Katie Roiphe Responds
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This is a guest post from Katie Roiphe, responding to the various critics of her recent DoubleX essay, "My Newborn is Like a Narcotic."
I'm mildly embarrassed to admit that credit for the interesting brouhaha surrounding my last piece belongs to the inventive subtitle writer, and not to me. (To answer some of the comments: No, I am not responsible for the subtitle, nor did I see it until the piece was on the site, which is in no way unusual.) I am, however, a little surprised that people would be so blinded by a flashy subtitle that they would not be able to read the substance of the piece itself: After all, it is the job of a headline to attract attention, not to present a nuanced or subtle analysis. It seems to me that we read too many millions of eye-catching headlines that do not perfectly distill the essence of the piece to take them quite so much to heart. And if people are not going to read past the headline, it would save writers a great deal of time and trouble to admit that now.
I have on occasion written a provocative or inflammatory piece. In fact, I teach a class on the art of polemic at NYU, which begins with Milton's Satan, whom I greatly admire, but this particular riff I viewed in the category of "quiet personal reflection." The one very tiny paragraph on feminism was not central to the argument. I was thinking about how we had come to talk about childcare as work or a profession. From Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, through Betty Friedan's brilliant The Feminine Mystique, to Naomi Wolf's Misconceptions, feminists have long argued about the arduousness of babies. I don't think this is a particularly controversial or original point: They wrote about the difficulty of child-rearing and they had their reasons. Any political ideology has to collapse the ambiguities and complexities of human experience in order to get things done, and feminism is no different.
To answer some of the other comments: Nowhere in the piece did I tell anyone else how to live. Nowhere did I suggest that my experience of the first days of motherhood was any better, richer, or more interesting than anyone else's. (To me, the addiction metaphor implies a derangement and desperation not entirely to be recommended.) Nowhere in the piece did I attack anyone for having a different viewpoint or experience. (Though frankly one does worry about the fragile commenter: If someone chooses to wear an orange dress are you hurt because of the implied critique of your yellow one?) Nowhere did I say that feminists hate babies. In fact, my own mother was a feminist, and I like to think she liked me.
Hanna Rosin Double X co- editor, reporter, prefer my friends live.
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Sorry, I stand by my post.
By: Katie27again | Sun, 09/06/2009 - 17:00
Sorry, Swelstead. I stand by my post. You might too if you actually read it. If anyone is blaming feminism for their guilt about wanting to stay home, they need to *focus* and see what's really bothering them. It's misplaced blame, brought on by the same misrepresentation of feminism Roiphe's piece puts forth. I readily conceded, if you recall, that there are some mom who feel superior to stay-home moms, but if sooooo many of your friends want to stay home, who,exactly, are these women making them feel bad? Helene Cixoux? Please.
AND, my dear, AT NO POINT did my post say anything even remotely suggesting what you've accused me of: "So what is it they fear? They fear that their friends - NOT their husbands, their female friends - will look down on them for 'giving in' to the nonsense you've spouted in your post. That only 'uneducated, delusional' women want to stay home with their children; that they are betraying the sisterhood;"
Please please please show me where the "nonsense" outlined above is "spouted in my post." Show me where I accused moms who want to stay home of being uneducated and delusional. Point directly at the line(s) in my post, please. In fact, if you read the last line of my post, you would recognize a familiar sentiment: Who wouldn't choose home with a beautiful baby over work, barring the very few people I know who LOVE LOVE LOVE their jobs.
Did you read my post? Or was the defense of feminism enought for you to assume I was some militant feminista lording it over my mom friends, terrifying them into silence for fear I would ridicule their love for their children and lament their betrayals! Where did you get this from? My post indicates NO SUCH THING. But thank you, Swelstead. You've just confirmed for me the exact type of reactionary (mis)reading of culture that enables all this scapegoating of feminism because some people just can't accept that their lives just. aren't. perfect!
And please ladies, raise your hands if you've heard a father talk about babysitting his children. I hear it all the time, even here in New York, at the very vanguard of civilization!
So, your friends are more valid than my friends?
By: swelstead | Sat, 09/05/2009 - 23:38
Well, Katie27again, I hate to disappoint - because your first sentence seemed so darn convinced - but I am neither uneducated (I have a university degree, in English no less, though I thought the Helene Cixous reference might have tipped you off there) nor delusional (my sister, who has many more degrees than I do and is a licensed therapist at a university, in case you needed HER bona fides as well, assures me I am not), and I am not some barefoot and pregnant southern beauty queen who thinks feminism is a bad word. I'm here in Toronto, where we take equal rights - and the choices that come with them - quite seriously. At least as seriously as American northeasters such as yourself who are apparently the vanguard of women's rights, and possibly more so.
