Hallelujah, Amen, now pass the potatoes…it seems I’ve found someone who seems to have experienced the same problem with feminism that I’ve recently encountered. During my googling marathon, I happened upon a blog called Mean Feminism. The first post I happened upon was an old one from July of 2006 titled, “Non-Motherhood and Feminism. Party On.” I read a few more of their posts (the blog was the work of “Edith” / “Vicky Vengeance”), which were all excellent. Unfortunately, it appears the blog has been inactive for nearly a year.

Let me give you a couple of the highlights:

All well and good. Here’s where it gets tricky: because we are so fearful of that stereotype, because we are so adamantly clinging to “choice,” feminists are often very involved in motherhood issues and not involved at all, or even downright opposed to, issues facing childless women.

…

When you have children, when you are straight, when you are pretty, you are definitely NOT immune to a ton of issues. You do, however, pretty much always have society’s thumb up in your direction. I want to talk about, for ten minutes or so, the people who don’t have society’s support, or even most feminists’. I want to talk about Ms. Stereotypical for just ten minutes, and how we can start bringing her back into the fray.

And then there was a kick-ass comment by Laura Linger, who has her own blog, Monkey Love:

Mothers don’t have to give a hot damn in a whorehouse about their childfree “sisters,” but whoa to any childfree woman who says that there is more to feminism than passing meaningless tit-baring laws so Junior can latch on whenever he likes. I personally don’t have a problem with public breastfeeding anyway. Don’t we have more important things, as a gender, to focus on? How about the continued wage gap between men and women for the same work (one could suppose that this is largely due to The Mommy Phenomenon in the workplace, but I’ll leave it at that)? The lack of insurance coverage for birth control, when HMOs are willing to shell out BIG BUCKS on fertility treatments? How about insurance coverage for those of us who want or have received tubal ligations? How about love, caring, compassion, and acceptance for ALL women and the choices that they make, instead of being exclusionary to those only belonging to the Tau Iota Tau sorority?

The “feminism” that these mothers spew leaves me cold because it is fraught with self-sabotage. By refusing to acknowledge lifestyle choices other than their own, these mothers fulfill every single shitty stereotype men hold about us.

Seriously, it’s nice to know I’m not alone in feeling that the feminist movement has left some of its sisters out in the cold – women would could be extremely helpful to the movement, women who have something to contribute. I’m thinking that, when it comes to feminism, those of us who have chosen to be childfree might just have something in common with the stay-at-home-moms. Wait…stay with me here for a minute. You see, I’ve seen feminists jump all over the shit of SAHMs, too. And I think I may have a handle on part of the reason. Maybe it’s because one of he big tenets of the feminist movement was that women should be able to “have it all,” just like men. And the SAHM and CF contingent have acknowledged that they didn’t want to “have it all.” And maybe that is pissing off the feminists.

Although, I admit I think the CF population gets a lot more bullshit from the feminist front than do the SAHMs, because even with the SAHMs, they can still get behind them on the breast-feeding in public issue, which appears to be a really, really big with feminists. But the Childfree contingent? Nope. We opted out of the we can/want to “have it all,” at least as far as the “all” means career and children. It doesn’t matter that we made the choices we deemed to be right for us. It doesn’t matter that we, too, still get paid less than men for the same work. It doesn’t matter that we, too, have to deal with employment discrimination because potential employers assume we have or will have children, which has the potential for the employer to have to deal with more unexpected absences, maternity leaves, etc. And it sure as hell doesn’t seem to matter to them that most of us believe that all human beings should be treated the same across the board, regardless of race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, reproductive status. Because it seems that, in their opinion, women who chose motherhood should be treated better than everyone else.

March 27th, 2008 | Category: Childfree, Feminism | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL