Can motherhood be an asset in academia?

I recently went on the job market. One job was an open position in "sociology or a related field." Another was a joint position in American Culture and Women's Studies (hello dream job!). My academic interests are specialized enough that I had to jump when I saw these opportunities.

I wonder if I will be penalized because I strayed from the orthodox path leading straight from graduate school into a full-time tenure-track position. I had one baby during my PhD and was pregnant with my second when I graduated. I began teaching part-time soon after my third was born, and I have continued to teach while I had my fourth. And let's not forget I've been lactating for over 9 years straight!

I have continued to publish, research, and attend conferences since I graduated, but those activities took place on top of raising four children full-time and teaching part-time. Without a full-time job to support research and publishing, I haven't been able to keep up the same pace as my tenure-track peers.

I'd like to think that my immersion in motherhood, breastfeeding, and maternity care activism would make me an attractive candidate, rather than disqualify me, since those activities are directly related to my academic specialties. But I can't be sure.

In Germany, though, the Technische Universität (TU) of Berlin has created post-doctoral fellowships that specifically favor mothers. Look at this excerpt from the fellowship reviewer guidelines:

All reviewers are asked to consider the individual living and working conditions of an applicant. Female researchers with diverse career paths and with non-academic knowledge and qualifications are expressly invited to apply for an IPODI Fellowship and we assume that a diverse personal, professional or scientific background may open up new perspectives and innovative approaches in research. Family-related career "breaks" as well as intersectoral mobility are therefore perceived as additional qualifications and should be considered positively within the selection process.

To read more about this program, visit Dr. Kristen Ghodsee's article "A fellowship program that favors mothers?"

Have you been penalized by--or helped by--your experience as a mother or parent? Does your workplace welcome women who have taken non-traditional career paths?

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More than one but not quite two

Today my freshman composition students are discussing what it means to be a man or a woman, in preparation for their first major writing assignment. In honor of Inga turning 6 months old today, I decided to do the writing assignment myself. I'm sharing it with my students to give them ideas for their upcoming paper. Inga is coming with me to class today; I hope she will add something tangible to our discussion!

What does it mean to be a woman?

Dr. Rixa Freeze

September 2, 2011

In kindergarten math class, I learned that 1 + 1 = 2. In grade school, I learned to conjugate verbs. I am. She is. You are. In high school biology, I learned about meiosis and mitosis, how our genetic code divides and recombines like great spiral zippers. In college, I learned about the political theory of individualism, about Cartesian dualism, and about feminist theories of the body. Yet none of this prepared me for the seismic shock of becoming a mother and suddenly discovering that I was more than one, but not quite two.

When I was pregnant for the first time, I felt a strange sense of recognition for my expanding body. My belly stretched, my breasts swelled, my skin tightened. I felt, for the first time, entirely myself. This, I thought, is what a woman’s body really is. It was a great discovery, as if I had circumnavigated the globe and split the atom and solved global hunger in the course of an afternoon.

Still, I could not ignore the little being inside of me. It first felt like champagne bubbles, then a school of minnows, then finally, like an actual baby. I could feel head and legs and butt. It hiccuped at predictable times. It kicked and punched, stretched and rolled. (It? She? He?) There was a person inside me, hidden behind skin, muscle, and water. This person was half me and half my husband, completely reliant upon my body but entirely its own self.

We think of birth as the great dividing moment that separates mother-fetus into mother and child. I’ve heard parents and doctors say “You’re on your own now” when they cut the umbilical cord. But I think of my third child’s birth and I can’t point to a definitive moment when I (pregnant woman) became me (mother) and her (baby). When did we become not-one-but-two—was it when her head emerged from my body? Was it when her legs and toes slipped out? Was it when, a few seconds after her birth, she lost her color and I gave her the first breaths of life? Even those breaths were not hers. They were mine, passed from my lungs to hers in the most intimate and urgent embrace either of us had ever known.

So I am not convinced that the act of birth marks the line between one and two. After birth, when our bodies were no longer tied together by umbilical cord and placenta, my babies still relied upon me for survival. My breasts were literally their lifeline. My youngest baby, six months old today, is still only nursing. I cannot leave her for more than a few hours at a time. Her rolls of fat, her dimpled bottom, even her hefty double chin came directly from my body.

