Today, a friend sent me this self
congratulatory article Being a Feminist Mother is a Liberating Experience and I
just had to take it to task. It irritated me and I wanted to understand why.
Using free association between terms such
as patriarchy, agency, intersectionality, racism and gender bias, the Indian
immigrant writer asserts that feminist mothering has helped her protect her
daughter from society’s patriarchal expectations, especially that of immigrant
cultures.
However, apart from broad general assertions,
she quotes only three specific instances where she felt that feminist mothering
gave her the tools to help herself and her daughter navigate a patriarchal
world.
-
Her Indian mother questioned
her decision to send her daughter to an expensive private school.
-
A boy questioned her daughter’s
interest in politics because girls are only interested in fairies and cakes.
-
When her 17-year-old daughter
wears short dresses, the Indian within her baulks but feminism gives her the
tools to let her daughter be.
Since she pompously starts the article by
presenting herself as someone at the intersection of race, gender and ideology
– an Indian immigrant mother in the UK with a mixed race daughter (half white,
half Indian) with feminist leanings – I’ll use intersectionality to examine her
conflicts.
The first thing to be said is that she
misses out on one critical intersection of her identity – class. As someone who
is married to a white British person and can afford to send her daughter to a
private school in the UK, she belongs to the educated professional class of the
UK at the very least. So we can’t ignore the impact that belonging to this
class would have on her own and her daughter’s conflicts and experiences.
Giving the best possible education to your
child, boy or girl, among this class is a norm – in fact, it would be frowned
upon to visibly discriminate between your son and daughter in providing the
materials of education. (In fact, it is a norm even among the equivalent
classes in India, and would have been 12 years ago when the writer placed her
daughter in school). A passing patriarchal remark by her mother who had no
control over her decision making, when the weight and fashions of the class
that she belonged to strongly supported her decision in favour of her daughter
doesn’t amount to a hard-fought conflict.
Ditto, a passing remark by a boy about
girls liking fairies and cakes and not politics. If you belong to white middle
class in the UK and are sending your daughter to a private school, she is
already being exposed to a whole range of women role models and feminist
ideology (from classroom discussions, literature, films, TV, media to more
immediate examples of successful women role models). Surely, all that armour
would weather a chance remark by a boy without any lasting impact. Even without
the benefit of feminist mothering, her daughter would have enough strong women
role models to be inspired from and to aspire to.
Feminist mothering would have surely had a
stronger role to play had she belonged to white working class because even if white
working class girls are inspired by women role models in society, economic
considerations do not support their aspirations to become one. Having a feminist mother to bolster your dreams and support them would indeed be a huge advantage.
Finally, we come to the writer’s daughter’s
short dresses. I truly feel for her here because her immigrant background and
her feminist beliefs would be at complete odds with each other here. Indian
cultures place all the responsibility of sexual control on women and bestow all
the privileges of sexual provocation and exploration to men. Mainstream western
feminism loathes placing any responsibility of sexual control on women – from
clothes to conduct to consent. The
writer’s choice would have been particularly hard given what was at stake - her
daughter’s emotional and physical safety and security.
The writer doesn’t really tussle with the
two oppositional stances though. She looks around and sees that short dresses
are the norm as is holding men responsible for sexual transgressions, and takes
comfort in the belief that her feminist daughter will be ok. However, that
doesn’t answer why despite decades of feminist demands on the subject, sexual
assault remains common in the West and its aftermath on women as traumatic as
ever.
Perhaps a more fruitful discussion wither
her daughter would involve the role of shifting contexts, places and power in
sexual dynamics between men and women, and how to remain alert, aware and
sensitive to them even as we assert our rights to live and experience life
freely.
Words such as patriarchy, racism,
intersectionality, gender discrimination have meaning and value. But every time
we use them slavishly and sloppily to find comfortable, convenient and
self-congratulatory positions, we rob them a little of their power and meaning
and end up empowering our opponents.
Being a feminist mother is liberating
indeed, especially when it gives you a comfortable look out post to view the
world and asks nothing of you in return. In other worlds, it is called
entitlement.
-->
