Category: motherhood

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‘UNFIT’ MOTHERS: THE BURDEN OF STEREOTYPES

By Srilagna Majumdar

During everyday conversations and discourses, we come across labels given to mothers that are burdened by stereotypes and fraught with sky-touching expectations limited by narrow definitions. Aimed at the welfare of others, this focus is seldom targeted towards women’s wellbeing. There have been so less frequent moments when fathers, and children, or people, in general, look at mothers as separate and independent human beings. Writing as an Indian student, engaged in feminist studies, it appears that the stereotypes that mothers are often corralled into can be organized into three main categories: Mothers as (a) primary caregivers, (b) teachers or role models, and (c) household workers or homemakers (Tessier, Gosselin, 2018). It would be safe to say that these categories are most often applied to biological mothers.

As a college student, contemplating the subject of motherhood, it appears that media depictions as well as the general tenure of social expectation dictate women caregivers must give exclusive priority to their children. Certainly, babies require much care and mothers are often the primary sources for expressions of love as well as providers of food and shelter. Being a good caregiver involves balancing many roles, including that of nurturer and a disciplinarian (as required). These qualities are highlighted in society with the expectation that mothers put everything on hold to be more available to their children and devote all of themselves to motherhood as the primary obligation. This belief reflects a deep internalization of an intensive mothering ideology. The mothers I know see themselves as purveyors of wisdom, important teachers- not exclusively in the academic sense- but as a source of information about how to get along in the world, which contemporary women are often encouraged to do.

But, within the home, many mothers are managers of the household. Women who are mothers are seen by some to embrace this duty to family almost exclusively. Many of the mothers I studied perceived themselves as very loyal toward their families. The chores associated with maintaining a stable home were a signifier of demonstrated loyalty. While divorced mothers might be perceived as failures: cowards, frivolous, weak for not persevering or enduring in the marriage (even whoreish, and easy-prey for free sex), promiscuous, irresponsible, selfish, not trustworthy, lacking courage, incapable of maintaining a family, alone and without protection, disrespectful of God’s rules, and without moral values – a heavy burden to contemplate, indeed (Aneja, Vaidya, 2016).

Outside the home, working mothers, portrayed by the media, or judged generally through a negative lens by society as well, are accountable not only to themselves but to the public at large. It is presumed that a mother, who works outside the home, would be incapable of managing the necessities of her children. If a mother keeps her child in the custody of a nanny, or a crèche, while she goes for work, society apprehends that it will affect the upbringing of the child and that full responsibility of any perceived outcome, is to be taken on solely by the working mother.

As in the previous two examples, mothers have a difficult time performing in the “correct” manner expected of them. Deviations from perceived “norms” are prone to accountability and assessment. Lesbian mothers, i.e. same-sex mothers are viewed as unfit, by society, in cases that I have read about or heard of. These negative conceptions appear particularly rooted in religious doctrine. Stereotypes regarding lesbian mothers as not normal are promoted by entrenched beliefs that children should be raised by a mother and a father, not by two mothers. The argument for this lack of a male parent, doctrine asserts, might confuse children, especially regarding their own sexual preference when they become teenagers (Tessier, Gosselin, 2018). Participants of interviews conducted by Vadiya, in 2016, reported different cultural norms influencing their attitudes. This included coming from a conservative Catholic religious background, uncontested and unchecked concepts of machismo, and the fact that interviewees did not know any lesbian parents personally, further polarizing them from actions outside of hegemonic ideals and further entrenching erroneous assumptions about “good” parenting.

The themes of deficiency and lack, good and bad mothers, the burden of care, and the valorization of the mothering role that have been explored here acquire a new dimension when we take into account a different kind of embodiment, namely, disability. When the mother in question is a disabled woman, the discourse of motherhood becomes even more complicated. Sexuality, conjugality, and motherhood are associated with normative, desirable, fertile bodies, whereas the disabled body is regarded as defective, undesirable, and thus, devalued (Aneja, Vaidya,2016). Motherhood denotes caregiving, while disability suggests a person in need of care herself, and thus, being unfit to assume the caring role for another, especially of one as vulnerable as an infant. We can certainly see how difficult it is for mothers to avail themselves of additional scrutiny.

