Bringing Up Baby

SIX YEARS AGO, the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, a group of ten women from the Boston area, published Our Bodies, Ourselves, a virtual primer of feminism. Feminism, in the authors' minds, meant looking at men and women as equals and the traditionally "feminine" values--generosity, compassion, love--as important. Buoyed by the success of Bodies, the same group turned this feminist perspective on the business of child rearing; the felicitous result is Ourselves and Our Children.

Some radical feminists have presented women with a Hobson's choice: be a good feminist or be a good mother. The Ourselves authors see raising children as healthy and creative, rather than inhibiting. Radicals wanted women to discard their aprons and get on in the real world; Ourselves, turning this view on its head, calls on men to discard their briefcases and join the world of women, to participate in the emotional growth of raising a child. Both men and women, then, should have careers, and both should enjoy the "nurturing," or emotional fulfillment, of being a parent.

The authors extend this idea beyond a husband and wife splitting duties to a new sense of letting children enjoy multiple parents: grandparents, friends, uncles and aunts, lovers, day care employees, and whoever else happens to be around. For the collective, raising children is a close encounter, with the comforting message that "We are not alone."

Moreover, the authors, using the mutual reinforcement of their group as a model, advise parents to share their experiences with other parents. Trial and error, the methodology of most parents, can be pretty scary, and talking with friends makes things easier. As they write, "We need to discover that other parents worry as we do, grow as we do, feel inadequate as we do, feel joyous, exhilarated or angry as we do." In this regard, Ourselves succeeds admirably. In reading, the book becomes a friend to talk to, a companion on the odyssey. Ten women from Boston and all the people they interviewed emerge from the pages to help you out.

The book can be read by any parent, married or divorced, gay or straight, working or unemployed, traditional or experimental. Open-mindedness is the watchword, and the authors view all family arrangements, even childless ones, with approbation. This openness makes the book generally accessible, an accessibility widened by the book's scope--from pre-parenthood to being the parent of an adult. In short, Ourselves will interest anyone in any stage of bringing up children.

BUT IT DOES have problems. Cant terms and phrases blemish the work, including, foremost, "nurture" in all possible tenses and manifestations. "Parent" is used repeatedly as a transitive verb, a questionable usage more startling than necessary. Quotations, essential to carrying the book outside the limited experience of ten women, sometimes obtrude, making the prose lurch like some balky pack-animal. And the eighth chapter, a pseudo-Marxist critique of American society, seems incongruous and overextends the credibility of the authors.

Ourselves and Our Children gives us a feminist view of the family much closer to the real world of single parents and female breadwinners than the traditional preconceptions. If this feminism seems to be merely a misnamed humanism, perhaps so; but the fact that we can now call feminism humanism might be the greatest testimony to the real achievements of the feminist movement.