WORLD NEWS FOR MONTENEGRO DIASPORA
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AUTHOR: M.J.
JD Vance's comments about Kamala Harris reflect a stubborn debate in supposedly progressive societies. states in an analysis for the Guardian author Nesrine Malik.
A woman without biological children is running for high political office, so of course that trait will be used against her at some point. Kamala Harris, in the short period since she emerged as the Democratic candidate for President of the United States, has come under scrutiny for not having children.
Conservative lawyer Will Chamberlain announced on Platform X that Harris "shouldn't be president" -- apparently, because she has "no stake in the game." The Republican vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, called Harris and other Democrats "a bunch of old ladies with no kids living miserable lives."
It's a particularly contagious tendency in the US, with a right-wing movement obsessed with female reproduction. But who can forget (and if you have, I'll be happy to remind you of a low point that still irritates me) when Andrea Leedsom, during the 2016 Conservative Party leadership election, said that Theresa May may have nephews and nieces, but “I I have children who will have children... who will be part of what follows". "Honestly," she added, as if the message wasn't clear enough, "I feel that being a mother means having a real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake."
It's an argument about political ability that masks a visceral disdain for the idea that a childless woman should have any credibility or status. In other comments, Vance said that "so many leaders of the left, and I hate to have to be so personal about this, but these are people without children who are trying to brainwash our children, it really disorients and upsets me." He seems so obsessed with this it's almost laughable: a man whose obsession with childless women borders on a complex.
But his "disorientation and agitation" is a political tendency that persists. She constantly asks the question of childless women, in subtle and explicit ways, especially as they advance in the professional sphere: "What's in the middle? What is the matter?” – the public sphere becomes a space for answering that question. Women perform a kind of group plea to be left alone, in their painstaking inquiries about how they came to the decision not to have children, or why they actually celebrate not having children, or pondering their ambivalence about having children.
Behind all this lies some classic old-fashioned inability to imagine women outside of motherhood. But one of the reasons this traditionalism persists in seemingly modern and progressive places is that the withdrawal of women from motherhood in capitalist societies – with their ill-equipped public services and support for parents – raises questions about our unequal, unrecognized economic arrangements.
A woman who does not bear children is a woman who will never stay at home and provide unpaid care. They are less likely to be tied to the household zone and extend their care to older relatives or other people's children. She cannot be a resource that supports the male partner's career, his weaknesses, time constraints and social demands.
Being a mother is an option, a floating worker, a joker in the deck. The absence of motherhood creates a void for that "free" service, on which societies organized around nuclear families and thinly subsidized entitlements increasingly depend. The lack of parental leave, childcare and elder care would become deeply visible - "disorienting and disturbing" - if the service was removed.
"Motherhood," writes author Helen Charman in her new book "Mother State," "is a political state." Nurturing, caring, creating human life—all immediate associations with motherhood—have more to do with power, status, and the distribution of resources... than we'd like to admit. Because raising children is the basic work of society, and from pregnancy onwards, it is divided unequally".
In other words, motherhood becomes an economic input, a public good, something talked about as if the women themselves were not in the room. Data on the declining birth rate draw comments from Elon Musk ("very worrying!"). Childlessness is down to personal motives – selfishness, being seduced by the false promise of freedom, lack of values and foresight, irresponsibility – rather than external conditions: the need for affordable childcare, support networks, flexible work arrangements and the risk of financial ruin that motherhood often brings. therefore creating attachment to partners. To put it mildly, these are material factors that should be taken into account when entering a state of no return". To assume that motherhood happens without such a context, Charman says, is a "useful fantasy."
It is a binary public discourse, which blurs the often thin line between biological and social realization. Childless women do not exist in a state of blissful separation from of their bodies and their relationship to motherhood: some had pregnancies, miscarriages, abortions and menstruation. Some have entered liminal stages of motherhood that do not fit a single definition from which they are excluded. Some extend the mothering role to various children in their lives. Some, like Harris herself, have stepchildren (who don't count, just as Theresa May's nephews and nieces didn't). Some have become mothers, just not in a way that initiates them into the blessed club. They feel regret, depression, and go through restlessness that doesn't fit the picture of an unhindered affirmation of your purpose in life.
But the privilege of those truths cannot be transferred to creatures whose rejection of the maternal bond has become a rejection of a wider unspoken, colossally unjust contract. Women with children gain social acceptance for their vital investment in "the future", in return for unrewarded, unsupported labor that supports and stabilizes the economic and social status quo. All this while still suffering ridicule about the value of their work compared to the serious labor of men who earn their bread.
On top of that, women have to deal with all that motherhood—or non-motherhood—entails, with all the deeply personal, confusing, isolating, and unrecognized realities of both, while being exposed to constant suffocating, infantilizing, and violent public theories and understandings that encroach on the their private space. Along with that comes feelings of self-doubt and shame for making the wrong decision, or for not being as happy with their decisions as they are expected to be. It is constant, painful vivisection. This, more than anything felt by clinical observers, is a truly disorienting and disturbing experience.
