Woman-Defined Motherhood

Jane Price Knowles, Ellen Cole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317765707
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Finally, here is an enlightening and empowering book that defines motherhood from a feminist perspective and then explores the implications of that definition. Feminist authors examine some of women's full, rich, and varied thoughts and experiences about motherhood. In contrast to the too often accepted male notions of what constitutes a "good'mother or a "normal" family, this important book presents a comprehensive and balanced view of motherhood--as women have observed and experienced it. The major issues surrounding motherhood today are closely examined--the pervasive problem of mother-blaming and mother-hating and solutions to overcome it; ageism, sexism, and motherhood; relationships between mothers and daughters; relationships between stepmothers and stepchildren; motherhood and sex roles within the family; adoption; infertility; and childlessness. Special insight is also provided into the concerns of women who are mothers--lesbians, women of color, mothers of biracial children, and adoptive mothers of children from different cultures. Woman-Defined Motherhood is must reading for women, including both mothers and daughters, for therapists and other professionals supporting women, and for anyone interested in mothering.

Section IV:
Diversity

Caught Between Two Worlds: The Impact of a Child on a Lesbian Couple’s Relationship

Eloise Stiglitz

Eloise Stiglitz, PhD, is Director of Student Affairs in the Department of Clinical Psychology at Antioch/New England and in private practice in Keene, NH.

More and more lesbians are claiming their right to motherhood through the courts, adoption and alternative insemination. While much has been written about the impact of lesbian parents on the psychological, emotional, and sexual development of children (Bozett, 1987; Harris & Turner, 1985/1986), little has been written about how children impact their lesbian parents’ relationship.

From personal and clinical experience, I noticed that a seemingly disproportionate number of lesbians who were in committed relationships, who had spent months or years discussing and planning for a child, who were psychologically and socio-culturally aware, were ending their relationships by the time their child was one to three years old. While this did not hold true for all lesbian couples who had a child, the numbers were higher than for the heterosexual couples with whom I had contact. Counter to the lesbian lore that lesbians “should” fare well with having a child because of their extensive planning and their tendency to have more flexible and non-traditional roles, these couples were struggling to survive. Two nurturing women caring for a child in a context of a supportive women’s community was a wonderful idea whose time had come. Or was it a myth?

What does happen to a lesbian couple’s dynamics when a child is introduced into the system? Do lesbian couples react differently to the birth of their first child than do heterosexual couples? Because little exists in the literature to answer these questions directly, I sought answers through an examination of related literature and by sending out questionnaires to both lesbian and heterosexual couples.

One of my basic questions was whether lesbians and heterosexuals react differently to the birth of their first child. To begin understanding what impact having a child has on these couples, I started with the largest body of available information: literature on the impact of a child on heterosexual relationship quality or satisfaction. My ultimate goals were to learn which relationship variables tend to have the strongest relationship to marital satisfaction post-birth, to review the literature on lesbian couple dynamics, and then to hypothesize about how lesbian couple dynamics might be interwoven with baby-couple dynamics. My hope was that the questionnaires would elucidate the picture.

Impact of a Child on a Heterosexual Relationship

In general, having children seems to be negatively related to marital satisfaction among heterosexual couples (Belsky, Lang, & Ro-vine, 1985; Belsky, Spanier, & Rovine, 1983). While most couples seem to report less satisfaction with their marital relationship after the birth of their first child, there seems to be a linear relationship between pre- and post-birth marital satisfaction, with those most satisfied pre-birth reporting the greater satisfaction post-birth (Belsky, Spanier, & Rovine, 1983). Heterosexual couples generally experience a honeymoon period of a month or two after the child’s birth (Miller & Sollie, 1980). This honeymoon is often followed by a significant decline in satisfaction over the next year or so (Belsky, 1985; Belsky, Lang, & Rovine, 1985; Belsky, Spanier & Rovine, 1983). Couples do not report levels of marital satisfaction equal to pre-birth years until their children all leave home (Anderson, Russell, & Schumm, 1983). Interestingly, although couples may be experiencing dissatisfaction with their relationship, divorces drop off drastically during the first year of a child’s life and severely slow down during the toddler and pre-school years. Divorces apparently resume during the school years.

This pattern was noted in my clinical work with heterosexual couples and was markedly different from patterns observed in lesbian couples I was seeing. That is, heterosexual married couples, on the average, were experiencing stress and relationship dissatisfaction during the first years of the first child’s life; they did not, however, tend to end their relationship, at least not until the child/children were in school. From the review of the literature on heterosexual marital satisfaction, three general areas emerged as most strongly related to marital quality in those first post-birth years: roles, intimacy, and social support. These same variables seemed, intuitively, to be significant for lesbian relationships.

