the personal is political

I’ve got a few things to get off my chest. So naturally I took to the net. Instead of trolling round other blogs, however, I thought I’d dust off my own soapbox. Over the past ten months of motherhood, and the nine months preceding it, I have been bombarded with all manner of messages, advice, information, conventional and alternative wisdom, and frankly it’s doing my head in. And I’m sure it’s only going to get worse.

The straw that broke the camel’s back, and subjected the blogosphere to blog 3.0 from me, was reading Zoe William’s article in the Guardian last week, ‘Come Back Superwoman: the lost ideal of combining motherhood and work.’ Although not exhaustive, it crystallised for me some of the things that have been bugging me for a while, namely, the great leap back to the 1950s we seem to have taken when it comes to motherhood and child-rearing. Suddenly, the - admittedly difficult to live up to - ideal of combining motherhood and work (aka ‘Superwoman’) is no longer as feted as it once was a few years ago. Confessing that you find breastfeeding a real drag and that you’re kinda bored stuck at home seems to require ten ‘Hail Marys’ and an ‘Our Father’ for penance.

I exaggerate, of course, and the only experience I’ll be drawing on is my own, which is both Pakeha and middle class. That experience so far has brought home to me the import of the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’. Practices and purchases that we make as parents, whether we actively choose them or not, say something about what we believe or don’t, what we’d like for our children and what we don’t. And these are political - with a small ‘p’ - whether we like it or not.

One of the things I’ve noticed so far in the last 19 months is the naturalising of everything: science is the new alibi for making sure women should be stuck in the home, or, if they aren’t, that they should feel pretty darn guilty about it. And science, or ‘hard-wired’ biological difference, is being invoked as the real reason why girls like pink and dolls and, hence, why women are ‘natural’ carers and nurturers. ‘Natural’ childbirth seems to be enjoying a new period of fashion too, and breastfeeding is ‘nature’s perfect food’ so why wouldn’t you make every effort to do it? Until the twentieth century, nature killed large numbers of mothers and babies in childbirth too, but perhaps we shouldn’t mention that.

Let me be clear. I am not against natural childbirth, breastfeeding, stay-at-home mums, working mums, dolls or scientific research. But, speaking as a cultural critic, it seems like something’s going on. As I try and implement my own parenting technique - the soon-to-be-patented one of Muddling Through - I aim to unpack what that might be.

As I mentioned above, I’ve got nearly two years’ worth of material stored up, and that’s before I even get to things that are irking me at the present moment. Along the way on this wild ride, I’m likely to ruminate on such things as gender performance, the politics of birth and breastfeeding, consumerism, role-modelling and the superwoman ideal, childcare and whether, how and when to go back to work. And I might even throw in some book reviews of some material I’ve been reading to try and get my head round these issues. You lucky people.