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An Essay on the Possibility of the Redemption of Hu-MAN-kind from Patriarchy

She’s calmer now, air sucks evenly into her lungs, we lean forward, tensed, the muscles in our backs and bellies hurt from the strain. It’s coming, it’s coming, like a bugle, a call to arms, like a wall falling, we can feel it like a heavy stone moving down, pulled down inside us, we think we will burst. We grip each other’s hands, we are no longer single… 

…The Commander, of course, is nowhere in sight. [Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale]

This bizarre, animalistic depiction of the birth of a child to a “handmaid” with whom all the other handmaids in the room become psychosomatically united in a trancelike collective delivery is one of the clearest examples imaginable of the fetishism of childbirth. Here Atwood is at her scintillating best, portraying this scene of “unity” and “sisterhood” among handmaids who may indeed feel solidarity with one another but who know all the same that they can trust no one, and masterfully reminding us that the Commander (the father) “is nowhere in sight”. 

Every page of this dystopian novel bears out the intention of this feminist author to depict the “phantasy of patriarchy”, a world where men and women go their own ways, studiously ignoring one another, barely interacting at all; a world where even women in leading positions play men and so keep the male-dominated way of things intact. This arrangement is perfect for the malign, patriarchal, theocratic state of Gilead where the tale of the handmaid is set. The scene described does not, however, suggest any true sisterhood among the handmaids. On the contrary, it is a deception – a fetish – which far from satisfying the handmaids’ frustration in fact draws them ever deeper into the system. 

Atwood’s narrative offers a clear enough depiction of the toxicity of a “woman only” world. Julia Kristeva, similarly, though in a more subtle and indeed more academic manner, warns us that any sort of “feminist escapism” into the safe world of the imaginary maternal womb outside language and social order (both, of course, doomed to be patriarchal) results in the creation of a parallel world with no connection to the existing order and thus also with no real chance of influencing or changing it. 

The most obvious context for establishing a “woman-only” club is the process of carrying, delivering, and nursing children. Julia Kristeva speaks about the sacralization – and I dare add privatization and ultimately, and necessarily, fetishization – of motherhood. From Simon de Beauvoir forwards, carrying, delivering, and nursing children has provided the core material for feminist intellectual endeavour, more often than not discussed in terms of the curse-privilege dialectic. But no matter how unique and life-changing these processes are, and however complex they may be for the mother to process intellectually, it is surely crucial to include father. 

Unlike those in Gilead, many fathers today are of course present during childbirth. Nonetheless, serious intellectual reflections on the father’s role and his influence on the mother and the child, and most importantly on himself, remain few and far between. Is the father simply there to hold the mother’s hand and flap around after nurses who are “not doing their job”? Or is his role to “truly become a father”?

Julia Kristeva is convinced that to provide the desired environment for the development of a healthy individual with a receptive and non-oppressive identity, the mother must discover meaning beyond her maternal role, beyond the child, and should not lose her desire for the father: “The point is that the child has to learn to recognize that the mother desires something besides the child.” And Allison Weir adds: “Divided between her relation to the child and her investment in the social world … the mother serves as a model of a subject who can sustain her identity in division.”  

However, neither Kristeva nor Weir, nor any other woman feminist to my knowledge, has ever offered a satisfactory explanation as to how a mother who lives in a patriarchal society and has experienced the life-changing and often life-threatening and self-splitting event of childbirth is to find desire and meaning outside the child. The task is, if not impossible, certainly far from straightforward. Aside from the physiological and emotional attack on the body, there is the matter of the external pressure on the new mother from doctors, midwives, nurses… “all for the baby’s benefit” of course! Kristeva speaks about the “violent abjection and sacrifice” of the mother. 

One possible answer, and one which sounds sound to me, is offered by Paul Fides, who speaks of the “pre-oedipal father”, although unfortunately Fides considers this figure to be beyond the sphere of reality: “The father is a third person, an external figure, an Other in this intimate relation between the child and the mother. The imaginary father awakens the subject to the love that comes with difference. As the child faces emptiness at the heart of desire that it envisages will come with separation from the mother, it discovers that it can welcome the other and the other opens itself with welcoming love.”  

Fides is convinced that the role of the pre-oedipal father, who has a healing and beneficial effect on both the mother and the child, is merely a figment; Kristeva is in no doubt that the father desired by the mother corresponds simply to the phallus.  

Bringing the father into the key event and primary subject of the feminist debate is, I believe, a necessary move forwards in any endeavour towards gender equality in our society. This is nothing revolutionary, but we must insist that fathers are not only to “help” but rather to engage existentially in the process of childbirth. Kristeva and Fides both portray the role of the father as somewhat static and utilitarian. The father does: he heals, loves, comforts the mother and the child. But the question remains “What is being done to him? Will we allow the father to be transformed by the process of childbirth and “truly become a father”, a real (not imaginary) pre-oedipal father? Am I too naïve to think that we must? The testimony of the father of my own two children gives me hope that this is not so impossible: “My presence at the deliveries was undoubtedly the most self-denying and self-emptying moment in my whole life – facing something so wild, animal and raw and yet being aware of my own helplessness gave me a lecture on how to pull back, how to yield without running away – an experience that our fathers never had.” 

Desacralizing, de-privatizing and de-fetishizing motherhood seems to be a promising way forward in the feminist and gender discourse. Let us give men a chance to go through the pains of childbirth in their own way and to be able to participate in all parts of this life-giving event – from conception onwards. It could well change their own self-understanding and help them see the toxicity of the existing patriarchal order and give them the will to break it.