Two Books that Begin with the Body
(Plus, a possible Other Feminisms summer book club)
I had the pleasure of reading and responding to two books that I think are of definite interest to Other Feminisms readers. Jennifer Banks’s Natality is a heartfelt, curious work on different ways women thinkers have centered natality in their account of human life and human purpose.
For nearly a year, I think, Jennifer has been leading a reading group on women and birth, which I’ve really enjoyed. It’s partially the topic, and partially that I love any regular gathering where I get together with thoughtful people for a deliberately chosen matter for thought.
Social media algorithms often direct my attention to places that interest me less, or are even actively bad for me, but it’s harder to turn away from a lively conversation without something else to turn to.
Several of us from the reading group wrote personal responses to Jennifer’s Natality for Current. Here is an excerpt from mine:
Jennifer Banks’s Natality opens with a stark fact: There is no such thing as a lone individual. As she writes in her introduction,” We may die alone, but we were never born alone . . . Our births were made possible by other people and were conditioned by the material world we arrive in, a world that is materially altered by our births.”
We begin our lives in a vertical, asymmetrical relationship. When we place natality at the heart of what it means to be human, we can begin to discern how to approach the many relationships, chosen and unchosen, that will develop throughout our lives. It can be tempting to deny our dependence on others or to reframe our relationships to all be equal and symmetrical. But the asymmetry of natality persists throughout our lives—we never stand alone, and our relationships are rarely exactly equal.
Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress is a more combative salvo that, for all it’s provocative framings, has a simple plea at the center of it: don’t frame women’s liberation through the denial of our bodies.
I was part of a panel responding to her book at DC’s Catholic Information Center, and my daughter was intent on underscoring my points on children contradicting our belief we can control everything. (She spent much of the panel on my lap, rather than with friend who was sitting).
Alexandra DeSanctis, Christine Emba, and I each wrote up our response to Mary’s remarks. Here’s an excerpt from my essay:
Our culture is distrustful of distinctiveness. It is easiest to guarantee that we can be fair to one another when we are all flatly equal. Any asymmetry, particularly the asymmetry between men and women, or between parents and paid care workers, is suspect.
As Harrington lays out, our culture responds with a frantic pursuit of modularity. Whatever is distinctive to us should be severable and shareable. The capacities of our bodies should be swappable with technological substitutes or paid assistants. The ties of our hearts should be disclaimed as merely chosen, held for as long as they make us happy and no longer.
Finally, I wanted to gauge readers interest in having a summer Other Feminisms book club. I keep finding that thinkers I love tend to cite The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul. It’s something I’d love to read with friends.
I’ve got The Autonomy Myth: A Theory Of Dependency by Martha Albertson Fineman and Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace by Sara Ruddick on my “to-read-in-2023 list” (though I don’t yet know how I’ll like them).
I also keep having the impulse to return to A Wizard of Earthsea, which I’ll admit is less obviously an Other Feminisms book than Left Hand of Darkness, but… I like it better. And LeGuin resolves her plot in a way that cuts against many of our assumptions about how difference and asymmetry must be handled.
I began but haven't had time to finish Vanessa Olorenshaw's book Liberating Motherhood.
https://a.co/d/cnctwkh
I like what I've read so far. Some excerpts:
"I am now a Feminist with a capital F, since becoming a mother. It became vivid and real to me just how women are devalued when they dare to connect to their female body and power. If feminism is for the rights of women but does not reflect or fully support the rights of a woman *as* a mother, then it's letting women down. It is failing to see a huge part of the picture... It is not enough to talk work/life balance, childcare, sharing care, flexible working or the pay gap... If our culture remains misogynistic and premised on patriarchal economics, mothers will have to play by the rules they didn't write and which fail and exploit them. Sisters, our right to care for our children *without sacrificing full citizenship or financial safety* is a right yet to be won."
"We are unaffected by maternity for longer than our ancestors ever were. So by the time the *mother* problem becomes *our* problem, we're so mired in it that any action we can agitate for is too little, too late. For us. The average age for first-time mothers in the West is increasing. It is now into our thirties. What does that mean, in reality? It means feminism is becoming *remote* from mothering."
