Source: Michael Austin’s Title IX Presentation at UE. Click for more info.
For the last few weeks we’ve been enjoying the performances of some of the best athletes in the world at the Olympics. We have the push for gender equality to thank for a lot of women performing and doing well at the Olympics. Since Title IX was passed in 1972, the number of women participating in sports has increased dramatically. Not only has the number of women participating in athletics increased, but the actual difficulty of competition (see video here). There’s just so much to celebrate in women’s progress, from Ibtihaj Muhammad (the first US woman to compete in a hijab) to Kimia Alizadeh (first Iranian female to ever win an olympic medal).
So it was surprising for me to see some random blogpost on a right-wing website on my Twitter timeline: “US Olympian sparks feminist outrage.” The post said Kerri Walsh-Jennings’ comments about loving being a mother struck a nerve with liberals on twitter; it had no links or examples of any comments that people were criticizing Walsh-Jennings, it just said it was happening.
Funny that a bikini wearing, working (yes, I’d call her being a professional athlete “working”) mom with a hyphenated last name became the newest Mormon hero of anti-feminism.
Easy to make up so it was easy for me to write off. Usually a hailstorm of controversy (what another blog called it) is accompanied by trending hashtags or something that you can find just by searching. Finally, after much hunting, I found one right-wing site that did have a link to actual criticism…..by one person saying one negative thing on twitter. Huh. How can we expect any person in their right mind to withstand such an onslaught? And obviously this one random internet user represents millions of liberal and feminist thinkers, right? The whole thing was a non-starter.
Imagine my (non?) surprise the next day when LDS Living decided to take the (untrue) blog posts floating around about criticism for Walsh-Jennings motherhood and do the courageous thing by making a public declaration of standing with motherhood against the feminists out to destroy the family. The LDS Living post (and surprisingly a few of the right-wing ones as well) filled my Facebook feed the next day. Everyone “taking a stand for motherhood against feminism!” A handful of Mormon feminists tried to stem the tide by asking the LDS Living Facebook page to verify any of the claims made in their post.
Crickets.
One of the most ironic things to me about the whole controversy is that one of the leading liberal feminists in the US, Anne Marie Slaughter, has written a book, Unfinished Business, about how the next frontier for feminism in the United States is to get our culture to value the act of caregiving. The motivation for the book came from the literal hailstorm of controversy she (actually) received in 2012 from writing the cover article for The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” It sparked a(n actual) national conversation and was one of The Atlantic’s all-time most-read articles. From a review of her book on Amazon:
The cover photo for “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” from The Atlantic
Slaughter’s strongest point is that there is powerful and ubiquitous discrimination against caregiving in the United States. Fifty years ago, women wanted out of the home. They wanted to have freedom to pursue their own goals, while also having the opportunity to support themselves. And over the past half-century, they’ve more or less accomplished this goal. Obviously there is still progress to be made, but there is no denying that women are better off than they were several years ago. They are better educated, more independent, and largely more self-supporting. But, as Slaughter says, “In the long quest for gender equality, women first had to gain power and independence by emulating men.” They may have proven that they can do “men’s work,” but, unfortunately, what was once considered “women’s work,” (i.e., caring for children and the home) is still not valued in our society.
The book goes on to outline ideas and actions that both men, women, companies, and organizations could make to help make everyone’s lives better when it comes to the work/family balance by valuing the work of caregivers. So, yeah. Feminists valuing caregiving.
My question is….why do we continue to do this, create fictional enemies? There is no *actual* large group of people out there disgusted that a modern woman is able to balance a successful professional athletic career and motherhood (or that she loves and enjoys motherhood) – why are we making them up? Why, as a Mormon people, can’t we move past the old caricature of the screaming, family-hating second wave feminist? Is it our persecution complex? Our need to have an actual evil enemy to fight? Why, if we’re standing for something, don’t we stand for real issues?
Some do it so they can have something to report on. Nothing new there. Rallying the troops by showing how under attack we are gets people hyped up.
Mix that in with a cultural innate feeling of being persecuted (and kind of proud of it) and it isn’t so hard to believe.
Same for this controversy:
Click bait draws attention.
Good post, Kristine. I’m not sure what you mean by “we”. Do you mean all humans? Mormons? Christians?
