitably, sex.
- A brief honeymoon period, usually compounded by more sex
- Some kind of big misunderstanding that breaks them apart [at this point the heroine may or may not discover that she is pregnant]
- Reunion. Marriage. BABIES.
The story outlined above is common to a lot of romance novels (including our old friend from last time, Bought: Destitute Yet Defiant) but it is by no means the only sprog-imbued narrative out there in Romancelandia. Nor is it even the most baby-heavy. A quick search on Dear Author for “babies” turned up eight pages of hits and reminded me that Dear Author actually has a tag for “secret baby” plotlines – yes, they exist, and they’re common enough that they get their own category on review sites. These stories might start out with two separated lovers meeting again after many years – but wait! She has a child! The fact that it’s his child is blindingly obvious throughout, but often only revealed at the very end! What could be more romantic?
A nicely infuriating example of this trope on my Kindle is a little tale called Emergency: Wife Lost and Found – a Mills&Boon Medical Romance by Carol Marinelli that, to be fair, I have to admit was less awful upon revisitation than I remember it being the first time around. It’s a reunion tale between two doctors who met in medical school and married young because – shockingly – they got pregnant, but whose marriage then fell apart upon the loss of the baby.
This is not, to be clear, in itself a storyline I take issue with. The loss of a child is a devastating one, and especially to a couple who married essentially because of the child (there are some token protests that it would have happened anyway because they were in Real True Love, but still) – I can only imagine the effects of that on their relationship. It’s no wonder they divorced, and believeable that their meeting again after so long would be fraught with emotional tension (and I don’t wanna go into the whole thing, but there’s a lot of emotional tension for their meeting to be fraught with). And it’s understandable that some of the tension between them also comes from Lorna, the heroine, having since discovered that due to endometriosis she’s unlikely to carry another pregnancy to term. I would actually have been extremely interested in a book that had dealt with those issues – that explored the characters coming to term with Lorna’s infertility, and how that might have changed or strengthened their relationship.
The thing is, the book doesn’t actually deal with any of those issues. It skates over them briefly, and then True Love Sex happens, and Lorna…gets pregnant. Magically. And by the book’s epilogue, she has another child on the way, and her happiness is complete. See, true love fixed her!
Secret babies and miracle pregnancies are not limited to contemporary romance fiction, either, although it’s only here that the total absence (or extremely brief, give-it-one-sentence-and-handwave-it-away mentions of) abortion, adoption (either way!) and foster care are so totally and thoroughly angering. Historicals often feature a heroine whose dark secret is that, for whatever reason, she thinks she can’t have children but then, inexplicably, has at least one child by the end of the book; the widow whose husband never gave her children, but who then meets the hero and gets pregnant so fast you’d think they had some sort of corresponding velcro arrangement, is a particularly common one. Because that is the miracle that true love can provide.
True love also, incidentally, provides the incentive for wanting the kids in the first place in roughly half of these cases – there are quite a lot of cases of heroines (and heroes, to be fair) for whom a family was always endgame, but also a depressing number of heroines who get pregnant, having never wanted or thought about children before, and are midway through a totally justified freakout when they realise that the baby must be Mr Man’s and melt into a puddle of warm, maternal goo and aren’t scared anymore. And don’t get me started on the reaction some heroes have to this. I distinctly remember a book I read a few months ago – it was called Momentary Marriage, one of those “we’ll just marry for a year or so to help us both out of a jam that could totally not be solved any other way!” storylines – and the hero of our tale not only makes plans to impregnate the heroine without her knowledge so that she’ll stay with him, but spends about half a page getting turned on at the idea. If art does imitate life, there are a lot more pregnancy fetishists out there than you’d expect. All I’m sayin’.
The thing is, while this trope may be extremely common in romance novels – overwhelmingly, nauseatingly common, even – it isn’t confined to them. Remember Asylum of the Daleks, the first episode of the new season of Doctor Who? That one that came out a few weeks ago? Remember Rory and Amy’s Fifty Seconds Of Conflict, when he shouts at her for leaving him and her response is WELL YOU WANTED CHILDREN AND I CAN’T HAVE THEM, SO I GAVE YOU UP RATHER THAN ACTUALLY TRY TO HAVE A CONVERSATION ABOUT THIS? Yeah. Because in the UK in 2012, apparently adoption doesn’t exist, and neither does speaking to your partner. Later on in the series we have Mad Scientist Alien, who looks at Amy and can immediately tell that she’s had children because she is sad and fierce and caring, as if motherhood is the only experience that could confer these characteristics. Genre-hopping a bit to Game of Thrones, we have Daenerys Targaryen, who becomes a mother to her people because she’s never going to have children who aren’t dragons. (Which I personally don’t see the problem with. I would much rather have dragon-babies than baby-babies, although I suppose feeding them would be something of a negotiation.) And these are just the examples I can think of off the top of my head.
