What is a Feminist Today
Patricia Stuart-Hagge
What is a feminist today? Is it the need to pursue "self-actualization", the right to work alongside men with equality and impunity, the right to control over our bodies and what is inflicted upon them, the opportunity to stand confident and strong as females who comprise more than half the world's population responsible for the continuation of humankind, the right to gainful employment and productivity? It is indeed all this and more. Women today stand at a crossroads - bridging the gap between the tyranny and objurgation of the past and the freedom that promises and embodies a better world for all.
But what of motherhood? Can a woman today proclaim herself a feminist and at the same time advocate the necessity and integrity of motherhood as a career? The answer should be and is a resounding "yes".
Today's society and all too often, hopelessly, feminists locate a woman's most significant activity outside the home, a mentality which questions and to some extent denies a woman the possibility of self-actualization through motherhood. Men, and especially women today, who consciously choose to have children and devote themselves lovingly to the care and nurturing of those children are insidiously shamed into believing that they have compromised their own advancing careers, their social aspirations, their expectations, and have capitulated to sexist and antiquated values. In so doing, they and most especially the mother have deprived themselves of their rightful experience of parenting.
It is my belief that the woman who chooses to make motherhood her career exemplifies feminism in its most basic form. Feminism speaks for people and who more importantly than our children? There can be no substitute (not even the best daycare centre, the most loving grandmother, the most caring friend or neighbour) for the concerned, loving, mature disciplined, aware and perceptive mother, qualities we enhance and develop in our mothering roles and which bespeak an as yet vastly untapped resource in our society. It is unfortunate and ironic that a mother's attachment to her baby, her confidence and pleasure in meeting her baby's needs should be jeopardized, submitted to shame and impatience at the very period in history when the effects of human detachment are most known and most apparent.
Today's societal mentality conspires to disrupt and demean the basic necessity of mother-baby togetherness and symbiosis which ensures our humanity. No mother-substitute can have the concern, the empathic intuition for need-meeting, the emotional rapport, the awareness of growth and growth experiences that a mother has. No one in all their life, will duplicate the profound intimacy she/he has with a loving mother. I grieve for all the children today who will never know that intimacy by virtue of being relegated to surrogate mothers.
I believe that children's emotional needs must be met, not at the whim and convenience of the parents, but on a continual twenty-four hour basis, by perceptive parents who love intensely and selflessly. If these needs are not met in the early years then the child will evolve into an emotionally unhealthy adult trying to meet early unsatisfied and unmet emotional needs in "adult" situations and experiences. Because a child's primal attachment is with the mother and because only she can breast-feed, a biological function unequalled in its capacity to ensure optimal physical and emotional development, her time and commitment cannot be duplicated. I am a mother who considers emotional health to be the greatest gift that parents can give their children and through their children, the world. Child-rearing is the crux of history.
In the final analysis, child-rearing is a one-to-one experience just as marriage is. You cannot for money hire a wife-or-husband substitute. Equally one cannot for money hire a mother (or father) substitute. Our children's futures, our communities, our country, our world hinges on our ability as women to mother, thereby bringing to fruition, societies in which all people are healthy, loving, caring, responsible and liberated in the true sense.
An ardent feminist, Patricia Stuart-Hagge
was asked to write something for the journal on the Feminist-Motherhood
issue. In her covering letter she states in part, "I could
of course go on at much greater length, both because the subject
interests me and because I enjoy writing, but have limited myself
to a couple of pages. (You have a journal to publish and I have
three children to nurture).