We are more than one, but not quite two. I haven’t discovered the calculus to describe where one self ends and another begins. I can only notice when the boundaries of personhood blur: how I can’t stop kissing the soft folds of her neck, how I wake at night moments before she does, how my body turns blood into milk into baby.

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Mother's Day tribute, scientist-style

I saw this over at Descent into Motherhood. The science geek in me loves it!

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Mother's Day Blues

Am I the only mother who doesn't like Mother's Day?

Honestly.

I have two children of my own whom I love beyond anything I could have imagined. I spend almost all of my waking (and many of my sleeping) hours with them.

But Mother's Day leaves me grumpy and cranky and all in a funk.

I don't like being told that my most important roles are chauffeur and cook and maid. Even if it's said in earnest by men and children trying to show their appreciation, it falls flat. I don't like the sentimental tributes that lump all mothers together and assign us certain universal qualities. Like The Amazing Ability To Clean And Cook And Look After The Kids Since I (The Masculine, Slightly Helpless Husband) Am Just Not Born With Those Skills.

I'm just not feeling the love.

If we really valued mothers--speaking both individually and culturally--we wouldn't have one day of lip service, followed by a year of neglect. Give us a year's paid maternity and paternity leave. Give us Mother-Friendly care in all hospitals and birth centers. Give us a culture that really, truly values mothers and children and finds ways to keep them together even when the mother needs to earn a living, like flextime, on-site childcare, or babies-at-work programs. Give us a month of daily home visits from postpartum helpers who can cook, clean, do laundry, and help with the other kids so we can snuggle and nurse our newborns. Give us generous social and emotional support for the tremendous work of mothering.

But please don't give us flowers and a sappy tribute to 1950's gender roles and think that will suffice until the next Mother's Day.

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Your baby the tyrant

A blog reader alerted me to a bestselling book from French philosopher and feminist Elisabeth Badinter, Le Conflit, La Femme et La Mère (The Conflict, The Woman and The Mother).I haven't yet read the book, but I did read an article about Badinter's new book in The Times. Among other things, Badinter claims that babies have become women's new tyrants, and that cloth diapers, homemade baby food, and breastfeeding are major culprits in the oppression--even modern-day slavery--of women. "It may seem derisory but powdered milk, jars of baby food and disposable nappies were all stages in the liberation of women," she comments. 

I then took an amusing romp through the comments. Is it just me, or does Badinter's argument, and many of the ensuing comments, just seem so old and worn out? Is there a way to talk about these issues without lobbing personal attacks against Badinter or simply rejecting everything she says outright ("if you're too selfish to lay off cigarettes and alcohol for a few months, then frankly you're too selfish to be a mother")?

My take on this whole weary debate:

