Mothering
It is a notion that we came to accept as self explanatory and one of the most normal things in life. That’s how it is supposed to be—we tell kids. Biologically speaking it is simply a process of reproduction, but is there anything ever so simple with humans? With our social mores, even the most primal things have tendency to take forms that have to be handled with fingertip delicacy. In this spirit, motherhood can be seen as a social construct, an institution that encompasses its share of rules, stereotypes and strata. Thus, since becoming an institution, it has lost somewhat of its spontaneity and beauty. As mentioned in the Transformations: Women, Gender & Psychology (Crawford, 2006) the society has cookie cutter formatted ideas about how such private matter like motherhood should be for everyone. Can everyone expect motherhood to be the fulfillment of all her expectations and then fill that role to outmost perfection? Are humans that similar to each other that even ideas and notions can be mass produced for them, or is this only valid for women? Isn’t the foundation of our system build on the understanding that each person is an individual with desires and goals unique to himself? Then, why should each woman experience a choice such as becoming a mother in a same way? Every single individual will probably report an event in a different light and each single one of them would be right, thus, I can only report my experience with a certain confidence.
First of all, bringing a child to term was neither an easy nor a clairvoyant decision. I had previously to this event already been pregnant, but due to timing and my then situation decided to cut it short. What I think was probably the best thing that I could have done at that moment, because even with the greater amount of maturity I have now, being a mother is not an easy thing. It is a constant apprenticeship and ongoing test of your patience. However, I have to admit that it is indeed an amazing experience. To hold a little being that completely depends on you and seeing it grow and flourish, is just very nourishing to a person. At least it has been to me. Motherhood has brought me an immense amount of stability and it helped me to come to a sort of peace treaty with my own self.
I have to agree with Crawford’s (Transformations: Women, Gender & Psychology) criticism about the double standard practices of our leaders. It is not fair to encourage women in higher social ranks to stay home and care for their kids and force the other women to go work for demeaning salaries that will anyway be not enough to pay for their children needs. To make matters worse, official policies dehumanizes these struggling women by classifying them as social dead weights, when in reality it is the government’s responsibility to find true solutions to their problems. It is very true that as a single parent one can hardly even make it in this country. Usually half of the income just goes to daycare, and then the rest to rent and food. The government doesn’t provide any help that I am aware of that makes the load of a single mother even a little bit lighter. Especially when seeing the statistics on how many children are raised in single parent households, one wonders why it is not a priority on the governmental agenda to do something for them. What kind of citizens are they expecting to have after leaving these children to grow up in poverty and despair? Michelle
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I stumbled upon your blog by accident, and I'm enjoying reading it. I'm taking a class on gender and sexuality in Japan from the 1850s - 1980s, so a lot of the ideas you cover here are topics we speak about in class.
ReplyDeleteOne thing this particular entry made me recall was a feminist activist, Yosano Akiko, in 1920s Japan. Yosano believed that the only way for women to gain independence was for them NOT to accept financial help from the government during and after their pregnancies. This writer believed that only by proving that women can support themselves, by themselves, could they also prove to society/men/lawmakers that women were just as capable as men and deserved equal rights.
Though I disagree with her ideas (I mean, how many women can support themselves and a child nowadays, much less ninety years ago!?), it's an interesting perspective.
Something else that I wanted to comment on was that men, too, are fitted into narrow gender roles, which is why I liked your post on MTV's "16 and Pregnant" show. Just in relation to the topics raised in the course I'm taking, I think it's interesting how male gender roles have changed over time, too. For example, just as the ideal shape of the female body in fashion has changed over the centuries (e.g., the straight, triangular shape of corsets in the 1700s versus the curved shape of corsets in the late 1800s or the non-corseted woman of today), so too, have men's fashions changed. Up until around the late 1800s, men wore just as ornamental clothes as women did, but it was the Industrial Revolution that changed men's clothing to become solely utilitarian, like the suit.
Another example is how male-male sexuality in Japan up until 1868, when the new Japanese government implemented policy-making measures focused on modernizing (in other words, Westernizing), was acceptable. After the new Meiji government took control in 1868, however, they formally encouraged the demonization of male-male sexual practices due to Western opinion that they were "barbaric," which is what led to the decline of such practices and the increase of homophobia in Japan. What I think is really fascinating isn't just the role the government played in this, but also how it was the hulking, brutish men with large shoulders who were generally characterized as those who still had sex with other men, versus the slighter men wearing flashy clothes who were associated with having sex with women.
I love how the stereotypes I described above are the exact OPPOSITE of what stereotypes of gay men that Americans hold in the present-day! It just goes to show that so much of our society, of gender roles, is socially created and entirely fluid!