Disability has historically been viewed as a ‘problem’ or aberration in need of fixing or remediation, suggesting that something is missing or lacking. The personhood and agency of women who are deemed ‘the other’ on account of their bodily differences are denied in the context of their reproductive needs and rights. Women with disabilities are regarded either as asexual beings incapable of becoming sexual companions or as hyper-sexual and unregulated ones (Aneja, Vaidya, 2016). In some cases, disabled mothers were abandoned by husbands, who later got married to able-bodied women at the behest of the man’s family. Many times, it is revealed that disabled mothers experience violence within the family, both emotional as well as severe physical violence in some cases. It can be imagined, how these disabled mothers also have to explain to their children why they can’t participate in an activity, attend a field trip, or use the same door [as their children do]. They might even have to spend a great deal of time explaining themselves or educating other people, and that can wear a person down (Scroll,2018).

In most societies, the predominant image of the family is represented by a middle-class, first-marriage nuclear family with two heterosexual parents, including a working father, a stay-at-home mother, and biological children (Routledge, “Marriage and Family review”, 2018). Social institutions, including mass media, language, legal systems, and religion, convey the message that this family configuration is the norm. As a student who wants to arrive at a finer feminist perspective, I feel this is how agency over the body and consent for the things done to it are appropriated by medical, legal, and social practices that challenge the very personhood and humanity of the mothers who want to break away from the society generated idea of how a mother should be.

Citations:

A Literature Review of Cultural Stereotypes Associated with Motherhood and Fatherhood, Sophie-Claire Valiquette-Tessier, Julie Gosselin, Kristel Thomassin, 2018

EMBODYING MOTHERHOOD-Perspectives from Contemporary India, Anu Aneja and Shubhangi Vaidya, Yoda Press, 2016

‘Your priority is your baby’: Why does India have a culture of demonizing working mothers?, Article by Scroll, 2018

Edited by M. Joy Rose

About Srilagna:

Srilagna Majumdar is a student of History, third Year in Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. She is a keen student of social sciences and wants to pursue her future in Museology. She is currently working with 1947 Partition Archive and Stanford University for a project regarding interviewing Partition witnesses. She is also a Digital Content writer and editor at the same Archive. She wrote papers on Redefining gender roles to get a wider perspective of gender relations in the Global South. Srilagna Majumdar lives in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. She is also working for developing the proper ways of editing Partition witness’s stories and preparing them for digitization. She is also working with the Partition Museum to archive Partition history and find how women were affected during the same. She interns with Daak, a nonprofit organization for promoting lesser-known artworks and artists of South Asia. Srilagna is also the research authenticator at India Lost and Found, a heritage conservation initiative by Amit Pasricha. She is an oral histories and research intern at Kashmir Untold, an initiative to archive stories of Kashmiri migrants and is also working for exploring various aspects of motherhood in society and trying to arrive at a finer feminist lens by being an intern at the Museum of Motherhood, Florida.

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Education gender health home Internships Medical motherhood Queering Parenting

Accepting Help

By Aster Woods

Can you imagine a scenario that would finally push you over the edge?

Or do you just keep telling yourself you can handle anything?

For people who care for others, hitting rock bottom is often an abstract principle. You do whatever it takes to keep on going. Because what’s the alternative? Really? People you love are counting on you. If you’re exhausted, you have to keep going. If you’re overwhelmed, you have to keep going. If your hands are shaking so badly that you break the plate you’re trying to clean, and then you burst into tears because you’ve failed to clean that plate, and then can’t stop crying, and then go numb and sometime later realize you’re still sitting on the kitchen floor…you stand up and finish the washing up, hands wrinkling in the cold water. Because you have to keep going.

I care for my mother. I need a break, I tell her. She doesn’t understand why; I explain that I’m struggling with my mental health, that I’m tired and stressed all the time. That I have been for a long time and it’s taking a serious toll.

She suggests I try chilling out.

I leave the room and scream into my pillow.

A few days later she hangs up the phone and beams at me. Your sister has agreed to help out while she’s visiting! Anger wells up inside me, hot and dry. Why on earth is it up to her? My sister knows the least about this situation, has no knowledge of how hard it is. Why on earth is she the one to decide if I get to have a break or not? Why does she get to choose when she takes care of our mum, but I don’t?

I know this is supposed to be a good thing. But panic overwhelms me. I have been resenting my caregiving but I can’t let it go. I have held it too tightly for too long. It’s who I am. Can I trust my sister to do it right? Is she going to mess up my carefully organized systems, making more work for me in the long run?

Or worse. Is she going to tell me that this is all easy, that I have nothing to worry about really, that my stress and frustration and despair and isolation are not valid emotions, but rather a symptom of my weakness and failure?

Why is accepting help so difficult?

Why can’t we put down this toxic burden of control? I want to relinquish this weight of responsibility so badly. I want to be able to move freely within my life. To do things that are only about me. I know that I can be a better person if I manage to do this and that it will mean I take better care of my mum; as people are so fond of telling me.

