Feminism and the Politics of Childhood Friends or Foes? Edited by Rachel Rosen and Katherine Twamley Feminism and the Politics of Childhood ‘This ground-breaking work straddles the divide between theory, prac- tice, and activism. By reflecting on the mother-child relationship and ana- lyzing care work in capitalist and patriarchal societies, this book provides a powerful counter-narrative to the pervasive individualistic social ontol- ogy that permeates Western academia. The authors’ approaches are sen- sitive to the legacy of colonialism and the divides between feminism/s. The ideas and problems explored in this book are both inspiring and provocative.’ Rachelle Bascara, Filipino Domestic Workers Association, UK ‘Insightful, provocative and evocative, Feminism and the Politics of Childhood: Friends or Foes? challenges readers to grapple with the uneasy ideological and political tensions arising whenever those positioned as children and as women commingle. Rosen and Twamley, together with a strong array of contributors, invite active and sometimes messy engage- ment with varieties of feminisms and childhoods so as to enable public, connected and relational ways of knowing, telling and doing. A must- read for scholars and activists alike.’ Daniel Thomas Cook, Rutgers University—Camden, USA ‘This book is genuinely ground-breaking. It spans disciplinary bounda- ries to foreground fundamental issues of care, relationality and justice, forging fresh and exciting new directions in conceptual theory and polit- ical action. The dialogical style and collaborative ethos underpinning its production is original and uplifting, making it an expansive, ambitious and exhilarating read.’ Val Gillies, University of Westminster, UK ‘Traveling the fraught borderlands between women and children, women’s studies and childhood studies, Feminism and the Politics of Childhood: Friends or Foes? asks an impossible question, and then casts prismatic light on all the corners of its impossibility – illuminating the temporali- ties and spatialities of the vexed and beautiful relational politics around love and labour, power and violence, care and antagonism, empire and liberation, social movements and interdependence. With contributions from a truly international group of authors in formats including photo essays, interviews, narratives and scholarly articles, these pages are filled with beautiful, provocative, important conversations about the fluid and differentiated relations among and between women and children, world- making in their effects and possibilities.’ Cindi Katz, City University of New York Graduate Center, USA ‘This provocative and stimulating publication comes not a day too soon. Exploring the profound complexities embedded in the woman and child relationship, it challenges the reductive instrumentalisation of women as simply a means of realising children’s rights, and makes a powerful case for recognition that the perpetuation of a hierarchy of rights impedes justice and dignity for both women and children.’ Gerison Lansdown, Chair, Child to Child, UK ‘A smart, innovative, and provocative book, Feminism and the Politics of Childhood explores the confluences and disjunctures between fem- inist studies and childhood studies by disaggregating the “woman and children/womanandchild” dyad. It breaks new ground theoreti- cally and methodologically by foregrounding the political economy of the unequal distribution of need and vulnerability in struggles for social justice for women and for children in diverse geopolitical landscapes.’ Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Distinguished Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies Syracuse University, USA ‘It is a rare book that can be said to inaugurate a new field of study. Feminism and the Politics of Childhood: Friends or Foes? raises and addresses issues so pressing that it is surprising they are not already at the heart of scholarship on feminisms and the politics of childhood. It draws on an impressive range of empirical, theoretical and practice material from different perspectives, disciplines and everyday practices. In doing so, it enables potentially antagonistic positions to be aired and refuses to reduce women and children to equivalences or to flatten dif- ferences between women and between children. Together, the chapters make a cutting-edge, critical intervention that readers will enjoy dipping into, but that will repay close and repeated reading.’ Ann Phoenix, Thomas Coram Research Unit – UCL, UK The Jane and Aatos Erkko Professor at the Helsinki University Collegium for Advanced Studies from 2016–2018, Finland ‘This stimulating book explores the relations between women and children in a contextualised way that is conceptually challenging and methodologically innovative. The product of a subtle and rich intellec- tual debate, the book fully embodies its driving inspiration: to foster a “generous encounter” of mutual learning between feminism and child- hood studies, and between academia and the world of political and social activism.’ Ana Vergara Del Solar, Universidad Diego Portales, Chile Feminism and the Politics of Childhood Friends or Foes? Edited by Rachel Rosen and Katherine Twamley First published in 2018 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ ucl- press Text © Contributors, 2018 Images © Contributors and copyright holders named in the captions, 2018 The authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0).This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).Attribution should include the following information: Rosen R. and Twamley K. (eds.). 2018. Feminism and the Politics of Childhood: Friends or Foes ? London: UCL Press. DOI: https:// doi.org/ 10.14324/ 111.9781787350632 Further details about Creative Commons licenses are available at http:// creativecom- mons.org/ licenses/ ISBN: 978– 1– 78735– 064– 9 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978– 1– 78735– 065– 6 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978– 1– 78735– 063– 2 (PDF) ISBN: 978– 1– 78735– 062– 5 (epub) ISBN: 978– 1– 78735– 061– 8 (mobi) ISBN: 978– 1– 78735– 060– 1 (html) DOI: https:// doi.org/ 10.14324/ 111.9781787350632 For women and children everywhere, in our struggles for social and economic justice. ix Foreword We are very pleased to welcome the publication of this book, which investigates an important (but neglected) field for study: how and how far feminism can take account of children and of childhood, and simul- taneously what childhood studies and activism aimed at improving children’s status can learn from feminism. The 18 papers result from a col- laborative process of learning and refining. Starting with a two-day sym- posium at which some of the chapters in this volume were presented and discussed, the editors and contributors have reviewed the papers and so ensured thorough, valuable and nuanced discussions of the intersections between gender and generation. This book makes an important contri- bution to improving understandings of interrelations between women’s studies and childhood studies, and their related social movements. The re- emergence of feminism from the 1960s onwards was matched by a new interest in childhood viewed as a social phenomenon. Both movements have been concerned with social and political status and have fought for the recognition of rights. Furthermore, whilst women have sought to problematise social assumptions about their relations with children, childhood studies have sought to extract children, theor- etically, from ‘the family’ and to site them as a social group with their own interests, and to attend to their specific interrelations with macro forces. 1 Our contribution here is to provide a viewpoint drawing on the history of the women’s movement and its work with and for children. This fascinating (but largely forgotten) social history predates, contrib- utes to and in some ways challenges modern discussions of feminism and childhood. A key theorist for this viewpoint was Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In her novel Herland , first published in 1915, three young men find themselves in a society where there are no men. This is a society run by wise, active, competent women, who plan an ordered community, self- sufficient in all necessary resources, and who do all the work needed to maintain it. Children are central to the design and workings of society. FoREwoRd x After the first months of breastfeeding, they grow up with the best of professional care, in joyous, active groups, learning by doing, according to the latest educational ideas. Nuclear families have been abandoned, since they stunt and distort children’s concept of themselves and waste female resources. During the course of the three men’s stay in this uto- pian land, they are forced to learn important lessons about gender and generation (although only after considerable displays of misogyny). 2 Some of these lessons were spelt out in Gilman’s non-fictional Concerning Children, published 15 years before Herland , which argued forcefully for more thought to be given to the status of childhood. ‘We should bear in mind in studying children’, says Gilman, ‘that we have before us a permanent class, larger than the adult population . . . As members of society, we find they have received almost no attention. They are . . . not recognised as belonging to society.’ 