In The New York Times today, Frank Bruni asks whether children should be allowed in bars. The short answer from many of his commenters is no, and I'm sure that's the immediate, knee-jerk reaction from most people.
But Bruni and his commenters may have missed a pair of posts from Feminste in May and July. In the first, Jill Filipovic notes how discrimination against women plays into negative attitudes toward mothers, manifesting itself as "I hate children" sentiment. She says these anti-child attitudes are particularly common in crowded, upper-middle-class neighborhoods like Park Slope. But it's not just about children per se -- it's about wanting to have comfortable, quiet community space; children compromise that because they don't move in the world the way adults do. Similarly, wanting to maintain the sanctity of adult-only spaces like bars isn't just about hating kids and, therefore, hating mothers.
The second post, by a guest-blogger named Maia, accused Americans of being anti-child because we don't like children around when we have a beer. But when she says American, she really means middle- to upper-middle-class urbanites. There are vast swaths of America where there are far more hokey restaurants full of children than there are bars that provide respite, and being child-free for a night is an unavailable luxury for many women.
Affordable childcare plays a role, but so does the the expectation, among much of the culture, that mothers are duty-bound to take their children with them everywhere and that the identification as a mother is so paramount that the idea of being an adult woman besides that is completely subsumed. Women still have much less access to the political and public sphere than men do, and many are bound by cultural expectations that women and motherhood are so inextricably entwined that women's most appropriate role in public life is as a mother. Like Jill, I'm very much for the idea that women should feel comfortable navigating the world with a child attached and not meet scorn wherever they go. The inability of women to access bars with children in tow may be a problem for some, but, in many places, the inability of women to have a social life that doesn't revolve around that of their children is a bigger one.
-- Monica Potts
