Amy Westervelt - Forget Having It All: How America Messed Up Motherhood--and How to Fix It

I am writing this book hip-deep in the chaos that is modern American motherhood. My children are young (two and six), my bills are high, and my career is in an industry that is a uniquely bad fit for parents: journalism. In the course of my research, my bank account has been overdrawn half a dozen times, Ive lost health insurance and then managed to get it again, and Ive had my car repossessed. Ive had to find new childcare arrangements twice, and threatened to divorce my husband at least as many times. But while the impetus to write this book came from my own life, and I will refer to my own experiences off and on throughout, this story is not really about me. Nor would I claim to have represented all types of mothering experiences, which are as many and varied as women themselves (or men, for that matter). I began to research motherhoodour perceptions of it, the ways we talk about it, the expectations placed on and around itnot only because I believe it remains, as some feminist scholars have posited, a key frontier in the fight for gender equality, but also because I see changing ideas about motherhood as the lynchpin to systemic transformation toward greater equality for all.

Our ideas of women and men have evolved over the decades, pushed by cultural dialogue and shifting policies. We have softened some of the lines around gender, broadened roles, relaxed rules, gotten more intersectional in our understanding of identities and oppression but where mothers are concerned, we have clung more persistently to rigid ideas and expectations, which limit not just mothers but all women, irrespective of their reproductive choices. Ideas of motherhood influence everything from workplace dynamics to policies and laws that impact all women and men as well, underpinning everything from gender expectations to parental leave policies to which public bathrooms have changing tables.

And while women have steadily earned more rights and status within the patriarchal system, that was never really the goal of feminism. Its not enough to replace men with the occasional woman in a patriarchal system; the system needs to be replaced, not remodeled, and mothers are one key to that endeavor.

The popular old feminists tale was that the world was matriarchal before it was patriarchalin some ways, it was pleasant to think of a time ignorant of paternity, when people believed that women just bore children the way trees bore fruit. But anthropologists have found little evidence for this notion of paternity-ignorant humans. It is true that many ancient cultures were matriarchal, and some still are. But this origin story also proved dangerous, an idea quickly picked up by misogynists who used it to illustrate that patriarchal societies represented progress forward, away from a primitive matriarchal past.

In fact, where human evolution is concerned, the opposite is true: Read any anthropologists description of the defining traits of chimpanzees, the closest monkey relative to humans, and its likely to include words like aggressive, competitive, focused on domination, and reflexively xenophobic. In other words, patriarchal. If thats making you think, Hey! Im a man and Im not like that, or I know many fine men who are not like that, its important to understand that my use of patriarchy here references the values that have come to be associated with this system, not any sort of gender definition. In fact, men are not destined to be patriarchal any more than women are destined to be matriarchal. Patriarchal women are the patriarchys biggest and most ardent champions. Instead of simply signaling ruled by men or ruled by women, Im using these terms to describe systems governed by particular valuesbecause over time, these are the values that have been demonstrated most often by each system. Patriarchal systems tend to be governed by competition and domination, which means they also tend to be characterized by aggressive and xenophobic behavior. Matriarchal systems are governed by care and collaboration, and their hallmarks are communication and inclusivity. Very few people are entirely patriarchal or matriarchal, irrespective of the sort of system they live in, but in a patriarchal system that rewards patriarchal values, those values will tend to get stronger over time, just as in a matriarchal system matriarchal values are strengthened over time. As primates evolved, we have progressed in ways that could make our societies more matriarchal (or matrifocal), which again, does not mean a patriarchy, but with women in charge, but rather a society with a heavy emphasis on collaboration, equality, and communication, all things that bigger brains enable and that, in turn, enable the growth of bigger brains.

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Womens kin role, and in particular the mother role, is central and positively valued. Women gain status and prestige as they get older. At the same time, women may be important contributors to the familys economic support, as in Java and east London. And in all three societies they have control over real economic resources. All these factors give women a sense of self-esteem independent of their relationship to their children. Finally, strong relationships exist between women in these societies, expressed in mutual cooperation and frequent contact. A mother, then, when her children are young, is likely to spend much of her time in the company of other women, not simply isolated with her children.

, feminine gender identification means identification with a devalued, passive mother, and personal maternal identification is with a mother whose own self-esteem is low, she wrote.

. OReilly positions mother as an identity separate from woman and thus in need of an intersectional lens. Indeed, mothers are oppressed under patriarchy as women and as mothers, OReilly writes in