women

I have a three-foot tall, blow-up parrot in my lounge room.

If you'd ask me this morning whether I'd have a three-foot tall, blow-up parrot in my house by day's end, I probably would have said "no."  However, life is like that, no?  One minute you have a sick little boy in your arms at the supermarket and the next minute, instead of sensibly buying some bananas, you find yourself watching the nice lady at the counter filling the world's largest balloon parrot full of helium.

In my defense, I thought it was one of those dainty, round balloons that would bob about prettily and harmlessly, cheering up this pale-faced, weary little boy.  Instead, as I wrestled it into the backseat of the car to loom loudly, resplendent in all its colours, over Tiny, I knew that it wasn't quite going to do the trick.  To his credit though, he took it all in his stride, eyes rather wider than normal.  While there were no delighted squeals emanating from the backseat as I had hoped, there was the occasional awed "Da," between long spells of silence.  It can't be easy making friends with a parrot that is taller than you, but he was trying.

Which is all a rather roundabout way of getting to the guts of today's post: Women.  It is the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day and, as the strong, proud feminist that I am, it would be greatly remiss of me to let it slide by without a word or two on the matter.  Which is exactly what I want to say: Women matter.

As a child of feminist and feminist-sympathising parents, I grew up surrounded by the ideas of feminism.  The first lesson I learned (not, perhaps, the first I was taught, though) is the one that will stay with me evermore.  It is a simple one: Women matter. They matter because they are women. Who they are, what they do and the accounts they give of their lives all matter.  So, we should pay attention.  In those early days, although I heard words like "oppression" and "domination," and listened to women talk about inequalities and discrimination, I couldn't grasp what that actually meant.  Really, at thirteen I just wanted George Michael to love me and to grow up and be a sultry cabaret singer.  Ahem.  However, this message, which anchors much of the rest of the feminist analyses of the world, is a timeless one.  Dare I say it again?  Women matter because they are women (which, historically, culturally, environmentally, socially, biologically and in many other ways, is different from being men).

Interestingly, my experience of saying this, or something similar, to people over the years, is a bit like trying to fit a large, blow-up parrot into the backseat of my hatchback.  In some cases it has made me a bit of a spectacle, in others, it has been seen as a kind of looming threat.  Nevertheless, in pockets all over the world, people today are seeing this message for what it is.  Women matter: What a resplendent, colourful, and joyous thing that is.  Not unlike a three-foot tall, blow-up parrot balloon, really.

Happy International Women's Day, women everywhere.

mother (part two)

Let's just dive straight back into the argument here...

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You may well be wondering where I am heading with all of this.  Join the club, it's warm in here!  Perhaps a little recap will get us all on the straight and narrow.

Yesterday, I questioned the way parenting advice books often present their advice as neutral, scientifically supported, expert-driven manuals for the modern parent.  To the casual reader, it is easy to assume that the advice offered is just the current thinking on what is the best, most effective way to raise your children.  There is no disputing that these books can be useful or offer creative alternatives to the ever-learning and growing parent.  Nor is there any dispute that they can use reputable scientific research to back up their suggestions.  However, the point I had wanted to make is that they are not just these things.  They are also carefully crafted worldviews that tell us who we ought to be and, by association, what kind of a world we should want.  I picked on the Sears' Baby Book yesterday, not because I don't like what they have to say, indeed there's a lot that appeals to me, but because I wanted to show how moral values show up, even in how-to manuals.

Tracey Hogg, the famous sleep training celebrity, is very clear about who we should be and the kinds of children we want.  In her world, parents need to offer schedules, routines and consistency to take control of life with a newborn.  In this way, they gradually teach their babies to become "independent and resourceful" in getting themselves to sleep.  I am not criticising Hogg here, I am just trying to show how worldviews creep in.  For Hogg, parents are guardians of time and life patterns, so that children can become independent and resourceful.  For the Sears, parents work in harmony with their children, and value children who are trusting and connected.  Both are cheerful, easy-to-read, how-to manuals but could they be more different in what they consider is the right, or good thing to do or become? 