You can’t pour from an empty cup.

But people are not cups. Filling yourself up again is difficult.

And this is what I think of as the heart of the problem: The stress is the only thing that enables you to get stuff done. The most sustainable option is to remain stressed, like a plane using less fuel to cruise than to land, refuel, and take off again.

Stress gets you out of bed in the morning, gets the kitchen cleaned. I can’t relax while there are the bins to take out; I can’t sleep properly if I’m also listening out for mum’s call for help.

To let go of my stress is to relinquish my responsibility; and that is an impossibility as long as I have people relying on me.

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Art Education Feminism Media MOM Art Annex motherhood motherhood hall of fame

HAPPY 100 YEARS OF THE VOTE FOR WOMEN IN AMERICA

Today is the 100 year anniversary of WOMEN GETTING THE VOTE in America. This is such a big deal!

Hard to believe, I was born only 37 years after this law was enacted.

Suffragette Sitting Room, MOM, NYC

At the Museum of Motherhood in NYC, we had an area called the Suffragette Sitting Room, where mothers would come and gather with their infants under the banner of these fearless warriors who marched, protested, and even starved for the right to be considered equal citizens.

I always find a way to include these foremothers of the feminist waves in the college classes I teach and remember fondly

Housewives On Prozac Band

the days when my band, Housewives On Prozac, was privileged to play the great city of Seneca Falls, New York, raising awareness about many of the issues mothers in America face. Those outstanding problems continue to include a continued lack of federally mandated paid parental leave, affordable childcare, accessible & adequate healthcare, as well as the issue of those who are home caring for loved ones without pay or social security in America today.

Let us not forget also, the simple willingness to declare “All people are created equal” according to the as-of-yet unratified ERA Amendment.
Thankfully, the fight for equality, access, and respect are continuing. From the Women’s March in Washington in 2016 thru the present, I  am so grateful to those worthy and peaceful activists at work in the #MeToo and #BLM movements who also see goals worth striving for. Let freedom ring.
~ Martha Joy Rose, Founder MOM
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Art Birth Education Featured health International motherhood Opportunities

Submissions Request – Each Egg a World: Stillborn Project

 

Adinda van ’t Klooster is making art about stillbirth.
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Adina organized the online exhibit, Each Egg a World after her own experience with having a stillborn child. Now she wants to help break through the “tremendous taboo” that she says thwarts discussion around stillbirth and hampers the funding of measures to bring the numbers down.
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To this end, she is inviting people who have suffered a stillbirth to contribute their stories to an online artwork which is set to be a highlight of the exhibition Still Born, which is due to tour later this year and in 2021 in London, Manchester and Newscastle (See full news story here online LINK).
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More than 100 people have already submitted their statements on their experience of stillbirth. This project is becoming a very moving piece of digital art as well as acting as a useful resource for raising awareness about stillbirth. Adina is looking for you to share your story. Click the egg below to see the exhibit. Click this link to submit to the exhibit.

(All art featured here by Adinda van ‘t Klooster)

Each Egg a World: Stillbirth

Featured Image Homepage: Porcelain Uterus: Fundal Height, imprinted porcelain, © Adinda van ’t Klooster, 2010, photograph by Colin Davison, 2017 
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Art Digital Media Internships Education Feminism gender home motherhood Queering Parenting Sociology

Let’s Talk About Monomaternalism

Explorations and Art by Aster Woods

What is Monomaternalism?

Monomaternalism, as defined by Shelley Park in her 2013 academic work ”Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood: Resisting Monomaternalism in Adoptive, Lesbian, Blended, and Polygamous Families” is essentially the pervasive notion that a person can have only one mother; it also privileges the bio-essentialist belief that only the birth mother is real. This notion naturally marginalizes the existence of adoptive parents, lesbian parents, transgender parents, inter-generational parenting (such as a mother-daughter team raising a child,) extended/blended families, and polyamorous families.

Let’s Unpack it!

As Shelley Park explains:

“Monomaternalism, as an ideological doctrine, resides at the intersection of patriarchy (with its insistence that women bear responsibility for biological and social reproduction), heteronormativity (with its insistence that a woman must pair with a man, rather than other women, in order to raise children successfully), capitalism (in its conception of children as private property), and Eurocentrism (in its erasure of polymaternalism in other cultures and historical periods)”

Monomaternalism’s patriarchal ethos has increased the pressure on mothers as they attempt to take care of their new baby within a vacuum, often devoid of support and under an overwhelming amount of pressure. While we are seeing a slow trend towards an even balance of parenting duties within nuclear families, society still has a skewed view of the responsibilities of the mother versus the father. The work being done, intellectually and culturally, to balance family dynamics will need to continue for several decades before a true equilibrium can be achieved.