3 Yet children were newly visible to adults, as they took their place in the public world of education. Gilman was one of many women thinkers and reformers in Europe and the USA who, in the last decades of the nineteenth and early dec- ades of the twentieth century, drew public attention to children as a social minority group. Most of these reformers were more concerned with changing laws and social policy to enhance children’s status and rights than they were with theoretical debates about relations between feminism and childhood. They spearheaded many social policy reforms spanning the fields of health, welfare and education, and were members of a transnational network that campaigned for civil rights, especially for women, children and exploited industrial workers. Many of these women reformers were driven by radical visions, such as that outlined in Herland , of a society organised for adults and children alike around the core values of justice, equality and non-aggression. It is no coincidence that in Britain the advent of women’s suffrage (granted on limited terms in 1918) and the establishment of the Save the Children Fund (1919) and of children’s rights (1924) by one of these women reformers, Eglantyne Jebb, happened at about the same time. In the USA, recognition of chil- dren as a social group led to many reforms of the Progressive Era. A key organisation was the federal Children’s Bureau, founded in 1912, and directed by the sociologist Julia Lathrop, one of the women reformers associated with the renowned Chicago settlement house, Hull-House. The Children’s Bureau promoted the interests of children and designed welfare and health services for them. 4 Both of us (independently) have been working recently on this social history, 5 drawing on the lives and work of some remark- able women pioneers. The papers in this book update our modern FoREwoRd xi understandings of the ways in which advancing the interests of women and children may or may not be linked at practical and theoretical lev- els. They provide a range of explorations of the complex interrelations of women’s and children’s lives. Critical to this is the conceptualisation of gender and generational relations that arrived with the women’s movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, reconceptualisation of children as a social group who contribute to the socio-economic wel- fare of families and communities has highlighted how childhood may be understood as a relational status wherein the child, though a bearer of human rights, is also subordinate to the older generation. Many of the chapters in this volume point to new directions for exploring how intergenerational relations across the life-course persist, but are also challenged and modified, not least in the light of social, political and economic macro and micro forces. At the same time we should stress, as the editors do, the over- riding importance of achieving social justice for women and children everywhere, since they continue to share the fate of being more likely than men to live in a condition of poverty and economic dependence, to lack basic rights, and to experience the violence of men and nation-states. Scholarship such as this book offers on the complex intersections of feminism and childhood will help to address these urgent and unsolved issues of public policy. Berry Mayall and Ann Oakley NoTES 1 In this respect, it is interesting to note the rise of academic work focusing on children who live outside families and who are workers rather than objects of schooling. These points are devel- oped in various chapters in this book. 2 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979, first published 1915). 3 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Concerning Children (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003, first published 1900): 45. 4 Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform 1890-1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 5 Ann Oakley, Women, Peace and Welfare: A suppressed history of social reform, 1880- 1920 (Bristol: Policy Press, 2018). Berry Mayall, Visionary Women and Visible Children, England 1900-1920: Childhood and the Women’s Movement (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). xiii Acknowledgements This book would not have been possible without the engaged contribu- tions of participants at our 2015 symposium Feminism and the politics of childhood and the dedication of volume authors to a sustained process of discussion and debate. Their commitment is what has allowed us to bring together such a stimulating and dialogic set of contributions. We would like to thank Kristin Liabo, Berry Mayall and Ann Varley for their support in formulating the