Lactophobia and "Discretion"

Stymied milk-slurping kittehs from I Can Has Cheezburger?

So the Denny's in Asheville, North Carolina, is just the latest in a long line of businesses where some twit took it upon himself to tell a nursing mama she couldn't feed her baby where everyone else was dining. Daisy at Daisy's Dead Air reports on the brouhaha - in which the restaurant manager threatened to call the cops! - and the resulting protest. North Carolina law guarantees the rights of mothers to breastfeed anywhere and anytime, but I guess lactophobia trumps the law.

Among all this absurdity, what jumped out at me is that the manager was going to call the police unless the mother covered herself.

In my experience, the demand for "discretion" while nursing may sound like a compromise, but in fact it's completely unreasonable.

My two little creatures partook of mama-milk until they were each about ten months old. As newborns, they wiggled a bit while nursing but mostly concentrated at the business at hand. It can't be easy to drink and breathe at the same time, but they practiced and practiced (oh, did they practice! about every hour and a half! for weeks on end!) until they'd mastered the task and grew large and fat. (Each of them gained about 5 1/2 pounds in their first six to seven weeks. Seriously.) Even as novices, they weren't exactly inert, but I could usually arrange a blanket around them and not feel too exposed.

And then one day, they discovered that mealtime was for socializing, not just for sustenance. They'd drink a little, and then blop! They'd pop off the nipple, look around, smile, drool, and flirt with everyone in the room. I'd be left with my breast waving at the world, chilly and exposed, until their Royal Babyness deigned to latch on again. If we were in a public place, I could be grateful if a jet of pressurized milk didn't spray any innocent bystanders.

Now, I'll admit I never went in for those "nursing" clothes that promise discretion. You know, those goofy, dowdy shirts with flaps and buttons that oh-so-discreetly announce "I'm lactating." That didn't matter, though, because once a baby pops off the boob, no flap in the world is gonna hide you.

There are blankets, you say? And the mama can artfully drape her nursing baby in flannel and fleece? My guys saw the mealtime blanket as a fun challenge. Grabbing and wadding up and throwing it probably did wonders to develop their motor and visual skills. But coverage? The net effect of a blanket was probably negative, because if you relied on it, you'd end up flashing even more skin once the kid wrestled it to the ground.

Besides: In order to fully cover your breast, you've got to swaddle your baby's entire head, too. Last I checked, infants need air as much as they need milk.

The standard feminist response to lactophobia is to say that men have issues with naked breasts that aren't displayed for their express pleasure. There's surely some truth to that. Prudery and prurience are often two sides of a single coin.

But the other thing about naked lactating breasts is that they bluntly remind us of our animal nature. Mammaries make it impossible to deny that we're mammals. There's no way to cover that up when you've got a baby at the breast, no matter how uncomfortable it may make some folks.

Update 12 noon, 2-27-09: Vanessa at Feministing alerts us to an example of how these two forms of lactophobia can intersect: Milwaukee hate-radio talk-radio host Mark Belling recently called breastfeeding mothers "sows" on his program, saying, "It's..it's what a pig does and it does it in public, right?" Just goes to show that misogyny and disgust at our animality make a happy, harmonious match.

"Reborn" Female?

I foolishly clicked on the "don't click ..." link at this post by Auguste at Pandagon ... and slid into a world of "reborn babies." In case you want to live a little crazy, too, here's where not to click.

If you're more prudent than I, maybe it's enough to know that reborn babies are ultrarealistic dolls weighted to flop like a newborn baby. They're sold on ebay, among other venues, for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Some are sold to mothers who've suffered a stillbirth. It's easy to snark at these dolls, but it's not my place to judge any comfort a bereaved mother might find. However, most are marketed to women who'd like a baby but are too old to get pregnant or just don't want an infant that poops and burps and eventually talks back (according to this MSNBC feature).

About the reborn babies themselves I'm generally in agreement with Auguste. I, too, think they are uncanny. Freaky. Replicants among us. Then again, I'm spooked by clowns. Even as a little girl, I wouldn't play with baby dolls. I adored my stuffed animals. They were cuddly and didn't look like aliens.

But here's what surprised me when I explored the photo galleries at Reborn-Baby.com: Nearly all of the dolls were female. I saw just two boys out of roughly forty dolls! Not every dollmaker has such a skewed sex ratio, but girls seem to predominate across the board. For instance, at Destinys Reborn Babies (no, they don't believe in apostrophes), the ratio of girls to boys is about two to one.

Now, I'm not willing to argue that the purchasers of reborn babies constitute a representative cross-section of the population. But their behavior merges with what I've observed anecdotally: the historical preference for a boy may have shifted toward girl babies in the modern West.

This is a remarkable transformation. Just a century ago, the rural German women whose birth experiences I've researched hoped and prayed for boy babies. Never mind their own innate preferences. If they failed to bear sons and heirs, no matter how modest their situation, they were considered failures as women. The whole community knew they were deficient. Their husbands and in-laws treated them with contempt. Mothers-in-law were particularly harsh. Not surprisingly, those women desperately desired boys.

The roots of this preference go back to ancient times. It was sustained by the importance of brute strength in the pre-industrial age, especially on farms. But probably more decisive were rural inheritance practices that resulted in daughters carrying off part of the family property as a dowry when they married, whereas sons inherited directly and continued to provide for their parents in old age.

Here's one example from a midwife in rural Bavaria circa 1920 or 1930, who attended a farm wife who'd borne three girls in a row. When the expectant mother went the hospital (due to the threat of complications) the farmer told her not to bother phoning if the baby was another girl. Predictably enough, it was a girl. The farmer neither visited his wife in the hospital nor picked her up to bring her home. The midwife said that husbands normally didn't even bother to look at a baby girl for the first couple of months - and they blamed the midwife, too, for the baby being the wrong sex.

While I'm very glad for the shift in attitudes (not to mention the modern awareness that the father's X or Y determines sex), I'm not at all convinced that a general preference for girls would be a real improvement. For one thing, reversing sexism wouldn't end it. It would only flip the terms of the inequality. This is structurally the same as the question of whether matriarchy would be superior to patriarchy. As long as one group is lording it over another, it's not fair or just ... not that we're in any danger of living in a matriarchal society, mind you!

For another thing I suspect that all kinds of rigid assumptions about girls are wrapped around the growing preference for them. Girls are thought to be easier to manage. They're imagined to be more docile. How is this progress from the tired old stereotypes of female passivity?

Objectively speaking, there are lots more cute clothes for little girls. If you've ever taken a look at the Land's End girls section, you know what I mean. I totally get the pleasure mothers have in dressing their daughters; I've envied it, to be honest, while pawing through drab piles of camoflage T-shirts. But what does it mean that we start sending the message from birth forward that a girl's appearance matters more than a boy's? And how can we then hope girls will resist the pressure to crave "sexy" styles before they even dream of puberty?

Finally, mothers may hope for a "mini-me," much as fathers have long hoped for a Junior to carry on the family name and their personal legacy. Such hopes can only be dashed. The burden of a legacy is a heavy one for any baby, whether a boy-child or a girl-child.

I actually always pictured myself as the mother of a daughter, so I may well be part of this new wave. Instead, I got two boys. I'm just wise enough to realize that quite possibly I would've made more mistakes with a girl, projected too much of myself onto her, assumed she'd be too much like me.

My boys remind me continually of how much greater the human potential is than the old straitjacket of gender roles would suggest. They're capable of great empathy and gentleness. (Okay, every once in a while the Tiger wallops the Bear, but that's rare these days.) They're creative and funny. They're definitely boys, but they're not imprisoned by the role.

One thing my boys don't do? Play dolls. But like the little-girl version of me, they cuddle and love their stuffed animals. That seems just about right.

Palin, the Object of Our Obsession

I know it's time to move on from Sarah Palin. Somehow, we have to shift everyone's focus off of her and back to Obama's promise of - well, not salvation, maybe not even transformation, but at least starting to remedy the fuck-ups of this country that I love.