Roles

While there is conflicting data regarding roles and marital satis faction post-birth (Waldron & Routh, 1981), it appears that women have a more difficult time than men in the transition to motherhood (Steffensmeier, 1982). They report more negative changes in their personal life, less time for themselves, and more burden of the responsibility of parenting (Harriman, 1983; Waldron & Routh, 1981). A couple of findings were particularly interesting, relative to lesbian parenting. Lenz, Soeke, Rankin, and Fischman (1985) found that both men and women who had high femininity scores on the Bern Sex Role Inventory (a scale measuring traditionally masculine and feminine item endorsement) fared better after the birth of their child than did those who scored lower on femininity. This could be due to the high demand for traditionally feminine behavior of nurturing and care-taking during the early years of a child’s life. On the other hand, LaRossa and LaRossa (1981) reported that chores and behaviors tended to fall along sex role lines after the birth of a child, no matter how non-traditional the couple’s roles were pre-birth. Among other things, this suggests that the women may be doing the brunt of the care-taking and child care. If the mother is feminine (high femininity score on the Bern), she would likely feel more satisfied after the birth of her child. In fact, Belsky, Perry-Jenkins, and Crouter (1985) found support for this: for men and women, the sex roles which are enacted by heterosexual couples post-birth are not as important to satisfaction as is the person’s comfort with the role chosen.

Intimacy

While intimacy does seem to be affected by the birth of a child, this variable is difficult to measure. Both men and women talk about having less time to spend together as a couple, enjoying fewer joint leisure activities and spending more time doing tasks such as childcare (Husten & McHale, 1983). Both men and women report that they experienced less emotional sharing with their partner after the birth of their child and women report less interest in sex (Harriman, 1983).

Since so much of intimacy is physical, separating the emotional from the physical parts of intimacy may be impossible. Both men and women talk about fatigue as one of primary stresses post-partum. In addition, women’s bodies are so involved in the birth and post-birth processes of labor, delivery, and nursing that they frequently talk about feeling like their bodies are no longer their own. Without having the energy or the ownership of one’s body, intimacy, especially physical intimacy, is understandably negatively affected.

Not all couples, however, are negatively affected by the birth of a child. What variables then, might differentiate those couples who are able to stay close through the stress of having a baby from those who report feeling less satisfied with their relationship? Feldman (1971) discovered that those heterosexual couples with a more companionate relationship (friendship as opposed to lover-type) tended to suffer the most after the birth of their child. From a different vantage point, Belsky (1985) discovered that the more realistic the couples’ expectations are of their new life-after-baby, the greater their reported marital satisfaction. One might expect, then, that the couples with the most intimate relationship and the most realistic expectations pre-birth would be best able to maintain their relationship quality post-birth.

Social Support

Interestingly, the best predictor of women’s post-partum marital adjustment was their ability to balance their social life (friendships) and motherhood (Myers-Walls, 1984). This was even more significant than their ability to balance career and motherhood. Similarly, Stemp, Turner and Noh (1986) noted that the women who were best able to alleviate their psychological distress after the birth of their child were those who perceived themselves as having social support. Support was not a factor noted in men’s post-partum adjustment.

In Summary

In sum, heterosexual mothers tend to do more of the care-taking, nurturing, and traditionally feminine-type behaviors after the birth of their child. If they are comfortable with this (feminine) role, they tend to feel more satisfied after the birth of their child. While intimacy, especially physical intimacy, is bound to be interrupted, the more intimate the couple is pre-birth, the more intimate they will likely be post-partum. Thirdly, the more social support and continuity of social life that a mother experiences, the better she will feel about herself and her primary relationship. Finally, the more realistic the couple’s expectations were of their new roles and relationship, the more satisfied they feel after the actual birth.

Lesbian Relationships

Lesbian relationships tend to develop dynamics which are somewhat different from heterosexual couples due firstly to the fact that they are comprised of two women—bringing to the relationship the unique needs, characteristics and development of women. Secondly, but not necessarily less important, the social context in which lesbians live in our society brings to bare another set of stressors which impact and shape the relationship differently than their heterosexual counterparts.

Lesbian Relationships: Dynamics of Two Women

Research and theory supports the notion that women tend to be more nurturing, care-giving, responsible, dependent and relational than men (Chodorow, 1978; Dinnerstein, 1976; Gilligan, 1982). While many now believe that women’s ways of being are different from, not less than men’s, society as a whole still tends to value men’s instrumentality over women’s communality: acting upon is better than interacting with; being independent is better than being dependent. Women are left with the struggle of valuing themselves as women, while being devalued by social institutions, or adopting some of those socially sanctioned characteristics usually associated with men which may be alien to their sense of self as women.

