BARBARA KATZ ROTHMAN

       In the search for solutions to social problems, Americans often resort to the language of individual rights. These
       have guided the women's movement for more than a century but may be inadequate for the task ahead,
       according to Barbara Katz Rothman. What is required is not only a new way of defining -mothering." We must
       also think anew about the changes in social structure needed to support both the rights and the needs of
       mothering.

       The ideology of capitalism, that goods are produced for profit, is clear to us; we know that some societies avoid the
       profit motive, and that most societies feel there should be some limit on the extent to which human life is viewed as a
       commodity. It may seem farfetched to apply this ideology to motherhood and to children. But the family has always
       been an economic unit as well as a social and psychological unit. What is new, perhaps, is the shift from children as
       workers to children as commodities, accompanying the change in the family as a unit of production to its new role as a
       unit of consumption.

       For the most part, children aren't workers in the family anymore. The farm family in rural, traditional American society
       is mostly a thing of the past. Because children don't become real partners in work, they become, in a sense, luxury
       items. We talk about children in very much the same way we talk about other luxuries: Can we afford a second car?
       Can we afford a third child? Accompanying this change in the way we see children is a change in our view of
       motherhood. No longer an event shaped by religion and family, having a baby has become part of a hightech medical
       world. There is artificial insemination, amniocentesis, contract surrogacy; during labor, a doctor manages the process,
       making it more efficient, predictable, rational. Likewise, when mothers and fathers push their babies onto a schedule,
       so that feeding the baby meshes into the nine-to-five day, parenting becomes an exercise in the rational and efficient
       use of time.

       And this, I fear, is where it is all heading: the commodification of children and the proletarianization of motherhood.
       We are no longer talking about mothers and babies at all-we are talking about laborers and their products.
 

       MIND-BODY DUALISM

       Ours is a liberal philosophic tradition which holds that what is especially valuable about human beings is the capacity
       for rationality. But hand in hand with the valuing of rationality is a theoretical disdain for the significance of the body,
       and a disdain for physical work in preference for "mental" work. The latter, dividing the physical from the mental
       work, and then using machines and people interchangeably to do the menial physical work, is the essence of
       technological organization.

       Blue-collar work is less valued than managerial work. The "white collar" is a status symbol for having risen above the
       work of the body. This division of labor is a particular problem for women as mothers: mothers do the physical work
       of the body, women do the menial work of body maintenance. Thus women become identified with the physical, the
       body, and men with the higher, the rational.

       This mind-body dualism has deeper consequences as well: by viewing the body as a mechanism of production, we are
       encouraged to see it as a resource to be used. If the mind and rationality are held "above" the body, it becomes
       relatively easy to see the body as a resource for the use of the mind, and, specifically, women's reproductive bodies as
       "societal" resources. And it is here-between the body as "private property" and the body as "resource"-that we
       encounter the ubiquitous problem of reconciling individual freedom and social order.
 
 

       THE BODY AS PRIVATE PROPERTY
 

       In the US, legal recognition of the body goes only to the view of it as individually owned. That is an idea deeply
       rooted in our liberal political system and our economic system, which is based on private ownership and free
       enterprise. And it is not a bad way of legally viewing the body: as property, privately and individually owned. Such a
       view protects each of us from all of us; protects us as individuals from potential abuses of power by the government.

       In fact, intelligent feminist use of this individualist ethos has been invaluable in assuring women's rights in
       procreation. Once women are recognized as full citizens, then individual women must be accorded the same rights of
       bodily autonomy and integrity afforded men. For women, that means sexual and procreative autonomy. Because it is
       her body, she cannot be raped. Because it is her body, she cannot be forced to bear pregnancies she does not want.
       Because it is her body, she cannot be forced to abort pregnancies she does want.

       Due in part to our current battles over the right to abortion, we tend to think that the three branches of government
       "permit" women to have abortions; as if the drive for continuing pregnancies came from the government, and the drive
       for abortions from women. In fact, the legal protection works also to permit women not to have abortions. When
       women's ownership rights over their bodies are lost, the rights to have and the rights not to have abortions are likewise
       lost.

       In American society, when we bring it back to the simple legal questions-who can force an abortion or forcibly prevent
       one-we wisely retreat to safety, calling forth our most sacred value: the power of ownership.

       This then is the way women have successfully been able to combine America's liberal philosophy with its economic
       ideology. Women have made use of the mind-body dualism, to allow a view of the body as owned, like a shelter
       which houses the more important mind. If one claims rationality for women-the essential liberal claim for all people
       -then simple fairness gives women the same rights of bodily ownership that men have, and the very high value of
       ownership, of property rights, is then turned to the advantage of women who can claim exclusive rights to their own
       bodies. In the name of ownership, women have demanded access to contraception, sterilization, and abortion.