Additionally, these parental gender roles can replicate in queer couples, with one partner bearing the weight of “motherhood” particularly if that person has physically given birth. Monomaternalism distances the non-birth-giving partner into an unreal and devalued form of parenting much closer to outdated archetypal fatherhood than traditional or contemporary motherhood. Additionally, we see withi8n monomaternalistic views the belief that the child themselves will suffer in a non-traditional environment; that only the straight, middle class, Eurocentric nuclear family is capable of raising a child successfully, and all other forms of child-rearing are to a greater or lesser extent covert forms of abuse. This particular belief is extraordinarily short-sighted as a large proportion of global cultures utilize an extended system of adults in order to raise children. The closed nuclear family is an outdated and relatively short-lived concept, as intergenerational households containing a number of different relationships and structures have been consistently the norm for much of our human history. I am also curious to see if, in the developed western world, we are likely to see a return to this family living structure as economic instability reduces the residential options of young couples, along with our improving healthcare and nutrition extending the average lifespan. It may become more normal for individual households to become communal, intergenerational extended and flexible arrangements, sharing childcare between them, as in other contexts.

Essentialism is a sociological theory that reduces a person to their biology, causing unsupported, widely erroneous claims.

“Antecedently convinced of biological essentialism, the romanticization of the biological mother-child bond shapes one’s phenomenological experiences of biological motherhood; those experiences then become “proof” of the essentialist hypothesis, making it a difficult hypothesis to dislodge.”

i.e. if a person is already convinced of biological motherhood being the only valid form of motherhood, the idealised view of the bond between mother and child forces that person to experience motherhood within that limited parameter (i.e. the biological bond is sacred and mystical) which then “proves” the original hypothesis, making a circular argument that is difficult to break. However, we have, as a society, a wealth of qualitative research and anecdotal evidence that proves that a mother-child bond can be profound to the point of sacredness in fathers and non-biological mothers.

What are just some of the negative consequences it has on families?

Competition among women for maternal status
This is especially prevalent when views differ on childrearing techniques, or best practices. At its most toxic, this can develop into a situation where the child’s autonomy is reduced and they are used as a pawn in a game they cannot understand. This situation can also play out inside a child’s mind, for instance after learning they have been adopted. It can cause significant emotional damage.

The erasure of many women’s childbearing and childrearing labors. 

A lack of attention to the ways in which women might— and sometimes do—mother cooperatively.
Much of the raising of children is devalued as only the biological mother’s input is seen as being true and valid parenting; although every adult who consistently interacts with a child has an influence on their wellbeing and development, this invisible labor is termed “babysitting” even when the adult in question has a societally valid link to the child (for instance, a grandmother or aunt.)

The treatment of children as private property.
This is a capitalist idiom that erases the rights of the child as an independent and autonomous person. Often used as a means of control within the context of punishment.
“I am your mother and you will do what I tell you to.”

The separation of children from mothers (and mothers from children) 

A lack of imagination concerning ways in which laws, policies, and practices could be transformed to better serve both women and children.
If a form of motherhood or parenting is not seen as legitimate it can have impacts far beyond the social; legal practices governing adoption and custody overwhelmingly privilege biological mothers and take little account of non-biological parenting. These have knock-on effects into child protection policies, family preservation policies, social welfare policies, tax incentives, census bureau definitions of family, school policies, hospital policies, employer benefit policies, and (in the case of diasporic families created through transnational adoption or by some other means) even foreign policy.

The maternal grief and guilt often suffered both by those who relinquish custody of their children and those who come to bear full responsibility for them.

Source:

Park, S. M. (2013) Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood : Resisting Monomaternalism in Adoptive, Lesbian, Blended, and Polygamous Families. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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Art Blog Cinema Feminism gender motherhood

Mother-Daughter and The Unsaid Things/ FILM

By Emily Zou

In my last post on Obachan’s Garden, a Japanese-Canadian documentary, I wrote about how focusing on the stories of mothers and grandmothers is important in disrupting the way that we remember our history and ancestry. For this week’s post, I’d like to write more locally about the wonderful way that a mother-daughter relationship is explored in Greta Gerwig’s 2017 film Lady Bird.

You’ve probably heard of Lady Bird, which made waves three years ago for its painful authenticity; Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut went on to score five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Director, and Actress. The consensus is clear: Lady Bird has brought together a ridiculously charming cast and created a captivating vision of Sacramento, all with some of the funniest and most heartbreaking dialogue committed to the screen.