The strength of a lesbian relationship is in part due to the powerful intimacy that two women are able to share due to their relatedness, orientation toward the other, and increased identification of two people who are of the same gender. Much has been written about both the beauty and the problems of lesbian relationship merging (Burch, 1982; Burch, 1987; Elise, 1986). As the two women come together they are able to touch upon a deep, primal bond which is at once fulfilling and frightening. Fear emerges out of each woman’s anticipation of being overpowered by or dependent upon another woman. Both fear of being overpowered and fear of dependency may be viewed as developing out of the resolution of our initial symbiosis and separation from our mothers. In addition, it is impacted by our struggle with society’s devaluation of women, women’s relationships, and women-related traits such as dependency. When the fear overcomes the joy, the women may choose to separate, creating cycles of merging and separation within the relationship.

Separation is accomplished by various means. Some lesbians immerse themselves in their work, others spend time with hobbies or political activity. Affairs and intense friendships are a way of triangulating the relationship to both allow closeness and distance. A common problem which results out of this merging-separation cycle is a reduction in the frequency of sexual contact (Burch, 1987). Conflict, either as a result of the above stressors or as means, to creating distance in and, of itself, arises and maintains the needed separation/distance.

Conflict is often part of another process, the creation of an equal balance of power. The single best predictor of satisfaction in lesbian relationships is an equal power balance (Caldwell & Peplau, 1984; Peplau, Padesky & Hamilton, 1983). More lesbians than heterosexuals value an equal power balance in their relationship, and more lesbians achieve this goal (Schneider, 1986). However, many do not. The variables most commonly associated with power in a lesbian relationship are money and education. Attributes associated with lack of power are commitment to, involvement in and dependency on the relationship.

Lesbians’ strong need for equal power in their relationship are once again multi-determined. Disenfranchised by the heterosexual world, lesbians do not not want to replicate within their intimate dyad what they experience outside. Similarly, many lesbian/feminists are struggling to break out of the traditional roles into which women have been cast. In another vein, however, the struggle for an equal power balance may emerge out of an old fear of being overpowered by another woman (mother). Lesbians merge and become frightened of being overpowered by another woman; each then struggles to gain her own power.

My schema for representing the dynamics of lesbian relationships has two parts. Lesbians, I believe, experience the push-pull of the merging-separation. When the women touch their cores, creating the intense joy, love, and intimacy they long for, they also touch upon the second dynamic: their fear of being overpowered by another woman. (Heterosexual couples, as a group, do not have to go through this cycle. Not only is their intimacy self-limited by men’s more rigid ego boundaries, greater instrumentality and lesser relatedness, but men do not need to fear being overpowered by women because our society supports men having power over women and not vice versa. Choderow (1978), in fact, postulates that our male dominated society has developed out of this perceived fear of being overpowered by women.) Both women struggle to not be overpowered. If the women have worked out their roles, rules and power attributes, then neither woman will be overpowered and the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Epigraph
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Half Title page
• SECTION I: Introduction Woman-Defined Motherhood
• SECTION II: Mothers and Daughters Two Poems
• “I Hope I'm Not Like My Mother”
• Daughters Discover Their Mothers Through Biographies and Genograms: Educational and Clinical Parallels
• Mourning the Myth of Mother/hood: Reclaiming Our Mothers' Legacies
• SECTION III: Mother-Blaming: Making Mother-Blaming Visible: The Emperor's New Clothes
• Mother-Hatred and Mother-Blaming: What Electra Did to Clytemnestra
• Mother-Blaming and Clinical Theory
• Old Women as Mother Figures
• SECTION IV: Diversity: Caught Between Two Worlds: The Impact of a Child on a Lesbian Couple's Relationship
• The Myth of the Wicked Stepmother
• Feminist Considerations of Intercountry Adoptions
• No Accident: The Voices of Voluntarily Childless Women—An Essay on the Social Construction of Fertility Choices
• Establishing the First Stages of Early Reciprocal Interactions Between Mothers and Their Autistic Children
• SECTION V Oppression: Mothering the Biracial Child: Bridging the Gaps Between African-American and White Parenting Styles
• Lesbian Parents: Claiming Our Visibility
• Sarah and the Women's Movement: The Experience of Infertility
• Sturdy Bridges: The Role of African-American Mothers in the Socialization of African-American Children
• SECTION IV: Research: Motherhood and Sex Role Development