Patriarchal Motherhood
The activist and scholar bell hooks observed that the homeplace was a site of revolution. Whether you are a mother, or someone who works with mothers, you know that the act of mothering - all the emotional labor, bedtime stories, care and love, feeding, comforting, and encouraging - is an incredibly profound and meaningful experience.
But mothers are tired. Mothers are frustrated. Mothers are overwhelmed. The pandemic forced mothers everywhere to wake up to a painful truth…this world is not set up to support us. And until we understand how the institution of motherhood is socially constructed to exploit women and reinforce social inequality and injustice, we will continue to devalue mothers and hold them back from fully realizing their power and place in the world.
It’s time for a motherhood revolution.
This is a four-part blog series in which I dive into four cultural forces that oppress modern motherhood in America: patriarchal motherhood, whiteness, capitalism, and patriarchal religion. Stay tuned for the rest of the series, where I dive into mothering under capitalism, whiteness, and patriarchal religions!
What is the patriarchy?
Let’s start with some basic definitions so we are all on the same page. I like Claire Wasserman’s definition of oppression as a place to start:
“The patriarchy is a system of oppression. Oppression is unjust treatment and control by another - whether it’s an individual, a group, or an entire social and cultural system.”
Claire Wasserman
Patriarchy is a social system that privileges and prioritizes men over women which results in women’s oppression / unjust treatment and control.
We see the patriarchy manifest in individual relationships, group settings, and also in cultural systems. We see it in our public policies, educational system, religious settings, and more. It’s not always about more power, but it is undeniable that men hold most of the powerful positions in the United States: 87% of the world’s billionaires are men, 91% of Fortune 500 companies are run by men, and 100% of US Presidents in the entire history of our country have been men.
But patriarchy affects men negatively too. Yes, this system prioritizes men and gives them a lot of privilege and power, but it also creates enormous pressure and little support. Under patriarchy, men grow up believing that boys don’t cry, so they learn to hide their true feelings. They are expected to be the breadwinners, to be sexually promiscuous, to prove their physical prowess, to be strong and self-reliant. Men are 4x more likely than women to commit suicide. 98% of mass shooters are men.
When I write about dismantling patriarchy, I do so in the hope that it will make women’s lives, and men’s lives, better.
What is patriarchal motherhood?
This is the experience of being a mother in a patriarchal society. It means looking at how our culture treats mothers and children in social systems that prioritize and privilege men. It means challenging our unconscious expectations about what it means to be a “good mother” today.
We're facing thousands of years of patriarchal motherhood, and it has created unspeakable harm to countless women and children.
“For most of recorded history, parental violence against children and men's violence against wives was explicitly or implicitly condoned. Those who had the power to prevent and/or punish this violence through religion, law, or custom, openly or tacitly approved it.”
Riane Eisler
There’s a lot of unlearning to be done.
Patriarchal motherhood as an institution puts a lot of pressure on the individual mothers. In her book, Mother Outlaws: Theories and Practices of Empowered Mothering, author and motherhood scholar Andrea O’Reilly writes about the rules of what it means to be a “good mother” under patriarchy:
Children can only be properly cared for by their biological mother
Mothering must be provided 24/7
Mother must always put children needs first
Mothers must turn to the experts for instruction
Mother must be fully satisfied and complete in motherhood
Mother must lavish excessive amounts of time, energy and money on rearing of her children
Mother has full responsibility but no power from which to mother
Motherhood and childrearing are personal and private undertakings, certainly with no political importance
Sometimes when I present this list to mothers, I get a lot of pushback. “I don’t believe that,” they’ll say. “My husband and I do this equally.” And while it’s true that there may be exceptions to some of these rules in individual relationships or families, these are cultural expectations that define motherhood and defying them is a challenge.
A good practice of self-reflection is to pause on each item on this list and ask yourself, “Where is this true in my life? Where is it not true? When have I felt influenced or challenged by this expectation?
The Nuclear Family
One of the ways in which patriarchal motherhood operates is the idealization of the nuclear family.
The "ideal" family unit: a heterosexual married man and woman who are white, attractive, upper middle-class, educated, and have two biological children.
In Patricia Hill Collins’ essay, “It's All In the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation,” she describes how the idealized family affects views of gender, race, and national identity in the US. Collins explains how the traditional family with a male head-of-household creates a hierarchy that “privileges and naturalizes masculinity as a source of authority.” Also, by emphasizing the heterosexual partnership between the mother and father as the ideal, heteronormativity (which is the cultural emphasis on heterosexual relationships) prevails.
What does all that mean? It means that if your family situation looks different from the “ideal” family unit, you are facing additional challenges to overcome. For instance, Elizabeth Bailey describes her experience as a lesbian mother as a practice in challenging hegemonic expectations of what is a family:
“We had to wrap our heads around how we would go about it; we had to come to terms with the idea of buying sperm from an anonymous donor from an online catalogue; we had to meet with doctors and nurses and wonder whether they would be homophobic or not; we had to decide how we would present and name ourselves as parents; we had to negotiate our own understanding of family and motherhood, and our partnership along the way.”
Elizabeth Bailey, “Bumpy road, Bumpy Road, Smooth(ing The) Road,” in "New Maternalisms" : Tales of Motherhood (Dislodging the Unthinkable)
How can we redefine the nuclear family?
Queer families do not happen by accident, and the extraordinary obstacles they have to overcome may offer a stronger resultant family unit. Heteronormative couples can take a cue from queer couples to engage in deep self-reflection and intentionality around the way they understand family and parenting.
This might include asking questions like:
What kind of values do we want to impart upon their children?
How will the unpaid labor of caregiving of the children be divided equally?
In a heterosexual couple, the mother carries the child for nine months and then possibly breastfeeds for an extended period; in what ways will her partner compensate for the enormous amount of time, energy and labor required in pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding?
These types of intentional questions required of queer couples, when asked by straight couples, can provide a framework of equality from the very beginning of nuclear families.
Queer families often engage in deep self-reflection and intentionality around the way they understand family and parenting.
Conclusion
As mothers, it is our role and responsibility to create the future we want our children to inherit. If you’ve gotten this far in this blog post, it’s likely that you feel just as empowered and moved to find ways to create a family structure that actually becomes a site of revolution. As Cynthia Dewi Oka explains, “the home is not a private resource that we draw from to do the real revolutionary work ‘out there.’ It is the front of human sustenance that is constitutive of hetero-patriarchal, white supremacist capitalism and its limits.”
It is a revolution within the home that will ultimately work to impact these systems.
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