Whose child is this? Kyriarchy, privilege, and motherhood

Y’all know that I blame the kyriarchy — to talk only of patriarchy is to whitewash (ha ha) the myriad ways that people, including women, are variously oppressed and privileged. It pretends that all women experience oppression in the same ways, and focuses on sexism as the prime or only marginalization of women (because the concept was formulated by highly privileged women — white, US, middle class, mostly educated, abled, cis, and largely straight), which erases the experience of the majority of women on this planet.

To think only in terms of patriarchy leads to false assertions based on too-narrow perspectives, on the belief that what one experiences as a cis white upper class academic woman is typical of all women. Like the assertion that women with children are privileged over women without. (No, I’m not going to link to where I encountered said assertion.)

To the contrary, childfree/child-having is a classic double-bind of womanhood; there is absolutely no way to “win”, no choice to be made that does not result in discrimination and oppression. For to be sure, childfree women — if they are the “right” kind of women, or perceived to be so — are absolutely criticized, and marginalized in many ways; there can be no doubt of that, I think, and this is absolutely not a competition of who has it worse. But let’s go back to that caveat, because that is why the narrow-minded privileged academics get it wrong: it is only some women — the “right” women, privileged women, women like the ones making that assertion — who are most definitely expected to be mothers, and woe unto them if they fail to fulfill this imposed obligation.

What if you’re not the “right” kind of woman? What then?

If you are not white, if you are not cis, if you are not well-off (forget being on public assistance of any kind), if you are disabled or have a history of psychiatric diagnoses, if you are “too young”, if you are “too old”, if you have “too many” children, and especially if you exist at the intersection of more than one of those “failings” — if you are not the “right” kind of woman, motherhood further invites society to comment on and assert control over your life, if society allows you motherhood at all.

Motherhood does not confer privilege, but is a function of privilege; it is conditional, a “right” granted only to those whom society is best pleased with — and only for as long as we continue not only to be “right” but to do “right”.

Because even the rich cis white etc etc mother is policed, often with further double-binds:  the work for pay question is a classic example — there is simply no winning that one, no matter whether one works out of the home, in the home for money, in the home for sticky kisses, or some impossibly juggled combination thereof.  But if she shares sleep space with her children, breastfeeds for “too long”, lets her child roam “too far”, or in any of a million other ways steps outside of what her society deems the “right” way to mother (whatever that is where and when she lives), even the most privileged mother still risks comment and criticism, risks losing her children to “protective” services.

(To some extent, I don’t think that is even necessarily wrong — I entirely approve of lines drawn against physical and psychological and sexual abuse, against reckless child endangerment and neglect, against child slavery and prostitution. The problems come when those definitions of abuse or neglect are defined by a kyriarchy-fueled society, implemented in kyriarchal ways with biases against the already marginalized, and are used to enforce kyriarchal norms: don’t let your child be too emotionally close or physically distant, don’t let women ever have a moment’s rest, don’t let women use their bodies as they choose, don’t respect the personhood and autonomy of children. There are ways to do serious, inexcusable harm as a parent, to be sure, but there are a far, far more ways to be “bad” in society’s eyes.)

We cannot, we simply cannot extrapolate from a singular, privileged experience of motherhood/childfree womanhood to the entire population of women and think it relevant or right. And to pit women against each other, to pretend that one side of a double bind is “better” or “better off” than the other? That’s how we all lose, and kyriarchy wins.

If you want to help broaden the understanding of what it means to be a woman with a child, please tell your story — any one of your stories — as part of the Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer.