“You click on a friend's name and what comes into focus is not a photograph of her face, but a sleeping blond four-year-old, or a sun-hatted baby running on the beach...Where have all of these women gone?” writes Roiphe, describing the majority of profile pictures of mothers in my friends list. I did a little Facebook statistical analysis and found that almost two-thirds of my friends who are mothers, have a picture of their child in their profile picture. Compare that to a little over a third of fathers who include a photo of their child in their profile photo. And this analysis did not involve the number of banal status updates some of my friends write about toilet training, eating habits and first steps.
Now before I am branded anti-child, let me say this: I understand that we tend to talk about what is important to us and what we deal with on a daily basis. If I was dealing with spitting up babies and squealing toddlers, kids would probably be an oft-visited topic of conversation for me. And of course, if I had a kid, they would be pretty close to the centre of my world, just like I was for my mother (Right? Right, Mum?). But just like my mother, I think I would have other interests outside the sphere of family, and my child and husband would not define who I was. According to Roiphe: “One’s children are of course an important achievement, and arguably one’s most important achievement, but that doesn’t mean that they are who you are.”
But here’s the difficult dichotomy within feminism: we strive for equal rights and the freedom to define ourselves how we see fit. So if a woman wants to take a great interest in the domestic sphere, free of societal pressures and expectations, what does it matter? If she just birthed a child of her loins and she wants to put a photo of him or her on her Facebook page, who cares?
Roiphe:
Many of these women work. Many of them are in book clubs. Many of them are involved in causes. But this is how they choose to represent themselves. The choice may seem trivial, but the whole idea behind Facebook is to create a social persona, an image of who you are projected into hundreds of bedrooms and cafes and offices across the country. Why would that image be of someone else, however closely bound they are to your life, genetically and otherwise? The choice seems to constitute a retreat to an older form of identity, to a time when women were called Mrs. John Smith…
It might be a bit difficult to project what book you’re reading or what cause you’re involved in through a profile photo. It is a small part of the whole Facebook page. And certainly the mothers in my friends list have other dynamic aspects of their personalities that are evident in their Facebook activities.
We need to validate archetypically female spheres: because of the whole uterus set up, women give birth to babies and due to their functioning mammary glands, tend to be the primary caregiver, especially in the first few months of infancy. Having and caring for babies does not mean women are sacrificing gains made during feminism’s heyday. However, being aware of what has gone before is essential. The Feminine Mystique illustrates a cultural shift in America where women were defined by marriage and family, yet many yearned for more. Nowadays, marriage and family may play a large part in women’s lives, but it doesn’t define them the way Friedan observed in housewives of the 1950s.
And here’s the proof: to the best of my knowledge, every single mother on my Facebook friend list is educated and employed. Thanks to feminists before them, they broke out of the domestic sphere with aspirations to higher education and careers. Some have kept their last names. I bet a few of them even let their husbands do the laundry.
Now if we could get some photos of that on Facebook…
