What the Hell is Happening to Feminism?

I was raised by a liberal, single, working-mother feminist. I knew who Gloria Steinem was when I was a kid. I was raised on the notion that feminists like my great-grandmother - who worked in the factories in downtown St. Louis while the men went to war, an original Rosie the Riveter (overlooking that Rosie was drawn by a man) - helped get us women taken seriously. 

Feminists were the reason that my mother could scratch out an existence in the podunk town from where we came. Feminism was the reason that my mother refused to feel bad about her lot in life as a single mother. She refused to be ashamed and look at me, her child, as a burden or view herself as damaged goods because she was a mother. She had ambitions for a better job, a better life, she wanted to do more things.

Thankfully, feminism told women that we didn't have to be ashamed to have ambition and be mothers. Until very recently.

I feel as though I've just found out that Santa Claus doesn't exist. Is feminism nothing more than a means to herd women to the polls? That only Democrat women are true feminists? Republican women, Independent women (of which I am one) can't be feminists? Are women women with choices or is the entire female sex summed up by wedge issues?

Feminist Sally Quinn has written and recently gave an interview where she blasts Sarah Palin on her decision to have a four-month-old Down's Syndrome baby and run for vice-president. Quinn says:

"Not only do we have a woman with five children, including an infant with special needs, but a woman whose 17-year-old child will need her even more in the coming months. Not to mention the grandchild. This would inevitably be an enormous distraction for a new vice president (or president) in a time of global turmoil."

Dr. Laura also had an opinion. Of course:

"I’m stunned - couldn’t the Republican Party find one competent female with adult children to run for Vice President with McCain?   I realize his advisors probably didn’t want a “mature” woman, as the Democrats keep harping on his age.  But really, what kind of role model is a woman whose fifth child was recently born with a serious issue, Down Syndrome, and then goes back to the job of Governor within days of the birth?"

This isn't about Palin. It's not about whether or not you agree with her, quite honestly, I don't give a damn because it's entirely irrelevant. This is about women. Whether Quinn and Dr. Laura realize it or not, they are essentially saying that women have limits, that children are limitations. Yes, she is unequivocally saying this. This is the side of the debate on which she falls by assuming this position. Oh - unless Quinn or Dr. Laura want to take some sort of China-family-policy on it and actually stipulate the amount of children a woman needs to have before they are considered a limitation. What's the arbitrary number? It's offensive that Dr. Laura presumes to know Palin so intimately that she would actually question her post-partum recovery.

So now I'm looking at everything I've been told about feminism and wondering if it's all a fairy tale. No jury would convict me, not with messages like the one above, and all of the women seemingly popping out of the woodwork, asking what sort of mother is she to run for office with a four-month-old?

If children were really limitations, if people were truly worried about whether or not a candidate could concentrate on their duties as a parent, this question would be universally asked of BOTH women AND MEN. John F. Kennedy had a baby in the White House. He is regarded as one of the greatest presidents of our time. Barack Obama has two young daughters. I can think of a plethora of politicians running or currently in office who have young children. Yet no one questions whether or not the attention of these men will be diverted by their children. No, that wouldn't play into the stereotype. Their penises have earned them a free pass. How nice.

So we're back to how dare a woman have five children and run for vice-president. You know, Nancy Pelosi also has five children and seven grandchildren and no one has questioned her ability to be Madame Speaker, though whether this stems from Pelosi's children being adults or simply because she's a Democrat remains to be seen. (Soledad O'Brien has four kids under ten-years-old, so, when will critics be asking her who's raising her kids while she's off on television with all her ambition?)

So yes, how dare a woman with, GASP, children run for vice-president or do anything, for that matter. I work 30 hours a week from my home, I also have ambition AND children. I didn't realize that those things make one a bad mother. If that's the case, I am very much not alone in condemnation.

Ambition and mothering are NOT mutually exclusive things. This is what we were told back in the Olden Days, before we had the right to vote, before we had the right to dictate the direction of our lives. Feminism gave us choices - we didn't have choices before.

Now bitter relics like Linda Hirshman tell the cameras that women who don't choose a certain way aren't really feminists, but an embarrassment to the female sex. And people like Sally Quinn, Dr. Laura, and more women than I care to list are telling everyone that again, if you choose to both be a mother and to have ambition then you are a bad mother. These women are brow-beating other women with female insecurities - EXACTLY like a chauvinist would. They're trying to guilt women into falling in line. This isn't feminism. This isn't sisterhood. This is bullsh*t.

(To go off on a tangent, Quinn tries to rope women in using Biblical definitions - which I thought were unimportant until now, suddenly. That's fine, it's easy to cherry-pick Scripture. She glosses over women like Ruth and Deborah, women who are revered because they didn't stay home, they had ambition to do better things and they did them. So no, Biblically, husbands and men are not encouraged to put women in rusty cages as a way to keep them in their place. My bag is that if you talk Bible, know it well enough beyond a Googled verse, Quinn. So are you saying that women of faith are excluded from feminism because of your poorly-paraphrased Biblical research? Or have you now found religion and want to apply it to this one circumstance? Either way, the argument is invalid.)

Women are not second-class citizens and mothers sure as hell aren't second-class citizens. Dr. Laura actually questions how well a mother of five can multi-task? Isn't that pretty evident? And people wonder why the "mommybloggers" are so active, why they make such a ruckus, why they perceive discrimination when there supposedly isn't any. It's because the notion that discrimination against mothers is nonexistent is a myth. We are worthy of respect. Children are not a burden, we are not limited, and if more people in this world had a mother's heart the planet would be a better place to live.

I refuse to believe that I am limited because of my kids. It's just the opposite.