Overview

From George Bush's insistence that the two-parent family still provides the best environment for building civic stability, responsibility and character to Hillary Clinton's claim that it takes a village, family values has become an indispensable catchword of both parties. But what exactly does the term mean? When pressed to answer the obvious questions - Whose family are we discussing? Whose values? - both liberals and conservatives claim that they have moved away from the untenable and exclusive mythology of a white, middle-class patriarchy in order to account for the complex social, legal and economic realities of today's world. But if this were truly the case, then why do discussions of the family continue to revert to fantasies of race, class, gender and sexuality befitting Ozzie and Harriet?

On 18 February 2003, the Center welcomed a panel of bright, committed young feminists to address just these questions. The conversation included authors Noelle Howey, Irshad Manji, Cathy McKinley, and Leora Tanenbaum, each of whom works to explode the myths of the American family and build exciting new networks of affection and support. In their discussion of families that are biracial, families that are transgendered, families that live outside of the narrow expectations imposed on them culturally, ethnically and religiously, we see the possibilities for a fuller picture of American families and deeper, richer understanding of their values. The panel was introduced by Jennifer Baumgardner and moderated by Amy Richards.

This is an edited transcript.

Overview

Noelle Howey is the author of the memoir Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods - My Mother's, My Father's and Mine (Picador USA/May 2002). In addition to receiving a starred review in Publishers' Weekly and rave reviews from major media like The San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post Book World and The Advocate, Dress Codes has been selected for Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers, Borders Original Voices, and the Booksense 76 list. A writer for publications as varied as Jane, Ms., Mother Jones, Glamour, Teen People and Fortune Small Business, she is also the co-editor of Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing Up With Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Parents (St. Martin's Press), which won two 2001 Lambda Literary Awards. She teaches at Oberlin College, her alma mater.

Irshad Manji, 33, is a best-selling author, TV personality, media entrepreneur and queer Muslim. Ms. magazine has named her a "Feminist for the 21st Century" and Maclean's, Canada's national news magazine, has declared her a "Leader for Tomorrow," putting her in the category of "Dreamer." Irshad is the author of The Trouble with Islam (Random House), which explores why and how the Muslim world can move beyond anti-Semitism to embrace diversity. Her Risking Utopia: On the Edge of a New Democracy, published in 1997, chronicles how young people are putting "hip" back into "citizenship" and has inspired school courses and book clubs as far away as Hong Kong. Manji is also President of VERB, a TV channel developed to engage young people on issues of global diversity, and is former host and executive producer of QueerTelevision, the world's first show on mainstream TV for gay, lesbian and curious straight people.

In 1995, Catherine McKinley edited Afrekete, a beautiful and reflective anthology of writings by black lesbian women. Then in 2002, she wrote The Book of Sarahs, which details the story of her search for her birth parents and her childhood as a black child of white adoptive parents in a preppy New England town. McKinley's memoir and her own story challenge thinking about race, identity, loyalty, family and love. Her experiences writing enhance her already powerful speaking about issues of adoption, race, class, and sexuality. Cathy is Associate Director of the Publishing Certificate Program at CCNY, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate creative writing. She lives in Hell's Kitchen.

Leora Tanenbaum is the author of Catfight: Rivalries Among Women - From Diets to Dating, From the Boardroom to the Delivery Room, about the ways in which women often try to sabotage one another, and Slut! Growing Up Female With a Bad Reputation, about girls labeled "sluts" by their peers (both HarperPerennial). She has written forNewsday, Seventeen, Ms. , and The Nation, among many other publications. Tanenbaum has appeared on Oprah, The Today Show, Inside Edition, The O'Reilly Factor, Politically Incorrect, and other programs. She has been featured in Redbook, The Washington Post, and The Forward. She lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.

Introductory Remarks

Jennifer Baumgardner: We're talking about family tonight partly because feminists have always been pretty obsessed with family. Family is the first place that women had power and family is also a seat of their primary oppressions as well. And 30 years ago, second wave feminists really critiqued the ways in which the family wasn't working for them.

And so we, our generation, grew up with these critiques. We grew up with the myth of the nuclear family, which I think is still totally perpetuated - the current Bush Administration is involved in nuclear things generally - but we also grew up with all the feminist dreams of what different kinds of families could be. Like, what would be the ideal feminist family? Is there one? Is there a feminist nuclear family where everyone has the woman's name and the dad does dishes?

We could have set up this panel in so many different ways, but as it happens, everybody on the panel, at least superficially, has a really distinct family and identity structure. They have things in common - everyone has written two books, everyone is in her 30s, everyone identifies as a feminist - but now I'm going to introduce them individually and I'm going to augment their differences, although again this is kind of a simplification because I'm sure that they have more in common than different.

First we have Cathy McKinley. Cathy is the editor of Afrekete, which is an anthology of black lesbian writings. It came out in '95. It was a big deal when I was an editor at Ms. Wonderful anthology. Soon after that she received a Fulbright Scholarship. She went to Ghana for two years. She's developing her research right now from that two-year fellowship.

She was raised in . . . I forget the town actually, Outerborough, MA. And she was adopted. She was raised by a white family in a white town. And she went and sought out her birth parents, which became her second book, which is called "The Book of Sarahs." And she is going to talk about that a little bit today. Even though this is personal information on some level, it's also how we construct our families. She has a long-distance relationship with a person in Ghana. So that's longer distance than I can even imagine, but it's a committed relationship.