I’ll take a narrow view of the “we” and go with Mormons. Mormons create false enemies for the same reason most Christians do. Christianity is a religion that depends on an absolute binary for its existence: God is the absolute good, Lucifer is the absolute evil. Christianity and, hence, Mormonism, uses this binary (incorrectly, IMHO) as both an engine to drive the members of the church towards the good and also to as a way to create “enemies” in order to give us someone to push against, impelling us forward as we avoid the “evil” other group and feel smug and righteous about our own “goodness.” This, of course, is all wrong. I’d love to see us embrace a neo-platonic model, something like what Plotinus teaches in the Enneads. He sees good as a kind of emanation from the unifying concept he calls “The One”, but he doesn’t posit an equally evil counterpart. Thus, the closer one gets to The One, the closer one gets to beauty, virtue, and especially eudaimonia (happiness) and the farther one gets from The One, the less one is able to access beauty, happiness, etc.. There’s no Satan involved, it’s just sort of up to us about how close (or not) we want to be to The One. I like Plotinus’s system much better than ours. It would really curtail, I should think, the unhelpful and often over-simplified binary thinking of a fair amount of members.
Really great post. I have noticed this phenomenon too, on both sides of the political spectrum, and I think it has a lot to do with two features of our media saturated world and one hard-wired cognitive defect.
The two features are: 1) we have enormous access to information, so if one person on one Twitter account complains about something, that can be put into a meme and splashed all over the Internet in a matter of seconds, giving the appearance that something that is not a problem is actually a problem. 2) We have so much access to political opinion that we can spend all day long watching, listening to, and reading “content” and never encounter so much as a single statement that we disagree with. We can surround ourselves with media that reflects ourselves back to ourselves.
And the hard-wired cognitive trait is what is usually just called “confirmation bias.” We tend to find what we are looking for. And the modern world is so good at organizing, archiving, and reproducing stuff that we can ALWAYS find what we are looking for.
So, if my echo chamber tells me that there is a large body of angry feminists out there criticizing women who chose to be mothers, and I have almost instant access to several trillion pages of information, I am going to find evidence of those people somewhere, and the second I do, I am going to share it with all of the people on the Internet who think like I do. Then we can all post it to Facebook and engage in a half hour or so of recreational outrage before moving on to the next topic. What could be more fun than that?
Brother Sky, I love that thought. A theology of one-ness without an archenemy. I suppose that’s how I approach my personal theology in practice. Interesting.
MA: totally agree that both sides are sucked into the vortex of echo chambers and confirmation bias. Really stinks when it’s the neighbors I sit next to at church who (figuratively) burn false effigies of me online.
We should be better than this, shouldn’t we?
This is a particularly good example. Generally the only place I hear about how wicked the world has become is at Church.
Which seems particularly ungrateful in the wonderful world we now live in.
I will knock down one of the false enemies highlighted in the post. To answer Ms. Slaughter’s question at the end of her quote, there are places that still value caring for children and the home. I suggest you look at right wing websites and you will find a lot. Plenty of mocking of the (sometimes) false enemies in liberals and progressives, but also plenty of valuing of traditional women’s work.
You don’t have to look far at the political agenda of the sources that trumped this up to understand their motivation. And I think it is pretty clear what the motivation is for those at LDS Living to have jumped on the band wagon. It fits a long-standing, political worldview that they share. Keeping it riled up has real monetary consequences for these organizations. They fundraise on this manufactured angst. It drives readership and views etc. Of course, this game can work for opposing political agendas too. It leaves us al the hard work of separating fact from fiction. Thanks for helping us all do that hear.
Also, I think that in the mormonverse we have to come to accept that we have long entered the era where our community is susceptible to the manipulations of the conservative right in America. Often we are seeing the “tail wag the dog” as more and more ideas, rhetoric and activities are filtering into Mormon thought and practice but where we identify them as being generated organically within our community. We should at least be aware of the origins and the motivation of those originating them as we evaluate what to keep and what to discard.
“So, yeah. Feminists valuing caregiving.”
But that is ONE author. Does she speak for all feminists? For every feminist who values caregiving, and there have certainly been some, even back in the height of the second wave–for every one who promotes motherhood and respects caregiving, there are others who do not. When Michelle Obama chose to devote her time as “mom-in chief,” some feminists called her out for “letting down the side.” The Washington Post has written various articles on that issue.
