The Seemingly Inescapable Association of Women and Child-Rearing

I recently saw a commercial for the show “What Would You Do?” in which situations are planted to see how the general public will spontaneously react. In this episode an actress played a desperate mother who had supposedly left her baby at home in order to take a break. She toted a baby monitor around in a restaurant at maximum volume so that other patrons of the eatery could clearly hear that the baby was crying excessively. Some ordinary citizens displayed concern, to which the actress responded that she does not really feel a special maternal bond to this child. In particular, one concerned woman came up to the actress and said something along the lines of “You’re a woman, you know these things” and “You made a decision to have a baby so you should take care of it.”

            This scenario seemed to allude to some of the readings that we have done in this class, particularly the Simone de Beauvoir and Gayle Rubin essays which discuss women’s identity and the sex/gender system. Although people think that we are a modern, maybe even progressive society, there still exists the primitive association of the woman with motherhood and taking care of the child, a task that appears to support the socially constructed sex/gender system that Rubin mentions. The widespread notion is that mothers are supposed to have this special connection with their children, which helps them tend to the needs of their offspring.