Housewives can be artists, too (and four other stories)

Five reads on gender (in)equality and feminism to end your week.

This week, via that sometimes beautiful synchronicity of Twitter, I came across a podcast that restored and refreshed my hopes, faith, and energies. Maybe that’s a lot to attribute to one podcast episode. Maybe the truth is that spring is here and the sun came out for a bit and so a weight has lifted. Still, given that this podcast was about mother artists, it got me thinking about being a mother, and being creative, and reproduction, and reproductive rights. So this week, The Backlash mostly has reads on these issues. Here they are….

1) The best thing you will read on the need to rethink childcare (and parenthood)

After the UK government passed it’s major childcare reform last week, my day job colleague Sophie McBain published a beautiful long read about why we need to fundamentally rethink parenthood and the way we approach childcare. Here is a snippet:

For many women, motherhood is the moment that the limits of feminist progress are fully revealed: the gender pay gap is more accurately a motherhood gap; in straight couples, parenthood is the point at which men leap forward in their careers and women, drowning in domestic work, fall behind.

And here is another:

A truly transformational plan, one that addresses all the reasons the UK has become one of the worst places in the developed world to raise a child, would not patch up a broken system on the cheap: it would boost maternity pay and expand shared parental leave; it would ensure that childcare workers are fairly paid, and celebrated; it would rebuild Sure Start centres and other community groups; and it would form part of a broader movement to reimagine our relationship with work and care. What happens next could reshape the country in monumental ways.

2) An activist was convicted in Poland for giving a pregnant woman abortion pills

Poland, which has some of the strictest abortion laws in Europe, has tried and convicted an activist who gave a pregnant woman abortion pills. Justyna Wydrzyńska was sentenced to 30 hours of community service a month for eight months. As CNN reports:

The case sets a precedent within the country that already has some of the most restrictive abortion legislation in Europe, which human rights watchers believe will further repress women’s reproductive rights. Wydrzyńska is a co-founder of the Polish activist group, Abortion Dream Team, which campaigns against abortion stigma in the country.

In a post on its website, Abortion Dream Team said Wydrzyńska provided the pills to a woman named Ania, who was married to “an abusive man” who threatened to report a kidnapping if she traveled to Germany with her 3-year-old son for an abortion. Ania’s partner reported her to the police, who then confiscated the pills.

Also, I recently signed up to Repro Nation, the Nation’s monthly newsletter on reproductive rights around the world. It’s a very useful resource.

3) On pregnancy and patriotism

In this long read in New Lines Magazine, Amie Ferris-Rotman writes about being pregnant while working as a journalist in Russia. She describes a solidly female space of Russian maternity care, a sisterhood around maternity, and also how, even as a foreigner in Russia, her pregnancy was the focus of a national pride. The piece is fascinating as an insight into the place of motherhood in Russian culture, but also into how different maternity care can be from country to country, and how states often rely on women and their reproductive capacity to shore up the nation. Here is an excerpt:

Russia’s cult of motherhood has deep roots. Among the pre-Orthodox, pagan cultures of ancient Russia, the Mokosh deity was widely worshipped. When Vladimir the Great erected statues of the major Slavic gods in his sanctuary at the end of the 10th century, right before Russia adopted Christianity, Mokosh was the only one who was female. She was the mother of the harvest and goddess of fertility, often portrayed as a weaver, or traditional spinner of fabric. Mokosh was the moist Earth who married Perun, the god of the dry sky, thunder and war. Childbearing was seen as the earthly extension of the goddess’s powers to create new life through agriculture. Some Slavic cultures saw rain as Mokosh’s milk. There is evidence of Russian peasants revering the goddess until as late as the 16th century, with women appealing to her for help with childbirth and fertility.

Mokosh was largely replaced by Mary, and pregnancy’s hallowed nature continued in biblical form. Whereas the Western Christian tradition emphasizes Mary’s virginity, the Orthodox liturgy admires her fertility and maternity. Above all, she is the Mother of God, or Bogoroditsa in Russian (Theotokos in Greek). Orthodox medieval icons and religious texts always portray Mary as related to being a mother, stressing the compassion and sacrifice of her maternal sentiment.

4) Housewives can be artists, too

The subject of the podcast I mentioned in my intro is one of my all-time favourite writers (and heroes) Ursula Le Guin. For anyone unfamiliar, Le Guin, who died in 2018, was a visionary writer of mostly science fiction and fantasy. She had three children and wrote prolifically. In this episode of the Between the Covers podcast, her official biographer (and author of a book about mother writers) Julie Phillips, who knew Le Guin well, talks about the way some women have made parenthood work with their creative practice. It got me thinking a lot about the time and space we give ourselves for these things, and how they are not mutually exclusive. When I was on maternity leave with my first-born I found a rhythm of writing when I could and thinking about writing between those snatched moments, developing stories and ideas while breastfeeding or getting my daughter to sleep. I have continued with this approach. My partner, on the other hand, yearns for quiet and solitude for his creative practice.

We have often discussed whether there is something gendered about that. Somewhere in his subconscious sits the figure of the artistic genius. This genius is male. They are alone, deep in thought, in a studio or some other space of their own. For much of my life I had a similar idea of what being a writer or an artist was, but I relate so much more to someone like Le Guin or Toni Morrison, for instance, who didn’t (or couldn’t?) separate their home life from their creative life.

In her essay, “The Fisherman’s Daughter” (which is about these themes) Le Guin quotes the writer Joseph Conrad on his creative process, and then fairly tears him apart:

''For twenty months I wrestled with the Lord for my creation . . . mind and will and conscience engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day . . . a lonely struggle in a great isolation from the world. I suppose I slept and ate the food put before me and talked connectedly on suitable occasions, but I was never aware of the even flow of daily life, made easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful, tireless affection.''

A woman who boasted that her conscience had been engaged to the full in such a wrestling match would be called to account by both women and men; and women are now calling men to account. What ''put food'' before him? What made daily life so noiseless? What in fact was this ''tireless affection,'' which sounds to me like an old Ford in a junkyard but is apparently intended as a delicate gesture toward a woman whose conscience was engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day, for 20 months, in seeing to it that Joseph Conrad could wrestle with the Lord in a very relatively ''great isolation,'' well housed, clothed, bathed and fed?

As Julie Phillips and the host David Naimon discuss on the podcast, there is still a paucity of thought, of theory, of intellectualising about motherhood, or parenthood. These are not modes that necessarily negate creativity. They can nurture it.

5) Trans women have been banned from female events at international athletics competitions

World Athletics has announced it will not allow trans women to compete in female events, in order to “"protect the female category in our sport". Why the urgency on this issue? Listen to Lord Coe, president of the association:

When asked how he would respond if a transgender athlete said the decision was unfair, Lord Coe told Sky News: “We don't have any transgender athletes in international competition, that day may come.”