And of course some feminists have claimed that Slaughter is not one because of her views.
For me, I am happy to work with groups and individuals of all persuasions on issues of common interest. But please don’t try to pretend that all feminists are pro-motherhood.
“My question is….why do we continue to do this, create fictional enemies? … Why, as a Mormon people, can’t we move past the old caricature of the screaming, family-hating second wave feminist?”
I don’t think we do much as “a Mormon people.” Mormons live all over the world in a variety of settings, so I have no interest at all in figuring out why “we” do this or that since all that does is make someone feel left out if they don’t do things the way “we” are supposed to.
But in my own life, I don’t find that the impact of second-wave feminism is a mere caricature. I am delighted that you feel totally supported in your choices regarding family and career, but unfortunately not everyone does.
At the state university where I am employed, they no longer allow undergraduate students to attend part-time. This is a big door-slam to the pathway that many parents in the past followed to finish a degree while their own children were in school, then return to employment when the kids are out the door. That decision has been somewhat mitigated by the availability of online courses, but it is still a hard course load to maintain. If caregiving was respected, the university would appreciate that those parents have another job.
At the (different) state university some of my offspring attended, I was horrified at orientation when an advisement speaker got up and declared that liberal arts majors earn more than nursing majors. This is true, if the liberal arts major is in a hustling full-time-plus job and the nurse is working part-time. But the nursing degree (as President Hinckley pointed out) has all kinds of options for working part-time and is likely to be always in demand with the aging of the baby boom. However, university advisement is only preparing people for full-time lifelong careers. They view time off for caregiving as a thing off the past.
It would be easy to assume this is a vestige of older second-wave feminists who will be retiring soon, allowing a more pro-family cohort to assume power and change policies.
But I hear this from younger colleagues all the time as well. “You can’t have more than one child,” is something recited by women in their 20s and 30s. Right out of Linda Hirschman’s “Get to Work.”
I have taken a lot of grief and bullying by female supervisors for being a bad example to other women and being ridiculous about wanting to make my family a priority. It is a real issue to me. And I have felt comforted by church teachings.
Naismith we’ve gone the rounds on this before and you’ve been given grief but never in any of my 3 full time or 3 part time jobs have I ever had these issues (idaho, las vegas, and virginia). I understand that you do. I certainly agree that there is undervaluing of caregiving and family issues in our culture – thus the need for the Unfinished Business book. It was a direct response to Sheryl Sanberg’s Lean In. Anne Marie instead says everyone needs to lean the hell out (back to family) and our culture needs to stop penalizing them (companies’ leave policies, flex hours, etc.). So the book wouldn’t have been written if there wasn’t work to do and conversations to have.
The point of this post is this specific incident of fabricated outrage over Walsh-Jennings’ comments. I’m sure you can agree this incident was ridiculous.
“So the book wouldn’t have been written if there wasn’t work to do and conversations to have.”
Um, yeah. Except that a lot of those same concepts were presented in Betty Friedan’s book THE SECOND STAGE, published in 1981. Which was not popular and criticized by feminists.
Again, I welcome any voice who speaks up in favor of caregiving and against the policies that force women to do things the way men have under the guise that same is equal.
But the impact of those policies on the lives of women even today and the young women who believe it suggests that such attitudes are much much more than a mere “caricature.”
And part of my point is that if one has experienced that criticism in your own life, you are willing to believe that someone else has as well.
But also, I am not sure to what extent we can declare it “fabricated.” Tracking media hits about my organization is part of my job, and it can be tricky due to closed Facebook groups, publications by professional organizations (their magazine for membership rather than the journal whose articles are indexed) and misspelling or changing hashtags midstream. I admire your certitude that it was fabricated.
Too much click bait is fabricated these days.
I hit a site I wish I had book marked. All it was was click bait outrage memes.
Often covering both sides. I looked at it in response to a thread appalled at a meme –and discovered that all they were doing was trying to spark attention and outrage. It was amazing.
