I’m sure my traditional stay at home Democratic but none the less rather subservient mother and Republican father never expected to raise a feminist liberal daughter, but they did. After reading many of the other wonderful diaries posted to this series, it had me doing some soul searching as to just how I wound up with many of the attitudes that I have from being comfortable working in a non-traditional job for a woman, to not caring if I got married or not and finally getting married late in life to not caring if I had children or not. I wanted to delve into the reasons that any of us decide to get married or not, and whether to have children or not, be they social or economic. What are the pressures that are put on women as opposed to men to get married and to have children? What is there to love or hate about being married or being single? About having children or staying childless? What are the barriers out there for men or women to be able to work and also raise family? What are the differences in how women are perceived who decide to remain single compared to their male counterparts? What are our responsibilities as a nation to assure that children are taken care of when women try to enter the work force?
Feminisms is a series of weekly feminist diaries. My fellow feminists and I decided to start our own for several purposes: we wanted a place to chat with each other, we felt it was important to both share our own stories and learn from others’, and we hoped to introduce to the community a better understanding of what feminism is about.
Needless to say, we expect disagreements to arise. We have all had different experiences in life, so while we share the same labels, we don’t necessarily share the same definitions. Hopefully, we can all be patient and civil with each other, and remember that, ultimately, we’re all on the same side.
My mom and dad never treated me like a girly girl. I always played a lot of sports, and was encouraged to do well in school, and had it literally pounded into me that I should never expect to sit around and wait for someone else to take care of me by getting married. If something broke around the house or if a bicycle needed to be put together, it was usually me fixing it or putting it together, so I was always pretty independent and self sufficient even at a young age. My parents were pretty typical for their time. They went to high school together, and got married in the early sixties, and my mom was actually working for Southwestern Bell for a while and she quit her job so she could go overseas with my father when he joined the Air Force. My dad was dirt poor growing up and their family never had much of anything, and he was pretty well raised by his older brothers and sisters since grandma was always working and grandpa was a drunk and not home too much and they were probably sorry when he was. He joined the Air Force as a way to get ahead in life and afford to go to school. After he got out he went to college and got his masters degree in engineering and all the while mom was taking care of us kids.
I’ve always felt like my dad just never wanted me to have to be poor like he was growing up, and mom didn’t want me to be stuck depending on a man to take care of her like she was and that was why they harped on me the way they did. She was an intelligent woman and graduated high school in three years with honors and she could have done anything she wanted with her life since she was so smart and did so well in school but she gave it up to raise a family, and I think she always had some regrets about what she could have done with her life instead. I think there were a lot of years she was really living her life vicariously through enjoying what I did with mine and seeing me independent and living on my own.
I’ve always wondered how much all of the talks I got from them ended up influencing a lot of my decisions I made later. There are a couple of different people that I could have gotten married to, but I didn’t want to be married just for the sake of being married and ended the relationships. I got to a point in my late twenties where I just really didn’t care any more if I ever got married. I had a decent job, I had a lot of good friends, I was out doing what I liked and playing ball and running teams and just having a lot of fun, and I just didn’t care. I always had people hounding me about having kids and getting married.
It always seemed though the ones doing the most hounding were usually the ones who were also the most miserable themselves...lol. It always seemed to be the most unhappily married men I worked with telling me how I should get married. My usual response was "Why, so I can be as happy as you are? All you do is complain about your wife!" I watched a lot of friends have kids only to be abandoned by the fathers and get stuck taking care of them on their own. I watched friends go through abusive relationships and stick with them because they felt they had nowhere to go. I never wanted to live like that. Also as I got older the allure of the idea of having children faded as I appreciated the freedoms that being childless gave me. Once I finally got married I was old enough that there was no way I wanted to have children that late in life. I wanted to retire when I chose to and not work later in life than I wanted to because I could not afford to retire due to having school age children while in my mid-fifties.
After reading this article on AlterNet: Why Working Women are Stuck in the 1950s I also wonder how many women are deciding not to have children for other reasons than the ones I had. From the article:
Although we have shelves full of books that address work/family problems, we still have not named the burdens that affect most of America's working families.
Call it the care crisis.
For four decades, American women have entered the paid workforce -- on men's terms, not their own -- yet we have done precious little as a society to restructure the workplace or family life. The consequence of this "stalled revolution," a term coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, is a profound "care deficit." A broken healthcare system, which has left 47 million Americans without health coverage, means this care crisis is often a matter of life and death. Today the care crisis has replaced the feminine mystique as women's "problem that has no name." It is the elephant in the room -- at home, at work and in national politics -- gigantic but ignored.
Three decades after Congress passed comprehensive childcare legislation in 1971 -- Nixon vetoed it -- childcare has simply dropped off the national agenda. And in the intervening years, the political atmosphere has only grown more hostile to the idea of using federal funds to subsidize the lives of working families.
The result? People suffer their private crises alone, without realizing that the care crisis is a problem of national significance. Many young women agonize about how to combine work and family but view the question of how to raise children as a personal dilemma, to which they need to find an individual solution. Most cannot imagine turning it into a political debate. More than a few young women have told me that the lack of affordable childcare has made them reconsider plans to become parents. Annie Tummino, a young feminist active in New York, put it this way: "I feel terrified of the patchwork situation women are forced to rely upon. Many young women are deciding not to have children or waiting until they are well established in their careers."
I’d love to hear any your stories on this issue. How many people have had pressures put on them to get married, and do women get treated differently than men do in that regard? How many people have been pressured to have children after you got married even if you didn’t want kids? How many people would like to have children but haven’t done so because it’s not economically feasible, and due to the type of problems that are outlined in the Nation’s article that I linked above? How many people like myself didn’t get married until they were older, and did you still decide to have children or not? How many people are single and loving it and possibly don’t care if you ever get married? How many of you are single and want to get married and have children but share the concerns raised in the article posted above?