So why am I having trouble shifting focus, myself? Yeah, I'm scared because she's a wingnut who could too easily become President. But I'm not normally this obsessed about any individual 'winger. Huckabee alarmed me, too, but you didn't see me blogging about him for ten days straight.

I think I've finally figured it out after reading this post by Jessica at Jezebel:

When Palin spoke on Wednesday night, my head almost exploded from the incandescent anger boiling in my skull. ...

And the question now is why? Why does this particular pitbull in lipstick infuriate — and scare us — so viscerally? Why does her very existence make us feel — and act — so ugly? New York Times columnist Judith Warner calls Palin's nomination a "thoroughgoing humiliation for America’s women," because "Palin’s not intimidating, and makes it clear that she’s subordinate to a great man." ...

I think what Ms. Warner is dancing around, but not saying outright, is that for a certain kind of feminist, Palin is a symbol for everything we hoped was not true in the world anymore. We hoped that we didn't have to hide our ambition or pretend that our goals were effortlessly achieved ("I never really set out to be in public affairs, much less to run for this office," the Governor has said.) We hoped that we could be mothers without having our motherhood be our defining characteristic, as it seems to be for Palin. We hoped that we did not have to be perfect beauty queens to get to where we wanted to be in life, that our looks, good or bad, wouldn't matter. ...

I think the correct high school stereotype is of the homecoming queen. For many of us looking back at high school, we can now feel a smug superiority towards the homecoming queen. Sure, she was pretty and popular in high school, catering to the whims of boys and cheering on their hockey games, but what happened to her after high school? Often, she popped out some kids and ended up toiling in some not particularly impressive job. We can look back and say, we might have been ambitious nerds in high school, but it ultimately paid off. What's infuriating, and perhaps rage-inducing, about Palin, is that she has always embodied that perfectly pleasing female archetype, playing by the boys' game with her big guns and moose-murdering, and that she keeps being rewarded for it. Our schadenfreude for the homecoming queen's mediocrity has turned into white hot anger at her continued dominance.

(I've excerpted a lot of it but the whole post is worth reading.)

You know, I don't have any real issues with Palin's beauty queen past. I'm not a great beauty, myself, but I'm also not hideous. I don't know what it's like to have men drool en masse over me, but I've always been attractive enough for nearly all of the men who interested me. So I don't have jealousy issues about beauty. Nor do I discount the intelligence of women who happen to be conventionally beautiful. In high school, I even got along just fine with the homecoming queen, who was the band's drum major.

(In fact, in an odd chapter of my past life - which I'd forgotten until very recently - my band friends nominated me for "basketball homecoming queen" my senior year of high school, a very obscure honor indeed. It was mostly of a joke, and I was sort of an anti-candidate. I so didn't fit the type and I was never "popular" but I did have plenty of friends. I vaguely recall coming in second.)

But the cheerleaders! A few of them had this slightly simpering, dumbed-down way of dealing with boys. They weren't dumb, they just played the part. They hung out with the girls who were "popular," which - as in most high schools - was not at all the same as being well-liked. They acted just slightly frosty to the rest of us, enough to register with the girls but pass under the boys' radar. (Just to be clear, I have a couple of friends who were cheerleaders in high school. I'm not casting aspersions on all cheerleaders, just a select few from my high school.)

To this day, I have a real allergy to that sort of woman. Sarah Palin strikes me as one of them - as a woman who will fake and flirt and cajole and act stupid to please the menz - and then turn around and stab women in the back, individually and collectively.

Patriarchal systems have always required women like these. Every era has had its Anita Bryants and Phyllis Schaflys. Madame Bitch at Open Salon suggests that far from being the target of sexism, Palin is the very apogee of playing by the patriarchal rules:

What are the ways in which Palin embodies these sexist rules?

• She's number 2, not the top of the ticket.
• Her very appointment is a testament to the paucity of women leaders in the GOP -- had there been more choices, perhaps McCain would have chosen someone with fewer drawbacks.
• She's a mother of 5 children, so her "woman" credentials cannot be challenged.
• She constantly downplays her ambition and her accomplishments, even though the ambition is oozing out of her ears.
• She dumbs herself down.
• She embraces the frantic mommy role, both literally, and figuratively for her leadership roles.

To me, Palin seems not like a trailblazing, hard-charging battering ram, but a gray fascimile of that ideal, and one that is neatly confined into the small allowed space for her to exist, completely controlled for the comfort of the men who created those rules.

(Read the rest here.)

Palin is quite literally being controlled by the men, at least for now. She's being groomed and prepped and the press is not being allowed access to her - although word came out today that she'll grant an interview to Charlie Gibson later in the week. It reminds me a little of Old Testament descriptions of girls being prepared for entrance to the king's harem. The Book of Esther recounts how they spent a full year being beautified with oils and perfumes and makeup before they ever had a private audience with the king.

Palin has her beauty routine down pat, but the patriarchal grooming is no less intense for being focused on the names of foreign leaders and the pros and cons of privatizing Social Security. (I'm not suggesting that these are in any way "patriarchal" subjects. It's only the GOP take on them that's steeped in patriarchal assumptions.) My hunch is she's a quick study, judging from her convention performance. She seems to be smart and very, very tough. If Palin were transported back to the Old Testament, she wouldn't be a girl in the harem. She would be the woman who runs it. (For those of you who've read The Handmaid's Tale: Palin would be Aunt Lydia.)

Palin's experience in beauty pageants is not irrelevant; pageants teach and reward poise, self-possession, and smooth performances. So does cheerleading. I say this sincerely, not snarkily. These are good life skills for anyone. They're invaluable if you're a politician.

I'd like to think we're all beyond knee-jerk high-school emotions, despite the results of the past two elections. But I can't help thinking of another memory, this one from the back of the school bus, where my friend Kate and I were using our halting French skills to disparage the cheerleaders in what we assumed was our secret language. Eventually, one of them - a platinum-blonde named Mary - turned around and glared at us. We'd forgotten that Mary was in third-year French. Oops.

We underestimate the cheerleaders at our peril.

Palin's Cowboy Judgment, Confirmed

By now we've all heard that Bristol Palin wasn't pregnant last winter, but she's pregnant now. There's no room for schadenfreude. She shouldn't be made the poster child for the failure of abstinence-only approaches to teenage sexuality; we have too many such poster children already. She's going to face the difficulties of early motherhood with the added burden of publicity. She'll also find deep joy in her baby, I'm sure - a point too rarely mentioned for all the moralizing about "teenage mothers." She's embarking on an amazing adventure in one of the hardest ways possible. I wish her well.

But as I wrote yesterday, it's Sarah Palin's conduct that's at issue. We now have no reason to doubt that after her water broke, Palin first delivered a speech in Dallas and then traveled all the way back to her hometown. Yes, she beat the odds by not going into labor. It was a foolhardy maneuver, just the same.

Here's what eMedicine says about premature rupture of membranes (ROM, or "yikes, my water just broke!"):

Most patients (90%) enter spontaneous labor within 24 hours when they experience ROM at term. ...

All patients with ROM should be asked to come to the hospital to ensure fetal well being.

(For a solid discussion of this issue in laywoman's terms, see this article at drspock.com.)

In other words, this is not a situation where there are two reasonable alternatives, such as accepting or refusing pain relief in labor. (Yeah, I know some people will condemn epidurals, but I'm not willing to go there in this post.)

After one's water has broken, the major risks to the fetus are infection (which remains fairly modest within the first 24 hours) and a prolapsed cord (which can occur if the fetal head is not securely engaged, thus blocking the cervix). Cord prolapse is less likely in second and subsequent deliveries because the head is usually engaged during the last few weeks, covering the cervix as it begins to dilate. Since Sarah Palin was only at 36 weeks, it would have been prudent to be checked by a doctor, since cord prolapse can threaten the baby's life.

