This is a self portrait of a 1950s housewife. What do you see?

Thank You to my friend Cindy for allowing me to print her mother's work.

by Tracee Sioux

When looking at 6 to 12 week maternity leave policies in the United States one has to wonder:

Do employers and lawmakers hate mothers?

Or do they hate babies?

After you push a human being out of your crotch and feel pressured to return to work before your stitches have even dissolved you have to wonder, Which of us to they hate more?

What causes policies that are detrimental to both mother and child?

Devaluation of motherhood.

What if anti-mother employment policies are a direct result of women criticizing motherhood? Women do it to preserve our hard-won place in public life. Perhaps, the end-result is damaging and harmful to working-mothers and their families because it manifests in anti-mothering employment policy.

I'm playing with the theory that the devaluation of motherhood is a bi-product of feminism and emancipation. An over-correction, if you will.

Follow my thinking here, for thousands of years women were submissive and oppressed. We were told the only thing we were qualified for was mothering. To break out of our narrowly-defined role, we did the only thing we could: we minimized and devalued motherhood.

Consider my family as a microcosm of the whole. In order for me, personally, to break away from my mother's Church and Society sanctioned stay-at-home-mom role I minimized what she did. The cleaning, the cooking, the nurturing, the caring, the self-sacrifice, the moral building, the breast-feeding, the birthing, the nursing, the educating, the training, the whole mothering bit got reduced to nothing. Nothing important or validating anyway.

Now that I have children of my own I can see that this so-called nothing is really what makes the world go round. The growing of people, nurturing human beings, the next generation, trumps professional achievement. I want both, but the mothering keeps the entire species evolving and thriving according to the scientific Grandmother hypothesis.

To break away, I devalued motherhood and then was shocked, angry and surprised that my husband would dare equate my mothering to nothing.

I think there is ample evidence, in the last 30 years, that men will follow our lead. They'll resist, but they will eventually follow. We are, as their mothers and wives, the most influential people in their lives. If we led them to devalue motherhood, then it stands to reason that we can lead them back.

Valuing motherhood starts with each of us. Obviously, we have made good progress. Women are not going to run back into their Normal Rockwell mothering roles, it didn't make us happy then for legitimate reasons.

But, I think it's a grave mistake to criticize the stay-at-home mom who does choose that role today. The stay-at-home mom reminds us that motherhood, in and of itself, is a valid ambition.

Why would employers and lawmakers hate mothers? It would be absurd to hate the very people they love most. Is it possible that anti-mother employment policies are the result of women devaluing motherhood?

Thoughts anyone?

Clarification: I use the term mothering and motherhood in a collective sense. For instance, though Oprah has no children I think she mothers all women. Likewise, Violet, who brings up some issues about mother's in the workplace has spent 15 years mothering me, though she suffered from infertility.

Clarificaton II: This is not meant to be a controversial article on working versus staying at home. I suggest that when we devalue one we devalue the other. It's meant to offer a solution:

When we value motherhood all women, working or not, mother or non-mother, single or married, benefit from family-friendly (however you want to define family is fine with me) policies.

You just don't want to miss the Carnival of Radical Feminists. Doesn't that just sounds like . . .Well, use your own imagination and leave a comment about the picture that forms in your own mind.

Of great comfort to me is that I'm not the only one who isn't so much disturbed by pornography as the trend toward violent pornography. The mixture of sex and violence in mainstream television, on the Internet, novels, commercials (Misogynistic Violence for Breakfast) - well, it's a highly disturbing trend every mother of a girl should be concerned about. Hell, every woman should be concerned about it. The presence of violence as a legitimate turn-on is a clue to how angry men are and how they fantasize about re-obtaining power.

If I thought I could get away with it, I wouldn't have told her she had the option of cheerleading. She's too smart to fall for that kind of crap. Instead, I listed the options.

She gave me a sly smile, knowing I would disapprove, and said, I want to do the cheerleading.

Have you ever wondered why girls should be cheering for boys, but boys don't cheer for girls? Do you think that's okay?

Mama, when I went to watch Eric play basketball Emma was cheering for a girls' basketball team.

Are you sure?

Well, you weren't there, but they had girls playing basketball and I think Emma was cheering for that team.

Do you think it's fair that only boys are allowed to play football but girls stand on the side and cheer for them?

I don't even want to play football, she pointed out.

When Emma took cheerleading, she informed me, they didn't wear belly shirts, they wore long ones and I don't think they did anything imapropriate.

My husband didn't think it was a big deal. My friend thought I was being too extreme. Both pointed out that boys cheer these days too. The difference is, there are not entire scantily clad gangs of boys cheering for the girls' teams.

In the end, neither argument swayed me in favor of cheerleading. What did sway me is that my particular girl wants to try it. She thinks it will be fun.

I decided it would be more empowering for her to be able to make her own decision about which sport to try than it would be for me to forbid cheerleading on a feminist principle.

She's just a different kind of girl than I was. She's more of a girly kind and I was more of a tom-boy. But, I don't think it would be empowering to make her feel bad about being a girly-girl.

The more I thought about it, I could trace my negative feelings about cheerleading back to the time my parents told me we were moving again to a town with a small enough high school, where I could make it as a cheerleader.

Upset about the umpteenth move, there I stood dressed head-to-toe in black, pale skin, red lipstick totally Mod screaming, "Why would I want to be a cheerleader?" What I really wanted to articulate was, "Have we met? Do you know anything about me at all?"

So, to avoid a similar episode with my daughter, I'll acknowledge that she is the kind of girl who thinks being a cheerleader is fun. And I'm going to get okay with that.

I did some research and according to the Official Cheerleader's Handbook, cheerleading was invented at Princeton in the 1860s by men. They didn't let girls do it until the 1920s when they added gymnastics and tumbling at the University of Minnesota. It was World War II, and no boys being available, that transitioned the sport to where 90% of cheerleaders became female.

The song tells the story of a girl who has dreams, but she's inconveniently in love with this guy who is obviously not going in the same direction. The girl chooses to leave the guy to pursue the dream. She's sad, but her self and her dream are worth the sacrifice of a love affair.

By the way, my parents did tell me not to stay for him. But, I wouldn't/couldn't hear them.

I entered this column on Weary Parent as part of a blogging contest. The theme: "I want to know what advice your parents or another influential adult gave you as a teen that you took to heart. It can be funny. It can be serious. It can be a list, a story, a confession - be creative! Just keep it tasteful - this is a family-oriented site."