{"id":24085,"date":"2015-07-17T01:00:30","date_gmt":"2015-07-17T05:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=24085"},"modified":"2015-07-10T08:12:25","modified_gmt":"2015-07-10T12:12:25","slug":"qotd-feminisms-uneasy-attitudes-to-motherhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/07\/17\/qotd-feminisms-uneasy-attitudes-to-motherhood\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Feminism&#8217;s uneasy attitudes to motherhood"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Last week a person named Amy Glass wrote a breathtakingly honest &mdash; and breathless &mdash; rejection of traditional motherhood:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>I hear women talk about how \u201chard\u201d it is to raise kids and manage a household all the time. I never hear men talk about this. It\u2019s because women secretly like to talk about how hard managing a household is so they don\u2019t have to explain their lack of real accomplishments. Men don\u2019t care to \u201cmanage a household.\u201d They aren\u2019t conditioned to think stupid things like that are \u201cimportant.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Women will be equal with men when we stop demanding that it be considered equally important to do housework and real work. They are not equal. Doing laundry will never be as important as being a doctor or an engineer or building a business. This word play is holding us back.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>First, a few small points.<\/p>\n<p>I hear men talk about how hard it is to manage a household and raise kids <em>all the time<\/em>. (We may not talk about it in terms Glass can recognize, but as a subscriber to the Happy Wife, Happy Life school of marriage, it\u2019s my experience that husbands who don\u2019t recognize and appreciate how hard it is to run a home soon become ex-husbands or miserable husbands.) Glass also may only be hearing what she wants to hear. Or, she may know only asinine men. Who knows? Frankly I don\u2019t care which one is right because I don\u2019t put a lot of stock in what Glass has to say.<\/p>\n<p>Second, this is truly shabby work:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>Doing laundry will never be as important as being a doctor or an engineer or building a business. This word play is holding us back.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Talk about word play! You see the sleight of hand, right? \u201cDoing laundry\u201d is a single, discrete task, a subset of a vast realm of responsibilities that often come with running a household and being a mother. Being a doctor, engineer, or business-builder are total careers or vocations. In other words, it\u2019s a false analogy. Like saying being a chef isn\u2019t as worthwhile as being a truck driver because chefs \u201ccut vegetables.\u201d Every career or calling involves unpleasant or tedious tasks.<\/p>\n<p>Just in case you still don\u2019t get it, another illustration. Raising kids involves taking the barbarian clay of a baby and through the alchemy of love and the application of intellect turning it into an emotionally, spiritually, and physically healthy human being and citizen. Meanwhile, doctors put their fingers in old men\u2019s butts. So, to sum up: \u201cPutting fingers in old men\u2019s butts will never be as important as raising children. The word play is holding us back.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Third (as a reader flagged for me), Glass is not exactly a rigorous thinker. On January 15 she writes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>Every time I hear someone say that feminism is about validating every choice a woman makes I have to fight back vomit.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>On January 17 she writes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>The great thing about Feminism is that it means that women can do anything. You can be a working woman or a stay at home mother and both choices are equally valid. There is no \u201cwrong way\u201d to do feminism.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>This means that as good feminists, we never judge the choices of other women.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Assuming there isn\u2019t a technical explanation for what\u2019s going on here (a false byline, a prank, or maybe an angry capuchin monkey loose in the IT department) this is the kind of inconsistency that doesn\u2019t invite refutation so much as <em>medication<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Jonah Goldberg, &#8220;It\u2019s Still Only Two Cheers for Capitalism&#8221;, <em>The Goldberg File<\/em>, 2014-01-31<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week a person named Amy Glass wrote a breathtakingly honest &mdash; and breathless &mdash; rejection of traditional motherhood: I hear women talk about how \u201chard\u201d it is to raise kids and manage a household all the time. I never hear men talk about this. It\u2019s because women secretly like to talk about how hard [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,41,13],"tags":[374,987,95,375,43],"class_list":["post-24085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-children","tag-feminism","tag-jobs","tag-parents","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6gt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24085"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24086,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24085\/revisions\/24086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}