Good points everyone but I stand by my view that being a mother is only a small part of a woman's life and a woman should never have to define herself by her reproductive or parental status alone.
Of course she shouldn't; I could hardly agree with you more.
ie, should a concert pianist who has a child describe herself as a "working mother" or a pianist with a child? Or a pianist, regardless of children? Do men describe themselves as "working fathers"?
She should describe herself just as, when and to whom she wishes; however, not only may this description vary from time to time and from woman to woman, but there is also the question of to whom she describes herself. At a conference for women in music in the early 1990s, the composer Elizabeth Maconchy (who died a few years later and whose daughter, Nicola LeFanu, is also a composer) was reported as having said of the predicament of the woman composer that, to her listeners, she is a composer whereas to her family, she is a woman (mother, sister, wife, whatever) - to which she added a sardonic comment about the sometime difficulty of crossing the border there! To a woman's son or daughter, she will principally be mother, even if she is a professional pianist, so it rather depends upon who's asking and who's being addressed at any given moment, I think.
ahinton will say this is somantics but somantics construct our reality, if you want to ascribe to the post-modernists.
No, my concern about the use of semantics does not apply in this particular instance; the above is more a matter of who chooses to describe themselves as what, in front of whom and when. But in any case I don't want to "ascribe to the post-modernists"! There's an awful lot of confusion spread by many of those of post-modernist leanings, especially in the world of academia. Just for a moment's diverting amusement (assuming that it may provide such), have a look at the following random-generated pieces at
<https://www.elsewhere.org/pomo>;
(just press F5 or Refresh to have another sample until you get bored with this).
We also need to remember that there are are fashions when it comes to thinking about women and their roles and at the moment we are seeing something of a post feminist backlash (look at at Naomi Wolfe, talk about a sell out) where women are wanting to get back into the kitchen.
This is very true - and is, I think, where much of the danger lies. Feminist, post-feminist, modernist, post-modernist, complexicist, minimalist - the "l-ist" goes on - and tiresomely on. The desire to compartmentalise, classify and pigeon-hole as many people as possible is an ever-burgeoning one, a principal and invidious motive of which is to seek successfully to dictate to people how they should think, consider themselves and conduct their lives. All too many of those women of whom you write above as "wanting to get back into the kitchen" are doing so because they are being urged that this is the currently fashionable thing to do, rather than as a direct consequence of their own personal decision-making processes and aspirations. I've absolutely nothing in principle against women wanting to do this, as long as it is not the coercion of partners or others - or the vagaries and diktats of contemporary fashion - that persuades them to do so.
There was once a time when, if you were of a monied class, child rearing was outsourced to nannies and biological mothers had minimal contact with their children. The kids turned out fine and no one thought twice about it.
Now women are put on a guilt trip and cast as "bad mothers" if they don't want to stay at home to look after babies and put their lives on hold for their children.
And now it's the women with money who are the first to demand their right to stay at home while their partner brings home the money. The middle classes meanwhile can't exist without two incomes.
But this isn't about money really. It's about how women construct themselves and the sort of dialogues that are being fed into the construction of the "modern woman".
This is all very true. Putting women on such "guilt trips" is rather disgusting, it seems to me; apart from any other considerations, their "children" are people themselves - people in the making who, if they are female, may well come to find themselves subjected to the same kind of "guilt trip" deals later in life if the fashions of the day haven't changed by then.
Increasingly these days it is not only the "middle classes" that can't survive without two incomes. Consider the case of a single person in his/her mid-20s in UK who has emerged from university with a first-class honours degree, a master's degree, a PhD and £40,000 of student debt who lands a job with an annual gross salary of £50,000 (leaving him/her with a net disposable income of, say, a little over half of that) who then has to try to find a deposit equivalent to a year's gross salary in order to finance the purchase of his/her first home on a 90% mortgage, repayments on which will cost more or less the same amount as his/her net disposable income, leaving nothing on which to live and no spare cash with which to start repaying the student debt. Our government wonders why more people don't "save". What with? It wonders why personal borrowing is so devastatingly high? Why? Add to all this the statistics (insofar as any statistics can be believed) that would nowadays seek to inform us that the average cost to the parent/s of raising just one child for 18 years (allowing for current lowish rates of inflation during that period) will be in excess of a quarter of a million pounds and the sheer impossibility of the scenario becomes even more glaringly apparent. It is therefore no small wonder that many people's expectations exclude the experience of retirement, as this would be a luxury known to their forebeas but which they'll simply be unable to afford for themselves. It's not just the "middle classes" - only the very wealthiest can hope to overcome all of these hurdles and, in order to preserve the wealth necessary to ensure that they do so, their fight against the ever-increasing greediness of the taxman becomes ever greater, more elaborately sophisticated and - of course - more expensive.
To return to the subject of women, motherhood and careers, however, I'm not at all suggesting that this is an easy matter for women, in terms either of their conduct of careers and motherhood themselves or of their decision-making processes that lead to the balance or otherwise between these. It's an even greater problem for the woman who becomes a single mother when she already has a career to begin with and wishes to give up neither her parental rôle nor her career. One particular case that I know personally has been even more difficult than for most single mothers, since she is a professional singer who years ago was left with young children when her partner decided to absent himself from the family home for life without providing any future support or contact of any kind; being a "working mother" whose work takes her all over the world rather than allowing her to work near home and raise her children by means of the more frequent one-to-one contact with them that she would have liked made juggling career and motherhood even harder. Nevertheless, her career continued, her voice continued to develop and her children have each been through a prestigious university and have since landed good jobs. I'm not, of course, advocating this kind of situation, even though, in this instance, the end results have been remarkably successful against all odds - nor, of course, am I in any way defending the partner's behaviour.
I think that we are largely in agreement over most of these matters - apart, that is, from the "post-modernist" bit, of which I am as wary in its social manifestations as I am in its musical ones!
Best,
Alistair
Poll
Topic: did the tv show 'sex and the city' accurately portray 'the modern woman' (Read 2553 times)