Mothers and Sons: Contesting Privilege?

Stephanie May's citation of Simone de Beauvoir to the effect that "maternity is the 'one feminine function that is actually almost impossible to perform in complete liberty'" (122) brought me back to my initial introduction to motherhood thirty-three years ago. My son was born five days before the end of a fall semester at a time when my (then) husband and I were members of the same department. He taught his classes and administered his exams while I stayed in the hospital and then at home with a new baby, utterly in shock that I was not finishing the semester because I was a woman. Since my pregnancy was easy and I taught until the day I went into labor, nine months of pregnancy had not felt remotely as gendered to me as those first weeks of motherhood. Although I was fortunate to be able to stay home for six weeks, and I wanted to be home in the liminal, magical space with my son, I also felt that I was receiving a crash course on the complex interpenetration of "motherhood as experience and institution" that Adrienne Rich so brilliantly analyzes in Of Woman Born.¹ The expectations surrounding motherhood, like so many of its day-to-day challenges, are not about the gender of the child but about the nature of responsibility for another human being as lived out in a society that does not value women, children, or the work of care.

My son was born in 1977, five years after the publication of Lois Gould's "X: A Fabulous Child's Story" in one of the first issues of Ms. Magazine. That story, which humorously exposed the far-reaching and relentless nature of genderrole socialization through the tale of a family that tries to raise a child without anyone knowing its sex, was very much on my mind as I thought about the kind of parent I wanted to be.² As a feminist, I was committed to the abolition of gender roles—as much for boys as for girls. I wanted to rear a son who would be a whole person and the kind of man a feminist would be happy to know and, possibly, to marry. If feminists were not committed to raising feminist sons, I asked myself, how could we expect the world to change?

Thus like Stephanie, I began parenting determined to challenge cultural gender roles and to encourage my child to be his own self. But I found that, despite my best efforts, Alex's own self turned out to be very much a "boy" self whether I liked it or not. When he was about eighteen months old, I gave him a baby doll at the same time that a friend gave him a Matchbox car. He played with the doll for one afternoon, put it on a shelf, and never looked at it again, whereas Matchbox cars were his constant companions for the next eight years. One day shortly after he began nursery school at two years nine months, he came home and announced that he was not wearing his red shirts any more because "red was a girls' color." A few months later, he reported that he had been playing hospital at school, and he was the doctor and his friend Kate was the nurse. I asked why he wasn't the nurse and she the doctor. He looked at me like I was a complete fool and said, "because I'm a little boy and she's a little girl, and I'm going to be a man and she's going to be a woman, and men are doctors and women are nurses." This was at a point when he had a female pediatrician! I learned at least three things from these and many other such interactions. One—and I say this only half in jest, on the basis not just of my own experiences but of those of many feminist friends with sons—is that there must be a gene for wheels on the Y chromosome. Another is that reality is no match...