Your columnist uses the piece to depict a tired stereotype of the man-hating, child-hating feminist who rejects motherhood and anybody who embraces motherhood. Too bad she hasn’t read Adrienne Rich’s incisive account of the “exquisite suffering” her children caused her, both the love and the political challenges. She seems entirely unaware of Jacqueline Rose’s 2018 study of mothers and mothering – reviewed in the pages of this newspaper by Susan McKay – which presents the very critique of neoliberalism that Maria Steen offers as a critique of feminism. As activists and educators, as teachers of feminist theory and practitioners of feminist research, we easily see through the nonsense that Maria Steen offers as a critique of feminism. The Irish Times can do better than to publish an inaccurate take-down of a complex body of philosophical, political and sociological literature.

Source: The Irish Times March 19, 2020 00:11 UTC