The very great risk in Palin's case was that she'd deliver the baby on the plane. As I wrote in yesterday's post, the time between her water breaking and her arrival at the medical center in Wasilla appears to have been about 16 hours. Afterward, she said she was confident it was safe to travel due to her previous pregnancies. As far as I've gathered, none of them involved a child with congenital anomalies or premature labor. I assume she didn't take to the air with those pregnancies, either, after her water broke. As much as I respect women's body-knowledge, there were too many known unknowns here.

She played chicken with delivering her baby in the air - and won. If she hadn't gotten so lucky, an Alaska Airlines attendant might well have caught her baby. This happens occasionally, and mother and baby are usually just fine. But this was a risky call with a baby four weeks premature and known to have Down syndrome, thus at high risk of heart defects and other physical problems.

You can say this was a personal decision about her body and her baby. Yes, it was. I'm not suggesting Sarah Palin be treated as a criminal like those expectant mothers who've been subjected to court-ordered cesarean sections or who've been jailed in South Carolina for admitting crack cocaine use. I'm only suggesting we consider what this publicly-performed instance of private decision-making says about her judgment and temperament.

I'm not even saying she should be held to a much higher standard just because she has presented herself as a paragon of Christian motherhood. (The hypocrisy of being "pro-life" but then risking your baby's life just to get home is so manifest, I'll spare you my sermonizing.)

I'm just saying that this incident shows reckless behavior more befitting a cowboy than a national leader. We've already had eight years of cowboy governance. We know what comes from arrogance and ignorance of risks.

And if Palin's judgment looks pretty poor here, it's topped by John McCain's in choosing a candidate whose main qualification is her appeal to the Christian Dominionist wing of the Republican Party.

Babies, Biology, and Ideology

Photo by Flickr user JeremyHall, used under a Creative Commons license.

For feminists and women's health advocates, it's not exactly news that the life sciences aren't quite the beacons of objectivity that they purport to be. Even so, a study released today on the risks of pregnancy over age 40 is startling in how its conclusions are totally warped by ideology.

Published in the Journal of Women's Health, the study - "Pregnancy Late in Life - A Hospital-Based Study of Birth Outcomes," by Ali Delpisheh et al. - concludes that fetal risks rise sharply after about age 40.

Background: Pregnancy in older women is of great relevance, particularly in developed countries where many women experience pregnancy late in the childbearing age.

Methods: A hospital-based data analysis of 9506 delivery records from 1998 to 2003 at the Liverpool Women's Hospital was undertaken to assess pregnancy outcomes in older women of reproductive age.

Results: Overall, 2.4 % of mothers were >40 years of age (advanced), 5.6% were <20 style="font-style: italic;">followed a U-shaped curve with nadirs in the middle age classes. ... [my emphasis]

Conclusions: Pregnancy in older women is associated with adverse birth outcomes, particularly in primigravidas. Increased health promotion is required to highlight the risk of adverse birth outcomes in women who become pregnant for the first time in the late childbearing years.

So, okay. We already knew that pregnancy becomes riskier for both mother and child as the mother grows older. But first, note that the data follow a curve. Women don't suddenly drop off a cliff after age 40. If you go to the full-length study (available for free in .pdf format) you'll see that it really is a U-shaped curve.

Second, and more importantly: The data in the full text of the study clearly show that by all three measures (low birthweight, preterm birth, and small for gestational age), the babies of young mothers - defined here as less than 20 years old - fare just as poorly.

Yet the intro and conclusion of this abstract fail to even hint that extreme youth could be just as problematic as advancing age. Indeed, given that adolescents outnumbered the older gals by a ratio of 5 to 2 in this study, their babies' health problems represent a greater public health problem and an even larger contribution to human suffering.

Moreover, this study was conducted in Great Britain, a nation with universal health insurance. In the United States, the rate of complications among very young mothers is likely to be higher yet because they are less likely to be insured than the older crowd. In the United States, furthermore, complications of prematurity among uninsured adolescent mothers mean that 1) taxpayers will foot much of the bill for the NICU, and 2) those adolescent mothers will suffer financial worries along with the emotional rollercoaster of caring for a baby born too soon. Having watched friends deal with significant prematurity, I know I'd struggle even at my "advanced age." How much harder would that be if you, the mother, were only 16 or 18!

Now why would careful scientists fail to highlight the second half of their findings? Could it be that the cultural anxieties about women deferring marriage and childbearing have spilled into the hospital and lab, too? Because I honestly see no other reason why the abstract (which is all many doctors and journalists will read) should omit the sufferings of adolescents. The way the problem is currently framed, it plugs right into a discourse of blaming women for first establishing a career before starting a family, while ignoring the real physical risks of very early motherhood.

Parenting between the Cliffs of Risk and the Rocks of Pragmatism

Cliffs and rocks at Big Sur, California, photo by Flickr user Ed Yourdon, used under a Creative Commons license.

Yesterday in comments on my feminist homeschooling post and at her own blog, Marcy of Marcy's Musings suggested that my arguments against long-term withdrawal from the paid labor market were driven by a politics of fear. She pushed me to keep thinking about this, since they way I mix my feminism with my parenting is definitely not driven by fear. It’s a balance between risk-taking and pragmatism, which recognizes that "choice" is illusory unless you've got a clear picture of the trade-offs.

Honestly, a lot of people (feminists or not) might say I take a few too many risks. Too many years in grad school? Check. In an "impractical" field? Check. Married a foreigner whose training is in philosophy? Check. Rode home the other night on my bike after midnight - alone - through the big city of Berlin? Check. In other areas, though, I'm boringly risk-averse: I won't talk on a cell phone while driving, and I'm very careful with my kids' safety.

We all take risks - some smart, some stupid - and the trick is to figure out which risks are worthwhile. Marcy recognizes, for instance, that her decision to stay home with her kids through their school years entails a financial risk. She doesn't deny it, though she reduces it mostly to the risk of divorce, while I see the issue as broader: a spouse can also die or become disabled while kids are still young. My husband narrowly escaped death twice, and he went through a prolonged period of disability.

My story is far from unique. The Sungold family tree indicates why it's important for women not to become too dependent financially over the long term. One grandma was divorced from an alcoholic husband in her early twenties. (Circa 1912! Imagine the scandal!) She raised her two daughters alone until she met my grandpa nearly two decades later and then gave birth to my dad. One of my dad's half-sisters was divorced while her daughter was still tiny. His other half-sister was widowed in her early fifties. My maternal grandma was widowed while still in her early forties, with four children to support, the youngest (my mom) only six years old. Both my mom and her sister were divorced while they still had young children at home. Their two brothers remained married to the same women into old age.

So, in those two generations, only two of eight women enjoyed a husband's support throughout their childrearing years. (And those two were farm wives who worked from dawn to dusk and beyond.) It's not that the women in my family are unusually flaky, either; those who divorced did so only under considerable duress. While none of the women in my family chose single motherhood, they still had to find ways to cope, financially and emotionally. For instance, both my grandmas were teachers, and that's how they held their families together.

My family tree suggests why it's neither pro- nor anti-feminist to say that women run greater risks the longer they're completely financially dependent on a mate. The risks are simply a pragmatic reality.

Now, Marcy interprets my argument as saying

women shouldn't have the freedom to do what we find fulfillment in, if it means we might be dependent on the men in our lives, because if those men should fail, we will be in serious trouble. We should follow the current cultural pattern and go to work so we will have a "safety net" in case our husbands should walk out on us.
(Read the rest here.)

No, what I'm saying is something different. I'm suggesting that we need to balance a quest for fulfillment with awareness of the risks of long-term dependence, which grow over time. Only if we're realistically aware of the risks can we make informed and conscious choices.

