File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9712, message 349


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



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