I feel like this post is asking me to be patient with the movement, that they’ll come around and begin to value caregiving. (Why not use the term motherhood)
I don’t feel like anyone was painting feminists as the enemy, only pointing out a very real problem that extremist women are alienating mainstream women with their pro abortion. Anti child. Anti motherhood and racist leanings. Pointing out those in the group that are anti anything helps the group move more to a moderate and palatable center in which we can work together with greater force and power. Showing outrage over the aspects of feminism that don’t sit well with the majority of the group is a good thing because it helps mold the efforts of the feminist movement. No ones creating enemies. Pointing out what we disagree with in a movement is helpful. Also. How can I call myself a feminist when the group does things i disagree with and fights who I am and my identity as a woman? I’d love to call myself pro woman. Also. Remember what they did to Ann Romney? Just a public example of the same kind of things we women feel all the time when it comes to Raising children.
My love to all fellow women. We have a great work to do. The first of which would be to stop attacking each other for our choices. Especially those uniquely given to women. But all our choices. Don’t attack a woman who chooses not to bear children or who cannot. Just don’t attack at all. But DO pint out when a movement moves I a direction you don’t want to be a part of. Pointing it out is better than simply abandoning it. Right?
No. That is lipservice. When women need gainful employment, those same people who revere them will change tone, because none of their work was done for a paid boss. Their education (if lucky enough to have one) was followed by babies, so it doesn’t count. Their skills are practically ignored, and they have to start at the bottom, as if they hadn’t existed. I have been told by husband, conservative brothers and mother that of course, that is just reality. Yeah. I could have twiddled my thumbs for years and still started over at the bottom. Not raised 5 kids, homeschooled them, done my own taxes, served my community, church, etc, and all the other skills I honed extensively while nursing babies and changing diapers and being the drop in day care for friends. I kept up with technology, policy changes, everything, but I start over as if I had no degree or decades of practice. They can keep their praise, I will encourage my children to all value caregiving and education, to fight for the personal freedoms those right-wingers dismiss (like health care and reproductive rights) to co parent and share income generation so no one gets left behind.
SarahJane and Jen–you seem closer in viewpoint than it may look to you.
You’ve both experienced exploitation and a lack of support by people whose words did not match their actions–or whose words were dismissive and hurtful.
“Really stinks when it’s the neighbors I sit next to at church who (figuratively) burn false effigies of me online.”
This works both ways, doesn’t it?
Too many among us (and among every community, I suppose) try to caricature-ize those who see thing differently. It’s unkind, whichever direction it flows.
Jen, the reason the term caregiving is used is because she wants policies for mothers/fathers to also cover people who have to leave work to care for their aging parents. Caregiving happens on both ends and workers need to not be penalized for it.
I try hard not to judge a group of people by their weirdest extremists (tea party rally people using the n word) and in return hope for the same logic and reason in return.
“Imagine my (non?) surprise the next day when LDS Living decided to take the (untrue) blog posts floating around about criticism for Walsh-Jennings motherhood and do the courageous thing by making a public declaration of standing with motherhood against the feminists out to destroy the family.”
Yep.
Don’t like it that Deseret Management Corp owns Deseret Book of which LDS Living magazine is a business unit. I’m look for sources who uphold truth/accuracy and smooth out/minimize rather than accentuate divisiveness–acting as peacemakers.
Can’t find either of those qualities in the Deseret News or, apparently LDS Living magazine.
It seems like the handful of conservative news sites who reported the story were all pointing to the 2 twitter comments by Dixon as evidence of feminist outrage. There was one blogger who pointed to an additional source – a Salon article lamenting the fact that coverage of female athletes tended to focus on their spouses and families, rather than the athletic prowess of the athlete herself. The Salon article made the point that male athletes aren’t typically lauded for how they balance careers and family life, or referenced merely as the spouses of prominent women. But… lots of people chose to interpret the article as saying that marriage and family life clearly isn’t as important as athletic achievements. So getting mad over announcing an unnamed Olympic medalist as famous for being the wife of a Chicago Bears lineman is attacking the importance of marriage, I guess. But at least it’s another reason why someone may have felt the importance of family life was under attack during the Olympics. http://www.salon.com/2016/08/08/win-like-a-woman-how-the-media-is-still-failing-female-olympians/
Great post, Kristine. I love your title in particular. As others already said, it’s easier to keep the boundaries between us and the wicked world bright if we whip up false enemies to keep us all in line. (By “us,” I mean Mormons.)
Wheat & Tares 
Why do we do this?
Some do it so they can have something to report on. Nothing new there. Rallying the troops by showing how under attack we are gets people hyped up.
Mix that in with a cultural innate feeling of being persecuted (and kind of proud of it) and it isn’t so hard to believe.