       Yet, while the "owned-body" principle has worked for women in avoiding motherhood, it is less clear how it can be
       made to work to empower women as mothers. A woman's body may be her own, but the bodies of mothers are not
       highly valued. In fact, in pregnancy women may simply be seen to own the space in which the fetuses are housed.
       This is the argument on which attempts to control women's behavior during pregnancy are based: owning her own
       body is not enough to assure her civil liberties if her body is believed to contain potential wards of the state. The
       anti-drug, anti-drinking "behave yourself" campaigns aimed increasingly at pregnant women, along with the judicial
       trend toward prosecuting drug-abusing mothers for "transporting illegal drugs to a minor" through her umbilical cord,
       are the most blatant examples of this trend toward separating the rights of the woman from the rights of the fetus
       growing in her womb.

       Is it possible to make the legal concept of the owned body work in the interest of mothers? Women could take
       advantage of mechanistic thinking, and claim "sweat equity" in their babies: they are ours because we have done the
       work to make them. Women would then have made the connection between the owned body and the owned child. But
       the "sweat equity" idea will work only if women's labor, the "sweat," is valued.
 
 

       THE LIMITATIONS OF LIBERAL FEMINISM

       Though a great deal of progress has been made by the women's movement, as it stands, a generation of women have
       grown up to be exactly the kinds of parents they wanted their children's fathers to be. Women earn good money at
       secure, responsible, interesting jobs. Women take their work seriously-but they balance it against the needs of family.
       With a few glorious exceptions, men have not taken up the slack.

       While women have added full-time employment to the traditional mother role, men have mostly just added a few
       hours, at best, of "quality" time to traditional fathering.

       The feminism that spread with the Industrial Revolution and that wanted to give women "equality with men" was
       liberal feminism, the feminist thinking that dominated the first, and probably the current, wave of the women's
       movement.

       The simplest and least threatening version of feminism is to ask for what is seen in America as simple fairness.
       Demands for fairness consist largely of the insistence that prevailing liberal ideals be applied to women: equal pay for
       equal work, the same rights for women as for men, etc. Since in America we are living in a society founded on liberal
       principles, liberal feminism comes closest to mainstream values.

       Liberal feminism has its roots deep in American culture; feminists as far back as Abigail Adams requested that the
       framers of the Constitution "remember the ladies." Liberal feminists, in asking that the ladies be remembered, were not
       so much offering a critique of American life and values as they were seeking full access.

       Liberal feminism works best to defend women's rights to be like men, to enter into men's worlds, to work at men's
       jobs for men's pay, to have the rights and privileges of men. But what of our rights to be women? The liberal
       argument, the fairness argument, the equal rights argument, these all begin to break down when we look at women
       who are, or are becoming, mothers. Pregnancy is like nothing else, so how can uniqueness be made to fit into an
       equality model?

       Liberal feminists, seeking equality and recognition of women's rationality, but discounting the value of the woman's
       body, claim equality of parenthood between men and women. It is, after all, only women's bodily experience that is
       different from men's....

       "Equal rights" sound good. But a focus on rights ignores needs. Giving women all the rights of men will not
       accomplish a whole lot for women facing the demands of pregnancy, birth, and lactation. Because of the focus on
       formal equality, because of the value of mind over body, and because of the manner in which our technologically-
       oriented society seeks efficiency through the separation of work and home, physical and mental, etc., liberal thinking
       tends to diminish the significance of the physical parts of motherhood.

       As individuals, separation and compartmentalization form a central theme of liberal society. We "change hats"; "shift
       gears"; we carry our separate selves around, experiencing not only the compartmentalization between people, but
       within ourselves as well. We have "work lives" and "home lives." We change clothing in our different roles, we
       change style, we change tone.

       Yet against this, we have motherhood, the physical embodiment of connectedness. We have in every pregnant woman
       the living proof that individuals do not enter the world as autonomous, atomistic, isolated beings, but begin socially,
       begin connected. And we have in every pregnant woman a walking contradiction of the segmentation of our lives:
       pregnancy does not permit it. In pregnancy the private self, the sexual, familial self, announces itself wherever the
       woman goes.

       Motherhood is the embodied challenge to a liberal philosophy which serves to articulate the values and themes of
       technological society: order, predictability, rationality, control, rationalization of life, the systematizing and control of
       things and people as things, the reduction of all to component parts, and ultimately the vision of everything, including
       ourselves, as resources.