But motherhood and daughterhood is the movie. In fact, the original draft for the film was titled Mothers and Daughters. The title Lady Bird instead refers to the name that our heroine, Christine (Sairose Ronan) chooses for herself, a perfect example of how eclectically rebellious she is. Desperate to fly to the east coast, to find “real culture”, Lady Bird follows Christine in her senior year of high school, as she falls in and out of love, smokes weed, gets into college, passes her driving test and performs in musicals. All the while, she fights with her mother, Marion, (Laurie Metcalf), a father dealing with depression, and coming to terms with her family’s status in a class-stratified society.

While ruminating on having to talk to people about creating her film, Gerwig remarks in a 2017 NPR interview that “most of those people are men. And if they were raised with sisters or if they had daughters, they knew what it was… But if they didn’t, they had no idea that that was how women fought and how they loved, too. I think it was kind of like they were getting to look into a world that they didn’t know existed”. As more women take the helm in moviemaking, stories that only we can tell come to light and are shared. And its movies like Lady Bird, that capture how beautifully painful leaving home and loving it only after you do so, can be. It’s a story that honors motherhood and our homes that was created because of the women’s own experiences.

There’s one scene that really sums up what makes this film so special to me, it goes something like this: Christine is talking about her college essay with a nun, she wrote it about Sacramento, and the nun remarks that you can tell how much she loves the town. No, Christine replies, I hate this place, I just pay attention, but the nun asks, gently, “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?” Cut to her Mom, anxiously waiting for her in a thrift store.

See, love is not always gentle, is not always understandable. But the best love is often the kind that perseveres even when it’s not easy, even when it’s not wanted. The realest loves are embarrassing and irritating and overcritical, but you have to love something a lot to believe in it. To love someone not because they are worth loving but because they are someone.

Lady Bird is painful to watch because it’s real. Gerwig has tapped into this very egocentric teenage stream of worries and worries. You change so much in adolescence; you’re in a constant state of shame for some past iteration of yourself and how earnest you were in being that version of you. You’re always cringing because of the things you forgot to love properly or for the things that you didn’t appreciate enough. And of course, you think you know everything, especially once you realize that you don’t.

And so after seeing a version of you (a teenager) portrayed on screen, you have to take a moment to step back from being caught up in your own head and your own worries. You take note of your surroundings, the home you take for granted, and then the people that have become part of your home.

I remember talking about Lady Bird with my mom after we watched it; we were hiking up a mountain and she was displeased that I had watched a movie that deals with sex and homosexuality. She didn’t like it, and in trying to explain why it touched me, I found that there were tears in my eyes as I tried to describe the raw, heartrending ending scene. She pointed out the traitorous evidence of my emotions and laughed at me.

And I guess its moments like that that prove Lady Bird’s point. Gerwig quipped “I don’t know any woman who has a simple relationship with their mother or with their daughter”, and the very messy way we love our mothers and daughters comes across so effectively in her movie.

I don’t even know if I will even be going to campus in the fall (I’ll be a freshman), but I have become acutely aware of this strange, liminal space that I float in, still at home but not really belonging to it anymore. We owe such an existential, unpayable gratitude to our mothers for all of the trouble they went to allow us to live our little lives. I don’t really talk to my mom much these days, but even when we do, whatever I say never seems to be enough to capture just how deeply I am in her debt. How do you even begin to walk around all of the unsaid things?

I haven’t the faintest clue. But I’ll place my faith in whoever is penning my coming of age story, hoping that they’re as fond of me as Gerwig was of Christine. That it’ll all turn out okay, that I’ll finally have the courage to say Thank you.

(Even if it’s only when I’m 460 miles away).

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Feminism gender Internships motherhood Queering Parenting

Meet Our New Intern and #Queering Motherhood:

In our ongoing efforts to bring education and practical knowledge together in a place where we can cooperatively learn and grow, MOM is proud to present the work of our newest intern Aster Woods. Aster hails from the Welsh/English border and is interested in museum curatorship, art, caregiving labor, and the notion of #queering motherhood. She contacted us regarding her interest in creating an online body of work around these topics.

The phrase “queering” something has been widely used to deconstruct normative assumptions about individuals and social expectations. By queering something, we are asking people to reconstruct a known definition of something and complexify it, complicate it, and disentangle it from its strict confines. Often motherhood, and the way in which it is performed, is something people are quick to judge and fast to condemn. Some believe that all mothers should only behave in nice, good, and proper ways. But, women who are mothers, are people first, with all their inherent problems, issues, and challenges. When we apply one universal theme to all people we stop seeing them for who they really are, which in turn makes the individual invisible. Below are some excerpts from the book Queering Motherhood, which Aster is reading as she goes through the next several weeks with us looking at this subject.