I'm not at all arguing that mothers should take six weeks' maternity leave and then plunge back into work full-time. I'm not inveighing against stay-at-home parenting. My own choices have tilted in that direction since my first baby was born. I chose to take the financial risk of parenting first - and working for pay only secondarily - during my kids' preschool years. I believe kids need intense attention while they're very young. As infants, my boys got that almost entirely from their dad and me. Starting from around their second birthday, they went to daycare half-days with six other kids and a wonderful caretaker; they loved it, and I could work part time. Only now, with both kids in school, am I returning to work full time. I'm lucky I'll still be able to pick up the kids after school, since I can grade and prep classes at home. My work responsibilities have allowed me to spend lots of time with my kids, and to enjoy the sort of self-fulfillment that Marcy describes. I was lucky that my husband supported (and quite literally subsidized) this arrangement. Other people make other choices, and that's okay too, as long as their choices are conscious and well informed.

Indeed, failure to recognize the importance of active, involved parenting - and its rewards for children, mothers, and fathers - poses very significant risks of its own. The truth is, most jobs are a hell of a lot less interesting than mine, and it's very common for parenting to be far more fulfilling than paid work. That goes for most of men's jobs, too, although lots of fathers still find their fulfillment through the breadwinner role - sometimes too narrowly, at the expense of closer relationships with their children.

Where I differ from Marcy is mainly in the length of time we're spending outside of the paid labor force. The risk here is that re-entry into the labor force becomes increasingly difficult, the longer you've been out. For women, this has historically translated into a substantial risk of poverty in old age or upon their marriage ending. (One of my aunts is in precisely this position now, at age 76.) If the kids are still at home, they're hurt by poverty, too.

In other words, I'm arguing that we need to consider the long-term perspective in our decisions. For me, it made sense to roll back my career to spend lots of time with my little ones. That was a risk and a trade-off. It struck me as worthwhile - and it was. But I see how its costs continue to rise over time. The choice to homeschool, if it means two decades or more outside of the labor force, carries risks and sacrifices that would be too costly in my life. Above all, my children would depend on me completely if my mate's health failed again.

Other folks are free to take that risk, and for some parents whose circumstances are different than mine, it may make sense. However, it would be misleading to portray these significant risks as minimal or to argue that homeschooling may be a more feminist choice than relying on the public schools. The only feminist choice, I'd say, is one that's thoroughly informed.

Finally, I really haven't addressed the elephant in the room: socioeconomic class. It should be clear, though, that the capacity for real choice depends on a certain level of prosperity. In many families, both parents must work in order to avoid eviction and keep the utilities on. That's when choice - even to take a brief maternity leave - can become an unattainable luxury. And that's why poverty has to be a central issue for feminists. That would be a whole 'nother post.

A Sniffly Penalty for Parenting "Right"

Photo by Flickr user James Jordan, used under a Creative Commons license.

So you had a baby. You breastfed for a year (well, ten months, because he was losing interest and you were ready to get your body back). And you waited until he's six months to introduce solid food (well, five months, because he was watching your spoon move with such lust!). And you did all of this "right" - well, by the book, anyway - because your baby's dad has wretched allergies and you wanted to spare him the same fate.

And now? It turns out you did it all wrong:

Delayed introduction of cow's milk and other food products is associated with a higher rather than lower risk for atopic manifestations in the first 2 years of life, epidemiologists in the Netherlands report in the July issue of Pediatrics.

They note that one of the most widely recommended allergy prevention strategies is delaying the introduction of milk and solid foods into the infant's diet. However, there is little scientific evidence to support this advice.

To investigate, Dr. Bianca E. P. Snijders, at Maastricht University, and her colleagues analyzed data from a prospective birth cohort of 2558 infants. Mothers completed questionnaires at 34 weeks of gestation and at 3, 7, 12, and 24 months postpartum regarding food exposures, allergy manifestations, and confounders. Blood samples were collected from the infants at 2 years of age for determination of sensitization.

After adjustment for duration of breastfeeding, sex, exposure to tobacco smoke, maternal characteristics, and family history of allergy, delay in the introduction of cow's milk products beyond 9 months significantly increased the risk of eczema (adjusted odds ratio 2.29).

(Source: Reuters Health via Medscape, free registration required; article also available at revolutionhealth.com without registration; the study is published in Pediatrics 2008;122:e115-e122.)

Translating back from science-ese: Wait too long to diversify your kid's diet and you could more than double his or her chances of living with allergies.

Of course breastfeeding is still a good thing. But women have been made to feel guilty for introducing solid foods "too soon" and for not "exclusively" breastfeeding for "long enough." All of those are spongy terms that seem to shift with the winds of changing medical fashion.

That baby of mine - the one who watched my spoon like a tennis match - was the Bear. He's had the sniffles this week. I've wondered if he might be showing some mild allergies, since he didn't otherwise seem sick. I still don't know. But at least now I'll stop wondering if his sniffles has any relation to those carrots that he wore so cutely all over his face as a plump and happy five-month-old. Of course, he wanted them earlier. Maybe he was right?

It's funny how I wrote nearly a hundred pages in my dissertation on what a crock "expert" advice can be - and yet I'm one of the biggest suckers for it.

I Pass the Bear Test as a Mama

Well, here's the consolation for being a disaster as a 1930s housewife: I got the Bear's highest rating when I arrived home last night. Still sleepy from the ride to the airport, he informed me, "Mama, you get an A plus plus. And Daddy gets an A plus plus."

That's an A++. My students should be so lucky to get a grade like that from me - ever!

Okay, I'd just increased my market value by going out of town for a few days, but even so: I marvel at how forgiving my children are. I marvel at how they are thriving with their imperfect but (apparently) good-enough mother. I have so many moments where I'm impatient or distracted or just worn thin by their squabbling. And yet, at the core, they know how much I love them, and I know how much they love me.

Yet another of my mate's roses.

The Nanny Diaries' Classy Critique of Class

Here's my latest installment in my series, "Reviewing movies that everyone else has already seen." (The first one was "Juno.")

I watched "The Nanny Diaries" this weekend (on DVD, how else?) and thought it did a surprisingly nice job of reflecting critically yet unobtrusively on how social class functions in the United States. If you've seen it, you know that its portrayal of Upper East Side matrons is merciless. They're self-absorbed, petty, bored, materialistic, and completely unavailable to their kids. They scheme to get their children into the right preschools. They mandate hours of French instruction every week for their preschoolers. They spy on their employees with nannycams hidden in teddy bears. They're a more selfish but equally obsessive version of the mothers that Judith Warner profiles in Perfect Madness: Motherhead in the Age of Anxiety. It's easy to take potshots at them, which the movie plays for both laughs and tears.

While that's probably the most obvious level where the film deflates class privilege, it's not the most interesting one. There are more subtle - and sober - messages about the nannies themselves. And I thought that was cool, and unexpected, for a Hollywood movie.

The first of these is how class and race intersect in toxic ways. The central character, Annie, is a white gal from New Jersey, fresh out of college. When word spreads among the rapacious matrons, they fall all over each other trying to hire her because, as one of them says bluntly, "she's white." And she's not an immigrant.

Since the movie's a comedy, it's not going to give us a blistering critique of how nannies are often women who've been forced to emigrate in order to feed their children in a faraway country. But it doesn't ignore that reality either. There's a painfully funny scene where the matrons drag the nannies en route to a seminar on "conflict resolution" and the matrons sit on gilded chairs while the nannies are pressed up against a wall as if in a police lineup. While the nannies are being interrogated about their grievances (which of course will be punished, not resolved!), one of them, a black woman from Africa, says that she's had to leave her children in order to raise a rich family's kids. That moment is not played for laughs. There's no way you could. You see the discomfort of the matrons as they struggle to repress this knowledge, to sink back into their comfortable denial. And you're reminded of how easy it is for any of us with relative privilege to repress and deny the reality that poverty lives cheek-by-jowl with wealth - that the enjoyment of class privilege depends on that juxtaposition of the rich and poor.

