moving to a new web site!

After two years of writing on Blogger, two blog titles (A Doula, Too and Feminist Childbirth Studies), and 160 posts, I'm ready to move into my own space. I'll continue with my usual weekly posting but at First the Egg, a web site that will include extensive information as well as my blog. Please do follow me over, change your links, update your blogroll, spread the word, get in touch with any feedback or suggestions you may have, and enjoy the new site!

Thanks. And see you there.

Emily James Putnam on motherhood and isolation (1910)

An interesting historical tidbit:

"It follows from the lady's history that she is to-day, when freed from many of the old restrictions and possessed of a social and financial power undreamed of by her originators, a somewhat dangerous element of society. Her training and experience when not antisocial have been unsocial. Women in general have lived an individualistic life. As soon as the division of early labour sent the man out to fight and kept the woman in the house, the process began which taught men to act in concert while women still acted singly. The man's great adventure of warfare was undertaken shoulder to shoulder with his fellows, while the rumble of the tam-tam thrilled his nerves with the collective motive of the group. The woman's great adventure of maternity had to be faced in cold blood by each woman for herself. The man's exploit resulted in loot to be divided in some manner recognised as equitable, thus teaching him a further lesson in social life. The woman's exploit resulted in placing in her arms a little extension of her ego for which she was fiercely ready to defy every social law. Maternity is on the face of it an unsocial experience. The selfishness that a woman has learned to stifle or to dissemble where she alone is concerned, blooms freely and unashamed on behalf of her offspring. The world at large, which may have made some appeal to the sympathies of the disinterested woman, becomes to the mother chiefly a source of contagious disease and objectionable language. The man's fighting instinct can be readily utilised in the form of sports and games to develop in boys the sense of solidarity; the little girl's doll serves no such social end. The women of the working-classes have been saved by their work itself, which has finally carried them out of the house where it kept them so long. In the shop and the factory they have learned what the nursery can never teach. But the lady has had no social training whatever; the noticeable weakness of her play at bridge is the tendency to work for her own hand. Being surrounded by soft observance she has not so much as learned the art of temperate debate. With an excellent heart and the best intentions but with her inevitable limitations, the lady seems about to undertake the championship of a view of society to which her very existence is uncongenial."

(in Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, ed. Miriam Schneir, pp. 252-3; originally from Putnam's 1910 The Lady)

Mama, Ph.D.: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life

I resisted reading Mama, Ph.D. (ed. Elrena Evans and Caroline Grant) for a long time because I felt sort of alienated and icked out by its title--I'm a snob in some ways, and 'too cute' is most assuredly one of them. But it turns out that the book itself is quite good. I've read it one little chapter at a time over the course of the past four months and enjoyed it quite a bit. Yes, it took me four months to read a 250-page 'for fun' book. Yes, I am an English professor. No, I wasn't reading anything else other than the many books I've taught. No, it doesn't make any sense that I don't have time to read. Oh well.

Evans and Grant gathered thirty-five short essays, all by women academics and women who used to be academics (recovering academics?). Most of the contributors are mothers--of one child, or of a couple (still pretty unusual amongst academic women--let alone tenured ones), or in one case of six (a particularly strong essay, and talk about unusual!). I would have liked to see some men's voices amongst the women's--the voices of our colleagues who--like my own partner--are also fully-engaged parents and fully-engaged academics.

Some of the essays are excellent. Many attend to academia's tendency to embrace the mind/body split and value apparently disembodied minds--and therefore to be uncomfortable with and unaccommodating of the pressing physicality of pregnancy, breastfeeding, and parenting (especially of young children). The book also represents the decision not to have children at all, as well as the experiences of fertility problems and miscarriage within academic culture.

For me, as an academic woman parenting a small child, this book was affirming. Like most of the women in the book, and like most of the academic mothers I know (and not just of my generation), I work like crazy to make everything look seamless from the outside, to be an excellent teacher and scholar and colleague and a good parent and at least an okay partner, to show up at work smiling and to show up at my child's preschool smiling, not to appear as sleep-deprived as I have been for the past three years and some change. I love what I do, and I feel better keeping everything together than I would being a disaster. But it's really nice to read the voices of other people who actually know how hard this particular juggling act can be.

I think, too, that this book could be a useful--and engaging, and accessible--read for people with academic parents in their lives but who aren't themselves academics, or who are academics but not parents.

