review: Wonder Woman

Unfortunately, this is not a review of the comic, film or TV series of Wonder Woman, the feminist super-hero, but a review of Australian journalist Virginia Haussegger’s 2005 book Wonder Woman: The myth of ‘having it all’.  

Its starting point is a provocative and visceral article entitled 'The Sins of our Feminist Mothers' Haussegger wrote for The Age in 2002. In it, she bared her soul about the recent and devastating discovery in her late 30s that she was not able to have children. Her article went further, questioning whether feminism has sold women a myth: that despite its important gains, it had made women like her believe that they could ‘have it all,’ when in fact they might really have to choose between career success or children.

This book grew out of the huge reaction, both positive and negative, to that article: 

That sense of being sold ‘a crock’ was a common theme in the outpourings. What fascinated me about many of these letters, emails and commentaries was that it seemed no matter where a woman stood, be she mother, mother-to-be or non-mother, something was wrong. It was as if a scabby old scar had been ripped off a festering wound. (p 25)

Haussegger clearly intends her book to be a Betty Friedan-esque expose of a kind of modern-day ‘problem with no name’ (p 289). She tries to connect her own experience with that of the women who responded to her article - both the mothers who felt short-changed by the experience of motherhood (whether finding out having kids was not all it was cracked up to be or missing out on career opportunities) and the women who did not have children (whether the ‘child-free' women who adamantly insisted on their right not to breed, or women who did not have children for one reason or another).

On the positive side, the personal stories that Haussegger recounts in the book are incredibly moving, and her ability to connect with the women telling them is certainly part of that. Reading about Carolyn, a woman who struggled with numerous fertility treatments for well over a decade was almost unbearable, and left me hoping her story had a happy ending. It did. In her early 40s, Carolyn eventually gave birth to a much-wanted son. Other women who struggled with fertility, and whose stories feature in the same chapter, were not so fortunate.  

What is clear from the stories Haussegger tells is that women occupy a spectrum when it comes to their reproductive capabilities: from the extremes of the militant child-free women who voluntarily sterilised themselves to women who know from a young age that being a mother is a core part of their identity and thrive on having large families. Whatever position women occupy on this spectrum, both their humanity and their rights are not solely defined by their biology. It’s not simply a question of mother versus non-mother, and it’s  shame that Haussegger presents it that way.

What lets this book down, then, is its attempts to connect the stories together into a political analysis. Haussegger makes clear that she’s read several key feminist works, yet she somehow manages to lay ‘the blame’ for all women’s dissatisfactions with their lives at its door. It’s quite astounding that terms like ‘patriarchy’ (or a similar structural term) or even ‘power’ barely rate a mention in the book. Even the notion of assigning blame to someone or something for what, at least in Haussegger's own case, sounds like a particularly cruel twist of fate, seems to stop at the level of the individual and her ‘choices’ (or 'non-choices'). 

Several of the chapters in the book see either the women she quotes or Haussegger herself blaming ‘other’ women for their problems. A particularly egregious example is provided by one of the child-free women who, in the course of asserting the validity of her own life-choice (fine), took a swipe at all people who care for children on more than a casual basis by saying that all they do is ‘sit around all day’ (and paid parental leave is an 'unfair advantage' that involves 'getting paid to sit around all day' p 239)! Frankly, this is both offensive and wrong, and not exactly a great basis for solidarity around respecting all the subject positions that women occupy. 

Rather, the heart of the issue is that a patriarchal system primarily defines all women by their biology - how they look, how sexually available they may or may not be, whether or not they have children - regardless of whatever else they have to offer. That will manifest in different ways depending on what other subject positions an individual woman occupies: some women will be derided for being successful in traditionally male roles and not having children (just this week, yet another extremely offensive and sexist attack on Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard proves this point), while others will be seen as ‘doing nothing all day’, as well as losing out on any number of economic benefits, because they are stay-at-home mothers. Blaming each other or an abstract spectre called ‘feminism’ for this only serves to leave dominant structures of power intact.

Commentator Leslie Cannold is spot on about the central problem of this book:

While Haussegger is a wonderful raconteur, and demonstrates a clear gift for exploring emotions - her own and, through interview, those of others - she desperately lacks any capacity to think her way out of the complex problems she explores in Wonder Woman.  

Despite having read most seminal and popular feminist texts ... she clearly failed to absorb their central and most important message: that the personal is political. Without this understanding, or some structural framework to make sense of her experience and those of other women in terms other than those proffered by liberal individualism, Haussegger lacks the tools to extricate herself from the circular path of self-blame and DIY solutions that have characterised her journey, and to cut a clear path forward for her female readers. (Cannold, The Age)

And it got me thinking about the way she defined the problem too. 

