Is THIS Liberation


Anne Miles

...having to mother within a patriarchal culture

I would like to thank the Members of the Committee for allowing me to present my ideas today. My name is Anne Miles. I am a single mother of two children who feels that government subsidized daycare is not the answer to my needs.

The mother is a childcare provider worthy of recognition and remuneration. The feminist emphasis on free and universal daycare as the only road to liberation has bothered me for a number of years now. It does not meet the need some of us have to be close to our children, and our children's need to be close to us.

Many women in this society, however, claim to be bored, disenchanted and oppressed by the task of mothering. I feel that this alienation from their nurturing feelings is a sad consequence of having to mother within a patriarchal culture. Mothers have very good reasons for feeling this way.

Despite the sentimental lip service paid to motherhood by the most reactionary elements of society, in reality there is no status and no power in mothering as it is commonly practised. Women are brainwashed to believe that predominantly male experts know more about parenting than they do; this despite the fact that the experts change their theories from year to year. I believe that many women see mothering as an arduous task only because they are trying to live up to unreasonable and constantly shifting standards of "good" mothering. It is my belief that a mother is better off following her own instincts, taking pride in her unique relationships with each child, allowing herself just to relax in her role and truly enjoy her children, thus opening herself to the joys and delights of parenting. The reason this is not encouraged, it seems reasonable to assume, is that this anti-woman culture is terrified that mothers might profoundly influence their children, thus releasing humanizing female energy into a system that has long been weighted in favour of male values.

The wife in our society is seen as existing primarily to fill her husband's needs, not her children's or her own.

The experts employed by the status quo seem intent on separating us from our instincts. The weapon they use is guilt, and mothers are particularly vulnerable to it. We are made to feel that we are bad for our children and our children are bad for us. If we relax and allow them the freedom to grow, we are seen as being negligent. If we show that we care, we are accused of making our children overly dependent upon us. Many feminists, rather than encouraging us to be strong in our mothering, tell us that the way out of this no-win situation is to work outside the home. This is supposedly a more healthy life-style for the mother. Given the lack of confidence in her mothering ability that the average woman has been left with, the idea of leaving her child in the care of trained, professional daycare workers and going back to the less complex, less frustrating world of the nine-to-five job, understandably has its appeal.

But is this liberation? I maintain that feminists have made a serious error in encouraging women to seek freedom by entering the dehumanizing male world, by cutting ourselves off (as men traditionally have) from our nurturing selves. A truly radical approach, it seems to me, would be to change the world to accommodate women and children, rather than having women adopt prevailing patriarchal values. It seems obvious that one way to do this is to value the traditionally unpaid labour of women. In the past, women have cared for the very young, the very old, and the very ill. Our rebellion against this slave labour has meant that the human beings once in our care have been herded into institutions. But ours is a necessary and valuable work that has contributed for millennia to making society more humane. Why should it not be paid so that we may do it and still retain our autonomy?


Excerpted from a presentation to the Task Force on Childcare. Anne Miles, a former Maternal Health News Board Member, is the mother of Laura, 7 and Tristan 3, and a writer whose articles and letters on mothering, feminism and daycare have appeared in Kinesis, Mothering Magazine and the MH News. She lives in Gibson, BC.