Trust Women (at Spilt Milk)

Just a nod to a lovely post at Spilt Milk on Blog for Choice Day. And have a happy weekend.

yoga and the pain/suffering distinction

Birthworkers often try to explain that pain and suffering are not the same thing, on the premise that 'birth usually hurts' doesn't have to equal 'people giving birth suffer.' [The shortish version: We have the physical sensation of pain, and then we have the emotional experience of suffering, which are sometimes but not always related. We all agree, certainly, that I can suffer--feel fear, distress, lack of control, sadness, regret, and/or other 'painful' emotions--without physical pain (because someone betrays me, a family member dies, I make a mistake, I have upsetting memories or dreams, etc.). Yet people often assume that the opposite is untrue--that physical pain is always accompanied by suffering. Supporters of low-intervention birth tend to disagree: I know, for instance, that I can feel not only suffering without pain but also pain without suffering. Although much of my own labor was quite painful, I only experienced suffering during transition.]

Understanding this distinction and believing in one's ability to navigate pain without suffering allows a person to perceive labor as an experience that can involve no or little suffering. And therefore be less fearful, more empowered and active, etc. (thereby potentially helping the person stay relaxed and in fact experience less pain than she would if she were tense, immobilized, frightened). It's sort of hard to explain convincingly, though, since people have been told all our lives that birth is SO PAINFUL that you should get an epidural in the parking lot, etc., or you will never be able to cope. In this narrative, of course, pain=suffering.

A few months ago I had an opportunity to practice yoga regularly, and as my practice deepened and my body responded to it, I realized that yoga offers a pretty perfect illustration of the pain/suffering distinction. Stretching to the point of challenging but not injuring oneself involves identifying the line between good pain--productive pain, manageable intensity--and bad pain--destructive pain, suffering. Yoga does hurt, if I think about it objectively, but it hurts in a way that feels delicious and warm and useful. Sort of how a good massage hurts some if your back is really messed up, but only in a way that feels good, like that's just what needs to be happening. Obviously we could also talk about sex here, about the intensity that could be described as pain but is processed instead as pleasure and promise--and no, I'm not talking about anything kinky here, though those sorts of comparisons might also apply. And I imagine other sorts of exercise also fit into this schema, though I haven't, um, tried them out to check. (You won't, for instance, find me out running.)

Surely some prenatal yoga instructors point out this empowering and clarifying aspect of the experience (of yoga, for birth), but the DVDs I used as a pregnant woman never mentioned it. I wish they had. It seems to me that it would be wonderful for people anticipating childbirth to understand on a really concrete level that they can feel pain without suffering by actually feeling pain without suffering in a self-aware sort of way. One more argument for prenatal yoga, ideally integrated into thoughtful childbirth education!

"What does a feminist mother look like?": 1 of 2

Well, one of them looks a whole hell of a lot like me.

I'm a couple years late to the party, but all the same, in response to an old post on Blue Milk:

1. How would you describe your feminism in one sentence? When did you become a feminist? & 2. Was it before or after you became a mother?

I see gender as a socially-constructed system that supports various kinds of domination and subordination and deeply harms both women and men by placing us in limited, unfulfilling roles. The kind of feminism that interests me questions gender as a system as well as those other structures of domination and subordination, including heteronormativity, class structures, constructions of race, and so forth. (Okay; that's two sentences. And there's quite a lot more in my post What Sort of a Feminist Are You, Anyway?)

I don't really know when I "became a feminist." I was raised by my feminist parents and grandparents to believe unproblematically that girls and women are whole people; I was encouraged to think of my career and my education just as much as my brother was; for heaven's sake, my (fantastic Southern and Catholic) grandma graduated from college early and had a fulfilling career right alongside raising my dad and aunt. On the other hand, I'm not sure I started identifying as a "feminist" until ... embarrassingly ... college or later? And--though it mattered to my politics and ethics much earlier--feminism only became central to my scholarship after I gave birth.

3. What has surprised you most about motherhood?

A) I much prefer "parenthood"; I don't particularly think of myself as a "mother," and "mothering" and "fathering" aren't distinct activities in our family. B) Oh, geez, lots of things. I had no idea what I was getting into--I'd never changed a diaper or fed a baby! A few things: How romantic giving birth can be. How amazing breastfeeding feels when you've been away just a bit too long and finally have a chance to nurse again. The fact that my body is strong. The fact that I can keep gently taking care of someone who just made me cry (by head-butting me in the face; by keeping me awake all night; whatever). The fact that I could--absolutely without irony or a sense of humor--hand my perfect little baby to my partner the moment he walked in the door after a day away and announce, hightailing it out of the room, "I don't want to touch it again today. At. All." (And, yes, "it" refers to our child in that sentence.) The realization that I hadn't been busy, before. The wonderful truth that it's possible to breastfeed and write your dissertation simultaneously as long as you have a Boppy, a firm sofa, and a laptop. That I could become much closer with my partner than I had been. That parenting is 24/7. What it's like to get profusely vomited on--while naked--when you hate vomit more than all the other icky things in the world combined. That if you're really really sick and on your own, instead of taking care of yourself, you curl up in a ball on the floor but keep making sure your kid's safe, even if he's crawling all over you and you're in tears. That we were right: cloth diapering is perfectly doable, and he would start using the toilet on his own if we didn't push it, and we didn't need a stroller if we didn't want one, and people can parent differently from the norm and be just fine. That mortality scares me more, not less, now. That I'm a capable human being, not just a capable scholar and teacher. That my partner is the best parent I've ever seen. That three-year-olds can be really funny, not just I'm-humoring-you-because-you're-a-child funny.

