I overheard a woman talking to her friends at the park.
Woman I am, I’m gonna get my glasses done. I put them on today, with my hair – I had my hair braided, and I put them on, and no makeup, and I looked like SUCH a nerd, and then I was like, maybe I don’t want them on…I’m gonna get them – it’s just for reading and watching tv, so it’s not that big of a deal, right. Yeah. I’ll wear them when I can sit at the coffee shop and I ain’t got no kid, and I got a backpack on, sittin’ there and wanna look cute, and educated, all at the same time, pull out my glasses – I won’t even read the book I have, I’ll just sit there and look pretty, in the sun. Do it in the park. Count how many guys I can pick up – not that I would pick up guys.
I find it so disconcerting when hipsters actually say the things I think they’re thinking.
Sometimes I worry that feminism went off into a corner and went to sleep while no one was looking. Or that it’s been so mangled by the media that it’s unrecognizable. I mean, when I was a little girl I thought that being an at-home mom meant you bounced around the spotless kitchen, wearing a starched blue dress with a useless apron tied around your waist and a rictus of a smile plastered on your face.
As a woman, I know the term at-home mom has a list of definitions as long as my arm. It means a woman who waves goodbye to her three older children as they walk off to school, then goes back inside to play games with the two who aren’t old enough for school yet. It means a woman who’s home with her baby and her toddler all day, then drives off to her night shift as soon as her partner gets home. It means a woman who puts down a piece of paper, a pencil, and an envelope in front of her seven year old so he can practice his printing by writing to his Granny, then takes him to the Science Centre where he plays with his friends for the rest of the day. It even means a man who cradles a baby in his arms and feeds her the breastmilk her mommy pumped before leaving for work.
Feminism is about choice. Your great-grandmother probably didn’t have a choice about her future. Maybe she wanted to be the mayor, or maybe she didn’t particularly want to have children, or maybe she wasn’t even very interested in getting married. But back then, there wasn’t a choice. She couldn’t get a job, she couldn’t have her own money, so it boiled down to: get married and have children, or live alone in the woods eating berries.
Now women have a multitude of choices: get married! Have children! Don’t have children! Don’t get married! Marry your lesbian lover! Become a neurologist slash astronaut! Camp out in front of George Bush’s house for peace! Become the Prime Minister of Canada!
But I hear the at-home moms scorning the working moms because of “the poor abandoned children, no mother to take care of them”, and the working moms sneering at the at-home moms because of “the poor smothered children, they never leave the house”, and I worry that feminism is sleeping over there in that corner and no one can wake her up.
Then I come across a moment like this one, from the 1952 series “Radar Men From the Moon”, and I feel better.
Man 1 I still think this is no trip for a woman.
Woman Now, don’t start that again. You’ll be very glad to have someone along who can cook your meals.
Man 2 I’ll say we will. Don’t give her any more arguments.
Man 1 Okay.
View Comments
l.r.s
30 Mar 2006
I’m probably guilty of being one of those stay-homers that looks down a little on the moms whose kids are in daycare. And yet, the fact that we have a good set of options for moms no matter what their ambition is something that should set us ahead on the ole liberation front. Oy, I sound like an idiot. What I mean is: just because I wouldn’t choose one road, doesn’t mean that road isn’t a viable path for someone else. I’m glad to hear it so well-put on your blog. I wanna be a mommy, and I am thankful that when I am done with being at home all the time, there will be someplace for me in the world at large. And so, I think feminism has succeeded wildly.
Jen
30 Mar 2006
I was recently frustrated that the feminists put down Sandra Day O’Connor for “abandonning” them to quit the Supreme Court to take care of her dying husband. As you said, Sage, that’s part of what feminism is about, being able to choose. The woman broke a lot of ground for other women and now she has something else she needs to do. Support her.
Sigrid
30 Mar 2006
Amen Sage.
Why don’t we all stop sticking our noses in everyone’s business, start paying attention to our own needs, and GET OVER IT. Feminism is important, but so are our lives and our families in this extremely challenging time we are living in. We need to accept our differences, not preach to each other about who is doing the right thing – because there is no ‘right’ way to live your life.
As a woman currently contemplating the whole work/child dilemma, I found your essay extremely enlightening. It was so simple really, but SO important that it was said.
Kelly
30 Mar 2006
Let us please extend our choices as women to those who choose not to have children at all. As someone who has chosen not, I am considered “childless” – there isn’t even a positive word that denotes my “status” without putting others down. The number of times I have heard how selfish I am, speculations about the state of my uterus, that I must not love kids, that I am money-hungry, that I’m not really grown up….the list just goes on and on and these are things that I have picked up from people my own age and younger…you’d think that since this is one of the issues that feminism was founded upon, we would treat those without children with as much respect as those who sacrifice for the sake of their children.
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