Monday, November 08, 2010

Mother Blood is Boiling

My mother blood is boiling.
Why?
Erica Jong's WSJ article.
She misunderstands so many of the points she is cutting down, and I was going to address them bit by bit, but then I read this sentence, "It's a prison for mothers, and it represents as much of a backlash against women's freedom as the right-to-life movement," and decided to stop reading. (Don't worry, I will revisit the article once I calm down.)
The second wavers who still espouse this crap make me ashamed to call myself a feminist and seem to want to make me ashamed of having made the choices that I made in my life. I wanted to be a stay-at-home mother long before I had any idea of who I would end up with and regardless of the fact that my mother spent my childhood telling me about all of the cool things I could be when I grew up.
It was and still is my ideal career choice, whether or not 2nd wavers or the government consider it a career.
And if I wanted to cloth diaper, make my own baby food, co-sleep and wear my baby, that was my choice, too. When I was doing that stuff it was mostly considered weird at the time, so it was hardly a matter of being "imprisoned" by society or the patriarchy or whatever bullshit these people espouse it to be.
I'm so sick of this type of thinking from the 2nd wave that it is extremely difficult for me to be grateful for the work they did for and before the Third Wave. Just as they seemed to be ungrateful for the generation before them, but they don't like to talk about that, ahem...
I support and respect women who work for pay, whether they have children or not, so when will the unpaid work of women (and increasing numbers of men) be supported and respected as well?

~~~~~~~~~~~~
UPDATE: I have to add that I also resent Jong's use of the term "right-to-life movement" instead of the anti-choice or anti-abortion movement.

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