"We have had, what, thirty-plus years of child-free feminism to live and preach. No room for nappies. No room for thinking about 'non-economic' contributions to society. No room for remembering that while a woman can do anything a man can do, there are three big things a woman can do that a man can't: create life, give birth, and breastfeed. We need to proclaim that power rather than be ashamed. We have internalised the message that we do not matter and that these things are inconsequential, or make us weaker... Our experiences may well be ethereally gender-neutral until a human being makes his way down our vagina and attaches to our breast, covering us in amniotic fluid and connecting us with the life-creating and birthing process of generations of women before us.
"We have sneered at work ([gestating, birthing,] breastfeeding) when it is something only a woman can do... We devalue work (child-rearing) when it is work traditionally done by women. We have failed to protect and support mothers or value women's life-creating power and life-sustaining work. Sisters, we must demand greater support and flexibility for that - not simply the liberation *from* it."
"This is not to say that sex is destiny. Feminism has been there, and done that. But somewhere along the line, the rightful protest that we are *more* than mothers and more than our wombs has led to a failure to remember that we are, still, *mothers.*"
"Just so you know, this ain't no backlash. There were never any good ol' days: feminism hasn't 'gone too far.' Actually, it didn't go far *enough*... We cannot expect feminism to succeed until we embrace all women. And that includes mothers. We cannot treat women as being of value and worthy of respect only where they disavow or sideline matters of motherhood. We cannot exile motherhood from feminism... 'Our oppression as females is closely linked to and bound up in our roles as the bearers of new life and male hatred of our female reproductive power.' It is all connected: motherhood and feminism cannot and should not be separated."
"If current trends in social and economic policy are anything to go by, there will be greater and greater barriers against our ability to care for our own families. And conditions may well become so intolerable owing to lack of money, security, support, respect, freedom and autonomy (or exhausting second shifts) that we, and the next generations of mothers, will struggle; but the blame will be placed on *motherhood.* Not politics. Not economics. Not patriarchy. Not neoliberal pathological market-driven environmental and social destruction. Not misguided attempts by some feminist camps to eradicate mothering. But *becoming a mother.* And that script is being written right now with the sanction of women, female politicians, and of course, patriarchal neoliberalism."
"However, just because a voice grabs the mic doesn't mean that it is either right or in the majority: a woman at home raising her family, happily or not, will not have her voice heard... If we struggle to speak of the issues that remain for all women under patriarchy, we are even more bound when we try to articulate the mother issue. There is an awkwardness about women's reproductive and mothering experience. They are seen as more private and personal... We may not speak our own line: that being a mother by desire is, for many women, one of the most precious experiences of our lives."
"The political and economic system must start to reflect this reality and the reality of what many, *many* women want: to have their work as mothers respected, valued and supported. For their return to employment to be a time of their genuine choosing, rather than compulsion. We have a long lifespan. With that in mind, we can do better than forced workforce participation for our *entire* adult lives."
"We cannot and must not tolerate financial sacrifice and greater risk of poverty in women because they raised their family for the benefit of society. The answer to the 'mother question' and the 'feminisation of poverty' cannot in all conscience continue to be 'get her earning a pittance outside the home when she would prefer to be with her children.'"
"It is important for our culture and socio-economic systems to start to value *care* and *carers.* This is so whether the carers are men or women, whether parents or paid professionals, or other relatives, such as grandparents or even children. Indeed, in the UK, there is a significant number of children who care for their parents or siblings. It is important. When I argue for valuing care it is with *all* carers - of the young, the sick, the disabled, the elderly, and the dying - in mind."
"Maternal feminism [is a movement which is] reminding the world to remember the need for love and humanity, and which places mothers at the heart, rather than in the margins."
I realize this is my first post here -- I've so enjoyed reading Other Feminisms since I discovered your work last year! Just wanted to chime in that I would love to join a book club that discussed The Technological Society, however the book club took shape. I've very much wanted to read Ellul's work for some time, and would love to read it with a group of thoughtful people...