With that in mind, you may want to rethink your comments about my statements about my friends ringing 'false' and being 'bullshit'. I assure you they are not. They may, I concede, be different than the statements of your own friends - neither group of friends representing a statistically significant sample - but they are in fact true. And it definitely IS feminism that has made them feel guilty about wanting to stay home with their babies, because thanks to our liberal maternity/paternity leaves, our unemployment insurance systems, and other 'socioeconomic' factors, these are women who COULD afford to stay home (for a few years, anyway) without 'long-term economic uncertainty'.
So what is it they fear? They fear that their friends - NOT their husbands, their female friends - will look down on them for 'giving in' to the nonsense you've spouted in your post. That only 'uneducated, delusional' women want to stay home with their children; that they are betraying the sisterhood; that they are giving in to these droves of husbands (again, your experience in the liberated northeast is apparently vastly different than mine in Canada, because I don't know any "fucking father{s} [who] talk[s] about babysitting his own children" in the way you describe) who are pressuring them to go back to work.
What's interesting to me is that your response to my comment purports to talk about 'choices' and how feminism is all about giving women these choices, and yet you appear to think there are none. You've dismissed my comments as uneducated and delusional, and dismissed the feelings of my friends as false and just plain wrong (apparently the only reason they should be worried about going back to work is the economic one, not the emotional one).
And this is what bugged me about the whole tempest in a teacup Dr Roiphe's blog (and follow-up) in the first place: This woman writes what is clearly a VERY personal account of HER experience of a new baby - and, in my opinion, her own experience of what feminism taught her to expect from new motherhood - and everyone freaks out and says she's wrong to feel this way. If feminism was supposed to give us choices, shouldn't the first among those be the choice to feel - and express what we feel - honestly, without being ripped a new one?
At first I figured the subtitle of the original piece - not Roiphe's, as we know - was just hyperbole designed to generate attention. Now I'm thinking that perhaps it was right on the money: There are still plenty of feminists out there who seem determined not to let women have any feelings outside the prescribed guidelines. Perhaps "not one of [your] new mother friends has ever claimed that they feel inadequate about not wanting to go back to work...etc." because they're afraid of the tirade that would ensue from you if they did.
Oh Swelstead!
By: Katie27again | Fri, 09/04/2009 - 12:21
You are entirely uneducated and/or delusional if you think feminism is responsible for making new mothers feel guily about going back to work. Feminism has always been primarily about giving women choices. Allow me to refresh your memory: Before women demanded their rights to the same choices men had, they labored thanklessly over nothing but children and housework. They were effectively barred from doing ANYTHING ELSE. Irrespective of how otherwise satisfying something may be inherently, if it is foisted upon you without your consent and you have no other choices, well, only a very special kind of easy-going would fail to get resentful at some pojnt, no? I assure you cheesecake for dessert every night is, by definition, drudgery.
The reason why many of us out there get so angry when feminism is attacked from ANY angle is because those of us with clear heads can see just how much more work there is to be done. For example, until men are free to feel that child-rearing and domestic labor is a viable vocation (and there are so few men out there who would even admit to themselves that they could be happy being a stay-home husband)and a worthy investment women will continue to bear the majority of the burdens of child-rearing and domestic labor. (If I hear one more fucking father talk about babysitting his own children!) So while women have wrested the option to have a life outside of children and housework from the resistant hands of men, it appears to have come at a great price. Did we think it would be so easy to walk away from servitude without men collectively (even if neither vengefully or entirely consciously for that matter) taking something in return. Women are now doubly saddled to both the expectation that they will earn money AND be the sole domestic laborer.
I don't know what circles or national demographics you move in, but here in the northeast I know few couples who could afford to have one parent stay home full time without incurring serious long-term financial uncertainty. And PS, the women I know who could make ends meet staying home are, you guessed it, pressured by their husbands to go back to work. Yes, there are some full-time working mothers out there who lord it over the stay-home moms, getting their superiority on; but in my experience, I've found just as much superiority heaped on working moms from the stay-homes who lord it over them that they are somehow negligent, can't do all the things stay-homes do, etc. Bitches will always be bitches, but from a larger cultural and socioeconimic perspective, it most certainly isn't feminism that makes new moms feel guily about going back to work.
PS:I know plently of new mothers, but your insistence that droves of them are wailing about "I know I should want to go back to work" rings so incredibly false. I think it is more accurate to say that many women *do* feel, after having a baby, that they wished they did want to go back to work because they could, of course, use the money, but not one of my new mother friends has ever claimed that they feel inadequate about not wanting to go back to work because--Gasp--their job just isn't as gratifying as this beautiful little baby that does, after all, need *someone'* to provide 'round the clock care. That is pure bullshit.
