Can women be empowered by a philosophy designed to re-domesticate them?
Yesterday I asked whether women can be empowered by the philosophy of natural mothering, a philosophy created for the express purpose of oppressing them. Thinking further, it occurs to me that there is a better way to frame the issue. Natural mothering advocates seek to oppress women in a specific way — by re-domesticating them.
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Can women be empowered by philosophies created with the express intent of re-domesticating them? Only if you think “empowered” actually means powerless.[/pullquote]
Re-domesticating best captures the goals of natural childbirth, breastfeeding and attachment parenting advocates because of the multiple meanings of the word.
According to Google, these multiple meanings include:
- To tame.
- To cultivate.
- To make fond of home life and housework.
It comes from the Latin word domus, meaning home.
It’s no coincidence that natural mothering advocates are obsessed with returning everything to the home from homebirth to homeschooling. Because the ugly truth is that while advocates of natural mothering market it as empowering women by taking control over birth and schooling back, the real purpose is to take control of women by forcing them back to the home.
Achieving the goal of re-domestication of women requires collective amnesia over why women outsourced these traditional practices and why they wanted to leave the home.
Women were glad to outsource childbirth to hospitals because childbirth is inherently dangerous and excruciatingly painful. Moreover, the rapid rise in popularity of hospital birth owes much to the fact that for many women, hospitalization represented the only vacation from the endless drudgery of childcare and household tasks.
The process of re-domesticating women through natural childbirth (preferably homebirth) involves convincing them that childbirth is inherently safe and that pain is “good” for women. Midwives have taken to the task with gusto, recognizing that their income depends on not merely convincing women that they don’t need doctors, but going much further by claiming that doctors “ruin” childbirth with their pesky interventions; the interventions “interfere” with maternal-infant bonding for no better purpose than to save the lives of mothers and babies.
It only remains for lactation professionals to ruin the hospital as a place of rest by mandating rooming in and the closing of well baby nurseries so women will never be able to rest from their many domestic tasks and might as well return home early.
The process of re-domesticating women through breastfeeding is designed to keep them out of the workforce and immure them back into the home. Breastfeeding professionals and researchers have fully embraced the task, creating new “benefits” of breastfeeding as fast as the old “benefits” are debunked. They’ve demonized formula, deliberately eliding the fact that infant feeding was outsourced for many valid reasons: insufficient breastmilk is common and many women want to utilize their minds in fulfilling work instead of being tied to the home by the need to breastfeed. And, of course, advocates claim that anything other than exclusive breastfeeding “interferes” with maternal-infant bonding.
Though natural mothering advocates decry medicalization of childbirth, they adore medicalization of breastfeeding — from pumps, to breastmilk banks, to the off-label use of powerful medications with the goal of boosting milk supply. While they initially sought to make breastfeeding compatible with work outside the home, the latest research is directed toward demonizing pumping by claiming that pumping — like formula — harms the infant gut microbiome. Never mind that the evidence is remarkably weak and preliminary.
But when it comes to re-domesticating women, the philosophy of attachment parenting is by far the most transparent in its goals. Mothers are encouraged to literally wear their infants so they will never enjoy a moment’s solitude, a moment that might — heaven forbid — be used by a mother to meet her own needs.
But at least she can rest when her children are asleep, right? Wrong! Attachment parenting teaches that babies need to sleep in the same bed as their mothers. Never mind that bed-sharing literally kills babies. Mothers should not have any time at all when they are not in constant physical proximity to their children. Why? You guessed it: anything else will “interfere” with mother-infant bonding.
But even those years eventually come to an end, that’s why mothers must be loaded up with additional tasks like homeschooling and home medical care: “researching” vaccines and creating customized schedules, stocking up on tinctures and essential oils to create home remedies, growing organic food with which to laboriously hand grind baby food, shopping for all natural products, etc. etc. etc.
The “good” mother won’t merely avoid temptation to leave the home, she will be so busy that she will be unable to leave the home.
Not coincidentally, all economic power will be in the hands of men, and women will be rendered vulnerable to the whims of their husbands, permanently tied by their desire to protect their children from want.
Voila, re-domestication!
Of course there are women who are domestic by desire. There is no place they would rather be than home with their children performing domestic tasks. There’s nothing oppressive about women making choices to suit themselves. But that’s very different from women making choices because they’ve been socialized to believe that their children will not bond to them unless they stay home to give birth, breastfeed for years, and never have their children farther than a 12 inches from their bodies.
Can women be empowered by philosophies created with the express intent of re-domesticating them? Only if you think “empowered” actually means powerless.