I appreciate that a lot of people do want children. I appreciate that some would even go so far as to say that their children are the best things in their lives, and that is valid and legitimate and completely worthy of representation in fiction. In spite of all that, though, as you may be able to tell, I have extremely little patience with this trope, and I’m going to try and explain why without sputtering too incoherently. Bear with me a moment.
Okay.
Okay.
First of all, I have a huge problem with motherhood being portrayed as the only really worthwhile thing a woman can aspire to. Motherhood is worthwhile, and it is important, and it deserves to be venerated and respected. But I object to the idea that it is the only thing that is worthwhile and important and worthy of veneration and respect. This elevation to the exclusion of all other things is not, as I’m not the first person to point out, extended to fatherhood, either – a man who never has children may well have been doing other, equally important, things, whereas a woman who’s never had children is often seen as an object of either pity or scorn.
So far, it seems that the only wish-fulfilment medium aimed specifically at women overwhelmingly portrays babies as the reward a good woman gets for being a good person and a good lover and without which no other goodness is really, truly good. Where does that leave women who have real-life style infertility – the kind that isn’t fixed by falling in lasting love – or those who just never had that wish in the first place?
And that brings me to my next point. I’d like everyone to bear in mind, by the way, that I say this next part as a person who doesn’t actually like children that much. I’ve definitely mellowed towards them as I’ve grown older – meeting some actually nice ones that I wasn’t forced to hang out with because I was presenting female at the time has helped – but I’m not a particular fan. They’re okay; I might want my own someday, but right now I’m leaning towards not. (That’s right, Friend Of My Friend’s Family Who Wrote Me That Poem About How Not Having Kids Is A Waste Of My Genes Five Years Ago1 – the answer’s still no.)
Let’s review, shall we? So far this segment we’ve talked about pregnancy, secret pregnancy, miracle pregnancy, infertility, abortion, adoption and the concept of motherhood.
What have we not – really – talked about?
Any actual babies.
I do understand that it can be difficult to write about the children in child-plotlines themselves, especially if the story in question is actually supposed to be focused on relationships between adults. But there’s a pretty big difference between “this character is important but doesn’t really do much beyond eat and cry and poop, so I can’t write too much about them” and “we need something important in this story! What’s important to women? BABIES! Let’s put some babies in here”.
I suppose my overwhelming thought is that if it’s so difficult to write about pregnancies or children in a well-rounded way that makes them more than plot devices (or Plot Moppets, as the good folk over at Smart Bitches refer to them) writers should maybe think more carefully about including a pregnancy storyline, and how to treat it if they do decide to put one in (as, er, it were). Babies are the tiny humans that shape the future of our world. They deserve more respect than that.
That’s it for today! Next time on Hopeless Reimantic…either marriage or playboy heroes, I haven’t decided yet.
See you then!
- Kate Beaton’s “Shut Up About Babies” shirt available here.
- True freaking story.
I found out that I was expecting a baby back in February, and since then my life has changed quite dramatically. Apart from feeling very slightly psychic (and a little bit smug) when I called early on that it was going to be a boy, I’ve become aware of lots of stories and ideas in the media that I had never really taken any notice of before.
Take, for example, the increasing need of some of the media to fan the flames of the so-called ‘Mommy Wars’, in which parents are pitched against each other in a tone that is almost ‘fight-to-the death’ in its urgency. It demands that mothers (only ever mothers- fathers are never a presence in these debates, or very rarely) pick sides: are you pro-breastfeeding or anti-breastfeeding? If you plan to breastfeed, how long for? Not long enough and you’re a failure. Too long? You’re a bit of a sicko, aren’t you? But no one ever really mentions those women who would dearly love to breastfeed, but can’t. At the end of the day, surely it’s better to have a baby who is fed and happy (perhaps on formula), than a mother and baby who are upset, wretched and hungry?
This problem was perfectly encapsulated by the issue of Time magazine that came out in May – a beautiful woman was pictured breastfeeding her toddler son with the headline “Are You Mom Enough?” Cue clutching of pearls and vicious fighting in the comments of websites that wrote about the feature. Actually, the ‘Mom’ in question, Jamie Lynne Grumet, is pretty sensible. She was quoted as saying “There seems to be a war going on between conventional parenting and attachment parenting, and that’s
what I want to avoid. I want everyone to be encouraging. We’re not on opposing teams. We all need to be encouraging to each other, and I don’t think we’re doing a very good job at that.” She acknowledges that attachment parenting, which she practices, is not for everyone.
As a feminist, these kind of arguments deflate me. It seems that some of us, in the clamour to declare our way of parenting is (or is going to be) the right one, decide that anything else is just not feminism. Cherie Booth caused an outcry when she denounced ‘yummy mummies’ who stayed at home instead of working. Again, outcry ensued across the blogosphere. But I say simply: feminism is about choice. It’s because of the work that our mothers and grandmothers put in that we can choose to go to work or stay at home, if we wish, although very often that choice is replaced by financial necessity.
I don’t know what kind of a parent I’ll be. I’m not making any hard and fast rules about what I’ll do when the baby arrives. I know, though, that I will try hard not to judge other parents’ decisions. Quite simply put, it’s none of my business. The majority of parents will choose to raise their children in the best way they know, and as long as the child isn’t being hurt or neglected, who am I to question the way someone is bringing up their baby?