The dangers of reading too much
By: swelstead | Fri, 09/04/2009 - 10:25
I've been reading the comments here and on Salon about this article of Dr Roiphe's (and her response to said article), and I registered to comment here mostly so I could tell all of you: Give your heads a shake.
This was a blog - a blog, aka 'disposable arrangement of words floating in the ether' - about the visceral joys of new motherhood, and how surprising it all is when you're going through it first-hand. Big whoop.
Am I the only one who's noticed that the comments alternate between "I've never read this perspective of new motherhood before - I'd only read about the drudgery..." and "She's evil! Feminism never dwelt on the drudgery!" Except - read the previous commenters. Feminism did so dwell on the drudgery.
Every single female friend of mine who's had a baby in the past 15 years (I'm 39 now) has, at around month 2 or 3, turned to me and said, eyes downcast and sheepish, "I know I'm supposed to want to go back to work, but I just want to stay here and look at my baby all day. I know that means my mind is turning to mush, but I've decided I don't care."
Why were they so surprised by this feeling? Why did they feel so guilty about wanting to stay home with their baby? It wasn't their mothers or their husbands or a patriarchal society who made them feel this way - it was the feminism they imbibed from watching their very first after-school special at age 9, right through the mounds of Alice Munro novels and Helene Cixous essays that'd been heaped on them in their teens and twenties. YOU read a Nadine Gordimer book and tell me if there is ONE OUNCE of joy in motherhood in there. Ha!
And yet we all know, when we get our baby in our arms, that we just want to gaze at it in rapture - in narcotic stupor - while time passes all unheeded.
I have no idea why so many people are pissed off with what seemed to me just a very normal expression of the I-want-to-be-with-my-new-baby-every-minute feeling that every new mother I've ever known has expressed. Perhaps I am unaware of Dr Roiphe's reputation - apparently she's a shit-disturber of the first water, so people are inclined to read too much into her stuff. But are you sure you don't have anything better to get cheesed off about today?
Thank you, Ms. Roiphe.
By: SomeonesMother | Thu, 09/03/2009 - 23:37
Thank you for your perspective. The professionalization of motherhood does no one any favors. The penultimate paragraph in your original piece was the best description of new motherhood I've ever read.
In the end, motherhood is the leading half of a lifelong relationship. Twenty years from now, this will be crystal clear. There will be no denying their in-living-color personhood when they tower over us, all of their facilities finally at their full command. The people our children already are will be actualized, our size, the fruits of our labors unavoidably front and center, and we will not be thinking of them as another item on our agenda. They will be either be people that we have served well or people we have shortchanged. Plants we've either watered faithfully or neglected.
So I propose this: Let's just start thinking of our children as people NOW, skip that whole Cat's in the Cradle myopia and take the long view. Parenthood is about relationship-building, not efficiency. It's about richness of experience, not expediency. It's about shaping the contours of our children's character, not just their G.P.A..'s and their output. The best children's message T-shirt I ever spied implored: "Be patient with me. God's not finished with me yet." I endeavor to avoid the judgmental set that doesn't understand that. Our children are subject to our teaching and our influence - more completely than we prefer to pretend - but they are our earthly equals, and we should treat them that way from the beginning.
I'm looking forward to a time when throwing our children under the bus finally goes out of vogue. When the steady stream of articles in widely circulated national magazines de-permeate themselves of thinly veiled contempt? Parenthood is a state of being - and if we must infuse the private sphere with the rhetoric of the public, let's use the words "long-term investment" and "research and development" to describe what we're doing. Maybe that would sound more palatable, and maybe that would feed our well-conditioned needs for significance and recognition. Or maybe we should just drop the deadening corporate ethos of the working world entirely. I'm here to suggest we'd be better off if we did.
Ms Roiphe, don't lie to people.
By: domini | Thu, 09/03/2009 - 22:40
I read the article, and I don't appreciate people trying to gaslight me. Ms. Roiphe has just lost any credibility she might have had with me.
Roiphe explicitly asked in the article if any woman would trade having a baby for having written The House of Mirth. She goes on to make it very clear in her article that she saw having the baby as the most important thing on earth. She also took at least one overt potshot at feminism. She also complained about having to leave the baby to go to a book signing. That sound was thousands of women rolling their eyes at her. Most women who go back to work don't have a choice about it, and would love Roiphe's priviledged work-life balance.
A number of her students are well-placed and adoring (the Salon discussion was proof of this). For some of us out there, the question became "Why is this piece any different from what I can find at Parenting.com?" It isn't. It really was not worth the furor it caused. It said nothing new, interesting, or important.
Talk about how to balance a career and parenting. Talk about having a baby AND writing that Pulitzer prize winning novel while not neglecting your kids. Those would be interesting and new. Baby love is old, and Roiphe article wasn't a particularly interesting slant on it.
I read it because of the controversy. Now I want my five minutes back.