Threading the Feminist Needle

 From Carrie Gress at Law and Liberty:

One of my goals in The End of Woman is to go beyond an understanding of woman as more than an “adult female human.” This is true of course, but it is not sufficient. I offer the long-held idea of motherhood (including psychological and spiritual) as a defining characteristic of womanhood. Matthew says, however, that calling women mothers is reductionist. Yet this ultimately denies the possibility to effectively speak of the nature of things. There must be a starting place. To say that women are mothers does not mean that women are only mothers or that motherhood looks the same for every woman. That would reduce a woman to doing. What needs to be captured is the essential nature of something, what something is, as being, and to move forward from that starting place. Ethics, which is the study of what we do, must start from what something is, from metaphysics, or the study of being. Thomas Aquinas, when speaking of the natural law, begins with human nature to derive the natural law precepts. Without a robust metaphysics to articulate what a woman is, defining womanhood can only come from what a woman does, which can usher in a host of dangers, particularly relativism, and the claim that men, too, can be women because they can do what women do.

Perhaps the reason for Matthew’s belief that attributing motherhood to women is “reductive and fundamentally infantilizing” is because feminism, for fifty years, has restricted our culture to saying precious little about the goodness of motherhood. Since the early 1900s, the word “drudgery” was used synonymously with motherhood by many feminists, with a masculine style of behavior given preference; again, the idea, “How do we make women more like men?” Matthew reveals this point at the end of her review when she declares that she is “the primary caregiver” to her three young sons. What is striking is that she somehow considers motherhood, in the form of loving and nurturing, to be reductive and infantilizing but calling herself a primary caregiver is somehow not reductive and infantilizing. The commonality of masculine idolization has been so absorbed by our culture that we can scarcely discern how much we are destroying womanhood by trying to avoid the concept of motherhood.

Primary caregiver is a pallid replacement for the word mother, as we can see in the example of Mary Godwin Shelley’s life. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died 10 days after Mary Godwin was born. Her father, William Godwin, later remarried, giving Mary Godwin a primary caregiver. However, the hole left by her mother’s death was one that never seemed to be filled, even by her primary caregiver: Mary Godwin Shelley’s writing skills were born as she learned the alphabet by tracing the letters on her mother’s tomb and culminated in her most famous work, Frankenstein, which some argue was about losses in her life, particularly that of her mother. This is certainly not to say that adoptive mothers are somehow not mothers, but that Mary Jane Godwin could never fill the hole left by Mary Wollstonecraft in her daughter’s life. Regardless, mothers are not simply workers to do things for us, but unique individuals with whom we are meant to be in deep and meaningful relationships.

Motherhood’s lean reputation developed as feminists emphasized the service and demands it requires, even presenting it as a form of codependency or simplemindedness. As Matthew appreciates, however, motherhood—to be done well—requires growth in virtue and a turning away from our vicious self-centeredness, as we witness in the mature Jo March of Little Women, of whom Matthew conjectures I would disapprove. I take no issue with what Matthew calls March’s unwomanly heart, having sought many of the same things Jo pursued in her young life. In the end, as many women do among the various seasons of life, Jo finds her deepest flourishing not only in her writing, but in her marriage to Mr. Baer, raising her children, and creating a warm home for boys where she exercises not only her intellectual gifts but nurturing and care. (Read more.)

Share