Irshad Manji lives in Toronto, Canada. She is also the author of two books. She is a television presenter, kind of an all-around voice for younger Canadians. One of her books is called Risking Utopia. And the book that she's currently about to launch and promote couldn't be more timely. The working title is An Open Letter To Muslims Worldwide. It's an argument for embracing diversity within the Muslim world, and an argument against anti-Semitism. She has been together with her partner, Michelle Douglas, for - I don't even know how long, but a long time. Because you stayed in my apartment two years ago and you were happily together then.

Irshad Manji: Four and a half years.

JB: Four and a half years. I actually don't know a lot about your family of origin, but I'm sure you will be talking about that today.

Leora Tanenbaum is the author of Slut. And most recently, the author of Catfight. She always wins the award for sauciest titles. We were talking earlier about how Leora is sort of representing on some level - and she finds this funny - the traditional family. She's married to a man and has two sons. And she also is very religious. She was raised traditionally Jewish and she has maintained that her entire life, and maintained that in her current family and reconciles that with her feminism.

Noelle Howey, there at the end, had to drive and brave such terrible snowstorms to get here from Ohio. She made it, finally.

Noelle Howey: More or less.

JB: She's sort of here. She's worse for wear perhaps, so we'll have to be easy on her. She represents a traditional family in the sense that she is married to a man and has procreated.

(laughter)

But she has a really remarkably different family because of her family of origin: she has a mother and then she has a father, but her father happens to be a woman named Christine. And she has written one book recently called Dress Codes and it's a memoir of her girlhood, her mother's girlhood and her father's girlhood. She has won numerous awards for this book. Among them, she was chosen to be Good Morning America's "Read This Book." Which means that among other things, you can now get her book at the airport.

And so, I'm not going to go into this much more because Amy is going to have their lives and opinions unfold for you, as she aggressively moderates. But this is my business partner and writing partner, Amy Richards, who is going to tell you a little bit about her family of origin as well.

And I should say, I come from a superficially nuclear family. From Fargo, North Dakota where dad was the bread winner and there are three kids and mom and dad are still married. But like most nuclear families, we're a lot weirder under the surface.

Biology, Gender and Family

Amy Richards: I struggle with this a lot, my relationship with my family. I don't know my father. My mother left my father two months before I was born and I've never known him. It's always very odd for me to even describe this man as my father because I don't know him. People will ask me all the time - do you have siblings? I found out that I have this half-brother, I guess. I found out that my father kidnapped him.

The point is that I have, my whole life, been forced to define my relationship with this man because of biology. And I think, if we look back into feminism's history, we see that feminism, as well as other social justice movements, have done a really good job of expanding our definitions of family. Step-parents are parents too. Adopted children are children too. We can have half-sisters. We can even have extended family that's still family. But the one thing that we have not done is to extricate biology from family. We have not said that just because we're biologically related, we're not family.

I think that that is the challenge that we have before us, as feminists and I think more specifically, as third wave feminists. And I know that I personally have been trying to find a way to radicalize this in my life, and I don't have a good answer except for coming up with creative ways of saying "He's my donor, not my Dad."

I spent my life thinking I was a minority, and can see now that in fact my family situation, which is not nuclear, is actually more like the majority.

I know that in my instance it would have been the worst thing had Bush regulated my parents to stay married. My mother was a classic welfare mom. She would have been forced to be married. I would have been the kidnapped one, maybe. And so, I hope that we can leave here both energized and politicized about this issue. But I think that in order to do that, we all have to start from a very personal place and so that's why I started from a personal place. And I think you'll see from each of our panelists, their work starts in that place.

Since I've started with this concept of removing biology from family, I want to address Noelle specifically. One of the things Noelle said to me when we met a couple of months ago was that her father, though now a woman, is her father. And so, Noelle, if you could talk about that relationship in your family? The family you were raised in, I should say.

Noelle Howey: Sure. My family was actually sort of typical and nuclear. Typical as I was growing up, I guess, based on your stereotypical notions of suburban, white, middle-class family. Father goes out, does work. Mother stays home, doesn't do traditional forms of work for money.

And then everything blew up when I was 14 because that's when I found out that my father was a cross dresser, and later he actually came out again as a transgendered person. Meaning that she wanted to live full time as a woman and transition into that gender, live full time as that gender. Change her name; change everything.

Eventually her anatomy would become one on a very long list of changes. And what's been an interesting thing that's happened through this entire journey - and it's been a really long one because I'm 30 now, so it's been about 16 years since my dad came out - is that I don't think we really had, even though my mother professed to be a feminist, a feminist family exactly until my dad came out.

It strangely put us all on the same playing field. My dad started dealing with the same sort of discrimination and assumptions that my mother had dealt with her whole life, and they weirdly started finding things in common. And my father started realizing certain ways that he - pardon my shift between pronouns, it's like an art form. Before my father transitioned, I used "he." Afterwards I used "she" most of the time. Anyway. My father realized that he had benefited enormously from being a man and was used to cutting people off in mid-sentence and being this take-no-nonsense business guy.

And so, right after the transition, he kept doing that as a woman. And people were like - "You're a bitch!" People freaked out. They said, "You can't act like that." And suddenly her earnings started shooting down massively until she was making below the poverty level. Somebody who had been very highly compensated as a man. So that weirdly put us all in the same place where we were all dealing with gender issues: I was in college dealing with finding my feminism. My mother was dealing with being on her own for the first time, with being in the working world and trying to get ahead and running into problems getting promoted. And my father was coming down off of this high that he had had as a man, and was dealing with all these things for the first time. And so, it brought us together.