Which brings me back to the "good" mother (the topic du jour) and back to Jong's terrible article.  The "good" mother is an ideal born out of a given ideology.  There is no objective, ideologically, politically or morally neutral definition of what it is to be a good mother.  Indeed, there is no simple, universally agreed upon 10 point plan pointing us in the right direction.  This is not a bad thing.  What is bad, though, is when advice is gussied up as if it is The Truth and not actually supporting a particular worldview about how we all ought to be.

Which is why Jong grates on me so.  Oh, does she grate.  It is not her extraordinarily thin so-called feminist analysis of Attachment Parenting which gets me.  Nor is it her generous borrowing from French feminist Elisabeth Badinter's new book that irks.  What does grate, though, is the way she tries to "free" women from the constraints of ideologically-driven parenting advice while simultaneously constructing a pretty clear picture of what, for her, is a "good" mother based on her own worldview.  Subtly, but consistently, she weaves the notion that success for women is defined by the public sphere of career and money-earning.  Add to this her support for the liberal notion of a woman being "free to choose" her way of mothering and not be bound by any biological imperative to nurture, and we see a rather well-worn liberal feminist approach to mothering that mysteriously mirrors many of the patriarchal structures that shape our society today.  A full critique of this argument has to wait for another day (or lifetime). Here, all I want to do is flag the worldview that weighs down Jong's analysis so that we can better understand how she arrives at her advice on what it is to be a "good" mother.

Her article is written to provoke some and assuage others.  What it doesn't do is acknowledge the underpinning libertarian worldview that shapes her argument.  If she did, then it would have been impossible for her to end with "do the best you can, there are no rules."  For there are always rules for how to be a "good" mother, even a career-driven, nanny-employing "good" mother, we just have to find the right book of advice.

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Lovely people, that's the best I can do under the circumstances.  I hope it makes some sense and thanks, Jenny, for making my brain hurt.  Tomorrow will probably see a return of gratuitous shots of cute babies.

mother (part one)

Because I've been set a corker of a topic to write about, and because my response is taking time and zapping the last remaining energy I possess today (except the tiny bit that I need to climb the stairs and hurl myself into bed), this post will be in two parts, spread over two days.  Here is the tantalising introduction to my argument.  Tune in tomorrow for the cracker of a finale.

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Okay, so it's Monday and Mondays are for hitching up your pants, rolling up your sleeves and getting stuck into things.  (Sometimes they are for swanning around in your bathrobe but, alas, not today.)  Today, I'm going to tackle one of the big topics given to me last week - the "good" mother.  So, hang onto your hats.

First of all, let me preface this by saying that my good friend Jenny - a mothering scholar currently finishing her PhD in the field of mothering studies - set me this here little topic.  So, let's just acknowledge up front that I am wading into a whole pool of scholarly discussion without even some yellow floaties to attach to my poor flailing arms.

Secondly, this is a huge topic - one we could all talk about until the cows come home (and many have) and still not reach a conclusion.  So, my aim here is to not even attempt a conclusion but to simply share some thoughts that have been noodling around inside me of late.  There has been a little bit of discussion generated on the very interesting Apron Strings blog which stems from a recent article by the well-known author Erica Jong.  In this article, Jong takes a (rather wild and whipping) fire hose to the modern parenting school of Attachment Parenting and questions whether it is a new source of oppression for women.  She rejects it as a form of hyper-parenting that is a "new torture for mothers—a set of expectations that makes them feel inadequate no matter how passionately they attend to their children."  For Jong, Attachment Parenting leaves mothers and fathers guilt-ridden and exhausted and leaves children ill-equipped for life beyond childhood and family.  In a final advice-giving flourish she exhorts us to abandon Attachment Parenting and just "do the best you can. There are no rules."

