From: cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox) Subject: M-FEM: M-I: Mothering (Was `What's wrong with this list) (fwd from M-I) Date: Thu, 25 Dec 1997 21:41:33 -0600 (CST) [Gabriel Egan's posting to M-I seemed one that this list might find of interest, in particular because of its sharp perspectives on one of the ways in which "honoring" women may trivialize them. (cox: co-moderator)] Forwarded message: From: g.egan-AT-gold.ac.uk Date: Sat, 20 Dec 1997 20:10:50 +0 Subject: M-I: Mothering (Was `What's wrong with this list) Well, I know I said I was going but Sid's views of essentialism are worth responding to: > I deliberately used the word "her" for Nature > and not "it". Because, without Nature, without the life-supporting > environment that it gives us, none of us would be around, would we? > Nature gives birth to us, that is why she is like a Mother, who in > my view, is a much more important personality, than Father. It is > the Mother who brings forth new life - that is the realization > of the active, "generative" potential, not passive as you say I > implied. Not sexist at all but a tribute and a profound respect for > womanhood and feminism (proletarian and not bourgeois). `Mothering' is a job which has been given to women because it is thankless, unpaid, and dirty. Many women want more from life than to be reproducing machines. Women have the biological task of carrying the unborn infant but this does not make them better at all the horrible jobs that are required to raise children. `Primary caring' is a much better term than `mothering' because anybody can do it and there is good reason to believe that it is best done by several persons of each gender rather than one woman. That is to say, it should be a shared task, because it's so onerous. `Mothering' is merely one more gendered labour which it has long been claimed women are suited to (like cleaning, cooking, and simple repetitive tasks in factories) so that men can have the interesting, intellectual, jobs. `Nature' includes volcanoes, earthquakes, and meteor-strikes, but when people say `Mother Nature' they mean all the cuddly caring aspects of Nature which they associate with their mothers. The pleasures of parenthood are undeniable, but the structure of work in capitalist economies has intensified the identification of `woman' with `primary carer' which has been to the advantage of neither men nor women. (Notwithstanding the advantage to many men conferred by the removal of any primary caring obligations, the domestic oppression of women diminishes us all.) Gabriel Egan --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005