Interesting essay. Congratulations to your student for getting it published. I definitely think it provides a perspective that we didn't see when the article first came out.
I get so excited when my students do stuff like this.
And I am impressed with her writing.
That's great! In a way it's much less important what she says (I haven't looked at the essay yet) than simply the fact that she's saying it. This is the kind of thing that makes a class really influential in a student's life. Yay!
Good essay. I like the idea of connecting each chapter to current events, as I think ahead to next semester...
Great counter to the NYT article.
I am definitely happy that one of your students had something published as a result of taking your class. Congrats to her and YOU for that.
I have to say this, though: I am really irked by the idea of "full-time motherhood." I actually agree with the general point your student tries to make, but she completely turned me off with that phrase. She lost what could have been a very sympathetic audience. EVERY mother is a "full-time mother." Some of us also work IN ADDITION TO being full-time mothers (hence the title of the book _The Second Shift_.)
By using the term "full time mom," your student implies that some of us are part-time moms, which infuriates me as a feminist and as a mother. It's judgmental and inaccurate. Unlike a part time worker, I get no days off. I don't even get nights off. When Pistola wants into bed with me at 2am and I'm tyring to keep her in her own bed, I'm working, trust me. There is never a moment that I stop being Pistola's mom, even when if I'm not with her. Furthermore, due to the way I arrange my work and home schedules, I actually spend more time with Pistola than many stay-at-home moms that I know spend with their children. So how are they "full time" and I am only "part-time"?
I'm sorry to go like this. Clearly the piece hit a very touchy nerve. The problem is this: I spend enough time feeling like I have to justify my decisions to the many non-feminists in the world. I have to deal with attitude and nasty comments about how "someone else is raising my daughter" all the frickin' time. The last thing I need is to take crap from fellow feminists, too.
I wish to god women could be supportive of each other's choices, without labelling them as selfish or somehow "less than" (which is what terms like "full time mom" and "part time mom" implies). I can't help but notice the irony that just as I have been accused of being "selfish" for continuing my PhD and for looking for a professorship after becoming a mother, this student is accusing women of her generation for being "selfish" for thinking of one day becoming "full time moms."
I wonder if my husband will be "selfish" when he becomes a "full time dad." Gag.
ABDMom, you are exactly right, but to be fair to my student, the phrase was used in the original article in the NYT, I think. I seem to remember the article making the point about women choosing full-time motherhood over other careers, so she was using thier language, which makes it even more disturbing.
Oh, and the newspaper chose the title for her, which I told her is what happens in journalism. She, herself, was not happy with it.
That is disturbing, and while I know the NYT article used that language, I didn't get that she was choosing to mirror that language. I took it as unconscious reproduction. I would have like to see her interrogate that language, or at least briefly state why she used that language. I'm sure she was up against a word limit, but that is an awfully important part of the story to gloss over without comment.
Ditto ABDmom. The whole "full-time mother" thing got my dander up, too. Like ABDmom, I also missed that the author was consciously mirroring the NYT article's langauge--that just wasn't clear in her essay, and is something that should have been made explicit somehow.
Also, I have a very big problem with her idea that career-mothers contribute nothing to society. That discounts mothering in the same tired old way that "women's work" has been denigrated by the patriarchy for centuries.
I did like her point about women of all socioeconimic levels needing access to better choices regarding parenting options, and was sad that she left this core issue unexplored. This would have been a much more productive avenue of argument than pointing a judgmental finger at women for the choices they make--and would have been much more in line with feminist goals.
Commenting by HaloScan.com
