Re: the last point about recognizing "mothering" vs "parenting," I can see both sides - but I think that leaning into the gendered language is also a particular invalidation to women who are mothers but not primary caregivers. Just the other day, I saw a collection of tweets of frustration from women whose husbands or partners were primary caregivers - either as stay at home dads, or because they had work that was more flexible or required less travel, etc. So many of these women found that their children's daycares, schools, healthcare providers, etc constantly refused to contact the fathers first, or at all, when issues came up, despite repeated explicit instructions. One mother shared a story of coming out of a day of meetings with her phone off to a series of increasingly hostile voicemails from the school demanding to know why she wasn't responding and picking up her sick child (and of course, the school hadn't contacted her completely available husband, despite his designation as the first point of contact). As a therapist who works with kids, I've honestly caught myself falling into this at times, and had to make sure I was contacting a mother primarily or exclusively based on that family's request and not my own presumptions.
So I think that gendered designations of parenting result in erasing women in another way (as well as erasing men who fill that primary parenting role). I think it's much more appropriate and less distorting to talk about burdens and supports for parents, regardless of gender, and then to add - in the next breath - that women much more frequently take on those burdens and suffer from the lack of supports. The distinction matters. There's always an appeal to simplifying the world into neater categories, but we lose important things when we gloss over that complexity.
I run into a similar problem as your last point when trying to do (local/state) advocacy. Our locality is somewhat unfriendly to children, through a combination of failing to consider children/children’s needs, trying to make the locality appealing to (higher income) young professionals, a limited view of the typical/normative family, and cost of living. Our elected officials are also overwhelmingly men, and I struggle with how to advocate for considering children in local policies + pointing out how disadvantaging children has a disparate impact on mothers without getting “corrected” about how caregiving is gender-neutral. Which is true, it can be! But on balance, neglecting play spaces for young children and stroller-friendly sidewalks interferes with more mothers’ daily lives than fathers.
This is part of my problem with the term “pregnant people” as well. I think it is the female body in pregnancy and caregiving’s historical association with women that has produced our failure to accommodate and support pregnancy and caregiving - that it is directly born out of sexism against women *in particular*, not a genderless discomfort with pregnancy or children. In making them gender neutral, I worry that we risk glossing over the sexism aspect and enacting policies that end up disadvantaging women anyways - like Maryland’s recent paid family leave effort that excluded some part time workers, who are more likely to be women and more likely to be mothers of young children. And in all of this I think there is also a class/professional aspect, where the people writing the policies have full time jobs that the find meaningful, and therefore don’t consider or outright reject other caregiving/work arrangements, and the people funding the policy writing have monetarily benefited from profit margins off other people’s labor and therefore have a financial incentive to funnel more people into the paid, formal workforce.
I must say that my habit of picking Internet pseudonyms based on whichever maths problem occupy me at the moment has rarely been said to be delightful, but the compliment really made my day !
Using sex specific language is important for reflecting reality well and inviting women into an experience that is not "gender neutral." Women's experiences and histories are different to men and if this is obfuscated through neutral language, we lose our ability convey these experiences accurately and respectfully. In addition, correctly distinguishing between "gender" and "sex" is essential - I don't give birth because of a socially constructed "gender" but because of the sex of my body.
has anyone - ever - actually seen a toddler prefer his/her father over mother after a day apart if the child was a breastfed baby? i don't think so. this does not discount the work the father does. maybe he got up many times during the night. maybe he's the primary earner. maybe he's the more patient parent, does most of the cooking, or whatever. but, somehow, it seems, kids want their moms. and, that's okay! but, as a society, we need to acknowledge that for our families - our adult workforce, our children, our moms and dads and grandparents at work and at home. in this regard, the male norm is less engaged. they will never 'catch up' with women. there is just no equivalent. that said, women should not pay twice the price for their contribution to our culture - both in their physical hardship (and for me it certainly was a hardship with pregnancies and postpartum periods that were not easy) and in the career/financial hit they take with any time taken off work.