The movie's most subtle insights on class privilege deal with Annie (played by Scarlett Johannson) and her post-college employment dilemmas. Her mother, a nurse who's struggled as a single parent, fiercely wants Annie to enter the financial world and enjoy the security she lacked. But Annie is burnt out after working her butt off in college and has neither the drive nor the desire to become a high-powered businesswoman. Becoming a nanny is her little rebellion against lower-middle-class ambition. It's a gentle but revealing commentary on how class privilege hurts even those who are above the poverty line but still feel constrained from taking chances. In the end, Annie does take a real chance, enrolling in an anthropology graduate program. (Well, humanities grad school is not just chancy; it's a pretty sure ticket to being perennially underpaid. But that would be another post.)

Sure, you could fault the movie for being mostly about a pretty young white girl whose problems are nowhere near as severe as those of the women of color tending their charges in Central Park. There's certainly a need for exposés of the exploitation - and even trafficking - that nannies and other domestic servants too often suffer. But given that it's a romantic comedy and not a crusading documentary, "The Nanny Diaries" went much further than I'd expected in untangling the fraught rat's nest that is social class in America.

Image from Flickr user Roger528, used under a Creative Commons license.

On the Uses of Confessional Lit

Superior kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

A comment from Jenny Block on my blogging and narcissism post raises an obvious but important question: Well, why do we read this stuff anyway? Why do we provide the sort of bloated audience that makes it worthwhile for magazines to put Emily Gould's or Philip Weiss's navel-gazing on their covers? Jenny further asks where we draw the line between good, affecting memoir and self-indulgent TMI.

Hmm. I can think of three reasons why I read confessions and memoirs. And let's be clear: I'm a huge sucker for the confessional genre, including its excesses.

1) Well-written confessional lit makes me feel less alone with hard experiences and sometimes-taboo feelings. Here, I'm thinking mostly of the burgeoning literature on motherhood. Susan Maushart's wonderful The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Our Lives and Why We Never Talk About It is both analytical and experiential; it made me realize I wasn't just nuts when I had a hard time staying home with my highly demanding first-born. Andrea Buchanan's Mother Shock: Loving Every (Other) Minute of It made me laugh and reassured me that it was okay to just chill out once in a while. The writers at Literary Mama beautifully explore some of the less-well-mapped terrain of maternal experiences, usually from a first-person perspective. I could spend the rest of the day extending this list and making similar ones for sexuality, marriage, health, and so on.

While there's usually an element of confession in these sorts of memoirs, they don't feel like a guilty pleasure. They feel like a way to stay a little saner, kinder, and happier than I might otherwise be. They can also be politically powerful in much the way feminist consciousness groups used to be. They can push us to consider how our supposedly personal little problems might actually be systematic and if not completely socially constructed, at least socially exacerbated. Such is surely the case with motherhood as a largely privatized enterprise.

2) Confessional lit gives me an almost anthropological pleasure in seeing how other people live differently from me. Okay, that's mostly a fancy way of admitting I'm nosy. I'm fascinated by the glimpses I get of my students' lives in my women's studies classes. Though I obviously keep a professional lid on my nosiness and respect their privacy, I still get to learn a lot about them. Much of this fascination comes from their inhabiting the next generation from my own. They give me a peek into the future. They show me different ways of thinking.

Jenny's own writing on her open marriage definitely falls into this category for me. Her domestic arrangement is pretty different from my own, which is outwardly pretty conventional: a husband, two kids, monogamous heterosexual marriage, and a charming (if messy) house in the kind of friendly, front-porch neighborhood that supposedly went extinct by 1970. But then there's my inner life, which is politically quite radical and emotionally turbulent, full of unruly desires and ideas. If I look calm on the outside, it's only deep cover for my restless soul. Reading about how people live out very different choices satisfies my own curiosity, sure. But maybe it also helps me reconcile my own duties and desires by vicariously experiencing other people's less constrained lives.

3) On a base and prurient level, confessional lit lets us feel superior. I react that way even to the grand-daddy of all confessors, St. Augustine: Didn't he realize what a tortured hypocrite he was, trying to dissuade everyone else from sexual pleasure after he'd got his own? People got so riled up about James Frey fictionalizing half his memoirs partly because that sense of smug superiority relied on his exploits having been real. As I read about Emily Gould's exploits and Philip Weiss's inchoate desires, I was looking firmly down my nose at them - more so with Weiss, because he comes across as the sort of sexist pig that ought to be a feminist strawman but sadly isn't. I'm not particularly proud of any of this, but I'm guessing it's a common response.

I think an element of condescension often enters into our response to memoir, even if we're reading mainly in one of the first two modes. To use Jenny's work as an example again: It provokes a lot of judgmental comments. I'll admit that when I read her piece linked above, I too wondered whether her husband was really on board with opening their marriage, or if he went along because he saw no other choice. In the end, I realized that only they can judge that. But plenty of commenters felt they knew enough to condemn her on that score and many others.

Similarly, lots of writing on motherhood provokes judgmental, patronizing reactions. I'm not totally immune to them, either, even though I think I have immense reservoirs of sympathy as an imperfect mother myself. Mothers are just soft targets, I'm afraid.

In the end, I'm not arguing that the confessional genre is illegitimate just because it's possible to read most memoir while straddling a judgmental high horse. But I'm realizing that we'd do well, as readers, to be aware of when we're starting to wallow in our own superiority. As a writer, I suspect that we need less writing of the sort that is an outright invitation to read in this third, judgmental mode. And maybe this suggests one tentative response to Jenny's second question: As long as memoir can be read in the first two modes - as long as it advances our self-knowledge or our understanding of others - it probably has enough redeeming features to survive those readers who will insist on using it to build up their own egos.

I'd love to hear what others think about this, so please add your ideas in comments!

Bidding for Babies

Ohio is contemplating a law that would let adoptive parents pay a birth mother up to $3000 for her living expenses, according to a report in today's Columbus Dispatch. (Current law allows reimbursement for medical and legal expenses, but not for more general expenses such as rent and groceries.)

I know that pregnancy often puts women in a financial crunch, especially when it's unplanned. I want mothers and their (developing) babies to be well nourished, securely housed, well rested, and just plain nurtured. So why do I feel uneasy about this pending bill?

It's not really true that this law would create a bidding war among prospective parents, which was my initial concern. It would cap the amount of aid at $3000. It's likely that some adoptive parents do already help birth mothers with living expenses in violation of Ohio law, although I have no idea how common this is. If so, this cap would actually level the playing field by bringing a covert practice into the light and regulating it.

So far, so good.

Yet I feel slightly queasy at one rationale that proponents of the bill are giving:

"It is a birth-mom and a baby drain, and it means Ohio couples are losing babies," said Thomas Taneff, a Columbus adoption lawyer. ...

"Why is this important? It's simple," Taneff said. "Probably 25 or 30 percent of our birth moms are adopting out-of-state. This bill will help keep Ohio babies here for Ohio couples."
(Source: Columbus Dispatch)

Am I the only one who thinks that babies start sounding like commodities when they're discussed like goods in an import-export business?

Am I alone in feeling troubled when birth moms are discussed like a natural resource?

If the problem is a bidding war for babies among states - not among would-be adoptive parents - then a patchwork of state laws is not going to solve the problem. It's only going to formalize the competition at the interstate level.

Several policy goals are at stake here, and I think they're all things that decent humans ought to agree on: Selling babies is bad. Keeping babies and mothers healthy is ethically right and fiscally smart. Adoption is a beautiful thing when a woman feels able to go through with it. Birth mothers seeking an open adoption should always have the possibility of a local placement, because obviously if your baby moves to a different state you won't have any chance at a real relationship. And finally, no one should feel compelled to have an abortion or give up a baby for financial reasons alone.

If we care about all of these things, then I think two things need to happen, legislatively. We need a federal law regulating payments from adoptive parents to birth mothers, so that states don't get into stupid competitions over "their" babies. And we need much more generous public assistance for expectant and new mothers. I don't know that bringing back old-style welfare is exactly the answer. But if some pregnant women are in such crisis that the prospect of $3000 or $4000 entices them to send their babies to a family out of state, then the system is broken.

