Panel Discussion, "Young Feminists Take on the Family" (page 4 of 7)

The Labor Force & Family Labor

AR: You're a feminist woman raising two sons. And I think that historically we assume a goal of feminism is to make men more like women and women more like men. A lot of us maybe reject that, but what are you doing differently with your sons? Or in what way are you raising them in a feminist household?

LT: My kids are really, really young. They're one and three. So the fact that they happen to be boys hasn't really influenced overtly, on a day-to-day basis, it hasn't really influenced my parenting. I'm sure it must be influencing my parenting on so many different levels that I'm not even aware of necessarily. But I think a lot of those issues will come up when they're older. And so, I haven't really gotten there yet.

But one thing that I can and would like to comment on is the fact that I very much identify as a feminist. I'm involved in feminist activist work and feminist writing. And yet, I live in a pretty traditional family in that my husband is the one who makes the salary that we rely on.

I don't make that much money, for a lot of reasons. But mostly because of the fact that we have kids and I have slowed down my career tremendously, so that I can devote a lot of time to them.

I am married to a man. I'm the one who does the cooking and the laundry, who drops off my three-year-old at nursery school and picks him up. I do all of those domestic things that my husband, by and large, doesn't do. And something that, perhaps if we have time, we could talk about - I don't even see that necessarily as anything to do with the fact that I am feminist or that my husband isn't, because he is feminist. He's not sexist, even though it seems like a very sexist arrangement. It really has to do with the structure of the labor force, which really does force couples into an arrangement like this, where one person does end up being the breadwinner. And one person does end up tending the children.

And because of the sexist structure of the labor force, by and large, it does tend to be the man who is the breadwinner. And the woman, if this is a nuclear family that we're talking about, ends up running around doing all of those domestic things.

That obviously takes its toll on many different levels - economically, psychologically and otherwise. So again, Amy, I'm sorry I'm not so focused, I'm not exactly sure. It's definitely an interesting thing and certainly for many of you here tonight, if you are already starting to think - and it may be abstract or it may be concrete, but you're trying to think about your future and what kind of family you want to carve for yourself, these are things that are very important to start thinking about. Knowing these realities may help influence decisions you make about your careers and the kinds of lifestyles you are going to lead.

It Takes a Village: Beyond the Nuclear Family

AR: I agree that it kind of falls into two roles. Some of my first friends to have children were lesbian couples. And it was amazing to me, in each of these instances, the birth mother was the one who went back to work, and the other parent became the primary parent. It proved to me that there was this need to have one parent be the primary parent, and one be the bread winner. But it didn't need to be based on who was having the children.

Though I also think, and I've been lucky to be able to travel around the world and spend time in a few different countries, that it's also a very American or a very western way of looking at the world. It's become very cliché, but the Hillary Clinton book "It Takes A Village," which was an African proverb before it was Hillary Clinton's book title -

(laughter)

But Cathy has spent time in Ghana. And having myself spent a little time in Ghana, the thing I'm amazed about is it is the village. The whole village participates in the raising of a child. If you could just address some of that, Cathy? I know that you have many children in Ghana who aren't biologically your children, but who fill that role in your life.

Cathy McKinley: Okay. Ghana truly is a village in many ways. People say that Accra, the capital city, is more of a society than a city, and I think that's very true. It is a very peaceful place. There isn't a lot of crime. It's actually one of the safest societies I've ever lived in.

And even though it's surrounded by war and very much affected by war - the Ivory Coast and Nigeria are close by and Burkina Faso - it is an extremely peaceful and agrarian-feeling city. Even though it's not very modern, it's reaching towards modernism every minute. It's also a place where I went on a Fulbright Fellowship and didn't expect to find a relationship with a woman. I went there thinking that I was going to lock sexuality away, and maybe some of my girls would come and visit. I thought that I was going to spend these two years celibate.

AR: But you were doing a project on lesbians in Ghana, weren't you?

CM: Not necessarily. I had in mind I was going to -

AR: It became your project.

CM: I was doing a project on textiles and on the indigo trade and I wanted to look at women's political history through textiles and cloth and material culture. I had in mind I was going to find out what really happens with lesbians in Africa. And I did. I found out very quickly.

I left here, having just found my entire birth family - 14 siblings; my birth mother, who is Jewish; and my birth father is African-American and Chocktaw Indian. I was recovering from this eight-year period of searching, and then just a massive set of revelations that completely destabilized everything about my identity, my sense of myself and my family. And I got to Ghana and I got enveloped - family is everything there.

I had thought I was of running away from it, but I found myself really entrenched in family. It became really healing, like this kind of heterosexual model of family, extended families; where family is central to so many ways that the society organizes itself. All of the sudden it felt like this refuge, even though it was something I didn't necessarily want.

I met people and got pulled in very deeply to one specific family - my girlfriend's - and then to people in the extended community, and then to her very, very large extended family. And I haven't formally adopted a little girl there, but her mother kind of dumped her on me. I started feeding her because I thought she had a nutritional deficiency. I started giving her an egg every morning and her mother ended up dumping her on me. She's now living with my girlfriend and we're raising her. I get to be the dad who sends the money and sees her a couple of months out of the year.

We're still figuring out how to parent her. It's wonderful because she's parented by three or four adults, which I think is wonderful - it's this model of heterosexuality and extended family that doesn't get to be that at all in many ways. You expect certain things, but then you get inside and realize your expectations have been blown apart. For example, the kids get all these different adults to mediate each other. So you're not just stuck with your crazy mother and your alcoholic father or whatever it is. There are other adults who step in, mediate, bring in other kinds of models, and discipline the parent who's not taking care of things. It's been very wonderful for me and very healing.