Just Following People Whom I Love

hermanaresist:

jadedhippy:

sadydoyle:

Hey, kids, let’s talk. Let’s have some REAL TALK, talk that should (and probably will) be posted as a comment over at Feministe, but which I also want to lay out for you here. Here’s some stuff that’s happened, or is currently happening, to ladies!

• Slavery! Women were raped by the owners of plantations so that they would give birth to children who would then be slaves. Their right to choose motherhood, to be mothers, was twisted into a mode of production rather than a human relationship, and their ability to provide a safe, loving environment for their children was entirely taken away. If they had daughters, they knew those daughters would be raped, too. If they had sons, they knew those sons would be abused and worked to death.
• Also in slavery! Women had their children sold away from them. Their right to love and care for their children was utterly denied to them; their right to mother always only ever existed at the mercy of the white folks who “owned” them and their families.
• Maquilladoras and sweatshops! Those sure suck! Not least because women are forced to take birth control, and by some accounts forced to abort, so that their motherhood doesn’t get in the way of productivity! Again, for ladies of color and poor ladies, motherhood is a battleground. It’s either permitted or denied by white/rich/first-world folks; they don’t own it.
• Certain people — certain feminists — done went and tried to eliminate people of color from the planet! By advocating birth control, abortion, or forced sterilization for folks they considered unworthy of reproducing. Namely, brown folks. And poor folks. And disabled folks. And etc.
• “Welfare queens!” Yes, indeed. The idea that brown and poor women might be having children — might be mothers — was so abhorrent that the very idea of a brown/poor mother became a right-wing bogeyman, used to scare up votes against necessary financial support for poor communities.
• In the mid-20th century, middle-class, privileged white women complained about being stuck at home all day with the kids. This complaining is seen as the origin of 20th-century American “feminism,” and our idea of a pre-feminist victim is still the Betty Draper-style depressed housewife. It sure does seem like the Betties were having a bummer of a time and all! And their theory remains central to a lot of modern feminism, and modern feminist thinking about motherhood. Except WHOOPS:
• Those women’s children were pretty much always being taken care of by poor women, who were frequently women of color! Who were being paid substandard wages! And had to take care of those white kids instead of their kids, when they might very well have wanted to spend time at home with them!
• And even today, now that those middle-class white women have high-powered corporate jobs, women of color, poor women, and immigrant women are still serving as their nannies! And are still giving up time with their own kids in order to do so! And are still, in many cases, living on a different continent from their children, and saving up money to bring those children to the US, by working long hours taking care of someone else’s child!

Yes, White Feminist Commenter, I can see why you reject the idea that “motherhood is central to your existence.” White, privileged women have had to work very hard to get the right to do anything other than marry and birth babies, that is true. You clearly have read your Betty Friedan! Your absolute astonishment that certain poor women and women of color perceive motherhood — the right to mother, the right to identify as a mother — as central to their activism is, um. A bit sadder, given the really not-at-all-hard-to-find-out-about nature of these facts.

Yes.

the thing is I won’t even ATTMPT to enter dialogue. from me, just not gonna happen.