And that's exactly what's happening, according to the Dispatch story. It describes an Ohio couple, recently married, who gave their baby to a Missouri couple. They were facing some relationship struggles over religion (she is Mormon, he is Jewish) and she regarded abortion as completely unacceptable. But the reason they gave up their baby? They were faced with losing their home. She used the $4000 the adoptive couple gave her for living expenses to cover the mortgage, as well as for groceries and utilities. You have to wonder: If they'd had health insurance and enough money for their basic needs, would they have relinquished that baby at all?

Simply allowing Ohio couples to play the same game won't fix the real travesty: the fact that such games are necessary in the first place.

Dutch iris from my garden.

Another Reason I Love My Little Bear

This is what the Bear, age eight, gave me for Mother's Day:

(Click to enlarge.)

In case you can't read the fine print, it says

Dear Mom,
I am thankfull for you for 3 reasons: 1 because if you weren't alive I wouldn't be alive, 2 because you are nice and 3 because you make food for me.

Can't argue with #1, which is just typical, ineluctable Bear logic. As for #2, it's wonderful that he chooses to see the nice me and not the crabby one. And the quality of #3 fluctuates, too; some days, it's a good thing he likes veggie burgers.

I love the pop-up flowers. And I know he made them purple because he knew I'd like it. The only thing that makes me even happier than his artwork is this, his budding gift of empathy.

Happy Mother's Day

I love the idea of mothers being recognized for what they do. I hate the sentimentalization of it - never mind that this post starts and ends with flowers. (But as I've said before, flowers are sexy. They're not sentimental.)

Anyway, what I'm reflecting on this Mother's Day is how being a mother has made me appreciate my own mother more. She had the usual portion of burdens - though if you ask her, she'll say she had far more than her share of joys. Only now, having lived through sleepless nights with sick kids and breastfeeding babies, endured the tantrums of toddlerhood, and navigated some of the drama of a grade-schooler's social life - only now do I have a visceral appreciation of how my mom did all of that - and did it with unflagging cheer and love. No wonder I'm still sometimes surprised at how hard it can be; she made it look easy.

But my mother had a few extra troubles, as well.

When I was in college but my sister was only 11, my parents' marriage ended and my father wasn't much involved with us kids for several years. To his credit, he did keep up with his financial obligations - and my mom is still quick to point that out. To her credit, she was always willing to include him (though not his girlfriend) in family events. She did what millions of other single parents have done, but that didn't make it any easier. And she did it with an abundance of grace and love.

Earlier yet, when my parents were still married, my father nearly died of complications of a chronic disease. He was in the VA hospital in Minneapolis, and we were living in North Dakota, six hours away. Over a nearly two-month period, she somehow managed to hold everything together, making the drive through blizzards and keeping us kids cared for, whether by neighbors or older relatives. My sister was only three at the time. And she didn't have the family support that would've been ideal. Her own mother was not terribly strong anymore. Her mother-in-law was more robust and could help with us kids as long as another adult was present. During one of her hospital trips, my dad's mother and sister had one of their epic fights while supposedly holding down the fort. My aunt let loose a string of swear words - my delicate ears had never heard such a barrage! - and stomped out, leaving my 81-year-old grandma in sole charge, with my mother still six hours away. It must have been a relief on so many levels when my father finally came home. (He's still doing well today.)

I got an inkling of what she must have gone through when my husband was being treated for life-threatening pneumonia and spent a month in the hospital with a couple of weeks in the ICU. (He's okay these days, too.) Our kids were one and four, and we were in Germany, where we hadn't planned to stay beyond a few weeks' vacation. In the weeks leading up to the ICU, when he spent some time hospitalized with related problems, I came to understand what a terrible conflict my mom had faced - knowing your young kids need your care, knowing your spouse needs your support and advocacy. Really, you'd need to be at the hospital 24/7, but you can't do that when you've got sole responsibility for little ones.

But the difference? When my spouse was admitted to the ICU, my mom dropped everything, flew from California to Berlin, and slept on a mattress on the floor in order to stay with my kids. I finally got to be where I was most needed. I remember the tremendous relief I felt, even in the midst of awful fear, at no longer being torn between two conflicting obligations. What the Bear remembers from that time is celebrating his fifth birthday with a cake in the hospital - and his grandma playing a "grammasaurus" at a dino-themed party once his dad finally came home.

And for all of that - as for so many other things - I will always be grateful to my mom.

Eighteen Kids Make a Quiverfull

A woman in Arkansas, Michelle Duggar, is expecting her eighteenth child, according to an AP story that was reported today. And she's delighted about it. The tone of the press coverage is just as chirpy as the mother-to-be herself:

It's a happy Mother's Day for an Arkansas woman — she's pregnant with her 18th child. Michelle Duggar, 41, is due on New Year's Day, and the latest addition will join seven sisters and 10 brothers. There are two sets of twins.

"We've had three in January, three in December. Those two months are a busy time for us," she said, laughing.

The Duggars' oldest child, Josh, is 20, and the youngest, Jennifer, is nine months old.

The fast-growing family lives in Tontitown in northwest Arkansas in a 7,000-square-foot home. All the children — whose names start with the letter J — are home-schooled.

Duggar has been been pregnant for more than 11 years of her life, and the family is in the process of filming another series for Discovery Health.
(Source: AP via Yahoo)

I realize it may sound Grinch-like to grouse about another woman's pregnancy. I'm willing to take her joy at face value; I'm also willing to grant that reproductive rights has to include the right to make childbearing decisions that I personally find incomprehensible.

But there's a darker side to the Duggar megafamily, one that's not much covered in the media. The only trace of it in the AP article is a single sentence:

She and her husband, Jim Bob Duggar, said they'll keep having children as long as God wills it.

This is a phrase we've heard before. Remember the Andrea Yates case, where a Texas woman suffering from postpartum psychosis drowned all five of her children in the bathtub? She and her husband, too, transferred all of their moral agency to "God's will," even after previous pregnancies had obviously made Ms. Yates mentally ill.

I'm not suggesting that Ms. Duggar is going to snap under the strain - not at all. (In fact, with a highly regimented system for enlisting the children in household work, her life is immeasurably more organized than my own. Not that I'd want to trade.) But there's a huge element of coercion in these fundamentalist communities that insist women forego birth control and turn their bodies over to God (and their husbands).

This is how the Duggars themselves describe their decision to accept as many children as their God will give them:

Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar married July 21st, 1984. At that time, they chose to use the birth control pill. They thought, “We don’t want children right now. We can’t afford them. We want children in our timing, when we’re ready.” Four years later they decided to have their first child. Then, Michelle went back on the pill, but she conceived and had a miscarriage. At that point they talked with a Christian medical doctor and read the fine print in the contraceptives package. They found that while taking the pill you can get pregnant and then miscarry. They were grieved! They were Christians! They were pro-life! They realized that their selfish actions had taken the life of their child.

They teach their kids creationism in their homeschooling, so the weird science in this passage is no shocker. They're parroting the idea that the pill is an abortifacient, which is simply not supported by any real, non-wingnut science. It is, however, at the heart of the anti-abortion movement's campaign to make hormonal birth control inaccessible (by convincing pharmacists not to fill prescriptions) and ultimately illegal.

Here's the rest of the story that's not being told by the media: Religiously, the Duggars are fundamentalist Baptists who - according to Wikipedia - support the Quiverfull movement. As journalist Kathryn Joyce reported in The Nation in late 2006, the Quiverfull movement demands wives be subservient to their husbands and bear as many children as possible to be "arrows" in a holy war against liberalism. Their bodies, Joyce writes, are to be a "living sacrifice" to God. The goal is to out-reproduce those of us who don't share their beliefs in an attempt to promote God's kingdom on earth, or at least their version of it. (Read Joyce's article; it's wonderfully reported, albeit chilling.)

