Friday, May 9, 2014

a mothers' day pillow book


in a departure from my previous mothers’ day posts - which were about the feminist origins behind a day steeped in sentimentality  and thinking about which mothers are celebrated on Mothers’ day and which aren’t - I’ve decided to model my thoughts about motherhood after the the Pillow Book by Japanese courtier Sei Shonagon. In a pleasing symmetry, Mothers’ Day also falls a week after the Japanese holiday Kodomo no Hi (Children’s Day) that takes place on May 5. 

The Pillow Book seemed to be everywhere in the 1990s. Well, okay in two places: the elegantly beautiful but really quite pointless Peter Greenaway movie The Pillow Book (1996) and as a framing device in Booker-nominee Ruth L Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998). Oh and I lived in Japan for a year towards the end of the decade.

Being hopelessly behind the times, I’ve only just managed to finish the actual Pillow Book - a collection of random and often whimsical thoughts by a court lady who lived over a thousand years ago (around 965) during the Heian period. While some of the book feels like a totally alien world - her worship of her mistress the Empress, for example - a lot of it feels very modern - for example, the sexual shenanigans of the courtiers. What was most startlingly modern, however, was its form: the constant use of poetry to communicate, particularly to amuse or seduce, compares with the quirky tweet or facebook status update, and the episodic and random nature of ‘the’ Pillow Book reads like a blog. Sei Shonagon’s writing style was so prescient she pre-empted the internet by more than a millenium! 

Shonagon was married at 16, and possibly at the time of her service to the Empress, divorced. She had a son, Norinaga, from her first marriage and is believed to have married a second time after her service ended. She had another child, a daughter: Koma no Myobu.  Shonagon did not write much about her son or motherhood particularly in the Pillow Book, but she did make some observations about babies and children:

Small children and babies ought to be plump. So ought provincial governors and others who have gone ahead in the world (p 78)

Adorable things: the face of a child drawn on a melon ... One picks up a pretty baby and holds him for a while in one's arm; ... he clings to one's neck and falls asleep (pp 168-69)

Presumptuous things: a child who has nothing particular to recommend him yet is used to being spoiled by people (p 170)

Hateful things: one is just about to be told an interesting piece of news and a baby starts crying (p 45)

She is perhaps best known for her meditations on ‘things’, the headings of some of which I am now going to shamelessly borrow to talk about motherhood-type things:

  • Things that cannot be compared

Baby number one and baby number two, so similar in some ways but as different as night and day in others. Good days and bad days: if you try to figure out what worked in the former and not in the latter it will drive you crazy. 
Your pre-maternal and post-maternal life. 
And body.

  • Unsuitable things

A baby and a plastic bag. My big girl’s choice of kindy clothes during a biting southerly wind.

  • Things that make one’s heart beat faster

Wondering if your baby will stay asleep once you shift her from you to the cot. Watching your big girl climb further and higher saying ‘watch me’: it’s important she learns but you can’t shake the image of her falling off the table out of your head. The anaesthetic drugs for my caesarean with baby number two.

  • Things that arouse a fond memory of the past

Taking out the clothes you packed away from baby number one for baby number two. Watching video footage of herself as a baby and toddler on my camera with my big girl.Having lunch in town where people wear clothes that don’t have food stains on them and have brushed their hair. 

  • Hateful things

1950s-style financial dependence. People suddenly seeming much less interested in what you have to say now you are no longer in paid employment. Powerlessness. Sentimentalising motherhood, especially on Mothers’ Day. Books about parenting. Being compared to a car. Being compared to a cow. Internet memes that aim to guilt-trip mothers even more (that means you ‘Iphone Mom’). Anything that aims to guilt-trip mothers. 

  • Depressing things

A baby who won’t sleep. A baby screaming inconsolably. Feeling like you will never sleep again. Feeling like you just don’t know what to do and have run out of ideas about how to stop your baby screaming inconsolably. Isolation. Being stuck in the house all day. The monochrome nature of things for little girls.

  • Splendid things

An unexpected but much-longed-for night of semi-decent sleep. Making deeper connections with your community. First birthday parties. Having the odd hour to myself to blog or read or eat or use the computer or stare blankly into space drooling wondering where all my energy has gone. Mining the rich vein of feminist writing about motherhood.