Essentialism is a sociological theory that reduces a person to their biology, causing unsupported, widely erroneous claims. From the book Queering Motherhood: “Antecedently convinced of biological essentialism, the romanticization of the biological mother-child bond shapes one’s phenomenological experiences of biological motherhood; those experiences then become “proof” of the essentialist hypothesis, making it a difficult hypothesis to dislodge.”P5

i.e. if a person is already convinced of biological motherhood being the only valid form of motherhood, the idealized view of the bond between mother and child forces that person to experience motherhood within that limited parameter (i.e. the biological bond is sacred and mystical) which then “proves” the original hypothesis, making a circular argument that is difficult to break. However, we have, as a society, a wealth of qualitative research and anecdotal evidence that proves that a mother-child bond can be profound to the point of sacredness in fathers and non-biological mothers.

“we may do psychic harm to children who do not live with their biological mothers, causing children who are adopted or raised by another mother to wonder why their real mother failed to exhibit maternal instinct.”P6

5 Reasons Why You Should Never Ask Queer Parents “Where does your baby come from?”

1. It’s invasive! The journey to queer parenting can be difficult, deeply personal and often unique. Respect boundaries.

2. You wouldn’t ask a straight family that. By asking a queer couple, you perpetuate their “othermess.”

3. You imply that their parentage is not valid or real. Their baby is their baby. End of discussion.

4. It’s disrespectful to the baby, too. As they grow older they will develop their own perspectives on their origins, and it should be up to them what they disclose, and to whom.

5. IT’S NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS! Your life will not be impacted by this knowledge in any way, therefore, you have no right to know. If the parents themselves share with you then that’s their choice. But don’t ever ask!

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Art Cinema Feminism gender History International motherhood

Obachan’s Garden – A Look At Motherhood In Cinema

“We think back through our mothers if we are women”– Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own.

By Emily Zou

Obachan’s Garden is a 2001 documentary directed by Linda Ohama, made to honor and remember her grandmother. (Obachan means grandmother in Japanese). Despite this simple conceit, the film takes on a wholly different life as the past is revealed and history is questioned. Moreover, the concepts of what a “good mother” is, are questioned, as well as how different cultural expectations of mothering can clash with each other.

The act of creating film centered on mothers and their experience of motherhood itself disrupts how we are used to learning about history– through our fathers and grandfathers. “Male- centered assumptions about history, as well as feminist ambivalence about motherhood, have complicated the enterprise of searching for mothers in history” writes Jodi Vandenberg-Daves in “Teaching Motherhood in History”. The act of remembering through our mothers offers not a new, but hidden perspective from the past.

“Ryosai Kenbo” is a Japanese word meaning “good wife, wise mother”, introduced during the Meiji period (1868-1912). Based on Confucian ideals of filial piety, it reinforces the idea that women could best serve their country by working at home. This was the ideal that Obachan was raised under, Obachan’s Garden explores how Obachan was trained from a young age to become a housewife, learning languages and dancing. Obachan then relocates to Canada as a picture bride, only to reject her husband the moment she sees him. She works for years to repay him for the ticket to Canada.

Motherhood in Canada was rapidly changing in the pre-World War Two era (when Obachan immigrated), with focus on an idea called the “Good Mother”, where mothering became more “professional”. There were more expectations on what a mother should or shouldn’t do, and the act of mothering became much more heavily scrutinized. A study by Western University explored how advertisements and magazines targeted mothers during this time period, “If mothers indulged their children with too much attention, their children would grow up to be dependent and sissified. Mothers who attended too little to their children’s needs and too much to their own, turned into screaming shrews, and their children became neurotic and fearful. If these precautions were not sufficiently intimidating, the articles also held up mothers who did everything so perfectly that they became unbearable prigs”. It is clear, then, that the way to be a mother was, and still is, heavily influenced by the rest of society.

All of this creates a multi-layered backdrop for Obachan as a mother, a complicated one that is explored through the documentary itself. Ohama paints a picture of a family learning more about their matriarch and her history.

Indeed, the documentary explicitly tells the audience the profound themes the film will explore. “How do we learn about things that have happened before us? And what about memories, what people remember? Are these memories always real?” Narrated over dreamy visuals, Ohama explores how our memory is fallible, how the stories that we hear are always one-sided. Through really getting to know her grandmother, the documentary pieces together a complicated past with motherhood.