Why do women go along with this pseudo-theology? I don't believe fundamentalist women - even those involved in such obviously anti-feminist movements as Quiverfull - are mere dupes. Just because a wife pledges subservience doesn't mean she's powerless. Quiverfull women, like Michelle Duggar, homeschool their children. For me, that would be a quick ticket to the loony bin. For Quiverfull women, I suspect it can be a source of power and satisfaction. Similarly, these women can build an identity around being crucial to building an army for God. Quiverfull elevates the status of motherhood, making it not just "the most important job in the world" (as the tired cliché would have it) but a holy mission. If you're already drawn toward having a large family anyway, what quicker route to fulfillment and meaning?

Another clue to the power Quiverfull women (and fundamentalist wives more generally) wield in mothering comes from the Duggar family's own website. It refers to "training" children and a "desire to train up their children to follow God with their whole heart." This is not-exactly-veiled code for an authoritarian approach to discipline that some fundamentalist Christians embrace. Two of its main exponents, Michael and Debi Pearl, describe it as geared toward producing perfect obedience:

"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it (Prov. 22:6)." Train up, not beat up. Train up, not discipline up. Train up, not educate up. Train up, not "positive affirmation" up. Training is the most obvious missing element in child rearing. Training is not discipline. A child will need more than "obedience training," but without it everything else will be insufficient. ...

There is much satisfaction in training up a child. It is easy and challenging. When my children were able to crawl (in the case of one, roll) around the room, I set up training sessions.

Try it yourself. Place an appealing object where they can reach it, maybe in a "No-no" corner or on an apple juice table (That's where the coffee table once sat). When they spy it and make a dive for it, in a calm voice say, "No, don't touch it." They will already be familiar with the "No," so they will pause, look at you in wonder and then turn around and grab it. Switch their hand once and simultaneously say, "No." Remember, you are not disciplining, you are training. One spat with a little switch is enough. They will again pull back their hand and consider the relationship between the object, their desire, the command and the little reinforcing pain.
(From Michael and Debi Pearl, "To Train up a Child")

Imagine deliberately setting up situations where an infant will be hit with a switch. An infant who's just learned to crawl! My Bear started that at six months! Even that exemplar of Christian authoritarianism, James Dobson, says: "There is no excuse for spanking babies or children younger than 15 to 18 months of age."

You could say many things about the parent in this vignette - that she (or he) is an incredible control freak, that she is indulging in cruelty. The one thing you can't say is that the parent is powerless. And therein, too, must lie some of the appeal for women who voluntarily sign up for fundamentalist family life. (I'm not thinking here at all of sects like the FLDS, where women have very little choice.)

But do you hear about any of this in the media version of the Duggar's story? No! Instead, the coverage emphasizes the quaintness, or cuteness, or sheer unusualness of the Duggars having (almost) 18 children. The website for the Discovery Channel show has fun games like "Name that Duggar!" But you scarcely hear a peep about the Quiverfull movement, its goals, its call for female subservience, or its adherents' medieval approach to child rearing - I mean, training.

Update, 11:20 p.m., May 10: Please check out the first comment for a fascinating inside perspective from a Quiverfull mother who practices attachment parenting and rejects the notion of wifely subservience. I'm glad to know that the movement is not monolithic and that there are some strong and assertive women in it. Thank you, Betsy, for your remarks.

Staying A-Breast of Human Rights

Good news for mamas and babies who don't want to live in seclusion until the kid is weaned. The AP reports:

The Vermont Human Rights Commission ruled there are grounds to believe Freedom Airlines discriminated against a woman ordered off a plane after refusing to cover up while breast-feeding her child. ...

The panel found grounds to believe that Freedom Airlines, a subsidiary of Mesa Air Group, Inc., "violated Vermont's prohibition against discrimination against women breast feeding in places of public accommodation," said Commission Executive Director Robert Appel.

First off, how fucking cool is it that Vermont has a Human Rights Commission? A quick Google search on "Ohio" and "human rights" turned up a hit for Ken Blackwell (who served on the UN Human Rights Commission! WTF?) and a colleague of mine here at the university who's got an intriguing project on human rights and feminist ethics. But no Ohio commission for human rights. Maybe one exists; but doesn't the name matter? How can we get one of these?

And how ironic is it that the offending company is called Freedom Airlines?

Here's the incident that sparked this case, again according to the AP:

On Oct. 13, 2006, Gillette, her husband and their then 22-month-old daughter, River, were headed to New York. While waiting at the gate to take off, Gillette, seated next to the window in the next to last row, began to breast feed her child.

She says a flight attendant handed her a blanket and told her to cover up. She refused. A short time later they were removed from the plane.

If you're reading my blog, you probably already agree that this is just silly. America really stands alone in so thoroughly sexualizing women's breasts that we're scandalized when they're used to give a child a healthy start.

What I want to add is how impractical a blanket usually is. Both my boys - but especially the Bear, who was born with his eyes wide open and pretty much hasn't closed them since - would never settle for eating under a tent, at least not once they were able to lift their heads. I mean, try throwing a large beach towel over your head during dinner and see how much you enjoy your meal! Better yet, move your plate into the bathroom and then savor your towel-bedecked meal. That's what babies and mamas are repeatedly demanded to do.

This kid was nearly two years old, so you can imagine how gladly she would've accepted a blanket over her face. Of course, if she'd thrown a tantrum as a result, that might've gotten her ejected, too. Then again, if your kid just repeatedly says "bye-bye" and you refuse to dope her with Benadryl, that alone can get you booted these days.

It doesn't have to be like this for nursing mamas and babies. I did most of the early care and feeding of the Bear in Germany, where he was born, and you know what? Breastfeeding in public was just a non-issue. Like most civilized people, the Germans recognize that sometimes, a breast is just a breast. And that mother's milk is a human right.

LOLmama and well-nursed LOLkitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

To Sleep, Perchance to Heal

I really, really love to sleep. Sure, there are more thrilling things you can do in bed - and in general, they're worth losing sleep over - but in an ideal world that'd still leave plenty of time for eight hours of nightly sleep. Or nine! I haven't regularly snoozed that much since the last millennium, which coincides with when I was expecting my first-born.

At a recent meeting with my women's studies colleagues, I mentioned to a couple of them who also have young kids that one of the hidden costs of breastfeeding - which I was grateful to be able to do, don't get me wrong - is that it sets you up for many years of sleep deprivation. All of them nodded vigorously. (N=3, so take this as the anecdote that it is.)

Sure, you can do things to mitigate this. Co-sleeping while my babies were really young helped; so did moving them to a bed of their own when they didn't need such frequent feedings. Their father willingly sat up with our restless first-born in the wee hours during those first crazy weeks. But if you're the milk source, even preparing some bottles for your partner to give isn't going to help, because you still need to pump or you won't sleep.

Most of all, though, you become so attuned to that baby's cry that you just can't sleep through it, no matter how helpful your partner. In the meantime, your partner is practicing ignoring the racket as much as possible. Because there's no sense in everyone being trashed come morning. And then your baby grows, but the toddler who takes his place through some strange process of alien child-swapping has bad dreams; the preschooler wets the bed; the grader-schooler has more bad dreams; the teenager stumbles in long after midnight. And though the dairy truck drove away years ago, the mother is still usually the first one woken.

This turns out to be a nasty irony of nature. Women are more likely to be sleep deprived due to their biological and social roles. At the same time, we're more likely to suffer ill health than men at equal levels of deprivation.

Carly Weeks of the Toronto Globe and Mail (via Broadsheet) reports on a host of ills that preferentially hit sleep-deprived women:

Researchers from the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., compared sleep patterns in a group of men and women and found that women who slept poorly had significantly higher levels of biomarkers that are associated with an increased risk of heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. Women who slept poorly were also much more likely to experience hostility, distress, depression and anger, according to the study.