What has been interesting in the years ever since, is that people - especially people in the transgender community - constantly question why I still call my father, my father. Why I haven't shifted to mother, because that's really common in the transgender community. But why must "father" and "mother" be switched? As though the meaning of "father" or the meaning of the term "mother" are implicit with whatever anatomical parts or whatever gender identity you have; that there is no greater meaning.

And then of course, the next logical question people ask me is - what does it mean? And I'm like - I'm not sure. And it's true. I'm really not. I don't know why my father feels more fatherly to me than motherly, given the fact that she's a woman now. Or why everything we're taught to think of as fatherly is oftentimes male. I actually looked up books about fatherhood in the library when I was working on one of my books. Most of them are actually about manhood. It says Essays on Fatherhood and it's all about being a guy. I mean, it could have just been Essays on My Manhood. So it's weird when you separate one from the other, which in my case, you have to. It's not academic. It's my life. How does this person keep being my father? I'm not really sure.

All I know is that she does not feel like my mother. And that "mother" to me has a certain connotation and it defines a certain relationship in my life that I'm not willing to relinquish that place. And in turn, I'm not willing to say I don't have a father. Because biologically speaking - and here we go back to biology - I do. The original sperm was from my dad at the time. It's kind of a weird conundrum.

AR: I think it's interesting because to me, not having a father, the father's role was just an economic one in my association. Jennifer and I wrote a piece one time about our fathers or lack thereof. Her father was the father I wanted because he was a doctor. I would fantasize about my father, but what I fantasized about wasn't who this person was and the relationship that I would have to him emotionally. It was a financial relationship that I was looking for. Because the only thing that seemed to distinguish me from friends of mine who had fathers seemed to be the economic thing. But now that your father's financial situation has dipped, it almost sounds like that's not even the role.

NH: Yeah, at the current time, yeah.

RELIGIOUS TRADITION AND FAMILY

AR: As Jennifer said in her introduction, Noelle is one of the two panelists who is now engaged in raising her own family. I think that all of us think about that - what we're going to do differently or how we're going to challenge what we experienced.

The other panelist in that role is Leora. Leora was raised in a traditional Jewish home and went to orthodox schools. And she herself is raising her children in a Jewish household. I'm sure that there is some sort of conflict that comes - that's presumptuous on my part, but I know that feminism has always had a tense relationship with organized religion.

How can we promote freedom and liberty yet at the same time follow something that is more hierarchical and laid out for us?

Leora Tanenbaum: I actually don't see so much of a conflict between my feminism and my Jewish observance because I reject the gender inequalities within Judaism without rejecting Judaism.

There are so many different ways you can practice Judaism and different ways to interpret it. Judaism is more than a religion dictated by a supposed supernatural being who says you can't do this, and you have to do this. There are so many other ways to look at it.

It's a rich association with a people, with a history, with a land. And so there are many different ways to interpret what it means to be Jewish. And I know you all know that, of course. But to say that there is necessarily a conflict between feminism and Judaism - it depends on how you're approaching Judaism.

And the parts of Judaism that I find sexist, I just don't practice those parts. Or I try to reform them. So I don't really actually see a conflict in my day-to-day life.

I should add, though, that I'm privileged to have benefited from a very, very strong Judaic education - from kindergarten, all the way up through 12th grade - that gives me a certain power and confidence and mastery over Judaic things in that I feel entitled to pick and choose. Whereas somebody who may lack that background and that confidence will probably take more of an all-or-nothing approach, which is the more common thing around the world actually. I just wanted to say that parenthetically.

Growing up, my family - I don't know whether to characterize it as feminist or not. My mom was the breadwinner. My mom is a physician and my dad, who is now retired, was a schoolteacher. So my mom made a lot more money than my dad. And yet, she was responsible for all the cooking and cleaning and domestic chores. So it didn't really seem like a feminist arrangement. My mom didn't identify as a feminist, at least not in those years when I was growing up.

We were a traditional Jewish family. According to traditional Judaism, a woman's role is pretty much to be a mother and to be involved in the domestic sphere. There was no inconsistency there.

Amy, tell me exactly again where I should be going? There are so many directions I could go.

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.

Choosing Family

AR: And then the other entity that steps in, for better or worse, is the government. Irshad, among all of her associations, is also from Canada, where they have a slightly more humane government than we do here.

One of the things that the Canadian government has done, as a kind of test case, is to include unpaid work in their GNP. And their GNP increased it by 30 percent or 20 percent, which proves how much work gets done raising children and taking care of households.

Irshad Manji: Which is not to say that government has done anything about that.

AR: Well, I was going to ask. I think that in the United States, we're supposedly the only industrialized country that doesn't have a national system of childcare. We don't have a national system of healthcare, and all of these things are important components of the family. So are we wrong to idealize our Canadian neighbors?

IM:Yes. Next question?

AR: And the other thing is that, in Canada, you don't even have gay marriage.

IM:Right.

