Join Us! The Motherhood Revolution

Off Our Backs, 2006 by Seelhoff, Cheryl Lindsey

A revolution in motherhood and family life has been underway for over 40 years now. It is a revolution I have had a part in creating and which I helped to lead, and which has consumed the better part of my time and energy for the past 35 years. Quietly, ordinary women like me have been recreating, reinventing motherhood, family life, our own lives, as well. I wonder why the revolution we are making has, by and large, been so invisible, and how the trails we've managed to blaze for ourselves might be broadened so that other women can, if not walk alongside us immediately, at least see the trailheads, beckoning them. I hope this article will be a step in that direction.

In 1989, on the eve of moving to women's land in order to participate in the creation of a woman-only community, Sonia Johnson wrote:

The agony of motherhood in patriarchy is that we are prevented from mothering our children. Looking back after four children and 26 years of motherhood, it seems to me that the moment I had my babies, society tied my hands and feet, stuffed a sock in my mouth, and forced me to sit helplessly by while it systematically tortured and brainwashed and poisoned my children. Men have reduced mothering to feeding, clothing and comforting and suffering....

It seems to me that mothering is the business of making the world amenable to children, seeing to it, for example, that every child born is immensely valued for being exactly who they are, making a world in which they therefore automatically love and cherish themselves, a safe, wholesome, healthful world, a world in which they can cooperate, not compete, can have time to be children, are encouraged to listen to their own voice so they will learn to have integrity and to rule themselves with wisdom and mercy, a world in which they can be themselves fully.

I want a world in which women can mother, not just bear children and keep them alive the best we can in a world that hates them.

Patriarchy continues to define for women what we want, continues to control the discussion of mothering. Which of us would ever have thought of such a hideous idea as child care centers, for instance. It simply would not have occurred to mothers to solve the problem of childcare in a way so profoundly unsatisfactory for both children and adults and ultimately for all of society.

Women, if we had felt powerful and had been setting the terms of our own debate... would have understood that the reason parents cannot care for children is that men's world is organized insanely, from its basic life-negating values out through every aspect of life. We would have begun, as we have, to ask the world-changing questions: what do we value? How do we want to live? What kinds of work really need to be done? How many hours a day of work would that make per person? How could we organize society so that everyone's needs could be met, only useful and healthful work would be done, and everyone would have time to live?

I dream of a world in which women are willing to take responsibility for reshaping the world. I dream of a world in which children do not entrust their lives to us only to have us, traitor-like, turn them over to the soul-killing, joy-destroying agents of patriarchy-particularly public schools...

It is as reprehensible as it is unnecessary any longer to bring children into the old world. We are capable of doing something completely different...

Sonia Johnson

Wildfire: Igniting the She/Volution

I cannot do justice to the deep feelings Johnson's words have stirred in me since I first read them. Through her books, all of which I own (some in duplicate and triplicate forgiving away), Johnson, the mother of four, has been an important source of feminist encouragement and inspiration to me. By and large, throughout my now-35 years of motherhood, I have been applying myself to the vision she articulates. I only wish living it out had not eluded Johnson herself, had not come too late for her. I can only wonder what she must feel reading the latest in the relentless flood of essays, articles, and books written over the last 20 years in which yet another feminist announces she is leaving the work force, she is leaving her profession, she is going to become a "stay-at-home mom," she has discovered her mother, or her grandmother, men, other feminists were correct, she can't have it all, it is impossible to combine motherhood and career without too much collateral damage, and so she is choosing motherhood and is foregoing her career. Actually, I hope Johnson doesn't read these articles for the aggravation they might cause her; I know when I succumb to the temptation to read them (which is rarely), it takes me days sometimes, even weeks, to recover, not because I fault or judge the writers, but because of the intense frustrations I feel over the apparently forgotten feminist hopes and dreams for revolution, for the building of a radically woman friendly, mother-friendly, child-friendly world.

It's not that I don't get what the Lisa Belkins or Linda Hirshmans mean or are saying (see Lisa Belkin, "The Opt-Out Revolution," New York Times, Oct. 26, 2003 and Linda Hirshman, "America's Stay-at-Home Feminists," American Prospect, Nov. 24, 2005). In 1983,1 myself participated in an internationally broadcast (eventually translated into Spanish and repeated annually) radio program entitled Career Homemaking, in which I and three other women, all professionals, described having decided to leave careers we had spent years preparing for to care for our families and children. I know only too well what Belkin and Hirshman and all of the many others who have made this decision have experienced. It's how limited they perceive their choices to be, their underlying hopelessness, the failure of creativity, often combined with a certain unspoken and naïve hopefulness, which is hard for me to hear.