4. How has your feminism changed over time? What is the impact of motherhood on your feminism?

In short: I've radicalized. Click here for a longer version.

5. What makes your mothering feminist? How does your approach differ from a non-feminist mother’s? How does feminism impact upon your parenting?

That's an interesting series of questions. I suppose our parenting is feminist in a quiet sort of way--our son says "he or she" without awkwardness and will sometimes call me on it if I say "he" or "she" without a reason for knowing someone's gender, for instance. We model nonsexist language because that's just how we talk and write. We've avoided highly-gendering clothes and toys and often let our child choose things himself. We've avoided television because so much of what's on it is sexist, racist, classist, ableist. We answer the inevitable existential questions from our own feminist perspectives.

I find myself saying the strangest things ...

One of the things I've found amusing about parenting is the way I catch myself right after uttering truly bizarre sentences as though they were normal things to say, totally nonchalantly. Stuff I wouldn't have foreseen saying, like for instance:

• Could you hand me a washcloth? There's a bunch of breastmilk on my keyboard.
• Please get your penis out of the ladle.
• No, shrimp do not have uvulas.
• I'm gonna read this story on the balcony now whether you stay here sticking your ass in the air or not.
• Bare butts don't go on eating surfaces.
• Spider-Man, be careful with his eye!

In retrospect, they mostly have to do with bodies. I love how small children have no body shame or self-consciousness. I love that my son's body and my body are the same to him as anything else he loves and feels comfortable around, not loaded in any way. I love that one day several months ago he said "I love all the parts of my body."

And I love laughing when I realized suddenly that he's gotten me to say something weird ... again ...

Sesame Street online

We're one of those slightly odd families without cable, or any desire for cable (even when the cable company keeps bizarrely begging us to take it for free), or a TV that's hooked up. Our child didn't watch a movie until he was two and has had a fairly moving-images-free babyhood/toddlerhood. So, now that we do occasionally watch movies with him and now that he sometimes sees TV shows via his school's DVD player, he thinks they're Very Special Indeed. In the past year, too, we've started showing him videos on YouTube and other web sites from time to time. It started with a desire to hear what various sorts of animals sound like. Then we discovered that our zoo has webcams that you can visit online. He was the Cookie Monster (familiar from books) for Halloween, so we showed him "C is for Cookie." And so we soon discovered his great love of Sesame Street. I consider this affinity to be a small miracle--a non-annoying show with values consonant with ours? Score!

I also love that his favorite character is Oscar the Grouch, whom he calls either "Grouchy" (like he's the eighth dwarf) or "the Grouchy" (like he's the Fonz), and that we therefore get to hear songs such as "I Hate Christmas."

So, anyway, I recently realized that Sesame Street's web site has loads of video content, and that it's much more cleverly organized than I would have anticipated. You can browse by character (VERY useful), subject, or theme; you can browse songs; you can go to "classic" content separately. Within the other categories (let's say you're looking at Oscar the Grouch clips), some of the results are marked "classic" with a little green-and-white circle in the top left corner, which I find helpful in various pursuits. The site is also, of course, searchable, so if you want to locate clips from some guest star's visit (or a particular song), you can. It's pretty addictive, actually ...

"Dad Delivers Baby with Help from Google" (but not, apparently, from the birthing woman)

My husband recently forwarded me this article with a huffy email attached, along the general lines of 'what the !@#$?' He later mentioned that I might post about it, or that maybe on second thought it was 'too easy.'

If you've followed that link, you see what he means. Basically: Does the birthing woman in this story have any agency at all? Did she maybe also do something in terms of getting a human person out of her own body in her own home? Let's see:

• SHE "started going into labor"
• she "began having contractions"
• (That's it.)
• HE "didn't turn to the doctors, but to Google" (apparently the two options are doctors or technology, which is particularly strange given that he [and presumably she] was worried "that the midwife wouldn't arrive in time")
• he was "Unsure of what do"
• he "fear[ed]"
• he "grabbed"
• he "Googled"
• he "followed [instructions]"
• he "found"
• he "delivered"

Quoting the father, the article continues:

I wasn't sure what I was going to do so I just looked up the instructions on the internet using my BlackBerry.

I was very, very nervous. I never thought I'd actually have to do it. [Is she even there?]

The BlackBerry told me that when I saw the head, I had to support it.

