Recently Katie Rophie wrote a piece on Double X about the way in which her “newborn is like a narcotic.” In it she talks about her deep love affair with her newborn child.
In the six weeks since my baby was born, I seem to have lost all worldly ambition. I can think about September, when I am supposed to go back to work, only with dread. I have a class to teach. I have to start writing again. But the idea of talking about ideas in front of students or typing a coherent sentence (i.e., my normal life) seems totally implausible.
White feminist’s got worked up in quite a fruther over Rophie’s piece. Some argued that the love affair Rophie wrote about is completely [scientifically] natural and feminist’s should not be threatened by the article. Salon published a number of different opinions in their roundtable. Some women argued that Rophie was way off and some argued that she was right on target.
What amazed me about every, single, one of these conversations is the enormous amount of privilege all of the authors took as a given when discussing motherhood. They were (and are) totally enraptured with arguing the merits of the emotions she feels towards her child.
Meanwhile, the entire time I read the essay I couldn’t help but think: how would this essay be different if she had to go right back to work after giving birth?
What the white feminists engaged in this conversation are actually doing is having a broader conversation that they’ve been having since the 70′s. Is motherhood oppressive or freeing? Is it a vocation that should be compensated like all other types of labor? Or is it a special spiritual experience that has been demeaned by this very conversation? (as Rohdie would argue).
What they are missing now (as they have always missed), is that most women of color (and poor women more generally), have never had the privilege nor the luxury of debating whether or not motherhood or work (theoretically) gave their life political agency.
Instead, the question becomes, how do I feed my child, keep them physically safe and find work that doesn’t totally suck away my soul and spirit (and keep me away from my child 24/7). Let alone how do I find competent and safe child day care since (unlike most of the white feminists engaged in this debate) I probably cannot afford a stay at home nanny or just simply go on sabbatical.
For these women, the question of whether or not motherhood is joy or work is a relevant one because they have so much choice about how they both organize and perceive their lives. They never once stop to consider those women who may not ever even have the opportunity to “stare longingly at their child’s eyes for hours,” because they have to get up and go to work every single day.
I course I couldn’t help but be even more bristled by Rohdie’s broad assertion about women writers.
I remember visiting one of my closest friends on her maternity leave last summer. We sat on a wooden bench in her garden and drank iced coffees, and gazed at her second baby. She is a writer, and we talked about how the women writers we most admired had no children, or have had one child, at the absolute most, but never two. (Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen had no children; Mary McCarthy, Rebecca West, Joan Didion, and Janet Malcolm all had one.)
Alice Walker had a child (and has written vividly about the experience), so did Maya Angelou, so did 
Iyanla Vanzant, as did a countless number of black intellectuals who would probably prefer not to be named on this blog 
. The point is, it is so telling that their list of “great woman writers” only includes white women. I couldn’t help but become aware (as Rebecca Walker did) of how much black feminist work these women had ignored. In fact, a major theme of black feminist intellectual work is about the struggle to bring together community, politics, family and work. Yet, nearly thirty years later, the women on Double X and Salon.com are behaving as though these are new questions.
At the end of the day, the question still remains. What is the white feminist responsibility to consider the problems of women who are not rich and white?
peace.
Related posts:
Word. Good points…that you shouldn’t have to even be bringing up again in 2009. Another way of asking the question is WHEN will white feminists stop being white feminists…and actually be accountable to intersectionality of feminism?