  • Annoying things

People who take down a parent's choice of baby carrier. Or choice of anything for that matter. Advertisements that don’t have a ‘skip ad’ option before the Peppa Pig cartoons on YouTube. When your baby prefers the packet food to the food you have taken the trouble to lovingly prepare yourself. When people tell you your baby’s hungry or tired like you don’t already know yourself and are trying your best to deal with her. Plunket.

  • Things without merit

Media constructions of mothers that depict the perfect mother as a dead one.

  • Shameful things

The time I gave my baby a small shake because I was nearly out of my head with frustration and then, realising what I had done, thinking that she would end up in CYFS care and I was the worst mother in the world. On really bad days, feeling like ‘I hate my life’ when I have many many things for which to be thankful.

  • Surprising and distressing things

A sudden feeling of invisibility once you are a stay-at-home-mother with no income of your own. Watching your baby have her first set of vaccinations and knowing that you consciously chose to inflict pain on her. Dropping your big girl off at kindy and knowing that she will have to ‘sink or swim’ by herself much more than she ever has before.

  • Awkward things

Trying to breastfeed in the back of a shearing shed. Trying to breastfeed in public anywhere your baby won’t co-operate. Okay, pretty much breastfeeding in public full-stop.

  • Things that give a hot feeling

Over-heated rooms. Engorged breasts.

  • Pleasing things

Finding two socks that match. Taking maternity clothes to an op shop. The baby actually liking the food that I have lovingly made for her. The big girl actually doing what you ask her the first time you ask. 

  • Things that fall from the sky

Donuts, hamburgers and broccoli in Cloudy with A Chance of Meatballs. My big girl liked the book so much we let her watch the film as her first movie. The fast-paced story and editing didn’t really seem to capture her and she kept asking ‘where’s the flying food?’
Rain, rain and more rain nearly every day at the moment.

  • Adorable things

My big girl discovering the word ‘odd’ and continually using it to describe things by emphasising the ‘d’ sound at the end. The baby laughing at her big sister standing on the table and loudly singing ‘commotion in the ocean, ooh ahh’ while she is having her lunch. My big girl making jokes and laughing at her own hilariousness. My on-the-move baby looking so pleased with herself that she can now roll and shuffle to get to the toys, plastic bags and dropped bits of food on the floor that she wants. And about a bazillion other things too.

  • Outstandingly splendid things

A baby who regularly sleeps through the night. Having two mostly happy, healthy girls and surviving to tell the tale thanks to the benefits and privileges of a ‘first world’ life and healthcare system. Dads who are very involved in raising their young children (where that’s wanted or possible, of course): getting the baby in the middle of the night, staying home from work when the children are sick, alternating parental leave arrangements, or being the primary care-giver for their children. When your baby starts to talk and, in time, says ‘I love you mummy’.

Happy Mothers’ Day!

Saturday, May 3, 2014

review: Wonder Women

Given how much time I have for reading at the moment, let alone writing about what I’m reading, I think book reviews may be few and far between in my posts this year. Seeing, however, as I did manage to read the not very long and articulately written Wonder Women: Sex, Power and the Quest for Perfection (2013) by Debora L. Spar, I thought I may as well review it. 

But not because it has anything very groundbreaking to offer, I’m sorry to say.

What is it about books that reference the fabulous Wonder Woman in the title that leave me cold? The last one I reviewed - by Australian journalist Virginia Haussegger - was also disappointing and often for similar reasons as Spar’s. 

Like a number of high-profile American women writers - I’m thinking particularly of Anne-Marie Slaughter and Sheryl Sandberg here - Spar is concerned with the idea of ‘having it all.’ I don’t know why I get suckered into reading these books - maybe because I live in the hope that there might be a high-profile, best-selling book informed by feminism that offers a bit more to their wide readership than stories about the author and her friends.

Spar is the president of all-female Barnard College in the US, having moved there from a professorship at the male-dominated Harvard Business School - and some of the most interesting parts of the book are her comparisons between the two elite institutions and their different gendered styles and discourses (comparisons prefaced to the point of parody with ‘not better, not worse, just different.’) I was particularly interested in her accounts of decision-making styles, and mentoring students, as well as the ‘controversy’ over President Obama giving the commencement address at Barnard (‘why would he waste his time talking to a bunch of girls?!”) These could’ve have opened the way for a more specific and nuanced analysis of the way gender operates in higher education in the United States.