AR: I was telling this story earlier - about a year ago, I went to breakfast with a friend of mine who had been in a long-term relationship with her girlfriend. I showed up at breakfast and she had this enormous diamond ring on her ring finger, and I went, "Oh my gosh, are you engaged?" And she said yes. She went on to tell me the most fairytale story about how she and her girlfriend had gotten engaged: they were in Paris; it was a surprise; she got down on her knee and she had a Tiffany's box. They were going to have a huge wedding in Maine.

All these things and my reaction was: is it progress that non-heterosexual couples can choose this? Or is it regression that this is what we want? That our way to be accepted is to conform to the stereotype? I don't know if you want to address that a little bit, because we were talking earlier about your relationship with Michelle and some of the work that you both do.

IM: Let me first say that for Valentine's Day, Michelle took me to the Golden Griddle. So it's not exactly a diamond ring, okay?

(laughter)

It's love, as far as I'm concerned. I will also tell you that I do wear two rings. And fairly recently, actually. I have for many, many years worn this gold ring which has an Arabic inscription in it for Allah, God. And on this finger, of recently, I've worn my commitment ring, if you will, to Michelle. We cringe at these words because we just find it so - it doesn't capture how we really feel about each other. Sometimes we're companions; sometimes we despise each other. We obviously love each other even when we despise each other. We're friends all the time, but we fight like cats and dogs. And it's just wonderful to have that kind of a person in your life. So one of the things I'm thinking about asking in the book that I'm writing about how Muslims can and must come to terms with diversity - I realize that this is a little bit off the mark, but I will get back to the focus. I'm absolutely out in this book. No use in hiding who I am - but I really want to know, from militant Muslims, I want to ask this question and I probably will if it's not edited out: which hand are you going to chop off first and why?

In other words, I wear two rings, one of which symbolizes my commitment to God. And the other of which symbolizes my commitment to my partner. And the two are intricately linked, as far as I'm concerned. Now, you obviously are not going to have me fit into your model of what a Muslim is, so which hand are you going to amputate first?

But more importantly: why? Back it up before you chop it off. That's what I want to know.

So back to the question of gay marriage, if you will

(laughter)

IM: I just want evidence. Evidence-based argumentation. Let's have it out. Michelle, as I was saying to Amy, is the president of the Foundation for Equal Families in Canada. And as it's name suggests, it's all about ensuring equality of law and policy for diverse families.

On our second date, when it was obviously clear that we really, really liked each other, she asked me two questions. She said, "Do you want to have kids with whoever it may be?" And I said , "No, do you?" She said, "No, thank God, no, I don't."

And then, because it was always an issue for each of us in our other relationships, she said, "Do you want to get married? Because in Canada, you know it's going to happen at some point. There's no assuming that it won't happen." And I said, "You know, no!" And she said, "Neither do I."

But I said, "Are you against marriage?"

And this was before I knew that she was the president of this foundation. And she said, "No, I really believe in everybody's right to choose."

And feminism as a word, even as a concept, didn't enter our discussion about this. It was assumed that as outspoken, self-confident women we are feminists whether or not we call ourselves that. So anyway, we were both very clear with each other that while we would advocate the right of other people to choose this, it's not a choice that we make. And we don't feel the need to apologize for it.

It's just a wonderful choice to have. Is it regression? I think the choice of having, the reality of having that choice, I don't see how it could be regression. I think there is such a thing, in a materialistic culture, as the tyranny of choices. But I wouldn't equate the choice to be married to your partner with some kind of commodity. I would hope that people would think about it a little bit more carefully than just retail therapy. So, for me, the choice is never an indication of regression. The question is: will we ask the questions we need to ask of ourselves before we jump into it? Hence, it all comes back to evidence-based argument.

But Do Women Have a Choice?

AR: And choice. That's something, when I'm asked to define feminism, that's something I always say. It's not so much what choice we make, but the freedom to make that choice.

Feminists have always talked about the family. We go back to 1963 when Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique about women fleeing their houses and leaving behind their brooms and entering into the workplace.

They did a really good job of ensuring for the next 20 or 30 years that women could have an equal place in the workplace, but what we didn't revolutionize was what we were doing at home. Everybody here has said - or Leora specifically said that her mother was still responsible for what happened in the home.

Jennifer and I have a chapter in our book called "Thou Shalt Not Become Thy Mother," which is both a chapter that examines our relationships with our mothers, our biological mothers and the women who raised us, and also, more figuratively, our relationship with our "movement mothers." We heard our feminist mothers saying to us, "Be liberated. Go out and make all these choices," but what we saw them at home doing was replicating that kind of sexism. That chapter and the ideas in it have caused a lot of tension among feminists.

And I think that tension ties into our understanding of family because family is such a personal place. It really hurts people when you're making different choices because it's seen as a judgment. I don't know if you want to address that idea.

LT: Sure. There's competitiveness among women in all different areas of life, from how thin you are to what you're wearing, to who you're dating. Whether you're dating a man or a woman. Everybody is always checking everybody out. There's a lot of competitiveness. But this chapter you've mentioned in particular, it's about competitiveness between mothers.

I started facing this kind of competitiveness even before I gave birth to my first child. When I was visibly pregnant, people would say, "Are you going to breastfeed? Are you going to have an epidural? Are you going to go back to work?" And you can't win because no matter what answer you give, it's the wrong one. But the really loaded issue is, "Are you going to go back to work. If so, when? How old will your child or children be when you go back to the labor force? Will you be going back part time or full time?"

