(Forewarning, this blog is being written as I participate in a very intensive Discernment Interview Placement weekend, and thus might be shorter and less profound. I also don't have a way to get my hand-drawn photo onto this post from the retreat center where I'm staying. Nevertheless...)
As tiny as it may seem to some, something that really stuck out to me from today's reading of "From 'Choice' to Change: Rewriting the Script of Motherhood as Maternal Activism" by Judith Stadtman Tucker, the founder and editor of The Mother's Movement Online, was a relatively unimportant 10-word quote:
"imposing market logic onto the complex moral universe
of social reproduction"
In this sentence, Tucker is analyzing the "rhetoric of choice" - anything is feminist as long as you choose it - as a feminist rationale for stay-at-home-motherhood. However, what struck me about this quote is that it is yet another way capitalist mentality has invaded our personal and interpersonal lives. (Now that you know my a little better, this connection to capitalism probably doesn't surprise you too much.)
Yet again, we can see capitalism invading the very way that we think about families and parenthood (specifically motherhood), not just the way that we are forced to live them out due to work-life policies. From our language ("Time is Money" - I spend time/money, save time/money, waste time/money, budget time/money, etc.) to our logic ("Cost-Benefit Analyses"), market mentalities have slipped into every crevice of our beings. In Tucker's article she notes how we apply this market logic of weighing costs and benefits of choices to mother in certain ways, rather than challenging the fact that these decisions have to be 'weighed' at all!
What would parenting look like in the United States if we could conceive of it outside the confines of not only the capitalist demands of survival, but the capitalist mentality of the very way that we encounter life - our capitalist hermeneutic?
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