Choice
At first glance, the propsition dubbed "choice feminism" sounds like a great idea: when discussing privileged women who have the choice between working and staying at home, who besides Linda Hirshman wants to condemn those who choose to stay home? My mother stayed home with me, after all, and friends of mine, people I love and whose choices I respect, stay home with their children. And yet, if it's really equally okay to choose to stay home, why do so few men choose it?
To me (and to some extent, it seems, to Hirshman), the difficulty with the idea of choice feminism rests in the concept of choice. It seems clear that in a hypothetical world free of social pressures and conditioning where women were actually presented with a number of equally acceptable choices, there would be no need for the choice feminist approach because it would be absolutely fine for a man or woman to choose to stay at home, and it seems equally clear that we don't live in that world.
I like to think of myself as someone who is reasonably self-aware, and yet I can think of dozens of messages about gender that I've internalized. How many more must there be that I haven't even noticed yet, just sitting there in my subconscious, shaping my self-conception, my politics, and all of the dozens of decisions I make every day? To the extent that this is true, every decision that I make is partly coerced; that is, part of how I think about my choices is controlled by external forces, and no matter how much I struggle to examine my desires and perceptions, I don't know that it's likely that I'll ever succeed in removing all of that control.
So here is my question: given that we live in a world with social pressures and norms, with still-strong gender ideology and conditioning, what does it mean to choose? Can I choose to fill a traditional gender role in a way that isn't buying into some kind of discriminatory essentialism? Can I choose not to fill a traditional gender role freely, rather than as a reaction to ever-present expectations? Or better yet, to frame the question positively, how can each of us exercise the maximum freedom and individual agency in terms of our choices while living in a culture where not all choices are equal ones?
To me (and to some extent, it seems, to Hirshman), the difficulty with the idea of choice feminism rests in the concept of choice. It seems clear that in a hypothetical world free of social pressures and conditioning where women were actually presented with a number of equally acceptable choices, there would be no need for the choice feminist approach because it would be absolutely fine for a man or woman to choose to stay at home, and it seems equally clear that we don't live in that world.
I like to think of myself as someone who is reasonably self-aware, and yet I can think of dozens of messages about gender that I've internalized. How many more must there be that I haven't even noticed yet, just sitting there in my subconscious, shaping my self-conception, my politics, and all of the dozens of decisions I make every day? To the extent that this is true, every decision that I make is partly coerced; that is, part of how I think about my choices is controlled by external forces, and no matter how much I struggle to examine my desires and perceptions, I don't know that it's likely that I'll ever succeed in removing all of that control.
So here is my question: given that we live in a world with social pressures and norms, with still-strong gender ideology and conditioning, what does it mean to choose? Can I choose to fill a traditional gender role in a way that isn't buying into some kind of discriminatory essentialism? Can I choose not to fill a traditional gender role freely, rather than as a reaction to ever-present expectations? Or better yet, to frame the question positively, how can each of us exercise the maximum freedom and individual agency in terms of our choices while living in a culture where not all choices are equal ones?
posted by Sarah at 6:56 AM
3 Comments:
[Arggh; I always forget to do this. Copied from LJ. ]
I like the positive framing, because I think the obvious answers to your negative questions is "no, you can't" :-J. But I'm a little uncomfortable with exalting freedom and individual agency as well; I mean, I like them, but there's a sense in which having a culture and a civilization means accepting some limits on that freedom for some presumed greater good. I don't know what to do with that discomfort, but it's there.
That basic question of "What are the standards you're measuring things against?" is applicable to your initial comments about choice feminism as well. If freedom and individual agency is top, then condemning people who stay at home (or the ones who work) is silly, and your line of argument (asking how *both* types are coerced by or rebel against societal expectations) make sense. But if you take your primary standard as "are their actions helping to reduce cultural stereotypes that I find wrong?" you might reasonably get a different answer. To me it all comes back to the shared questions of what are your goals, and what are your standards for judgement. And then you've got to work out how your actions play out within the cultural contexts; there are a lot of boomerang effects out there.
I think, as you hint, the people who speak as if all choices were equal are being less than aware or honest. A lot of these choices are pertially coerced (oops, the husband just *happens* to make the higher salary that they can live on...) or at the very least choices are made in a soup of prevailing norms, opinions, and outside pressures.
I suspect the same is true of racial minorities... but they may be more honest about the fact that no matter how they make choices, people outside will perceive them and their choices through a filter, so the facts of racism and prevailing culture never go away. You're just a little more adaptive if your choices are informed by knowledge of how others will react to you!
--klingonlandlady
Long story short: I think in a lot of cases the mother initially stays home because it's so much easier to breastfeed if you don't work at a separate-from-home workplace. After you've put in a certain period of time freely lactating from the comfort of your own home, I think it's just easier to stick with what's been established as the status quo and continue to have the mom be the caretaker.
Of course, my ex-husband and I chose to have him stay home with Sabine from when she was 2 to about 2 1/2. By that time her diet consisted of a lot more than milk and we had financial obligations that needed to be met. He could get college credit for it (he was a Northeastern student and he took a long co-op) and I had a higher earning capacity than him at the time. Hence, etc. I think that's fairly uncommon though.
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