‘Having it all’ seems a popular fantasy of the new millennium. In 2012, Anne-Marie Slaughter provocatively opined in The Atlantic that, for women ‘of her demographic’ - ones who have reaped all the apparent advantages from the feminist revolution - ‘having it all’ (i.e. successful career and family) was still not a realistic possibility and young women were being done a disservice to be told that it was.

While elements of both Slaughter’s article and Hausseger’s book resonated with me, I was principally left wondering about this mythical notion of ‘having it all’. This seems like a distortion of feminism to me. ‘Having it all’ sounds much more like the acquisitive language of capitalism - particularly when it is mentioned in the same breath as ‘choices’ - rather than the language of feminism - which has drawn on revolutionary language like ‘emancipation’ and ‘liberation’ or rights-based language such as ‘equality’ (ideally, of the substantive rather than the merely formal kind), or ‘the right to choose’ (i.e. the right to self-determination and bodily autonomy when it comes to reproduction). It also implies that all men ‘have it all’, which is clearly far from the case. 

I’m not the only one perplexed about the ‘having it all’ fantasy. Commentator Tressie McMillan Cottom says that Slaughter’s article left her cold because she did not relate to its concerns, whether from the subject position of her race or class, or ideological orientation: 

The article seemed to not only take for granted that all women have been told that they should have it all but that all women have–if not intimate–then definitely not adversarial relationships with power .... More often than not, power has worked to undermine my reality and my existence. And I don’t mean that in some fuzzy theoretical sense. I mean that when power, for example, starts talking about reforming welfare it is usually meant to be an act made on people who look like me; people with whom I identify even if I do not share their economic status. (Cottom, The Atlantic)

I too was somewhat bothered by both Slaughter and Hausseger’s analysis which speaks mostly to women in elite positions of power. This is not to downgrade the many challenges that women have faced to access those positions and crack the glass ceiling. Rather it is to note that most working women - and men, for that matter - are not CEOs or star journalists or politicians - they’re people making ends meet or, where they have some choice in the matter, trying to engage in work that matters to them (which may not be of the most well-remunerated kind). An analysis that fails to take account of this - and other realities, as Cottom attest - can only ever be partial and limited.

Unfortunately, especially given her public profile in Australia, Haussegger's book falls into this category.

'what does she have to look forward to?'

Another gem from the mothers’ group I have recently started attending provides the theme of this post. One of the mothers present told us about her sister, who is in her thirties and is still ‘living the London life’. This is code for ‘she has a partner, they both have plenty of disposable income and no children, and are able to do what they like when they like’.

Imagine, a woman earning her own money and doing what she pleases with it! In this day and age!

As the mother of a young child too, I can well understand what might drive this mother to slightly envy and occasionally even resent her sister’s apparently carefree life. What I don’t understand is what she said next. She told us that she had an unspoken question for her sister, one she would never dare ask, but frequently played on her mind. Puzzled, she told us what was bugging her: ‘I don’t understand what it is she looks forward to?‘

I have to confess, I was a bit stumped as to what she meant.

She then elaborated and said ‘I mean, I look forward to having lots of grandchildren. I love children, and I want lots of them and one day I want to be surrounded by grandchildren. I don’t understand what she looks forward to - another trip? A promotion at work? What?’

Someone else then chimed in with a similar question for non-mothers, this time the even more patronising ‘I know! I mean what have you accomplished if you don’t have children?’

At this point, I was thinking to myself that this might not be quite the consciousness-raising experience I was hoping for, and that perhaps I really had been born two decades too late. Where are those speculums when you need them?

I didn’t really feel that there was any rejoinder for me to make to this conversation that would not be offensive to either of the two speakers. Who am I to police a woman’s relationship with her sister? Nor question their positive sense of accomplishment and happiness with their own entry into motherhood. As far as that goes, good luck to them, it’s fantastic that they feel that way. What stuck in my throat was the policing of women’s other lives, and the assumption that, as all those present were also mothers, we would all feel the same way.

While I love my daughter and value my experiences with her so far, I do not consider motherhood to be my one and only accomplishment. I do not consider raising a child to be ‘my greatest achievement’. And, especially, I do not consider women who do not, cannot, or will not have children, for whatever reason, to somehow not be ‘proper’ women (the implied subtext of the conversation above) to either be pitied or treated with suspicion.

