"Motherhood is the great unfinished business of feminism"--Ann Crittenden
Blogher is great and I just registered with them, but why was I forced to choose one category to list my blog in and why is their category about motherhood called "Mommy and Family"? I want my blog listed under feminism AND parenting and why on earth would that be surprising? The crosslisting part may be my bumbling--maybe I haven't figured it out yet. (Gentle readers, don't hesitate to instruct me. I will admit to newbie-ness. But what I will not do is what I've seen too often on get-help listserves--women attributing their difficulty in using some piece of technology to their femaleness, or as one poster did, to her blondness. And never never to pregnancy or PMS. Gack. But I digress...)
The mommy part is them. Mommy is a word children use; why should grownups use it about women writing on parenting? The effect is infantilizing and dismissive. Mom isn't much better, as Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels discuss in their terrific book The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women.
I love Broadsheet, and its predecessor, Mothers Who Think, but these names are demeaning too. Okay, so the pun in Broadsheet is cute--I'll leave that one alone for now. But as if all mothers don't think. As if mothering didn't itself involve a lot of thinking, if done right. Yeah, yeah, there's irony intended in all of this, but I'm sick of irony being a sort of get-out-jail-free pass.
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1 comment:
Part of the problem is that this is an established category. "Mom blogs" or "Mommy blogs" as they are called. I agree it's a demeaning term.
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