The study, conducted by Edward Suarez, an associate professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke, was just published in Brain, Behavior and Immunity, in case you wish to track down the original article.

The women most at risk were those who typically took a half-hour or longer to fall asleep. According to the summary of Suarez's study in Science Daily:

For women, poor sleep was associated with higher levels of C-reactive protein and interleukin-6, measures of inflammation that have been associated with increased risk of heart disease, and higher levels of insulin. The results were so dramatic that of those women considered poor sleepers, 33 per cent had C-reactive protein levels associated with high risk of heart disease, says Suarez.

Why haven't we heard more about such risks? Gender and sleep is a relatively new field of study:

Suarez says that while women are twice as likely as men to report problems with sleep, most sleep studies in the past have focused on men, a phenomenon that has been slowly changing in recent years.

But other recent studies have produced similar findings. According to another Science Daily article, a study released last fall by researchers at the University of Warwick also found women to be at elevated risk of heart disease due to sleep problems.

The researchers found that the those women in the study group who slept less than or equal to 5 hours a night were twice as likely to suffer from hypertension than women who slept for the more recommended seven hours or more a night. The researchers found no difference between men sleeping less than 5 hours and those sleeping 7 hours or more.

At the five-hours or less mark, women are also more likely than men to gain weight irrespective of diet and exercise. Women whose sleep is broken are more likely to suffer from spontaneous pain. This last study didn't compare women to men, but its findings may be pertinent to those with fibromyalgia and other pain syndromes, who are disproportionately women. And broken sleep is exactly what new - and not-so-new - mothers commonly report, as do many women undergoing menopause.

I'm sure I could find more examples, but I'm tired, thanks partly to my ongoing caffeine deficit. I might just watch an old episode of Monk and turn in early, for once. Or I would, if only my son the Tiger would finally go to sleep ...

Sleep-deprived kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Reason, Unreason, and Reproduction

Now that the dust has settled from the latest skirmish in the Mommy Wars (Mothers vs. Non-mothers Edition), I've taken a closer look at the article in Reason magazine that set it off. In it, author Ronald Bailey argues that educated women are not just limiting their family size but forgoing motherhood altogether because children tend not to make people happy. Sometimes Reason has smart and interesting stuff; that's where I learned, for instance, that the TSA is tracking the books people schlep in their baggage. But the fuss over Bailey's piece was just so not worth it. The magazine may be called Reason, but this article is rife with unreason.

Bailey starts off in an eminently sensible vein:

I doubt that the "demographic winter" [i.e., the drop in birthrates below replacement level] portends economic collapse or social deterioration, but let us set that aside for this column, and instead ask why people are choosing to have fewer children?

Agreed, the demographic winter really is a non-issue. If anything, unless the earth's population stabilizes, we'll hit a point of economic and environment unsustainability – assuming we haven't already.

Why are people having fewer kids? Great question. Historically, Bailey is correct in saying that birthrates fall as women's educational and occupational options grow. This is a good thing not just for women but also for their children, who are more likely to enjoy good nutrition and education – and to simply survive – in smaller families.

This is not a new trend. France led the way already in the 1800s, well before the rest of the West, but by the eve of World War I, all of the industrialized countries were noting declines in their birthrates. This spawned panic that women weren't doing their duties. It may seem quaint today, but at the time plenty of people in the U.S. were dead serious (so to speak) about "race suicide" among non-immigrant whites. (Um, actually that might not be as antiquated a view as I'd like to think.) Germans were convinced that the more-fecund Poles would overrun them; such fears were one factor that spurred them to preemptively overrun the Poles.

So history teaches us that there are good reasons to keep a cool head about population fluctuations.

I also have no beef with Bailey's contention that not every human being is biologically driven to spawn. I have good friends who've chosen consciously and happily not to have babies. I could have taken either path, myself. I know I would've built a satisfying life if I'd never had kids, because I did just that for 36 years. All-encompassing biological determinism is silly and belied by the facts.

But does that mean there's no innate drive to reproduce? This is where Bailey's argument starts to crumble, because the opposite extreme of biological determinism is equally silly. Unlike in the past, the financial costs of bearing and rearing children outstrip any financial benefit parents may derive from them. Raising kids is expensive, particularly when you factor in the lost earning potential of whichever parent assumes primarily caretaking responsibilities. (Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood is still the best analysis I know of this problem – highly recommended.) The emotional rewards are not a sure bet, either, but more on that in a moment.

And yet, despite the unfavorable cost-benefit calculation, people keep having kids. In many cases, by choice. Is this all a result of ideology? It's true we still live in a culture where busybodies feel free to ask young women when they'll finally start having babies, where women are still presumed incomplete without children. But there are lots of enlightened women who feel quite free to tell the busybodies to buzz off, yet choose to have babies anyway. Are we all victims of maternalist false consciousness? If so, then I'm completed deluded about my own motives. If there were no biological drive whatsoever to reproduce, I would've stuck with my comfy life of reading and writing and hanging out in cafes.

There's also a major difference between choosing small families and choosing to forgo children altogether. Bailey conflates the two. The experience of most Western nations shows that given reasonably free choice, a minority of women will choose to be childfree, but most will have at least a child or two.

Bailey's most striking example – Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, where he says 30 percent of women are childless – betrays complete cluelessness about the cultural context. I lived in Germany for ten years. I know some of these women. Some are perfectly happy with their decision to remain childfree. Others will say that they just never met the right partner. Many felt they had to choose between motherhood and a career. This last group comprises mostly educated women who have options; working-class women usually have a child or two, and they usually continue working out of necessity.

Germany has lots of good daycares and family-friendly work policies, so you wouldn't think educated women face stark choices. But some employers are hostile to working mothers, in part because the law requires employers to hold a new mother's job for three years. Unsurprisingly, women of childbearing age face discrimination in hiring. Some employers assume they'll just get pregnant and bug out for three years. Another problem is that many schools let out early in the afternoon, leaving parents with major childcare hassles. The daycare network actually functions better for preschoolers. Probably the biggest obstacle of all, though, is the image of the Rabenmutter – the bad mother who heartlessly abandons her children to the care of strangers. This image is still so potent that some women seem to feel that unless they can do it "right," they shouldn't have children at all.

Finally, Bailey's argument suffers from a confusion of categories when he claims that children don't make their parents happy. But happiness is not the same thing as satisfaction. That's particularly true in the short term.

You'd have to be lobotomized to find every aspect of day-to-day childcare immediately rewarding. I'm tense and unhappy when my two boys go into auto-squabble mode. I sometimes wish for a mute button when their demands on my attention just won't stop. Some aspects of routine childcare can be boring, especially the extra housekeeping work. I crave more privacy than I get. I'm grateful for the Tiger's part-time daycare and the Bear's school (apart from the 11 snow days we've had this winter!) because without some time apart from my kids, I get depleted, crabby, and frustrated.

But what work – what relationship – is never stressful, or boring, or tiring? Just because I don't find parenting blissful 24/7 doesn't make it a hollow or foolhardy enterprise, as Bailey implies. On the contrary, it's intensely satisfying. And here the long view matters, not just the moment. The kids grow, they learn, they give back love, they make us laugh. They say startlingly weird and wonderful things in the midst of all their chatter. They let us see the world through their eyes, which can be funny or amazing or even enlightening. That's not just ideology speaking. At the end of the day, most days, my experience says yes, my life is more complicated and harder than it was before kids, but it's also richer. That doesn't mean parenting is the only path to fulfillment, only that we should respect each others' choices without assuming those on the other path are deluded.

Of course, it helps that we're having a pretty good morning. The kids just finished singing a hilarious out-of-season version of "Jingle Bells" in four-part disharmony with the neighbor girls. And now they're outdoors, romping on the swings and holding an Animal Club meeting on this first mild day, this blessed harbinger of spring.

Childproof cat from I Can Has Cheezburger?