       For those people who want to see women-their bodies, sexuality, Motherhood-treated with respect, liberal feminism
       fails.
 
 

       THE ATOMIZATION OF LIFE
 

       Though liberal feminism has fallen short in many respects, the idea that "the personal is political" was an early insight,
       a shining, glorious insight of the women's movement. These women understood that the celebration of the individual's
       power to create, to overcome, etc. fell very hard on the people who were structurally placed so as not to be able to
       achieve.

       Individualism is a deep-rooted theme in American society. Yet, because we as a society have conceptualized everything
       in terms of the individual-that it just takes gumption, strength, initiative-we must continually deal with the failure of the
       individual. We have obscured the structural barriers to success behind infinite examples of individual failures.

       As long as we keep asking how working mothers can resolve their problems, the terms "working" and "mother" will
       remain an inherent contradiction.

       The question should be: What is wrong with the way we have organized family and work so that they don't fit
       together? Certainly, two major social institutions should match. If they don't, there is a problem. And if we have
       created a notion of "work" in occupation and profession that precludes women from living full lives, there is
       something wrong with the social and economic organization of "livelihood."

       First and foremost, we must rethink the nature of the family, and gender relations within the family. At the absolute
       height of the feminine mystique, for instance-when every mother was supposed to be in her home, in her own kitchen,
       with her own children-breast feeding in America was at its absolute low point. Regardless of biology, American
       women were standing over the stove sterilizing formula for their babies. So, one could not even claim that the mother
       needed to be at home to breast feed her baby.

       Pregnancy, on the other hand, is certainly biological. But the issue of pregnancy, and the six-week maternity leave,
       has never really occupied
       the center of the family/work debate. The issue does not revolve around the physical experiences of pregnancy or birth.
       Rather, the issue centers on the care of children and the organization of family.

       The nucleus of the debate is the three-month old that cannot be abandoned on a hook; it is the three-year old that needs
       attention; it is the six-year old that comes home from school at 3:30, though work ends for his parents at 5:30.

       Women may not need fathers to share the mothering with, but they certainly need someone. Women cannot do it all.
       The problem of the double day for women, the unending circuit of paid work and then work in the household, not
       enough sleep, and back to work, inevitably takes its toll.

       The fact is that the social relationship of parenting, of nurturing and of caring, needs a social base, not a genetic one.
       Through their pregnancies, women begin to establish that base. But if women are not to drop from exhaustion and lose
       all pleasure in life, someone is going to have to help with the kids.

       Mothers are working in the nexus between the child and society. Children need their lives preserved and their growth
       fostered. The social group needs that growth shaped in ways appropriate and acceptable to it, for its own continuation,
       preservation and growth.

       Maternal practice must meet three interests then; those of preservation, growth, and acceptability. The initial and most
       powerful demand is preservation: simply keeping the child alive, especially through its vulnerable early months and
       years, beginning, for birth mothers, with conception. But the mother must do more than keep this heart beating: she
       must foster the child's physical, emotional, and intellectual growth. And she must do that in such a way that her child
       becomes an acceptable adult. Both for the sake of the child and for the sake of the society of which the mother, too, is
       a member, the child must fit in, must grow to meet the needs of the society.

       Looking at motherhood this way, as a discipline, a way of thinking, a response to the needs and demands that exist
       outside of the mother, shifts our focus from who the mother is to what she is doing. Who she is, who she feels herself
       to be, is deeply gender based: she is a woman, a mother. What she is doing is not gender based: the similarities in
       behavior of mothers has more to do with the similarities in their situations, in the demands they face from their children
       and from their societies, than it has to do with similarities in the women. And so the person engaged in this discipline
       of motherhood need not be a mother, need not be a woman, in order to engage in these activities, this way of thought
       and practice that is mothering.

       Perhaps this is one of those moments of crisis a society faces, where there are two paths that can be taken. We can
       focus on nurturance, caring, human relations. We can come to accept and to respect a wider variety of family
       relationships and arrangements. Those qualities we

       have come to think of as maternal could become more widely shared, by both men and women. We could direct this
       nurturance, this maternal caring, not just to children, but to each other. The values and the experience of motherhood
       could come to shape the way we live in the world. This is, I suppose, the fantasy, the truly revolutionary potential of a
       recreated motherhood.

       Or we can recreate motherhood to reflect the commodification of children and the degradation of the mothering project.
       That, I am afraid, is the direction we have been heading in for a long time, and what we are faced with now is the
       reductio ad absurdum of this process.

       A society that creates a decent environment for motherhood is a civil society. It is a world that is supportive of
       nurturance, of caring, of involvement with one another.