Motherhood & the women's movement:

...And women who didn't have roles but only lives knew that the question was not simply justice, it was life...

...But they waited anyway for some word to filter back, and when it did it was a corker: Give dolls to your sons...

...To remain fully committed to the women's movement, one constantly had to remember the saying that' 'an idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it...

...This was important because it was true, but deceptive because it omitted the fact that preceded and created it: women (and men, too) love their children mightily...

...From morning till dark, women of all ages and stations live different lives, better lives, because the women's movement exists...

...The second fact is that the Equal Rights Amendment has not been ratified...

...a time when people found themselves either parents or nonparents because it was The Thing To Do...

...If women did not love their children so dearly, the job of raising them would not be so difficult...

...One of the many ironies of the movement is that it has made a huge difference without gaining both a huge and committed following a fact that illustrates simultaneously the legitimacy of its basic issues and the foolish elitism of its methods...

...The women who believed in the basic feminist issues of equal opportunity, equal pay, and the right to be treated as full citizens and whole persons, but disbelieved in change for its own sake, were conveniently ignored by the movement because their beliefs complicated efficient, streamlined issues...

...All things considered, this was a feat of effort and detachment few people were inclined to attempt especially nonworking mothers who had been, in effect, rejected by the movement as insufficiently symbolic...

...If enough people do a difficult job at the same time, the fact that the job is commonplace will completely overshadow the skills required to do it well...

...And when stories began to appear in print of thirty-five-year-old women who had for...

...I say this as a fulltime mother who needed embracing, one who would have returned the embrace had they made the first move, with honesty...

...The trouble continued when women were expected to identify themselves incessantly as women...

...I wish them luck...

...These were people who chose to give, often at their own expense (since this is the true nature of giving), because it deepened and enriched their lives...

...Things being what they are, she is also a woman who needs to be told that she knows something...

...And the women who hoped for progress, but did not see motherhood as an idea or their lives as public causes or themselves as angry victims, felt the parade passing them by completely...

...The irony of it...

...People may find solace in the fact that their problems are not unique, but they can find no answers there...

...For this well-earned maturity and honorably gained insight, women were told by the movement that they were suppressing their Selves and living through their children...

...This wasn't the only fact they exploited whose source they failed to credit...

...Some of the byproducts of this awareness are human insight, philosophical and psychological resilience, and the instinct to know what's important and what isn't...

...If the leaders of the women's movement see no connection between these two facts, then their days of impact are behind them...

...I'll be watching with interest...

...Most women have accepted this state of affairs as they would accept a surprise inheritance from a snooty relative: glad to have it, but facts are facts...

...The leaders of the women's movement exploited the love mothers feel for their children without ever acknowledging it...

...And that wasn't all...

...The essence of being a mother is a woman's awareness that for as long as she lives, she will be bound to her children by her own intimate love and concern and hope...

...These were people who understood that nobody can Have It All, but it's every person's right to try so long as he doesn't whine about the burdens of the effort...

...Mothers needed to hear aloud a truth that existed in their own minds and hearts, but seemed to exist few other places: that the commonplace work of raising children had value not dollar value, but social value, personal value, moral value...

...Totally ignored was the fact a woman who can help to instill in her growing children compassion and courage and honor and humor, while also managing housework and homework and carpools and illness, and do it all day, everyday, year after year, is a woman who knows something...

...The movement offered most women, in the guise of guidance and support, more ceaseless expectations, more ways to fail, and Oh, my God more potential guilt...

...If feminists are trying to analyze the failure of the ERA, they might look back to the moment when millions of women grew tired of sightseeing and headed for home...

...And now, twelve years later, two facts are obvious to me...

...For while feminists advised mothers and prodded mothers and supported mothers politically, they never embraced mothers...

...The condition of motherhood is one of life's ultimate inescapable facts...

...Mothers offered the women's movement insight into ways of doing a difficult and rewarding job while maintaining sanity and perspective and humor...

...deadened minds were large nuggets of genuine reward and satisfaction found nowhere else in life...

...It was a time of roles...

...Fulltime in spite of the fact that my household could have used a second income...

...They looked to the women's movement to speak this truth for them, and they looked in vain...

...Fulltime" meaning all the work, all the care, all the time (with help from my husband after his day at his fulltime job...

...WOMEN with children provided the movement, at a crucial point in its progress, with the possibility of a mutually beneficial exchange...