Re: the last point about recognizing "mothering" vs "parenting," I can see both sides - but I think that leaning into the gendered language is also a particular invalidation to women who are mothers but not primary caregivers. Just the other day, I saw a collection of tweets of frustration from women whose husbands or partners were primary caregivers - either as stay at home dads, or because they had work that was more flexible or required less travel, etc. So many of these women found that their children's daycares, schools, healthcare providers, etc constantly refused to contact the fathers first, or at all, when issues came up, despite repeated explicit instructions. One mother shared a story of coming out of a day of meetings with her phone off to a series of increasingly hostile voicemails from the school demanding to know why she wasn't responding and picking up her sick child (and of course, the school hadn't contacted her completely available husband, despite his designation as the first point of contact). As a therapist who works with kids, I've honestly caught myself falling into this at times, and had to make sure I was contacting a mother primarily or exclusively based on that family's request and not my own presumptions.
So I think that gendered designations of parenting result in erasing women in another way (as well as erasing men who fill that primary parenting role). I think it's much more appropriate and less distorting to talk about burdens and supports for parents, regardless of gender, and then to add - in the next breath - that women much more frequently take on those burdens and suffer from the lack of supports. The distinction matters. There's always an appeal to simplifying the world into neater categories, but we lose important things when we gloss over that complexity.
I run into a similar problem as your last point when trying to do (local/state) advocacy. Our locality is somewhat unfriendly to children, through a combination of failing to consider children/children’s needs, trying to make the locality appealing to (higher income) young professionals, a limited view of the typical/normative family, and cost of living. Our elected officials are also overwhelmingly men, and I struggle with how to advocate for considering children in local policies + pointing out how disadvantaging children has a disparate impact on mothers without getting “corrected” about how caregiving is gender-neutral. Which is true, it can be! But on balance, neglecting play spaces for young children and stroller-friendly sidewalks interferes with more mothers’ daily lives than fathers.
This is part of my problem with the term “pregnant people” as well. I think it is the female body in pregnancy and caregiving’s historical association with women that has produced our failure to accommodate and support pregnancy and caregiving - that it is directly born out of sexism against women *in particular*, not a genderless discomfort with pregnancy or children. In making them gender neutral, I worry that we risk glossing over the sexism aspect and enacting policies that end up disadvantaging women anyways - like Maryland’s recent paid family leave effort that excluded some part time workers, who are more likely to be women and more likely to be mothers of young children. And in all of this I think there is also a class/professional aspect, where the people writing the policies have full time jobs that the find meaningful, and therefore don’t consider or outright reject other caregiving/work arrangements, and the people funding the policy writing have monetarily benefited from profit margins off other people’s labor and therefore have a financial incentive to funnel more people into the paid, formal workforce.
I must say that my habit of picking Internet pseudonyms based on whichever maths problem occupy me at the moment has rarely been said to be delightful, but the compliment really made my day !
Using sex specific language is important for reflecting reality well and inviting women into an experience that is not "gender neutral." Women's experiences and histories are different to men and if this is obfuscated through neutral language, we lose our ability convey these experiences accurately and respectfully. In addition, correctly distinguishing between "gender" and "sex" is essential - I don't give birth because of a socially constructed "gender" but because of the sex of my body.
has anyone - ever - actually seen a toddler prefer his/her father over mother after a day apart if the child was a breastfed baby? i don't think so. this does not discount the work the father does. maybe he got up many times during the night. maybe he's the primary earner. maybe he's the more patient parent, does most of the cooking, or whatever. but, somehow, it seems, kids want their moms. and, that's okay! but, as a society, we need to acknowledge that for our families - our adult workforce, our children, our moms and dads and grandparents at work and at home. in this regard, the male norm is less engaged. they will never 'catch up' with women. there is just no equivalent. that said, women should not pay twice the price for their contribution to our culture - both in their physical hardship (and for me it certainly was a hardship with pregnancies and postpartum periods that were not easy) and in the career/financial hit they take with any time taken off work.