While we’ve seen the evidence of odds stacked against women and mothers time and again, it’s also clear that our smart strength has ensured continued success despite it. Still, there is no reason our jobs and lives should be any harder. But until society reforms the (lack of) support structures that be, women will continue to rail against the injustices in both overt and covert ways.

While the above description would fit a modern feminist author, it actually describes English and American writers in the nineteenth century. While the cultural mores of the time wouldn’t allow overt criticism, they were “especially concerned with assaulting and revising, deconstructing and reconstructing those images of women inherited from male literature . . . the paradigmatic polarities of angel and monster.” Gilbert and Gubar go on to say, “Examining and attacking such images, however, literary women have inevitably had consciously or unconsciously to reject the values and assumptions of the society that created those fearsome paradigms.”

What characters or authors have you read that subvert ‘fearsome paradigms’ of patriarchy? In what ways?

While fighting for authentic experiences in our own lives, it is empowering to see ourselves reflected in the pages we read for enjoyment and enlightenment. Not images created by someone else that vilify those who dare buck the system.

Does your life, your existence show discrepancies between who you are and who you are ‘supposed’ to be? Are you somewhere in the middle? How does that feel?

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Self-help. While the initial image that comes to mind may be a busy mix of paperbacks and spiral-bound workbooks on a bookstore shelf, this was actually another field in which women subverted the system from the inside out. It was at the crux of a “giant upsurge of interest in women’s health care.” (Cleghorn 283)

In their 1973 book Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English said that “every effort to take hold of and share medical knowledge is a critical part of our struggle.”

Self-Help has somewhat morphed into ‘self-care’ these days – but only in the truest sense of the word. In real activism and attention to policies as well as true self-work and growth – not merely beauty routines and out-priced treatments.

How do you take care of yourself?

In what ways do these acts help you choose yourself over what society says is the way to be?

Can you identify one place you could help yourself more? How will you do it?

Can you identify one way YOU subvert the system of motherhood society has set up for us?