To be a good mother - according to the way our culture defines a good mother - you shouldn't go back to work at all until your youngest child is in kindergarten or first grade. And even then, you shouldn't be working a full-time job. You need to get home in time to be there when your child gets home from school and cook a nice, nutritious dinner with a starch and a vegetable and a protein.

So you're obviously not going to be climbing any major career ladders, if you keep that up. And I'm not the good mother. Actually I don't really know anybody who fits the bill of the good mother. Why is there so much competitiveness? Why do we look at each other - mothers, I'm talking about - and judge each other and gossip about each other behind each other's backs, because there is no right way to be a mother. And we really haven't been taught what the right way is. The real answer is that we don't have real choice, which is something you were just talking about. Many of these choices are imposed upon us.

For most mothers, whether or not they decide to go back to work part time, full time or not at all, has to do with their economic situation, what kind of child care is available to them in their neighborhood, how expensive that child care is. If they have a partner, what their partner's financial situation is. If they have a financial safety net through a partner at all. Health insurance considerations. I don't know anybody who makes a real choice. When it comes down to it, a constellation of situational forces kind of descend and you end up in a situation.

You end up following that path. Nobody likes to admit that. And what ends up happening - I know I'm generalizing, but I do find this to be true - nobody likes to admit that that's really what happened. Instead, what they like to say is that they did make a choice and their choice was the right one, and here's why. I can be very specific about that. I have lots of girlfriends, lots of women in my peer group who are full-time stay-at-home moms. And if you ask them, "What led you to this choice or this lifestyle?" they will almost always say, "It's better for my family and better for my children." But if you dig a little deeper, you will find that that's not why they initially went that route. Initially, it was because they had been laid off right before they gave birth or right after. Or they gave birth and wanted to work part-time, but their supervisor or employer wouldn't let them. Or they had just moved from one city to the other and had a child and it was just really hard to find a new job. There ended up being a million other reasons that had nothing to do with the well being of their families. And yet, because of the dominant line and the dominant conventional wisdom about what it means to be a good mother, you're expected to do everything because it's good for the well being of your family.

We assimilate that and internalize that and so, even if it hasn't colored our decisions, when we talk about it to ourselves or to others, we give that as the explanation.

Adoption

AR: When Jennifer and I were interviewing for Manifesto, we asked people why they got married. A common answer was because we were in love. And I thought, "Well, I'm in love and I'm not married. Are you more in love if you get married?" It was just this default answer. And even though I think our choices are limited - Cathy, you in a sense had a moment in your life where you had a choice between two mothers. And you, more than choosing a mother, you were really choosing, as a bi-racial person raised in a white family, an identity. Could you address the concept of adoption, specifically inter-racial adoption, and why you sought out your birth family?

CM: That's a lot. It's a little complicated because at first I had this fantasy of a black mother. I spent years and years fantasizing about who she was, imagining who she was and revising it.

Meeting different black women who were interesting to me gave me different models. I knew then that I was part black and part white, but I didn't know my birth mother was Jewish and I didn't know she was white until I was 26 or 27 years old. Because of the laws of closed adoption, you get non-identifying information. They don't feel beholden to giving you very much detail at all. But then I found out, and I had this Jewish birth mother who, all of the sudden, I liked immediately.

I didn't realize how much I did want a relationship with her until I met her. But at the same time I was uncomfortable trying to integrate this Jewish identity because I had never - it was so far from my mind. In college, I was very involved in Black Nationalist politics and it was kind of the horror of all horrors to end up with a Jewish family. It put me in opposition to everything I was trying to be a part of. So it was a lot to integrate all at once. And the questions about biology. . ..

When I met my birth mother, there was so much about her that was so immediately likable. She had a lot of my sensibilities. A lot is dictated by biology, and it was immediate and it was very interesting to me. At the same time, she was an extremely troubled person and our relationship was severed after the first year.

And then, in the process of mourning a lot of things around that experience, I did come much closer to my birth mother, who I didn't feel - we had a difficult relationship at times. She's kind of an anti-mother in a way. My mother is - she's not transgender but you might think so if you saw her. She was always very much the man in the house. And so, it was very complicated.

Motherhood: Challenging Myths

AR: Irshad, you said that you don't want children. I know that that is hugely threatening to society.

IM: I think my children would be hugely threatening to society.

(laughter)

AR: It obviously was a choice you made at a certain point in your life and I'm wondering why you made it? What are you facing having made that decision?

IM: Like so many young women, in my adolescence I certainly dreamt of bringing home the briefcase. Peeking into the bedroom and seeing my husband cradling our baby. That's the way it was going to be, no question about it because if you can imagine it, you can achieve it, right?

And I had no idea that I could even be a candidate for lesbianism, never mind be one. So that realization didn't dawn on me until I was locking lips with another women, a few years later. But not even at that point, but during the course of time. I'm a huge believer in self-awareness.

We are, all of us, very complex creatures. And I am deathly afraid of imposing my baggage on you creatures. It's not even about the world having too many people already, why not adopt, et cetera. It really has nothing to do with that, although it probably would if I took it that far.

But I don't want another very - let me put it this way: I'm dealing with so much in my life as it is, and so much about what it means to be an ethical person in all sorts of respects, that to subjugate my kid to these kinds of discussions, which I undoubtedly would, and demand answers, however temporary they may be, would probably drive the kid crazy and truly make that kid a little bit more threatening than I would like him or her to be.