Sadly, these anecdotes were almost buried in her much more generalised main focus on beauty, love, sex, motherhood, housework and aging. Not that these topics aren’t important - and the section on aging was particularly interesting - but, given her background in government, business and economics, she could’ve also drawn on feminist research in these areas to look at the broader picture for women.

Like Haussegger - and also Sandberg and, to a degree, Slaughter - the main problem with Spar’s book is its assumptions. It starts from the individual but fails to ‘connect the dots’ and see how individuals are constituted as subjects within the culture in which they live. She does go one better than Haussegger, however, and uses the word ‘patriarchy’ all of once in the book. No other similar term for systemic gender and sexual inequality - institutional sexism, indirect discrimination, structural discrimination, or even rape culture - is used in the book. In fact, while the book looks at internalised violence - such as eating disorders (Spar is an anorexia survivor and writes poignantly about what drove her to this: the quest for perfection of the book’s subtitle) - it barely touches on violence against women, rape culture, sexual harassment and discrimination on the basis of sex.

Spar’s thesis then is that her generation of women have sacrificed themselves on the altar of perfection thanks to three main sources: their mothers (of course! for having expectations that their daughters will have careers as well as families), the media (about which there is actually very little critique), and ‘the feminists’ (not feminists, or feminism, or even named women with a feminist agenda, but ‘the feminists’ - there’s a distancing phrase if I ever I saw one!) (pp16-20). 

Despite the mention of ‘power’ in the book’s subtitle there is very little analysis of the way power is created and disseminated. For Spar, power simply seems to mean ‘being in power’, and her answer appears to be for career-focussed women to join the echelons of power and transform it from within. But if you only understand power as a construction of consciously rational individuals then the only way you can make sense of inequality is by resorting to the level of crude conspiracy theory: a bunch of rich white guys get together and plot to keep everyone else in the entire world under their thumb. Sure, this might be the effect of patriarchy and/or capitalism and/or white supremicist culture but it’s not really how it works nor why it persists.

The other thing that irked me was her attitude towards feminism.  She is at pains to point out at the beginning of the book that, even as she became highly educated and took on high-powered jobs, she actively distanced herself from ‘hairy-legged feminism’ (aargh - self-hating cliche alert!). Now that she’s older and wiser, and has tried to balance the main competing demands of being female (i.e. having a career and having kids), she’s begun to see that feminism might in fact have lots of interesting things to say about her experiences.

Mmm hmmm.

Her book then quotes from feminist research, gives a potted history of key moments in white Western feminism, and provides pithy epigrams from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as well as Tina Fey’s Bossypants. She writes that her book espouses a ‘revised and somewhat reluctant feminism,’ a ‘softer and gentler form’ that isn’t so invested in proving women’s equality and quits blaming men. And despite her book’s avowed interest in power, she actively says she’s not interested in ‘examining the power hierarchies that undeniably still separate men from women’ but rather in ‘practical issues’ (pp 10-11).

Doh! 

Is it just me or does she not really get what ‘the feminists’ have been not shaving their legs to tackle? What is the ‘softer, gentler’ feminism meant not to threaten? And as for not blaming men (yawn) see my previous comments about patriarchal structures. The quest for equality is not so much about proving that women can do what men can do, but dismantling the structures and systems that disempower women: substantive equality. I don’t know what’s ‘impractical’ about that.

Genuinely empowering women to be leaders in their communities is undoubtedly transformational, as numerous commentators including Marilyn Waring, Amartya Sen and even Sheryl Sandberg have pointed out. The crucial point, however, is in what leadership means. Spar et al seems to understand leadership as a means for top-down transformation within existing power structures, while for others it means grassroots action, self-determination or changing the nature of power itself.

In short, I’m kind of bored with these ‘can we have it all?’ books. Nobody has it all. Creating the desire to ‘have it all’ is part of the ideology of capitalism not feminism. I’d like to hear more from women who are less concerned about buying into this mythology - even if it to critique it. Today, for example, I read about research on the experiences of young Maaori and migrant women in New Zealand maternity services and the biases, barriers and stigmatisation they faced in accessing those services. 


At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist myself, could it be that commercial publishers have much more of a vested interest in selling books that trade in desire and fantasy rather than changing the world?