STIRRED BY THE DISCOVERY of soccer moms, feminists are now on the lookout for minivan madonnas. “Family feminism,” a new twist in America’s most malleable social movement, seeks to enlist women who want to listen to their maternal urges rather than ignore them. Yes, with a PTA card in one hand and a NOW card in the other, mothers need no longer feel neglected by the feminist movement. Now, motherhood and feminism can “dialogue”!
The publication of novelist and columnist Anne Roiphe’s manifesto for ” family feminism,” Fruitful, was the occasion for a panel discussion called “Motherhood and Feminism: A Dialogue” in Washington last week. Alas, there wasn’t a lot of dialoguing going on, just a lot of rambling familial anecdotes offered by both panelists and audience. There was precious little debate about either motherhood or feminism; both were unambiguously accepted by everyone in the room as unambiguously good for women. And yet the source text for the panel was a book by a feminist dissatisfied with feminism’s view of motherhood. “The irritation between mothers and non-mothers was swept under the rug of sisterhood,” Roiphe writes in Fruitful. “The intellectual and emotional misfit between child care and feminism was observed but not solved.”