I should note here, before I get too much further and lest I be accused of selfishness, that my definition of achievement is of something completed and finite: an essay, a task, a mountain-climb. Perhaps this is too narrow, but, for me, parenthood is very much a process and in process. It is something that will only reach an endpoint when one of us dies. To my mind, to make my child into something that I have ‘achieved’ is in a sense to wash my hands of her. I think it also puts a heavy burden on her: ‘don’t screw up or you’ll ruin what I’ve achieved’. While she is young, it is my responsibility to give her the best start possible, but her life will be her creation.

But I’m digressing.

What I want to discuss in this post is the idea that women who don’t have children are missing out in some way. I’ve never heard anyone say this about men who are not fathers. By this logic, aren’t they missing out too? Or is it okay to not be a dad, because you can legitimately find self-worth and accomplishment in other things?

This conversation reminded me of the way in which New Zealand’s former prime minister Helen Clark was described in some quarters as selfish because she did not have children. This is notwithstanding the decades of public service she had provided to the FOUR MILLION people of New Zealand, and, subsequently, to the world, as the head of the United Nations’ Development Programme. Recently, Australian prime minister Julia Gillard has been subject to the same kind of sexist scrutiny of her suspect childless ways (this is the subject of a blog-post by the fabulous Antipodista). Presumably, Mother Teresa (maternal in the monastic sense) is suspect in the same way, then? The idea that women can only be accomplished if they have children is sexist, patronising, and narrow, regardless of who says it. I stress that this does not mean that mothers shouldn’t feel a sense of accomplishment for their mothering, just that there are many ways to be accomplished, and why should we compete over them and judge each other for them?

If we think about it a different way, if Helen Clark had had three kids, would New Zealand mothers have access to 20 hours’ free childcare for their three-year olds? If Mother Teresa had had a brood of her own babies, would the abandoned street-children of Calcutta have had a tireless champion? Perhaps they still would have accomplished these things - I don’t for one minute want to suggest that mothers can’t do these things too - but perhaps they wouldn’t have.

In Mother of All Myths, Arminatta Forna suggests that the reason mothers and non-mothers are in competition with each other is to do with the current societal preoccupation with pro-natalism: ‘we are all part of a society that assumes, encourages and rewards parenthood while disapproving of those who do not have children. ... Indeed, pressure from family and friends has been cited by study after study as a major reason for wanting to have a family’. (p 139)

Feminist academic Sara Ruddick in ‘Maternal Thinking’ traces how women of all kinds are made to feel guilty by pro-natalism. She writes:

Guilt complicates feminist rage - and slows down feminist activism. There is the mother's guilt towards her children, and the non-mother's guilt that she has evaded this mass sisterhood now elaborated for us all as full of joy and pain, blood and passion, that she has evaded the central life dramas of intimacy and separation described so well in feminist writing about motherhood.

Before deciding to have a child myself, I had ambivalent feelings about becoming a mother. I didn’t not want children, but I couldn’t say that I definitely wanted them either. It never really seemed like the right time, when there was so much else going on in my life. I enjoyed spending time with my nieces and nephews - another untruth about the childless woman is that she has no loving contact with children at all - but it didn’t particularly make me want to rush out and get reproducing as soon as possible.

While I was in my twenties, no-one really passed a comment on this. But, as soon as I turned thirty (and I had been married for a year), the comments began in earnest.

‘So, when are you going to have children?’

‘Um, I don’t know.’

‘You really should, you’ll be a great mum.’

‘O ... kay.’

If I was foolish enough to actually engage anyone on the topic, I ended up being in the unenviable position of trying to defend not having children, which didn’t reflect how I felt at all. I came to resent these conversations and the way in which family, friends and even acquaintances felt that it was perfectly fine to voice their opinion about my uterus like it was their property. It got to the point where my inner child was wanting to react ‘I’m never going to have children. So there!’

Needless to say, I had to take a step back from all this static and make a more mature decision about whether or not to have children based on what both my husband and I wanted for ourselves. As you know, we now have a lovely daughter, and are happy with our decision. But we do not feel we ‘missed out’ by waiting to have her. On the contrary, for us, we feel that we’re both more confident and in the best place possible to parent her.

I also feel strongly that, as a role model for my daughter, I want her to learn that motherhood isn’t just about reproduction, doing the washing up, and looking for lost toys. It is also about figuring out what’s important to you and how you want to live your life.

Because it is true that if you do become a mother your time for yourself is precious, and there’s no point wasting it on judging other women's lives.