And when the baby actually comes out, I had to place her on Emma's chest, then covered them both with a blanket and make sure they were both comfortable and relaxed.

In the end, the mother is represented as grateful to her heroic husband and to his Blackberry, with no attention to any feelings she may have about her own body or herself. Of course, we have no idea how this family actually views or talks about the event, but the article gives us a pretty clear view of how contemporary culture constructs agency in the birthing space.

cookies cookies cookies

Okay, so this post has absolutely nothing to do with either birth or feminism. (Cookies are good immediately after birthing? Feminists love cookies? Oh well.)

But I love me some cookies. I particularly love these peanut butter cookies (at Heidi Swanson's excellent 101 Cookbooks), which look weird--olive oil and maple syrup?--but are profoundly delicious. I make them with unbleached white flour and smooth peanut butter, because that's what we have, and I freeze the little dough balls on a cookie sheet and then in a freezer bag so that I can enjoy fresh cookies whenever. They are particularly delicious rolled in sugar right before baking. And my son can eat the dough while we make them because it's eggless.

Also, Tim Mazurek's food blog Lottie + Doof just ran a mouthwatering series of posts called 12 Days of Cookies. I want shortbread and Linzer Sablés and Apricot Bow Ties and lebkuchen and Cardamom-Pistachio Cookies and Apple-Cranberry Rugelach and Glazed Butter Cookies (which my not-that-into-cookies partner would actually like too) because mmm ...

learning about breastfeeding

I'm not an expert on breastfeeding; I'm just an enthusiastic learner. I've read several books, own what I like to call 'The Big Book of Breastfeeding,' attended a class for pregnant women planning to breastfeed (when I was indeed pregnant and planning to breastfeed) and a class for doulas supporting nursing mothers and one just on breastfeeding in general (anatomy, benefits, challenges, etc.), breastfed my son until he decided to stop (I cannot believe I once bought the inane if-he's-too-old-to-ask-he's-too-old-to-breastfeed line of 'reasoning'), and had long conversations with breastfeeding mothers and their support folk (partners, friends, family, doulas). The science is all so complex and fascinating, and the experience itself is this bizarre and wonderful mixture of the quite complicated (even overwhelming) and the profoundly simple.

One thing I've learned through my experiences with and contemplation of breastfeeding is sort of counterintuitive: In our culture, someone with NO experience around babies may actually be dealing with a blessing in disguise. I had never changed a diaper before I had my baby, and we were the first among our friends to reproduce; the awesome part was that I had nothing to unlearn. Especially because I don't really watch TV, I had no bottle-based preconceptions about how to hold my baby while he ate (preconceptions that can cause positioning and latch problems); I didn't feel pressure to burp him routinely; I'd never imagined formula-feeding my baby, because I'd never really thought much about babies one way or another. I don't mean I'd always imagined breastfeeding--I just mean I've never pictured feeding a baby at all, period, even though I'd pretty much always planned to have children eventually. Maybe the fact that I'm a big flake about family stuff and totally career-obsessed finally paid off :)

I've been thinking about this idea particularly since I read Laura Keegan's great book Breastfeeding with Comfort and Joy, which emphasizes images of comfortable positioning and latch because Keegan believes we're so inundated with bottle-feeding images that we essentially try to bottle-feed our babies with our breasts. Obviously the ideal situation is to have been around lots of happily breastfeeding mother/child pairs. But in lieu of that opportunity ... I'm just glad I don't watch television.

evidence on breastfeeding support

First, though unrelatedly, I'm linking to a short, crisp poem, Sharon Olds's "My Son the Man." Enjoy!

So then ... These two documents from the WHO Reproductive Health Library may be helpful in thinking about effective support for breastfeeding mothers (or mothers who are considering breastfeeding):

• "Support for Breastfeeding Mothers"
  
• "Interventions for Promoting the Initiation of Breastfeeding"
  

The first finds "evidence of effectiveness of both professional and lay support in promoting continued breastfeeding" but also reminds us that "[d]eveloping and implementing long-term breastfeeding early support systems in under-resourced settings is a major challenge." The second finds that

Information, education and communication (IEC) activities can help promote the initiation and successful continuation of breastfeeding. Information packs provided by commercial companies to pregnant mothers to encourage breastfeeding appear to have no benefit

and "reiterates that information, education and communication (IEC) plays a crucial role in the initiation (and successful continuation of) breastfeeding. Population-specific interventions are necessary to educate and motivate pregnant mothers to initiate breastfeeding. Postnatal counselling in addition to prenatal education is important to achieve maximum benefits. Counsellors also need to refresh their skills and information in order to sustain their knowledge and enthusiasm." Human beings offering human, interpersonal, responsive support both before and during breastfeeding really help. (Shocking, huh? But, seriously, people need more breastfeeding support.)