Blog Post #3

In class today we were talking about gender roles played by our parents and how we, as children responded to them. I felt a combination of surprise and and disappointment as I listened around me to how people grew up and compared it to my own image of my parents and their respective roles in my family. Both of my parents worked full time and when both came home they split up the “household” jobs pretty evenly. I never recognized those gender roles until I was much older and only because it was mentioned to me by my friends. However, despite this equal division of chores, I still feel a lot closer to my mom than my dad although not by a significant amount I believe. I don't know if this comes from societal biases or even biological biases but I think both exist to varying degrees in each maternal/child situation. I just read Patricia Collins' “Shifting the Center” and think that she makes an excellent point in bringing this to light.

Collins wants to “recontextualize motherhood” so that it includes differences and more extreme types of struggling for different races of mothers into the feminist conversation. As different as all of the relationships we had with all of our mothers that we spoke about in class today we still only focused on (as did Suleiman) the struggle for autonomy, creativity and individualism as a mother. But Collins asks us to consider those mothers that cannot even think beyond the survival of their child? How can a mother like that even consider and explore her own creativity when she doesn't even have a choice about if/how/when to have kids and to raise them? How can she become autonomous when her family and even her entire community requires her for her survival? For these mothers and their children, what is their relationship? Collins speaks about how it changes depending on time spent together with whether or not the children work with the mother or if the mother is out all week working. She talks about a greater dependence on the children too especially for those that may be illiterate or don't speak the language and for mothers that cannot keep their own children and how that relationship survives, if it even can. I compare this to our conversation today. It isn't that we need to lessen the conversation about mothers being able to find that autonomy but we need ti open it up to mothers whose guilt stems from the death of a child. Both are legitimate claims of he maternal feminist however, we cannot forget one while we talk about another.