Feminism and unschooling and more…
Here is an article that was shared with me recently…
Feminism is a funny thing…
For some it may mean that women need to be completely independent, need to work, not have kids and not go into any other role than the independent womyn figure that would never trust a man if her life depended on it…
For some it means juggling both worlds of kids and family and then working out of the home to be “equal” to men.
And for some… being at home, raising kids in the way that is the best ways… not the mainstream ways…. is an act of feminism… However, I think that a lot of self proclaimed feminists see this as being impossible, but it isn’t…
The way I see it is that for a while, feminism was about equality in status as human beings. The right to vote, the right to speak, the right to work with equal pay, not one more important than the other…
Equal… but… not the same…
However… sometime, somewhere, it seemed to change…
I remember when I was in university and hanging out in some feminist circles and feminism was no longer about equality, it was about men-bashing… it was about surpassing men, it was about taking over… Instead of being equal, it has become about leaving the role of woman and motherhood behind and looking at it as something to be ashamed of…
However, my choice of staying at home, raising my children, making my own choices about the way I birth is part of the way that I express who I am as a woman…
So, taking back my womanhood, taking back my body in birth by UCing, taking back my role as mother and nurturing and raising my children in the ways that feel right naturally and not because of a stigma, breastfeeding, co-sleeping and now unschooling, all in the while of being an equal partner within my relationship with my husband and partner in life is the way I express my feminism…
Men have in most part shaped the society that we live in, they in many ways formed the ways that society in general raises children…
Men were the physicians that wanted women to birth in unnatural positions so that they could “see better”, not caring at all that the birth on the back position makes it harder on women to birth and can put babies at risk…
Men were the ones that have made breasts sexual and that have put stigmas on breastfeeding and were the physicians that perpetuated the myths that formula was not dangerous and that often was better than breastfeeding even though they could not be further from the truth…
And it goes on and on… Men have made many mistakes, and it is up to us to change things, however, correcting those mistakes by taking on the same family roles as the men in the past is not the way to go and in my opinion is doing a disservice to the children…
So going back to that article and unschooling, well… I don’t agree with all of it but I think that some good points were brought up in the article and in the comments… unschooling and feminism don’t only come together in the ways that the author is describing, it is about more.
It is about teaching our own children, it is about letting them make their own choices for what is right for them and recognizing that they too are equals in our society, it is about recognizing that the school systems that have been set up clearly do not work for all children and there are serious flaws and that it is part of the role I choose of motherhood to give my children the best chances they have to be happy in life…