...Its leaders are making plans for a more systematic political approach, an approach in which every woman counts because every woman represents a potential vote...

...No ally there...

...Left untouched was the fact that amidst the confinement and relentlessness and stripped nerves and janet scott barlow, mother oftwo and a former preschool teacher, has written for Parents Magazine, Marriage and Family Living, and the Cincinnati Post...

...This is not to say that the women's movement has had no impact...

...The questions raised during the seventies were, to a large extent, human questions...

...years confidently but casually declined motherhood like a piece of chewing gum, and were now either overcome with the need to reproduce and nurture and love, or all giddy with discovery after having babies, the other women the ones who had long understood that a woman's body is indeed a female place didn't know whether to laugh or cry...

...So after women had wandered off for a while to see Boys And Girls Are Alike They Just Look Different, and had gone a little farther to check out Sexual Politics and Finding Yourself, they finally said, "Aw, the hell with it...

...I'm tired and overworked and guilty," the other women the ones who had made some peace with the fact that all worthwhile human endeavor has a cost smiled slightly and turned away...

...It was time to worry when your son chose trucks over dolls and your daughter dressed as a nurse on Halloween...

...They knew it was a lie...

...The ERA is dead today partly because of this failure...

...The trouble started when those questions were given purely political answers...

...The first is that most mothers know more than anyone else about the nature of love and duty, the conflict of love and guilt, the mixed bag of surprise rewards and unforeseen heartaches and the endless ways in which a complex job can fulfill and deplete at the same time...

...But for a nonworking mother to have felt an attachment and commitment to the women's movement, she would first have had to hear that she was right to follow her choice, was free not to act as a symbol, free not to represent a cause...

...While the women's movement was asking much of women in the way of self-examination, commitment, and courage to change, and doing much for women in the way of political and social advancement, it wasn't offering much to women in the way of understanding and acceptance of lives already chosen, already being lived...

...They took a straight-line shortcut toward a worthy goal, lacking the courage to see that in human problems the shortest distance between two points is rarely a straight line...

...The movement offered mothers the possibility of vocal public validation of worthy work done with skill...

...Nothing much here...

...Fulltime because I thought I could be a "complete" person and raise my children at the same time...

...The dirty trick was not in examining this condition...

...I'm going home...

...Fulltime motherhood was characterized as confining, relentless, nerve-stripping and mind-deadening all of which was partly true, some of the time...

...But they turned back with regret because they had hoped to view something grand...

...The first move was theirs to make...

...a time when women were bewildered and angered by the consequences of situations not chosen but merely accepted...

...Despair is personal business no matter how many people feel it at once...

...Thoughtful people who supported the basic ideas of a movement whose time had come found themselves rejecting leaders whose methods and rhetoric dishonored the validity of their own issues and the courage it took to raise those issues...

...They took the expedient course, with power and politics as their guides, and the result was predictable...

...And one of the byproducts of living an "ordinary" life is that one has time for only so much sightseeing...

...and because the stakes were so high all round, the honesty was vital...

...So when, inevitably, Having It All hit the fan in public, when women with careers and homes and husbands and children and Selves finally cried out, "Hold it...

...Since then, I have followed my nature, my needs, and my early personal commitment, and have remained a fulltime mother...

...This had long been the case (and still is) of women who were mothers...

...Women were told to monitor their children's play roles and toys, make sure their sex lives were fifty-fifty, divide housework evenly with their husbands, find their Selves, know their Selves, fulfill their Selves and assert their Selves...

...This is tough...

...It was a time and this was nothing new when women (and men, too) got up one morning to find themselves married to the wrong person for the wrong reasons...

...it was in telling such people that the responsibility for the problem and the source of the solution were somewhere outside themselves, could be sought through political movements or social causes...

...If women did not love their children so fully, they could make quick work of guilt and anxiety and choices and options...

...From a distance...

...If we can believe what we read, the women's movement is in a time of transition, reorganization, and re-evaluation...

...But this fact has not made large numbers of women grateful converts to feminism...

...And responses to life were not to be found in easy slogans and forced symbols and convenient roles...

...During the early, highly vocal years of the women's movement, mothers who chose to stay home with their children were used as negative symbols, a point of departure...

...But it was also a time nothing new here either when women and men took responsibility for their own lives, and made choices that involved trade-offs with the wisdom not to label every exchange a "sacrifice...

...In the process, and because it suited their ends, movement leaders gave voice to an important but deceptive fact: raising children can be painful...