brought this and this and this, but I like that first link especially. I’m a parent. I wanted to be a parent. I worked hard at it, but I find it weird to consider the pressure we put on people who don’t want to have children.
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Slaughter certainly did kick a hornet’s nest with that article. The responses have been…well…varied…
What I took away from Slaughter’s Lament was…if it’s so damn difficult for someone as well educated, highly paid and highly successful and highly privileged like Anne-Marie Slaughter, imagine what it must be like for just plain folk…many of whom don’t even have the luxury of a choice on wether to work or stay at home.
That IS so often missing, the voice of the voice-less. If I can’t afford the discussion, the discussion is going to seem pretty stupid to me. As it often does.
Kristin Rawls was…well…shall we say…not impressed. (Trickle-down feminism. There’s an image to ponder.)
Naomi Wolf was a little kinder.
But it did manage to reinvigorate the “Capitalism…what a concept!” conversation.
I was extremely frustrated by Slaughter’s article. It was great to see something published that talked about the possibility and desirability of changing the social structures that govern workplaces– they are quite arbitrary. (I’d love to see more calling-out of social structures and naming of their merits and demerits and consideration of change, much more widely.) But it was quite aggravating to see the framing (which led the article) about decrying what Slaughter claims she was led to expect but unnamed feminists. Feminsits are some of the best among us at naming structure and critiquing it, at conceiving new ways.
The societal pressures, especially in light of dwindling resources, and not just the most recent kick in the teeth to the “American Way of Life,” but what environmentalists have known for decades, is staggering. My own mother, hardly a stellar example of someone who enjoyed being a parent, always used to end most conversations with the lament, “when am I going to become a grandmother?” And I wasn’t even married, so I know it was just a learned reflex on her part. Finally my sister did us all a favor and had a son, and the questions stopped.