This article is terribly written, badly argued, and filled with questionable evidence used in support of dubious claims.  Indeed, I am sorely tempted to agree with Suzie MacKenzie when she wrote in The Guardian a decade ago: "Jong is incorrect all over the place, and never more so than when she writes."  However, my interest here is not to defend Attachment Parenting against Jong but to think about the role of parenting advice in the construction of what it is to be a "good" mother.

I am heartily sick of advice.  Particularly of the parenting variety.  This doesn't stop me seeking it out, reading it or listening to radio shows when authors, bathing in the warm glow of their recent conclusions, wax lyrical about what we should all be doing.  I just continue to feel exasperated each time I do.  However, I continue to tune in for two reasons.  The first is that, like many of us, I rely on people, hopefully experienced ones if not experts, to guide me in all endeavours where I am a novice.  The second reason, though, is that, like all of us, I am deeply embedded in the culture I live in and, whether I like it or not, pay some attention to the norms,  social mores and competing dynamics that shape that culture.  Believe it or not, parenting advice fits here and is used to both describe the world we have, as well as to shape it.


Almost all parenting advice, in the veritable library of parenting advice available to us, is presented as generally neutral, sound, authoritative and intended only to be a benevolent guide along the bewildering journey of new parenthood:  "The instruction manual that Mother Nature forgot..." or "the 'baby-bible' of the post-Dr Spock generation."  While they may be many of these things, they are not neutral, non-political, scientific descriptions of how to parent.  Rather, I think they are actually complex moral arguments, presented in a sometimes misleadingly straightforward "how-to" format, that describe not only what you should do as parents, but who we ought to be (as mothers and fathers) and who our children should become as future members of our culture.  For example, it doesn't take much digging to find the moral virtues that the Sears (of Attachment Parenting fame) believe a parent should have: "to be in harmony with their children...to [be able to] read their babies' cues, and...respond intuitively and appropriately...and who enjoy parenting."  Not, we might note, something less touching like: "to provide food, water and adequate shelter for ten years until they find a job and start contributing to the family income," which might have been something a working class family a hundred and fifty years ago might have considered fair.  I pick on the Sears simply because I have their book close to hand, but a quick dip into most other parenting books will show that they are not alone in drawing a picture of who it is good to be as a parent.

"So, what is wrong with that?" I hear you mutter.  Well, nothing, except for the fact that none of them acknowledge that they are making moral claims and that they are tailoring the research they cite to fit a worldview they hold about the kinds of mothers, and fathers, they believe ought to populate the western world.

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Stay tuned for part two where I tie all kinds of complex and thinly observed loose ends into one helluva argument.

witness

Last night I learned, again, about the power of women.

As a long-time feminist, it is not news to me that women - in the face of great fear, brutality and injustice - can show enormous powers of resistance. However, as I sat and listened to Dr Margorie Agosin talk on the Arpillera movement in Chile during Pinochet's brutal military dictatorship (1973 to 1989), I felt particularly moved by the capacity and courage of women to simply say no. To say, we will not be silenced, we will not believe lies, we will ask hard questions and, most importantly, we will bear witness to the injustices and tragedies that unfold around us.

No a las Alzas, No a la Dictadura, Basta de Hambre /
No to Inflation, No to Dictatorship, Enough of Hunger

The arpilleristas were women who met in the safety of church basements or in their poor neighbourhoods to craft small quilted, appliqued and embroidered three-dimensional artworks - what Agosin calls tapestries - that told the stories of their lives during this time. Using their traditional skills of needlework and composition, they forewent the customary scenes of Chilean countryside or idyllic representations of community life and instead told the stories of oppression, resistance, loss and protest that characterised their lives during this time. The pieces were sold to support themselves and their families, and they often made it out of Chile to an international audience which enabled the stories of a brutal regime to be heard beyond their borders.

¿Dónde están? / Where are They?

I want to share a little extract, in Agosin's words, from her book Tapestries of Hope, Threads of Love.