Same for this controversy:
Click bait draws attention.
Good post, Kristine. I’m not sure what you mean by “we”. Do you mean all humans? Mormons? Christians?
I’ll take a narrow view of the “we” and go with Mormons. Mormons create false enemies for the same reason most Christians do. Christianity is a religion that depends on an absolute binary for its existence: God is the absolute good, Lucifer is the absolute evil. Christianity and, hence, Mormonism, uses this binary (incorrectly, IMHO) as both an engine to drive the members of the church towards the good and also to as a way to create “enemies” in order to give us someone to push against, impelling us forward as we avoid the “evil” other group and feel smug and righteous about our own “goodness.” This, of course, is all wrong. I’d love to see us embrace a neo-platonic model, something like what Plotinus teaches in the Enneads. He sees good as a kind of emanation from the unifying concept he calls “The One”, but he doesn’t posit an equally evil counterpart. Thus, the closer one gets to The One, the closer one gets to beauty, virtue, and especially eudaimonia (happiness) and the farther one gets from The One, the less one is able to access beauty, happiness, etc.. There’s no Satan involved, it’s just sort of up to us about how close (or not) we want to be to The One. I like Plotinus’s system much better than ours. It would really curtail, I should think, the unhelpful and often over-simplified binary thinking of a fair amount of members.
Really great post. I have noticed this phenomenon too, on both sides of the political spectrum, and I think it has a lot to do with two features of our media saturated world and one hard-wired cognitive defect.
The two features are: 1) we have enormous access to information, so if one person on one Twitter account complains about something, that can be put into a meme and splashed all over the Internet in a matter of seconds, giving the appearance that something that is not a problem is actually a problem. 2) We have so much access to political opinion that we can spend all day long watching, listening to, and reading “content” and never encounter so much as a single statement that we disagree with. We can surround ourselves with media that reflects ourselves back to ourselves.
And the hard-wired cognitive trait is what is usually just called “confirmation bias.” We tend to find what we are looking for. And the modern world is so good at organizing, archiving, and reproducing stuff that we can ALWAYS find what we are looking for.
So, if my echo chamber tells me that there is a large body of angry feminists out there criticizing women who chose to be mothers, and I have almost instant access to several trillion pages of information, I am going to find evidence of those people somewhere, and the second I do, I am going to share it with all of the people on the Internet who think like I do. Then we can all post it to Facebook and engage in a half hour or so of recreational outrage before moving on to the next topic. What could be more fun than that?
Brother Sky, I love that thought. A theology of one-ness without an archenemy. I suppose that’s how I approach my personal theology in practice. Interesting.
MA: totally agree that both sides are sucked into the vortex of echo chambers and confirmation bias. Really stinks when it’s the neighbors I sit next to at church who (figuratively) burn false effigies of me online.
We should be better than this, shouldn’t we?
This is a particularly good example. Generally the only place I hear about how wicked the world has become is at Church.
Which seems particularly ungrateful in the wonderful world we now live in.
I will knock down one of the false enemies highlighted in the post. To answer Ms. Slaughter’s question at the end of her quote, there are places that still value caring for children and the home. I suggest you look at right wing websites and you will find a lot. Plenty of mocking of the (sometimes) false enemies in liberals and progressives, but also plenty of valuing of traditional women’s work.
You don’t have to look far at the political agenda of the sources that trumped this up to understand their motivation. And I think it is pretty clear what the motivation is for those at LDS Living to have jumped on the band wagon. It fits a long-standing, political worldview that they share. Keeping it riled up has real monetary consequences for these organizations. They fundraise on this manufactured angst. It drives readership and views etc. Of course, this game can work for opposing political agendas too. It leaves us al the hard work of separating fact from fiction. Thanks for helping us all do that hear.
Also, I think that in the mormonverse we have to come to accept that we have long entered the era where our community is susceptible to the manipulations of the conservative right in America. Often we are seeing the “tail wag the dog” as more and more ideas, rhetoric and activities are filtering into Mormon thought and practice but where we identify them as being generated organically within our community. We should at least be aware of the origins and the motivation of those originating them as we evaluate what to keep and what to discard.
“So, yeah. Feminists valuing caregiving.”
