Feminist Mothering of Sons: Ethical Practices for Everyone

A few years ago in one of my church parenting workshops on sexuality education, I was asked about my parenting philosophy. Faster than I could logically reason, I responded, "I'm raising my children for the common good." I would say that is feminist parenting—in my case, mothering. It signals an ethical practice and value set that go against dominant cultural forms of patriarchal (and racist, heterosexist) parenting. It is consistent with Christian values of justice and liberation seeking a vision of the common good. In this sense, the contextualization of mother as parent and son as child does not change the normative criteria that define feminist parenting.

In the anthology Feminist Mothering, Colleen Mack-Canty and Sue Marie Wright articulate the values that shape and define third-wave feminist families. They name two: concerns about oppression and use of inclusive decision making.¹ In the study, feminist families were diversely arranged to include variations of sexual orientation, race, relationship to children, and paid labor. They found that families' notions of gender equity, a starting point of feminist consciousness, shaped a broader understanding of hierarchical arrangements and connection to other oppressions. Thus, unlike the second-wave feminist movement that often theorized motherhood from the dominant group as white, stay-at-home, heterosexually married women in need of freedom—these families were less likely to seek gender equity at the expense of racial, class, or heterosexist injustices. The authors conclude that third-wave feminist parenting practice begins with a desire to create gender equity, but recognizes that can only be accomplished if they disrupt the dualistic structure that fuels injustice. While the study provides a few examples of ethical practices that characterized feminist parenting, I want to name four in support of my suggestion that feminist parenting is "raising children for the common good."

First, feminist parenting teaches and practices gender negotiation as a means to establishing the value of gender/sex equity. Sex, in this context, is understood as defined biologically and genitally, and does not predetermine gender characteristics. Sex, however, is understood to correlate with and inform one's gender identity and expression. Within the confines of feminist parenting, mothering signals parenting done by a female—it does not carry with it particular roles, duties, or even the inherent notion that females by virtue of their sex have the ability to mother effectively. bell hooks, in her essay "Revolutionary Parenting," illustrates an example of mother = female: boys taking care of a doll are often said to be playing mother. However, "Seeing men who do effective parenting as 'maternal' reinforces the stereotypical notion that women are inherently better suited to parent."² The boy is practicing being a father (a male parent) who takes care of children and nurtures them in relationship. The label of "fathering" may be off-putting as it reinforces a link between sex and gender identity—yet in this use, it allows effective parenting (nurturing a baby) to be equally recognized as mothering and fathering.

Bronwyn Davies, through an in-depth study of preschool children, found that adult caregivers were missing a crucial link between sex and gender in their attempts to move children to "gender-neutral" play and identity. She writes,

Adults interested in liberating children from oppressive sex roles are generally not questioning maleness and femaleness as such. They are simply rejecting the negative side of femininity for girls . . . and the negative side of masculinity for boys. . . . What we have failed to realise in wondering why it is that children so enthusiastically take up these ways of being so is that these qualities themselves are key signifiers of dualistic maleness and femaleness. Children cannot both be required to position themselves as identifiably male or female and at the same time be deprived of the means of signifying maleness and femaleness.³

In other words, we ask children to be and play across gender lines while constantly reinforcing their sex as girl/boy. Girl/boy has no meaning for children when gendered behaviors are removed and disrupted, given that the wider society defines them as one...