This is how childbirth and especially child rearing

This is how childbirth and (especially) child-rearing have become synonymous with
mother hood and not fatherhood or even community as many cultures throughout the world have
less difficulty conceptualizing. The uniquely American myth of “housewife” that solidified in the
1950s made pregnancy and child-rearing primarily female activities that men came to have less
and less to do with.
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In fact, most depictions of labor from that time (and the pastiche of 1950s
in period piece films and tv made thereafter) would show the father far from the delivery room,
in a comfortable waiting room, wearing a suit and passing around cigars. The gory body horror
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Terry Arendell, “Caregiving and investigating motherhood: The decade's scholarship,” Journal of Marriage and
the Family 62, no. 1 (2000).
50
Angela Leung et al., “Assisted Reproductive Technology Outcomes in Female-to-Male Transgender Patients
Compared with Cisgender Patients: a New Frontier in Reproductive Medicine,” Fertility and Sterility 112, no. 5
(2019): pp. 858-865, DOI: 10.1016/j.fertnstert.2019.07.014.
51
Sanae Elmoudden, “Policed Bodies: The Joy of Pregnancy and the Silent Loss,” The Journal of Motherhood
Studies (October 29, 2019), .
52
Debra Langan, "Mothering in the middle and self-care: Just One More Thing to Do," Mediating Moms: Mothers in
Popular Culture , 2012: 268-83. McGill-Queen's University Press. Accessed December 15, 2020.
.

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of giving birth to a child, the screaming, the blood, the tearing of flesh—all of this was
completely excised from the father’s experience. Instead, he enjoys the cultural prestige of
fathering a child, sharing the news with strangers, being congratulated; for the father, childbirth
was a social experience. This phenomenon, one that is probably truer in media than life, is an
example of how birth makes the woman abject, while solidifying the husband/father role as the
subject of the social world, one that brings men more cultural and economic power. It extends to
child-rearing in the role of mother as primary caregiver to the children. In this way, motherhood
is a role that is crucial to the ideological reproduction of our hegemony, not to mention the literal
reproduction needed for society to exist. Mothers not only create life; they raise the children into
adults. Mothers in this way have an important role in the perpetuation of society and its
hegemony.
By isolating childbirth and child-rearing as feminine roles, culture has created another
paradox. The motherhood role is both abject, and severely limiting to women. But it gives
women an immense power to potentially upend society if only she ever shook the false
consciousness that limits her. This paradox is deeply disturbing. It embodies all of what Kristeva
described as the threat of the abject: a fear of ill-defined boundaries between life and death,
society and societal collapse.