In her article examining Obachan’s Garden, Sheena Wilson writes that “the telling of mother-stories can be reclaimed as an act of resistance, whether mothers are telling their own stories, or daughters and granddaughters are retracing their matrilineal genealogies”. We need more of these stories to “think through our mothers,” to see our history from their point of view.

Sources:

Fullerton, Romayne, and M.J. Patterson. “Procrustean Motherhood.” FIMS Publications, 2010.

Larsen, Robert. “Ryousai Kenbo Revisited.” Hastings International and Comparative Law Review, vol. 24, no. 2, 2001.

Wilson, Sheena. “Obachan’s Garden.” Demeter Press, 2016.

Read about Emily’s Remote Internship with MOM: Reviewing Motherhood in Cinema [CLICK]

 

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Art Cinema Featured Feminism gender motherhood

Motherhood in Cinema

By Emily Zou

“Motherhood studies as an area of scholarship is on precarious ground”, Samira Kawash warns in her article New Directions in Motherhood Studies. Advocacy for mothers and the study of feminism are inextricably linked, yet the study of motherhood has been largely neglected by the feminist movement. There are numerous reasons for this (which Kawash elaborates in her article), including the desire to remain separate from conservative “family values” and changing feminist theory. It will take years and a lot of work for this field to be more broadly recognized.

So this is that: the years and the work.

Through the next few weeks, I hope to understand and discuss films through a lens of motherhood studies, or as museum founder and scholar Martha Joy Rose elaborates “Mother Studies” citing motherhood as an institution, mothering as an act, and mothers as the persons at the center of this discourse. But, before we begin, I would like to explain why I feel studying both cinema and mothers is important.

There are three main reasons as to why film is worth thinking and writing about. The first is the most obvious: cinema has an audience, and the messages portrayed onscreen have real life impacts. Franklin Fearing wrote in 1947 that “motion pictures achieve their effects because they help the individual to cognize [their] world.” This still holds true today; anyone who has seen a film knows that it is not a passive experience, it is an interaction. Cinema allows us to peek into worlds that we could never imagineThey also can change our minds; a 2015 study from the University of Dayton found that 25% of participants changed their stance on the government after watching Argo and Zero Dark Thirty. The ideas expressed in movies are of consequence– they shape how we see the world. This is why so many people campaign for diversity onscreen and fight for more female directors. Accuracy in visibility is key to the millions of people who come in contact with these ideas.

So, studying fictional mothers is important because of what they mean to their audience. Of the influence of the portrayal of mothers in cinema, Asma Sayed writes in “Intersection Interventions in Global Cinema”:  “–are these mothers good? How quickly are they able to reclaim their pre-baby bodies? How do they balance work and mothering? Such questions are a reflection of societies in which, historically, a woman’s primary role has largely been defined by her ability to bear and rear children.” The representation of the maternal figure on screen both reinforces and is produced by societal values.

But motherhood, mothers, and their portrayal onscreen reveal much more about society. Like how Sherlock tells us that oceans can be deduced from a drop of water, a singular film can provide insight into the context of the world that made it. Why it was created, how it was created, how people responded to it, and all of its intentional and unintentional effects can be profound and impactful. Jennifer Wingard’s article “(Re)Producing Globalization: The Labouring Body in Maria Full of Grace” links how capitalism and imperialism affects the bodies of mothers in the film Maria Full of Grace. Sayed aptly summarizes Wingard’s article: “It is important to follow the movement of Maria’s body not only to understand how women’s bodies affect and are defined by the contradictory flows of global capital, labour, and migration but also to see the limited range of choices available to women navigating within this system. Wingard points out how women’s labour is not recognized as part of economic production, even though it is essential to sustaining the global economy.” fictional mothers may not always be explicitly metaphors for any socio-cultural commentary, but the idea of the maternal and how it relates to those issues are still expressed through them.

Intersectionality is essential to creating an inclusive environment to learn about motherhood, which varies across race, class, and culture. Family dynamics are constantly changing across the world. Samira Kawash remarks that “…we need to broaden our awareness and understanding of the diverse positions and meanings of motherhood. Feminist scholarship on motherhood in the past decade has focused attention on the various ways in which mothers cannot or will not submit to the (white, middle-class, heterosexual) norms of good mothering.” So, not only can mother characters reveal infinitudes about the world, but we must expand our study of mothers of all kinds, from all around the world.

My last and most romantic reason is that the appreciation of art is what makes this life meaningful. There’s this quote that I love by Donna Tartt: “Beauty alters the grain of reality.” She was describing paintings, but this idea applies to all forms of the sublime that we are lucky to experience on Earth. The cinematic experience is a wonderful one, and I am  excited to reinterpret them over the course of the next months.