original project and hosting the 2015 symposium. A small grant from UCL Grand Challenges was also crucial to the symposium’s success. Our appreciation goes to Ann Oakley, Ann Phoenix, Virginia Caputo, Ohad Zehavi, Nara Milanich and Valeria Llobet for taking the time to read and comment on our draft introduction. All gaps and insuf- ficiencies are our own. Finally, our thanks go to the anonymous reviewers of our proposal and draft manuscript for their perceptive feedback, and Chris Penfold for his flexibility and guidance on all editorial matters. xv Contents List of figures xviii List of contributors xx Introduction The woman– child question: A dialogue in the borderlands 1 Rachel Rosen and Katherine Twamley Section 1 Tense Encounters: Gender and Generation 21 1. A necessary struggle- in-relation? 23 Erica Burman 2. Working-class women and children in Grassroots Women 40 Merryn Edwards 3. When the rights of children prevail over the rights of their caretakers: A case study in the community homes of Bogotá, Colombia 50 Susana Borda Carulla 4. Thinking through childhood and maternal studies: A feminist encounter 66 Rachel Thomson and Lisa Baraitser 5. Notes on unlearning: Our feminisms, their childhoods 83 Debolina Dutta and Oishik Sircar 6. Ideal women, invisible girls? The challenges of/to feminist solidarity in the Sahrawi Refugee Camps 91 Elena Fiddian- Qasmiyeh CoNTENTS xvi 7. A ‘sort of sanctuary’ 109 An interview with Liz Clegg by Rachel Rosen Section 2 Life’s Work 115 8. Love, labour and temporality: Reconceptualising social reproduction with women and children in the frame 117 Rachel Rosen and Jan Newberry 9. Caring labour as the basis for movement building 134 An interview with Selma James by Rachel Rosen 10. Care labour as temporal vulnerability in woman–child relations 139 Gina Crivello and Patricia Espinoza-Revollo 11. International commercial surrogacy: Beyond feminist conundrums and the child as product 155 Kristen E. Cheney 12. Stratified maternity in the barrio: Mothers and children in Argentine social programs 172 Valeria Llobet and Nara Milanich 13. Decolonising childrearing and challenging the patriarchal nuclear family through Indigenous knowledges: An Opokaa’sin project 191 Tanya Pace-Crosschild Section 3 Political Projects and Movement Building 199 14. ‘Too Young to Wed’: Envisioning a ‘generous encounter’ between feminism and the politics of childhood 201 Virginia Caputo 15. Feminists’ strategic role in early childhood education 218 Sri Marpinjun, Nindyah Rengganis, Yudha Andri Riyanto and Fransisca Yuni Dhamayanti 16. ‘Gimme shelter’? Complicating responses to family violence 225 Sevasti- Melissa Nolas, Erin Sanders-McDonagh and Lucy Neville CoNTENTS xvii 17. Becoming- woman, becoming- child: A joint political programme 241 Ohad Zehavi 18. Feminist intuitions in Peru’s Movement of Working Children 257 A dialogue between Alejandro Cussianovich Villaran and Jessica Taft Bibliography 261 Index 279 xviii List of figures Fig. 2.1 Mother’s Day march and rally, 2004 41 Fig. 2.2 Women’s and children’s conference poster 42 Fig. 2.3 Grassroots Women press conference 43 Fig. 2.4 Labour Committee mural 44 Fig. 2.5 Postcard campaign for childcare 45 Fig. 2.6 Storytelling for children, Mother’s Day rally, 2008 46 Fig. 2.7 Children at the microphone, Mothers’ Day rally, 2008 46 Fig. 2.8 Laundry line art and resistance, Mothers’ Day rally, 2008 48 Fig. 2.9 Laundry line art and resistance, Mothers’ Day rally, 2008 48 Fig. 5.1 At the Amra Padatik rally, Kolkata, on International Sex Workers’ Rights Day, 3 March, 2009 85 Fig. 5.2 Film poster artwork by Anirban Ghosh depicting the five protagonists 87 Fig. 5.3 Debolina with Gobinda at his residence, during the filming of WAFS 88 Fig. 10.1 Time allocation by girls and boys on different activities on a typical day (in minutes) 147 Fig. 13.1 Blackfoot girl playing by the Old Man River that borders the Blood Indian Reserve and city of Lethbridge (Photograph by her father, Bill Healy) 193 Fig. 13.2 Grandparents talking with their new grandson (Photograph by mother, Jessica Goodrider- Loewen) 194 Fig. 13.3 Blackfoot cousins playing (Photograph by mother, Chantilly Prairie Chicken) 195 Fig. 13.4 Father connecting with his son (Photograph by mother, Alison Crop Eared Wolf) 196 Fig. 15.1 Early Childhood Care and Development Resource Centre (Yogyakarta, Indonesia) 219 xix LIST oF FIGURES Fig. 15.2 Teachers reflect upon what it means to be men and women 221 Fig. 15.3 Girls and boys have equal access to learning materials 221 Fig. 15.4 Children learn to work together and respect others 222 Fig. 15.5 Mapping parents’ and teachers’ experiences of violence 223 Fig. 15.6 Involving fathers and mothers in an outing 223