I've had this discussion with friends as well, and they always said to me, "Aw, you're being too hard on yourself, you'd make a great mother." But what is it to be a mother? What is it to be a father? So I think probably I thought this through too much to actually have a child.

It's like, there's no right time to buy a house or to have a child. Don't think about it too much, otherwise you'll never get off your ass to do it.

AR: I'm sure that some people in Leora's book might actually consider this a bad thing, but one of the things that has impressed me about Noelle is that I knew her for many years and didn't know she was married and didn't know she had a kid. It's not something that consumes her life. I guess that is more revealing about the other people in my life, who do have kids and are married because it actually consumes a lot of their conversations and a lot of their time. I think that's maybe an odd compliment to make of you, but I actually consider it a real mark of your independence. Is that something that you do intentionally?

NH: So many people have said that to me, which is really strange to me. I mean, I never have pictures of my daughter with me, and that always seems to be some sort of mark of the bad mother.

(laughter)

I was thinking of a number of things while everybody was talking. First, you said that there is no way to win, and there isn't. There's no way to win. My husband and I got married two-and-a-half years ago and my daughter was born a year ago, and there's always this assumption, when the two of us are together, that I'm the one who knows everything about her. We screened our doctor, we Googled her and she came up on all these feminist organizations: fabulous, a feminist pediatrician. But every time we go there, she's says, "Mom, do you want to hold her while she's getting the shots?" "Mom, how much is she eating?" And the thing is, my husband is actually the primary caretaker for our daughter.

AR: In those moments do you say something? Do you say, "Why are you talking to me?"

NH: I do, but sometimes it's exhausting and I just want the baby to get the shot already and I don't. It's not that I don't take care of her. It's just that my husband is actually better at it. He's better at it. He's better at being with the baby for hours and hours and hours. Me? I'm like, "Okay sweetie, it's been about an hour and a half, I'm going back to the computer."

If I were a male, I would be considered an amazing father, so involved. But as a mom, there's this constant assumption that I should be primarily concerned, and I think that part of this, dealing with some of the things we've been talking about, is because we have this isolated model of what constitutes a family.

Whether the couple is heterosexual or non-heterosexual, you have this assumption that the child has two primary parents. And you are isolated in your little family unit, in your little house or apartment and you take care of that child. Almost nobody else helps, unless you're lucky enough to have grandparents who make an occasional appearance. But other than that, you are responsible.

There has been a huge movement called attachment parenting that is both reactionary and very liberal. You have some home schooling Christian families who are all for it, and you have liberal feminists who are all for it. Except the thing is that it encompasses breast-feeding the baby until the baby is ready to wean itself. Maybe that's at one year, maybe it's at five years. But that's okay. Don't care that you can't fit into your clothes. Don't care that you have to have the baby suckling on you, wherever, whenever, for years. You should be with your baby at all times; the baby should sleep with you; the baby should eat with you; the baby should never, ever watch television, God forbid. There are so many rules to be a good attachment parent. Having become a mom in the last year, I've been inundated and watched over by well-meaning women who are members of all the right groups, whose politics I totally agree with, with whom I can go to peace marches and rallies, and yet who are utterly horrified that I'm not breast feeding anymore. Because it's better for the baby, and it's all about the baby. And actually, in my case, the baby weaned herself. If I tell them that, then they're like, "Okay."

It's incredibly hard because I led this very independent life for a long time, and I had my identity largely based on my work. Then all of the sudden, you become a mom and your identity is supposed to be based on your family. That's supposed to be enough. You're not supposed to want other things. Your priorities will have changed, as everybody tells you, when you get pregnant. And my priorities didn't change that much. I mean, I love my daughter and she is important to me and so is my husband, and so am I and so is my career.

My husband and I have actually forged what I think is a very feminist family arrangement. My husband is the primary caretaker and he's training to be a social worker. He's all about nurturing. His mom is a lesbian and so he is already accustomed to unorthodox family arrangements. He definitely is like the wife in our relationship, in that more traditional sense, and I am more of the bread winner, which is really sad, let me tell you.

(laughter)

But nonetheless, we are constantly expected to reverse roles. Even people who are supposedly on our side, often assume the reverse and still put the onus on me. Sorry to vent.

Thinking Outside the Box

AR: As Jennifer was saying earlier, there are more similarities here than differences. I think one of the most important similarities is that each of you really thought about the choices that you made. That differentiates you, sadly, from a lot of other people, or from the perceived majority. Because I think the perceived majority falls into the habit of what society expects of us. And maybe that's always been feminism's role: to challenge those expectations. As we can see from this panel, one person's choices don't cancel out another's.

Now we want to turn the conversation over to the audience. If you have questions or comments, please feel free.

Audience Member: I was interested in the systemologies of the categories that we think in, and the limitations of language: we struggle with these boxes that we don't quite fit into. Noelle, in your book, which I really enjoyed, it's really funny -

NH: Thank you.

Audience Member: You start using the word Da, to describe your father, after he has the sex change. Amy and I were talking before the panel started about the word "Single" and how there are only a couple of categories you can check off on forms: single or married. What do we do with the rest of us? I'm wondering how you would suggest we go about changing these categories and changing the language in which we think? Obviously, that's not the only barrier to changing social policy. But in a lot of ways, the way we live in the world starts with how we think of ourselves and the language that we use.

