Price of Motherhood: Feminism and Cultural Bias Andrea L. Press

          Price of Motherhood: Feminism and Cultural Bias

Andrea L. Press

           Stephanie Staal’s Reading Women: How the Great Texts of Feminism Changed My Life (2011) traces her rediscovery of the relevance of feminist texts to a very particular issue in her life, her own transition from career-woman to mother. Thi relates to what was a key issue for second-wave feminism: our society’s lack of provision for ambitious working mothers of all social classes, including privileged ones like Staal. Staal’s story is simple. Like many educated, privileged White women of her generation, as a student, and as a young working woman, Staal believed that the battles of feminism had been won and feminist insights were no longer needed. After all, in her experience, sexism had not impeded her educational or career progress. Her discovery of feminism’s relevance came with the surprising realization that motherhood meant taking a hit to her career, and locking her into a battle with a prototypically oblivious, careerist partner over the proliferating household workload.

             The cultural reactions to Staal’s book are telling for the cultural and political divisions among feminists and postfeminists that they reveal, and for the way they illustrate a cultural tendency to pigeonhole all feminism as liberal feminism. The feminist heritage—Friedanand many of the great books Staal mentions—is discounted similarly as battle cries for women who need no wars. While certainly race, class, ethnic, national, and sexual inequalities between women remain unsolved, inequalities based on gender remain and affect women across the spectrum of difference. We continue to need a political and analytic language to address them. Both Staal’s book and See’s review demonstrate in part our ultimate failure after more than 3 decades of feminist education, scholarship, and activism to overturn these common misconceptions of feminism. The widespread popular bias against feminist insights—both in the media, and in the public’s perspectives on feminism as a political position—works against widespread support for these needed reforms. The broader, more radical efforts and sweep of so much of second-wave feminism, which addressed the sharp social class, racial, and ethnic biases in the way mainstream media addressed these issues, is still off the table of popular awareness and concern. Feminist perspectives are treated as simply matters of ‘‘opinion.’’ Structural analyses remain overlooked. While this status quo persists, we cannot expect any lasting shifts in public opinion or consciousness.