Barnard Motherhood Conference Featured on NPR's All Things Considered, 12/5

Trascript of the broadcast:

Host:

A recent conference at Barnard College in New York featured women from the A Call to Motherhood movement. The women chided contemporary American culture for devaluing motherhood and childbearing, which is not so new. What was noteworthy at this particular forum was its success at bringing together women from across the political spectrum and breathing new life into an old debate. NPR’s Margot Adler has more.

Adler:

Its quite likely that over the past few months you’ve come across some book or article or television program that talks about what the media has dubbed as "the mommy wars". About the tensions that exist between mothers who work and mothers who stay at home. Ranging from articles in New York Magazine or books like Sylvia Ann Hewett’s Creating a Life or Allison Pearson’s "I don’t know how she does it" a kind of Bridget Jones diary of a working mother. The decisions that women make and the hidden costs of those decisions have been part of an ongoing discussion in our society. At the Barnard conference, Anne Crittondon, the author of "The Price of Motherhood" discusses why the most important job in the world is still the least valued. To put it in a nutshell, young women take for granted gains that women have achieved because they now have a decade or so before they are forced to confront the society of devaluing motherhood.

Unknown: (speaking to audience)

We want ten or fifteen years of women’s lives where they don’t find there is an obstacle. The new problem is when you have a baby. When you have that child is when these issues really hit you.

Adler:

On a recent evening in a house in Brooklyn, a group of nine mothers, mostly middle-class and most of them with very young children are meeting in person for the very first time. They’ve been part of an e-mail list created by one of the women. They give each other advice and support. The Ft. Greene section of Brooklyn is a neighborhood filled with children. In fact the 2000 census says there is a higher percent of children under the age of one than any other place in New York City. When you ask about the decisions these women have made regarding work and family the conversations spills out easily. Here are Betsy Gutmacher who is a working mom and Liz Schnorr who went to a recently stated home and started the e-mail list.

Schnorr:

I get to work, I work so hard and sometimes its great and sometimes I go home and wish that I never had to go back. I am really interested in the concept of having it all and doing it all which I think is poisoned our society right now. The three years that I stayed home with Georgia was the greatest years of my life. They were angelic, it was beautiful, much more exhausting than going to work everyday. And now that I’ve gone back to work I’ve become one of those working mothers. You know what? There is no answer. You know? We are all wrong. (laughter)

Adler:

Jenny Douglas another woman in the group once worked for a television network and remembers telling her co-workers right before the baby was due….

Douglas:

Do you think I could actually be home with the baby? I mean gross! That would just be so boring don’t you worry I’ll be back in two months! And you know, but I had this kid and I just felt this instant connection and attachment that I could never have conceived this. And I remember just blurting out to my husband "I don’t care if we live out of a teepee and eat hotdogs I just want to be with my baby!" I just had a total paradime shift.

Adler:

Discussions like these around the kitchen table have gone on for years but what was unusual about the symposium at Barnard College several weeks ago was that it called for a motherhood movement that would combine the gains of the last 30 years in women’s rights with a new movement that would give honor and support to mothers and to the work of nurturing children. The politics of the conference shattered millions of common notions of left and right. It brought together on the one hand the Motherhood Council at the Institute for American Values, a socially conservative think tank and on the other hand, women like Kim Gandy the President of The National Organization for Women. It joined a liberal call for economic support for women and parents with an attack on contemporary American culture that many religious conservatives might well support. The symposium featured historians some of whom argued that the women’s movement of the 19th and early 20th century had a better understanding than today’s women do on how to combine and value private as well as public life. There were tensions in the meeting. A statement released at the forum attacked feminism saying that the concerns of the mothers were seen outside the mainstream. Kim Gandy the President of NOW disagrees, saying that most of those tensions were created by the media.

Gandy:

I see individual tension between women and that is not a tension between the women’s movement and motherhood.

Adler:

One historian replied that all one had to do was look at the classic text women were writing in the 1970s to see that motherhood was denigrated. But (Name indiscernible) the director of the motherhood project at The Institute for American Values said all of these tensions were not really about a war between women.

Director:

I think it is a tension that is in our culture. The whole culture drives us to value the work, the achievement, the speed, the money and drives us to devalue the caring, nurturing, loving, feeling. The whole culture does that. We are simply suggesting that the women’s movement has not helped us as much as we had hoped to equalize that imbalance.

Adler:

She says that the real conflict is not between work and family as much as it is between the culture and family. Between what the Culture Project calls the Money World and Mother World. Back at the house in Brooklyn, there was some discomfort with the notion of a motherhood movement. Sara Chen the mother of 10-month old twins who teaches at Hunter College asked why should mothers be singled out? Isn’t caregiving something we all should be doing? Why should being a mother or having children make a difference to the kind of world one wants to inhabit? You hear it all the time she says.

Chen:

Oh you have to have clean air for our children. Oh so adults don’t deserve clean air? We have to have good schools for our children. Oh so adults don’t deserve a community in which children are educated? Actually everyone needs that and I think children is such a hotbutton issue that if you say we need blah blah blah for our children somehow it will fly whereas to say "Well I am a single person and I am 40 and I don’t have any kids and I don’t want any kids but I’d really like some decent healthcare. That’s selfish and illigitimate.

Adler:

What did resonate with the Brooklyn women was the notion that the culture as a whole did not encourage a community of caring. Denny Douglas.

Douglas:

We are all making individual choices and we are all second guessing our selves, second guessing each other. I have made the choice largely to be home with my kids and that’s what I felt was the right choice but its been agonizing and I think what feels poignant to me that I suspect this is the case with women who are working too. We are all kind of going at it alone and making it up as we go and there is some liberation in that and it is lonely.

Adler:

If the call for a motherhood movement left these women uncomfortable. They joined the women at the Barnard College conference in believing that the culture and the market had to be tamed and that it was important to work toward creating a society and community where the decisions one made or were forced to make are not quite so solitary. Margot Adler NPR News.