But that is ONE author. Does she speak for all feminists? For every feminist who values caregiving, and there have certainly been some, even back in the height of the second wave–for every one who promotes motherhood and respects caregiving, there are others who do not. When Michelle Obama chose to devote her time as “mom-in chief,” some feminists called her out for “letting down the side.” The Washington Post has written various articles on that issue.
And of course some feminists have claimed that Slaughter is not one because of her views.
For me, I am happy to work with groups and individuals of all persuasions on issues of common interest. But please don’t try to pretend that all feminists are pro-motherhood.
“My question is….why do we continue to do this, create fictional enemies? … Why, as a Mormon people, can’t we move past the old caricature of the screaming, family-hating second wave feminist?”
I don’t think we do much as “a Mormon people.” Mormons live all over the world in a variety of settings, so I have no interest at all in figuring out why “we” do this or that since all that does is make someone feel left out if they don’t do things the way “we” are supposed to.
But in my own life, I don’t find that the impact of second-wave feminism is a mere caricature. I am delighted that you feel totally supported in your choices regarding family and career, but unfortunately not everyone does.
At the state university where I am employed, they no longer allow undergraduate students to attend part-time. This is a big door-slam to the pathway that many parents in the past followed to finish a degree while their own children were in school, then return to employment when the kids are out the door. That decision has been somewhat mitigated by the availability of online courses, but it is still a hard course load to maintain. If caregiving was respected, the university would appreciate that those parents have another job.
At the (different) state university some of my offspring attended, I was horrified at orientation when an advisement speaker got up and declared that liberal arts majors earn more than nursing majors. This is true, if the liberal arts major is in a hustling full-time-plus job and the nurse is working part-time. But the nursing degree (as President Hinckley pointed out) has all kinds of options for working part-time and is likely to be always in demand with the aging of the baby boom. However, university advisement is only preparing people for full-time lifelong careers. They view time off for caregiving as a thing off the past.
It would be easy to assume this is a vestige of older second-wave feminists who will be retiring soon, allowing a more pro-family cohort to assume power and change policies.
But I hear this from younger colleagues all the time as well. “You can’t have more than one child,” is something recited by women in their 20s and 30s. Right out of Linda Hirschman’s “Get to Work.”
I have taken a lot of grief and bullying by female supervisors for being a bad example to other women and being ridiculous about wanting to make my family a priority. It is a real issue to me. And I have felt comforted by church teachings.
Naismith we’ve gone the rounds on this before and you’ve been given grief but never in any of my 3 full time or 3 part time jobs have I ever had these issues (idaho, las vegas, and virginia). I understand that you do. I certainly agree that there is undervaluing of caregiving and family issues in our culture – thus the need for the Unfinished Business book. It was a direct response to Sheryl Sanberg’s Lean In. Anne Marie instead says everyone needs to lean the hell out (back to family) and our culture needs to stop penalizing them (companies’ leave policies, flex hours, etc.). So the book wouldn’t have been written if there wasn’t work to do and conversations to have.
The point of this post is this specific incident of fabricated outrage over Walsh-Jennings’ comments. I’m sure you can agree this incident was ridiculous.
“So the book wouldn’t have been written if there wasn’t work to do and conversations to have.”
Um, yeah. Except that a lot of those same concepts were presented in Betty Friedan’s book THE SECOND STAGE, published in 1981. Which was not popular and criticized by feminists.
Again, I welcome any voice who speaks up in favor of caregiving and against the policies that force women to do things the way men have under the guise that same is equal.
But the impact of those policies on the lives of women even today and the young women who believe it suggests that such attitudes are much much more than a mere “caricature.”
And part of my point is that if one has experienced that criticism in your own life, you are willing to believe that someone else has as well.
But also, I am not sure to what extent we can declare it “fabricated.” Tracking media hits about my organization is part of my job, and it can be tricky due to closed Facebook groups, publications by professional organizations (their magazine for membership rather than the journal whose articles are indexed) and misspelling or changing hashtags midstream. I admire your certitude that it was fabricated.
Too much click bait is fabricated these days.
I hit a site I wish I had book marked. All it was was click bait outrage memes.
Often covering both sides. I looked at it in response to a thread appalled at a meme –and discovered that all they were doing was trying to spark attention and outrage. It was amazing.
