What’s up with N.O.W.???
Apr 22, 2002 Ancient Archives, Feminism/Politics
My god, NOW (National Organization for Women) pisses me off sometimes. I am so sick of their daycare/daycare/daycare push instead of a push for CHOICE! Reproductive choice should also include how you *choose* to live your life after reproducing! I was pissed about their take on the recent decision by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine to start an information campaign about the very real decrease in fertility women can expect as they age. What does NOW do? They respond thisaway:
So, should women be panicked about loss of fertility if they wait to have children?
No. Caution, but not fear, is in order. … Still, only some 2 percent of babies are born to women over 40. Women in their twenties and early thirties are most likely to conceive, and after 35, the ability to conceive drops for most women, and the risk of birth defects or other abnormalities rises.
I don’t know. Sounds to me like those very real stats *are* pretty scary. Remember, I’m a 32-year old fertility-challenged women who knows whereof she speaks. And then:
If the United States had better child care and leave policies, if the American workplace were more family-friendly, women would not be forced to wait until they were older to have children.
See there’s that daycare push! Like it’s the panacea for all of our woes! Yes, yes, we need more and better childcare. Absolutely. I agree. But I feel like NOW is as backward as the old-school, blue-pinstriped bad guys on this issue! Of course there are feminist women who want careers modeled on the “male” concept of work-out-of-the-home (and there should be policies that support her decision) but many other feminist women *don’t* want to work that way. They don’t want family time relegated to evenings and weekends. They want more flexibility in the long-term, not just in a daily flex-time schedule that lets them cram their 40 hours a week into four days instead of five. They want a parent’s decision to be at home to be respected, to be financially beneficial to the family (in the form of tax breaks, social security, that kind of thing). They want to be able to CHOOSE because feminism is about CHOICE.
Here’s a quote from an interview with Anne Roiphe:
DAVID GERGEN: Anne, some 30 years ago, you began having children and you also began marching in favor of women’s rights. Now you question in your book is there a contradiction between being a mother and a feminist. Is there a contradiction?
ANNE ROIPHE, Author, Fruitful: I don’t believe there’s a contradiction. I believe that it is our human right to be parents and women. And there’s no contradiction between feminism, which means women should have all that they are entitled to, all that they can do, all the opportunities that they can take advantage of they should have. That includes parenting; however, in the early days of feminism for a while there it became unfashionable and somehow not quite right to want to be a parent. And mothering was thought of as a secondary activity, and I’m someone who simply couldn’t accept that. Children were too much, too important to me.
Later in the same interview Ms. Roiphe talks about the drop in fertility women experience in their 30s and 40s and Mr. Gergen asks when she thinks is a good time for women to think about motherhood.
ANNE ROIPHE: I would suggest mid 20’s to early 30’s , and I would suggest that not that women give up their careers and have their children but that we work out a timetable in the culture so that we can build a career and have children, take longer to make partner, take longer to do a residency, take longer to become a CEO, and men and women can both in their late 20’s and early 30’s devote themselves partially to the needs of their young families.
How’s that for a revolutionary idea? Change the system to allow parents of both sexes to make choices that work for them! Wouldn’t that *really* be a radical feminist goal? To quit pretending that the wants and needs of families don’t exist? To allow women to say out loud, “I want to be with my baby!” without shouting her down about how she’s just been brainwashed by the patriarchy? Fuck the far right! Just because they’re all happy thrilled to see me cooking for my kid doesn’t mean they win! Hell, I’m teaching my son to be a radical so ha! They lose!
You know, I’m *surrounded* by feminist mothers at home; we’re not exactly a rare breed. Being at home is part of our commitment to feminism. My (feminist) mother raised me to believe that I’m more than a paycheck, that at-home motherhood is a worthy endeavor, and that questioning the status quo is POWERFUL and RADICAL.
I wrote this in part for the We Have Brains collaborative. The challenge was this:
What are you going to do about it? Name at least one feminist act you’ve done in the past week. And then come up with a plan of action: what do you have to contribute, and what are you going to do in the next week/month/year/millennium? It doesn’t have to be extreme (but it can be), it doesn’t have to be something the feminist next to you would approve up (but you could get her/him to join you), it just needs to be some sort of action.
My feminist action is my daily commitment to be a proud stay-at-home *feminist* mother. Rock on.
December 5th, 2003 at 7:14 am
april 22 lightbulb oprah moment a kindred spirit in what you said in this part of your journal.Thankyou.