- Stephanie is a teacher by day, and a writer/crafter/blogger by night. She’s a young old lady who lives by the sea, reads voraciously and drinks a heck of a lot of tea. Her website is here. Her latest project, Ladies In Monochrome, is an online archive of ‘lost’ or forgotten vintage photographs of women sourced from flea markets and antique shops.
International Women's Day parade in traditional dress in Po, Burkina Faso, 8 March 2009. Photo writer's own
One of my oldest memories as a small child in Bulgaria is making a fuss over my mother on International Women’s Day. I remember making cards in school, and learning poems, and generally being really impatient to grow up so I would get to have a fuss made over me, too. Sure, there was Children’s Day, but it wasn’t a patch on Women’s Day. They got a bloody parade. A parade! Soon I, too, would grow up, and get to have a parade. Or possibly a statue. I hadn’t decided.
Of course, my innocent dreams of grandeur were all for nought. A few years later we moved to the UK, and Women’s Day was banished to a vague memory of communism and its weird ideas. I got Mothering Sunday instead. The first time I opted for Mothering Sunday flowers and brunch instead of the usual Women’s Day, my mother thought I’d forgotten and burst into tears. Explaining I’d switched allegiance to a movable feast instead of a fixed day didn’t seem to win me many fans. And my father seemed relieved that he didn’t have to observe it, since, he pointed out, she was his wife and not his mother.
Now, look. Those first tremulous years of transition were admittedly ropey, and it took a while for everyone to settle into their assigned roles. Mum yields to brunches and jewellery more easily now, and hasn’t demanded a formal poem or performative dance for the longest time. And my brother just signs his name next to mine on the card. But that’s not really the point.
I’m starting to think we shouldn’t have made the transition in the first place. International Women’s Day was a celebration of being female, and an acknowledgement of women’s roles and contributions to society. One of the famous women we learned about in school was Valentina Tereshkova (sans tragic end), and I remember presenting my school teacher with a carefully constructed posy to acknowledge her position as educator. Admittedly, this was all orchestrated and ultimately about the glory of communism, so there are problems with it. But despite all that, I took from those few years of observing Women’s Day a sense of pride at being female, and an impatience to be a woman.
So let’s look at Mothering Sunday. Where to start? It’s a familial observance – you’re nice to your own mother to make up for setting the kitchen on fire that one time, and 24 hours of labour et cetera – and I’m under no obligation to be nice to any mothers I meet on my way home. Especially if they’re pushing those 4×4 buggies. Also, it’s a presents-and-flowers day, where you buy gifts to show appreciation for being born and suckled and generally not dropped on your head. No one is actually expecting you to do anything differently the next day, your duties discharged with a pink book on frills and a wilted bouquet.
Finally – and perhaps damningly – it only acknowledges one aspect of femininity. Mothering Sunday elevates mothering to the pinnacle of womanhood. What happens if your mother – much as you love her – just isn’t very good at this mothering malarkey? She tries her best, but curing cancer or trekking across the Arctic takes up a lot of time. I’m betting she feels a little silly looking at that cat illustration now.
There are other problems. What about other women you owe great debts of gratitude to? What about the grandmothers, aunts, stepmothers, big sisters, best friends, teachers, mentors and supporters who cheerlead you throughout your life? Maybe we should have a separate day for each of them. I, for one, am looking forward to observing Second Cousin Twice Removed Day. They always threw the best parties.
I find it problematic to have motherhood as the only aspect of womanhood that is nationally acknowledged. I find it problematic to have motherhood as a system of gratitude predicated upon familial links, rather than as an acknowledgement by society as a whole. Finally, I find it bloody annoying that my own accomplishments will not be acknowledged or celebrated by anyone, least of all in a parade. Quite frankly, sometimes I think that I – and all the amazing women I see around me – deserve a parade. And why not? It happens elsewhere in the world. Two years ago I was in the small town of Po, in southern Burkina Faso, on 8th March. The reason I was wandering around the country and not busy with an abacus is because International Women’s Day is a Bank Holiday there. And not just there.
Here comes the parade... International Women's Day parade begins in Po, Burkina Faso, 8 March 2009. Photo writer's own
In China, Russia and large parts of Africa, International Women’s Day still flourishes. Even in places such as Iran there are still people eager to celebrate women’s contributions and to show solidarity. There are still parades, and recitals, and girls waiting impatiently to grow up and have a day to be proud of being female. You could argue that, in the UK, many women would feel proud of being female much more often than that. You could point towards exam results, or women’s achievements, or women’s contribution to UK society.
You’d be wrong, I think. Of course, women achieve all of these things in the UK, and more. But when are these achievements acknowledged or celebrated?
When they give birth – and, a few months later, get their first pink Mother’s Day card.
Keep your cards and glitter pens. Bring back the parades.
Carry your banner with pride: International Women's Day parade