As a final note, I would like to bring up the idea Kawash concludes her article with, that “feminism cannot possibly hope to remain relevant without acknowledging motherhood in all its contradictions and complexities.” It is only through understanding mothers and the way we treat them that we can hope to advocate for gender equality without leaving our mothers behind. We must embrace the many forms that mothering can take in order to uplift and honor the legacy of the generations of mothers that have largely gone forgotten and misrepresented.

*side note: In Kawash’s article, she writes “One positive development is a new Museum of Motherhood, “a real and virtual social change museum focused on amplifying the voices and experiences of mothers while connecting ‘the cultural family,’… there is also an opportunity, not only in the Museum of Motherhood but in the broader field of popular and academic investment that the museum seeks to make visible.”

Categories
Art Birth Education Feminism health JourMS motherhood

Interview Opportunity/Play About Birth & CFP JourMS

Lillian Isabella

INTERVIEW OPPORTUNITY:

Lillian Isabella is an award-winning documentary theatre maker. She’s looking to interview at least 100 different people with all different kinds of pregnancy and birth stories throughout the Summer of 2020.

If you have been pregnant, are pregnant, or have given birth (of all ages), as well as the people who support pregnancy including doulas, doctors, midwives, acupuncturists (who help pregnant women), she’d love to speak with you for a new documentary play she’s developing!

The narrative of the play will be formed by the people she talks to and she’d like to get a wide snapshot of the state of pregnancy and birth in the United States and how it compares to abroad.

Her first documentary play was commissioned by the Metropolitan Playhouse and was about the legendary Jonas Mekas. Her second docu play, How We Love/F*ck, celebrated female sexuality and had its world premiere at Cherry Lane Theatre.

If you or anyone you know might be interested in speaking with Lillian, please send her an email at Lillian@LillianIsabella.com. More about Lillian, here: www.lillianisabella.com.

CFP JourMS

CRAFTING COVID: Embodying Disobedience, Calls to Action & Motherhood at the End of the World /Submissions through June 30, 2020

How have our lives changed in 2020? How are they the same? Is feminism taking a back seat as mothers turn to homeschooling, as salaries fade, hardship and isolation fray nerves, and as illness coupled with civil disobedience take shape on the streets?

Let these writings serve as a site of resistance as we practice the ongoing labor of birthing, art-making, scholarship, caregiving, salary-making, and survival in the time of COVID. Let us offer hope, support, and empowerment through knowledge, education, and shared experiences.

This special edition of the Journal of Mother Studies seeks to elucidate the experiences of families from an interdisciplinary perspective.

We have already received multiple submissions on a variety of topics from those conducting research, making home-site projects, working in hospital or alternative birth settings, as well as auto-ethnographic perspectives. Submissions are open on a rolling basis to all, through the month of June 2020.

JourMS submissions are peer-reviewed and the journal is published annually on September 1 each year online.

The Editorial Collective of the Journal of Mother Studies invites submissions of scholarly articles and essays from the Interdisciplinary Humanities as defined by the arts, history, culture, the social sciences, women’s and gender studies, literary studies, anthropology, the folkloric, psychology, the digital humanities, and media studies. We encourage dialogue between varying fields and welcome feminist critiques of race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, technology, media, public health, and nation. The Journal also features book reviews about newly penned and forthcoming works.

Please submit abstracts electronically. We will then contact you and ask you to submit a full MS Word attachments article via e-mail: JourMS@gmail.com 

  1. All work should be double-spaced, with 1-inch margins, in 12-point Times font
  2. Scholarly essays should be 5-18 pages double-spaced. Reviews should be approximately 500 words (we are flexible).
  3. JourMS is interdisciplinary, therefore, writers can follow either APA or MLA format (depending on your discipline). Double-space all text, on 8 1/2 X 11-inch paper, using Times New Roman. American spelling.
  4. All manuscripts must be submitted with a cover document:
  5. Include a page with author’s name, address, email, phone number, brief bio, affiliation, & recent publications
  6. A 250-word abstract
  7. You are welcome to submit original art, or photographic images along with your manuscript; please ensure that you have (or will) proper permissions. Additionally, we will accept alternative formats such as PowerPoint, video, audio, and visual presentations.
  8. We will send you an acknowledgment of receipt once your submission is processed. The Editorial Board reviews all submissions before sending them out for external, anonymous peer review.  We may provide reader comments, and ask you to revise and resubmit your work.
  9. Please submit a final manuscript in Word Document to JourMS@gmail.com
  10. Seeking additional editorial board members as well for this year’s edition

Please circulate widely! PDF is here for sharing: JourMS_CFP_2020