• "Choosing" not to breastfeed (and in lesser part, choosing disposables and processed baby food) and thus being obligated to purchase expensive, commercially manufactured products for a number of months and/or years does not feel very liberating to me. 
• For me, breastfeeding isn't just about getting food into the baby's body, but about relationship. How can you quantify something so complex as love or attachment or comfort?
• The women I've met who cloth diaper, me included, do it because they really enjoy using cloth, not out of a sense of grudging obligation to some unspoken ideal of motherhood.
• Speaking of washing diapers, is it really that much work to put diapers in a washing machine and hit a button? If we're talking about a new form of slavery, turning on a machine and spending...what?...30 seconds at a time doesn't seem all that terribly demanding to me. Now, cloth diapering would be a whole different story if I had to wash everything by hand... 
• I've never used either homemade or purchased baby food, and this particular example seems especially trivial. Children have to eat one way or the other. I don't see how buying small jars of prepared foods will somehow liberate women from an otherwise bleak life of slavery. 
• Badinter is coming from a position of wealth and privilege. She has the means to outsource many aspects of mothering, from feeding to childcare. What irks me are her grand, sweeping generalizations that all women ought to abandon the day-to-day tasks of mothering because she found them oppressive--as if economics and personal value systems played no role whatsoever in the various ways women choose to mother their children.
• I'm trying hard not to reject everything she says outright, but it's proving difficult. Especially her devaluation of children--they ruin your lives, just ship them off so you can do "important" things with "real" people, etc. Children are human beings, albeit small and often quite helpless, and they deserve an extra measure of compassion and care, not abandonment (however you might personally define it) to surrogates so their parents can "get on with their lives."
• I'm not buying her argument that French women are happier than German women because they are more successful at separating their motherhood from their womanhood. No room for nuance or personal preference. 
• Overall, Badinter speaks of breastfeeding, cloth diapering and stay-at-home parenting as if they were predominant practices that very few women dare break from. In reality, most women formula feed and buy disposables and send their children to day care. So I guess I am left wondering why she's getting herself so wound up over a non-existent "problem," as it were.
• I acknowledge that I am responding to someone else's summary of her ideas, since I haven't yet read the actual book. Great big caveat.
• I do think that modern-day, industrialized, nuclear family life can be isolating. I don't think humans were really meant to live in isolated, nuclear families where the father leaves to go to "work" and the mother "stays at home." I think it's a tragedy that most of us in the developed world have lost our extended kin networks. We no longer have sisters who can breastfeed our babies if we are away, or cousins next door to tend to our little ones, or grandparents who can be a daily part of their grandchildren's lives. We live in a culture in which work and family life occur in strictly separated spheres. Can we imagine new ways of combining the need to earn a living and raise a family, outside of todays' either/or options (working mom or SAHM? Paid out-of-the-home employment or unpaid stay-at-home parent?)

I had to laugh at this comment: "I don't understand why washable nappies and breastfeeding should ruin your sex life? It sounds all in the mind to me, oh no darling not tonight I've got to wash some nappies!!??"

Please read the article and the comments (and be warned, some of them get really off-topic), and then come back and discuss!

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Positive role models

I am usually not someone to follow celebrities. But this article about Jennifer Garner's balancing acting with mothering is noteworthy. She discusses her experience nursing her daughter while filming in the Arizona heat. Yay for moms who are dedicated to breastfeeding!

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How Women Become Mothers

I just came across this eloquently written article about giving birth, mentioning Ricki Lake's new documentary. It's called "How Women Become Mothers." A great read for Mother's Day.

And here's an interview with Ricki Lake about her documentary.

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Home Economics

I followed a recent link on Hathor the Cowgoddess' website, to this fantastic article "Home Economics, Sustainability, and 'The Mommy Wars.'" It's particularly interesting in light of our recent discussions about SAHM's and the "feminine mistake."

A snippet from her article:

And all of this focus on the women in question, and the impact of whether women work misses the basic point that for most of human history, children spent much more time with both parents than they do now, and that many of the negatives we attribute to the separation of children from their mothers might equally or more be said of the separation of children from their fathers.

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Are SAHMs making "The Feminine Mistake"?

Jennifer at The Lactivist recently posted about a new book called The Feminine Mistake. You can watch an interview with the author here.

Time is limited, but I wanted to raise the following points in response to the author's argument that women should not stay at home to raise their children, because they will suffer financially if they ever try/need to reenter the workplace:

- Her assumption is that SAHMs operate under a Cinderella fantasy and that they had no idea that choosing to stay at home would limit their income potential. From the women I know--and myself too--we knew we'd be making economic tradeoffs. And we were more than okay with that! It's not something women go into with their eyes closed.

- The author's core beliefs and values center around a person's economic worth, income potential, and career. Given those set of assumptions, her arguments do have logical consistency. But for families who have rejected the idea that money and status are the key to fulfillment and happiness, her argument doesn't hold.

- Her alarmist and imperious approach (your husband WILL die, divorce you, or lose his job; day care is just as good as having a stay-at-home-parent because expert X says so; women who stay at home are just avoiding real life and taking the easy way out; women will wake up one day and be miserable and poor because they didn't go back to work right away).

- Her idealization of the glamorous, fulfilling, high-powered career. At the end of the day, a job is a job. It has good parts, okay parts, and lots of boring parts. I would hope that our core identities don't become that wrapped up in our paid employment. The author herself points out how unstable jobs are (speaking about husbands who lose their jobs); shouldn't we anchor our worth and identity in something more permanent?

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