NH: It's strange because I actually don't use Da anymore. It fell by the wayside. But during the transitional time, because it had sort of a softer sound and every time I thought of the word dad, I'd think of a guy wearing a barbecue apron in the backyard of a suburban house, I needed a word that was vaguely fatherish, but that had a softer tone to it, or that just didn't have as immediate a visual image attached to it.

Now I call her Dad, Da, Christine, hey you. In restaurants a lot of times, I say Aunt Tillie, because otherwise the waiter will look and we'll get into a whole big discussion with the waiter for two hours. So language is a real pain, because you do struggle with these categories and they're so limiting. And at the same time, you can't just abandon them and pretend they don't exist - "Well, I'm going to have nothing to do with this category" - because it's there and, as a writer especially, you can't get around the language you're working with. It's a matter of trying to adapt it to your situation, which is a challenge, but that's what feminism is about, right? Finding ways to exist within these institutions.

AR: Yes.

LT: This isn't an answer to your question, but it's interesting. My three-year-old doesn't distinguish between males and females. He has girls in his class and he has boys in his class, but he doesn't think of them as boys or girls. In fact, he will make very cute mistakes, where he will refer to a girl as a boy, or whatever.

AR: Maybe he's slow.

(laughter)

LT: I don't interfere and try to teach or try to direct him to know Gabrielle is a girl and Mark is a boy. It's irrelevant, as far as I'm concerned. It makes me sad to think about when this innocent time will be lost. I'm very curious to know at what point in his development that's going to happen, but I'm enjoying it very much right now.

AR: Irshad or Cathy, do you say anything subversive when you're asked the question about "Married" or "Single"? I often think can it at least be "Married" and "Unmarried"? Is there another choice? Do you get mad about that?

CM: The language-thing is difficult in a lot of ways. I have friends who still call my adoptive parents my foster parents, because they just don't know the language of adoption. I always felt uncomfortably in the middle of all of it. The thing that I'm working on now focuses on sexual identity. One thing I like a lot about Ghana is that lesbians are called Supi. And Supi means the place where your spirit resides. Literally, it refers to a stool. Everybody, when born, is given a stool and that's the place where your spirit sits. Your stool is your Supi; it's the thing you're closest to. I don't know how it became, in the language, the word for women lovers.

AR: Irshad, did you have anything on that?

IM: Only very marginally, to say that I am more interested to know from you guys, maybe after the panel is over, whether the Bush Administration's boxes for certain families, or perhaps one model of a family, has an effect on your life, on your daily life? Or are we all simply living our lives as if they didn't matter, doing what we need to do and talking about what we need to talk about as if Washington didn't matter?

I will say this, it is fairly frightening to me to see how the mores of cultural minorities to North America influence public policy. We, at least in Canada, we are so caught up in the issue of multiculturalism, and much like the way Muslims take the Koran so literally, we, sadly, take multiculturalism very literally. Often what that means is that we fail to ask the questions that we need to ask of our cultural minorities, publicly, never mind privately, in order to formulate good public policy. For example, why is female genital mutilation still considered a cultural issue? Why is it conflated or confused with culture, as opposed to absolutely calling it what it is: torture?

I don't necessarily mean it's a problem for cultural minorities to have influence. Obviously, I'm not suggesting that at all. The problem is that I don't think we're being honest about it. One group of people is using culture as a shield. Another group of people is using culture as a sword. And there's a whole whack of people in the middle, who frankly, want a more honest public debate about these things.

Families and Competing Cultures

Audience Member: I've been spending a lot of time with immigrant women, some from the former Soviet Union, who have come to the U.S. and feel a bit alienated by American feminism because they feel that their traditions are not being respected, and that the way they've lived their lives for 30, 40 or 50 years is now considered anachronistic. They're trying to find a way to fit into western culture, without losing part of what has given them their identity through the years. Can any of you talk about the fact that in other cultures some women are more comfortable playing the traditional wife role, where they cook the dinner and take charge of the babies?

IM: Can I ask a question, in order to flesh this out a little bit more? Is there a particular example that you can give about what these women are saying to you about what doesn't quite fit with American mores?

Audience Member: Sure. I live in Brighton Beach and I met with Russian women about two months ago. And they see things on TV, images of American women, so one woman turned to me and said, "Am I that out of date?" Which was her way of saying that she doesn't fit. She told me she felt like she needed to isolate herself in a small community because when she ventured outside of Brighton Beach, when she came into the city, she felt like she was being looked down upon. I think it's more of an internal feeling than anything that is manifested outwardly, but when they see things on television or come to panels such as this, they feel. . ..

AR: Leora, do you want to address that?

LT: I do think that over the last 35 years of the feminist movement, going back to the beginning of second wave activity, there has been a disparagement among feminists of women who choose or have taken on the traditional role, whether or not that was an active choice on their part. There has been a sort of valorization of paid work outside the home. I think the tide is turning now. I think most people in the U.S. are very quick to now admit that most paid work is not very liberating at all, no matter who you are. Certainly, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed showed that. So that, coupled with the fact that there is more respect, in recent years, for women who make an active choice to stay at home or in some way to take on traditional aspects of the female role.

I do, however, think that it's is generational. I'm 33 and I think that this is something new for my generation and my peer group. It sounds like you were talking about women who are of my parents' generation. I'd be curious to hear from others, if the tide is turning for that generation.

AR: Do you have a comment on that?

