Third Wave feminist Rebecca Walker has written a memoir sure to send feminists into a new round of pearl-clutching.
The book, Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence chronicles Walker's changing philosophies about feminism and motherhood. And it repudiates large parts of Walker's previous work, Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, a book considered a poignant and thought-provoking look at race and sex.
Walker had been a leading feminist of the under 35 set, founding the Third Wave Foundation with Gloria Steinem.
Now, however, Walker has settled down into a more traditional relationship with a man (to whom she is not married) and with a child. According to this New York Times piece, Walker is stirring up the feminists by discovering what most women know already: motherhood is a marvelous, life-changing experience.
“I feel like I have arrived in myself to where I want to be and who I want to be,” Ms. Walker said in a telephone interview.
Walker is also telling young college women they need to plan to have children (gee, I made that point in the comments here and boy, did it get some unwanted attention).
"I keep telling these women in college, ‘You need to plan having a baby like you plan your career if it’s something that you want,’" she said. "Because we haven’t been told that, this generation. And they’re shocked when I say that. I’m supposed to be like this feminist telling them, ‘Go achieve, go achieve.’ And I’m sitting there saying, ‘For me, having a baby has been the most transformational experience of my life.’"
Feminism used to be a serious endeavor, back when it was concerned with real issues and not just a different name for whining, nagging, and man-bashing. But feminism lost its seriousness when it became all about the non-procreational vagina and patriarchal oppression. That's what turned off a lot of young women who won't even call themselves feminists these days because of the implications (just put "feminist blog" in your Google search and you'll understand why it's so embarrassing).
I'm not sure when feminism became synonymous with man-hating. Maybe it was about the time that Steinem said that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle (before she got married, of course). Maybe it was about the time career moms and SAHMs started the 100 years war. Maybe it was while we were so busy telling women they could "have it all" that we forgot to tell them they'd be so exhausted they wouldn't want it when they got it.
In any event, we forgot to tell women that they do have a biological clock and having children isn't as easy at 40 as it is at 30 or 25. So, yes, women do have choice they have to make that are different from the ones men make (blame God for your biology).
Apparently, Walker has discovered that biology is as important as career. As the SAHM debate devolved at Pandagon, it became increasingly obvious that if one considered it a blessing to put aside one's career ambitions for some portion of one's life, then that person was "privileged" or perhaps delusional. But most women know that the privilege is knowing one is doing something important, not just performing a task for money. Unfortunately, many modern feminists consider anything done for reasons other than self-fulfillment must be oppressive.
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