I feel like this post is asking me to be patient with the movement, that they’ll come around and begin to value caregiving. (Why not use the term motherhood)
I don’t feel like anyone was painting feminists as the enemy, only pointing out a very real problem that extremist women are alienating mainstream women with their pro abortion. Anti child. Anti motherhood and racist leanings. Pointing out those in the group that are anti anything helps the group move more to a moderate and palatable center in which we can work together with greater force and power. Showing outrage over the aspects of feminism that don’t sit well with the majority of the group is a good thing because it helps mold the efforts of the feminist movement. No ones creating enemies. Pointing out what we disagree with in a movement is helpful. Also. How can I call myself a feminist when the group does things i disagree with and fights who I am and my identity as a woman? I’d love to call myself pro woman. Also. Remember what they did to Ann Romney? Just a public example of the same kind of things we women feel all the time when it comes to Raising children.
My love to all fellow women. We have a great work to do. The first of which would be to stop attacking each other for our choices. Especially those uniquely given to women. But all our choices. Don’t attack a woman who chooses not to bear children or who cannot. Just don’t attack at all. But DO pint out when a movement moves I a direction you don’t want to be a part of. Pointing it out is better than simply abandoning it. Right?
No. That is lipservice. When women need gainful employment, those same people who revere them will change tone, because none of their work was done for a paid boss. Their education (if lucky enough to have one) was followed by babies, so it doesn’t count. Their skills are practically ignored, and they have to start at the bottom, as if they hadn’t existed. I have been told by husband, conservative brothers and mother that of course, that is just reality. Yeah. I could have twiddled my thumbs for years and still started over at the bottom. Not raised 5 kids, homeschooled them, done my own taxes, served my community, church, etc, and all the other skills I honed extensively while nursing babies and changing diapers and being the drop in day care for friends. I kept up with technology, policy changes, everything, but I start over as if I had no degree or decades of practice. They can keep their praise, I will encourage my children to all value caregiving and education, to fight for the personal freedoms those right-wingers dismiss (like health care and reproductive rights) to co parent and share income generation so no one gets left behind.
SarahJane and Jen–you seem closer in viewpoint than it may look to you.
You’ve both experienced exploitation and a lack of support by people whose words did not match their actions–or whose words were dismissive and hurtful.
“Really stinks when it’s the neighbors I sit next to at church who (figuratively) burn false effigies of me online.”
This works both ways, doesn’t it?
Too many among us (and among every community, I suppose) try to caricature-ize those who see thing differently. It’s unkind, whichever direction it flows.
Jen, the reason the term caregiving is used is because she wants policies for mothers/fathers to also cover people who have to leave work to care for their aging parents. Caregiving happens on both ends and workers need to not be penalized for it.
I try hard not to judge a group of people by their weirdest extremists (tea party rally people using the n word) and in return hope for the same logic and reason in return.
“Imagine my (non?) surprise the next day when LDS Living decided to take the (untrue) blog posts floating around about criticism for Walsh-Jennings motherhood and do the courageous thing by making a public declaration of standing with motherhood against the feminists out to destroy the family.”
Yep.
Don’t like it that Deseret Management Corp owns Deseret Book of which LDS Living magazine is a business unit. I’m look for sources who uphold truth/accuracy and smooth out/minimize rather than accentuate divisiveness–acting as peacemakers.
Can’t find either of those qualities in the Deseret News or, apparently LDS Living magazine.
It seems like the handful of conservative news sites who reported the story were all pointing to the 2 twitter comments by Dixon as evidence of feminist outrage. There was one blogger who pointed to an additional source – a Salon article lamenting the fact that coverage of female athletes tended to focus on their spouses and families, rather than the athletic prowess of the athlete herself. The Salon article made the point that male athletes aren’t typically lauded for how they balance careers and family life, or referenced merely as the spouses of prominent women. But… lots of people chose to interpret the article as saying that marriage and family life clearly isn’t as important as athletic achievements. So getting mad over announcing an unnamed Olympic medalist as famous for being the wife of a Chicago Bears lineman is attacking the importance of marriage, I guess. But at least it’s another reason why someone may have felt the importance of family life was under attack during the Olympics. http://www.salon.com/2016/08/08/win-like-a-woman-how-the-media-is-still-failing-female-olympians/
Great post, Kristine. I love your title in particular. As others already said, it’s easier to keep the boundaries between us and the wicked world bright if we whip up false enemies to keep us all in line. (By “us,” I mean Mormons.)