Audience Member: You said that making a conscious choice to take on a more traditional role, for example, is becoming more accepted. And yet earlier you were talking about people who lived that lifestyle but hadn't actually ever made that choice. Does anyone actually make that choice or is it this new myth that we've set up?

LT: Yes, you're absolutely right. I'm not saying that you necessarily are taking on wholesale every single aspect of the traditional female role. I mean, you can be a mother who is away at a paid job from nine to six, and then comes home to do the laundry. You may choose to do this or you may choose not to do that. Absolutely, as I said before, many of the choices aren't really choices because they're imposed upon us. But sometimes we kind of wiggle around within that framework and there are choices we make.

My husband does all the cleaning in our apartment because he's better at it and he hates the cleaning I do. That's his choice.

(laughter)

Amy Richards: Your hand went up. Did you have a comment on this?

Audience Member: I have two comments. The first is about the issue of female genital mutilation. At a previous job that I had, I invited Nahid Toubia to come and speak about FGM. For those of you who don't know her, she was the first female surgeon in Sudan, and she's published a fair amount on female genital mutilation. She came to speak about the topic, and it was actually one of the most well-attended -

AR: And very critical of the U.S. or American women.

Audience Member: And she said that it fascinated her that western people were so interested in FGM and so quick to condemn it given that they were so unwilling to look at their own practices around sexuality and self-mutilation. How many women would make the choice to have breast implants if society didn't tell them that it makes them sexy and marriageable, the same way that women practicing FGM in other cultures believe that it makes them more desirable for marriage. And granted, there is an age difference, but it's a decision you're making based on what society expects. I just wanted to put that comment out there.

The other comment I wanted to bring up was about the Russian women who were watching television and felt alienated. Even though we're talking about how many choices we have, I do see feminism as striving to create more choices. And so, it's unfortunate that those women -

Confronting Traditions

Audience Member: There are younger women in Russia right now who are basically using this idea, this traditional wife and mother role, as a commodity to sell themselves to American men. They have an Internet site burgeoning with business right now because there are certain kinds of American men who crave these young, very naive, very beautiful young women who knows that if she says she'll be a very good wife, people will give her a green card. There's a whole business around that.

I'm wondering what the panel's thoughts are about why American men would want these kinds of women?.

AR: Well, I think that's a myth that American women struggle with too. I don't think that's something unique to being an immigrant woman in this country. Women across the country, women across the world struggle to live up to a certain standard, with a similar sense of conformity.

NH: I gathered from what you were saying earlier that women were seeing images of high-powered career women on television, and then saying, "Well, I feel that American feminism doesn't include me." As though we were controlling the media!

(laughter)

I don't really feel like high-powered women shown on TV are really indicative of most of the feminist women I know either.

AR: Cathy, you wanted to comment?

CM: I wanted to say, first of all, in Ghana, I lived in a compound with women from Nigeria. It took me a while to realize that FGM was a big part of that community. It was going on all the time. And it made me revise so many things because it was so profoundly normal within that community. There were huge issues around health care and health access for everybody: the amount of death, stupid death around the food that we export; the number of deaths from food poisoning or bad pharmaceuticals. FGM fell under this whole huge umbrella of health concerns, and there was a way that was it so profoundly normal, I had to revise a lot of the way it was presented to me through American feminism. I see a lot of problems with the arguments now, which is not a defense of the practice, but it wasn't this huge social horror that was going on. There were many more pressing issues.

But I do hear a lot of Ghanaian men say all the time that Ghanaian women spoil when they get here. They want to go back to the village and get, not even a city girl from Ghana, but a village girl and bring her back. In some ways, it says profound things about their social alienation, the feeling that their family structure is falling apart. I don't think we want to read it in simple, macho terms, as if they simply want this idealized woman. It's more about their levels of alienation, of loneliness, of wanting to recreate the kind of family that they grew up in. I don't know if this has something to do with American men or American women, who have longings around the things that we may have lost in society.

NH: I remembered what I wanted to say, which was also about American men. Why do men want these traditions? To a certain extent, I think both my husband and my father, neither one who are traditional men, are in some ways an indication that there is an enormous struggle to be a certain kind of man in this society. By "certain kind of man," I don't mean an oppressive one. My husband, who is the gentlest, kindest, most unathletic man in the world, is constantly at family occasions asked, "What do you think about football, blah, blah, blah?"

These are small little things, but he was beaten up his entire youth. This was his constant, being forced into negative situations where he is supposed to assert his testosterone. My dad responded to those same cultural pressures in just the opposite way, by appropriating them and saying, "I'm going to be Superguy." He was macho; he was abusive - not physically, but verbally - to my mother. He berated her. He played on her self-esteem and her body image issues. All of which was textbook abusive husband behavior that we were able to look at in a very different light afterwards: this was my dad trying to pass as a man.

Even though we think there are a million ways to be a man in America, my father felt that the only way that he wouldn't get read immediately as some sort of swishy, effeminate guy who was not going to get jobs, not be able to support the family, was to become a hysterically-extreme version of masculinity. And while my dad may be an extreme version, I still think that men have to confront these sorts of pressures all the time. So, why do they seek out women who are compliant? They're taught to, in a way. Seeing what my father went through has given me some sympathy for that experience.

AR: It's past 8:30. Time to wrap up, so I want to let everybody leave who wants to leave. But I think the panelists will stay around, so if you have a question that was not asked, I want to encourage you to come up and ask it. Thank you very much.