She talks of the first time she met these women who would gather outside the Vicariate of Solidarity to make arpilleras. They had

bread bags filled with clumps of multicolored cloth and petitions for the government, demanding the whereabouts of their missing relatives. They looked determined, as if their lives were carried in those bags whose purpose was to find out about the fate of their loved ones. They were there with their lives, memories and families, all braided together and united through a scrap of cloth (2008, pg. 77).

This tale of women reclaiming their traditional skills to grieve, protest and witness the events of their time inspires me. While I could write many more paragraphs on this, in the interests of brevity (and your reading sanity) let me summarise, in simple point form, what moved me about the arpilleras.

• The stories themselves, as they were rendered in the cloth - these told of terrible loss, the disappearance of their husbands, sons and/or brothers; or told of torture; or told of active resistance despite the consequences.
• The way the pieces were fashioned - often out of scraps of fabric donated by the church and later, when they knew their "disappeared" men were dead, out of their men's clothes.
• The community of women working together to not only document terrible times, but to articulate their losses, their anger, and their resistance to what was happening to them and to Chile.
• And, the power of art and, in particular, women's traditional handiwork - so often dismissed as frippery - to forcefully observe, comment on, and to reject the violence of the men perpetuating the regime.

Aquí se Tortura / Here They Torture

I want to be like these women. I want to be strong, and brave, and to use my art, and the skills handed down to me by women over generations, not only to bring pleasure to people, but to be a witness, to resist injustice and wrongdoing, and to help others to do the same.

How wonderful that the creative world can offer us such riches. As I mentioned earlier, Dr Agosin's book on this history tells this story more eloquently and more powerfully than I ever could. Read it, if only so you can see the potential powers of transformation in your own work and hands.

** All images were taken from here (if you click on the picture it will take you directly to the source). Some, such as "Where are they?" were present at last night's talk.

iwd

Before it's too late, I wanted to wish all the wonderful women who visit here a Happy International Women's Day.

Yay for us! May we continue to love, flourish and do good in the world.

colour in

Pink has long been a worrisome colour for me.


One of the first realisations of my feminist life was that colour, however vibrant or dull, is never neutral - politically neutral, that is. The commonplace of blue for boys and pink for girls is just the beginning of a long set of expectations about who we are and what we should be - all practical, rough and tumble for boys, and all soft, gooey, sweetness for girls. Given that I have long been a believer that boys and girls, men and women, should be free to be whatever kind of human they want to be, it's no surprise that I spurned the colour pink in favour of all manner of other wonderful colours - like purple, green and white, for instance.

However, a few years ago pink started to wheedle its way back into my consciousness. Struggle as I might, I just liked it. To my guilty horror I felt soothed with some shades and enlivened by others. There's even a safe enough distance between here and the 80s for me to say that I could even consider the combination of pink and grey in some circumstances. Oh, it's been a slippery slope.


Luckily, pink doesn't suit me for personal attire, and so I've been somewhat saved from my descent. But not entirely. In a moment of weakness in Michael's on Boxing Day, my OTL (of all people) managed to convince me to come away with this gorgeous variegated yarn with which to crochet a throw rug.

And so it has begun.

Sharing Christmas II

Next cab off the rank were these serious chaps with a Christmas message for my mother.



After several years of crochet-extravaganza present giving to many members of my family, this is the first present I have made for my mother - as an adult, that is. Of course, there was the Easter card when I was about ten complete with the obligatory bunny on the front (except mine had a string of pearls and hairy underarms - as Easter bunnies are wont to have).

I remember growing up in our feminist household learning that the owl was a symbol of wisdom and strength used by the women's liberation movement. So when I saw these cuties via Moonstitches' blog, I knew immediately that I needed to make them for her.


I took a bit of artistic license with these - embroidering the letters and adding Christmas bells to a number of them. And then, of course, like my mother, there always has to be one rebel amongst the crowd...