Half Changed World

I have a new DotMoms post up today, about my loss of a few months of digital photos.  (For those who were concerned, I was able to get a bunch of them back by pulling the deleted images off of my memory card with PhotoRescue.  But some, including most of the first day of preschool this year, are gone for good.)  FYI, there was a story about DotMoms on some NBC stations earlier this week.

Thanks to The Zero Boss, I found this very interesting essay on writing about our experiences as mothers, by Andrea Buchanan, author of Mother Shock.  She starts by talking a bit about how the publishing industry consigns writing about the experience of mothering into either "mommy-lit" (which is not seen as real literature) or "momoirs" (which is less respectable than real memoirs).  She suggests that mothers have turned to blogs because the mainstream media portrays such a narrow and unreflective slice of our experience:

"So mothers who do not find themselves in what they read have begun to create their own narrative and to publish it in a place where anyone with access to a computer can find it: the internet."

And then she argues that mothering blogs are a powerful feminist tool because they provide unvarnished access to a range of experiences broader than any of us are likely to encounter in person.  By writing in her blog, she says,

"I write about such private things in a relatively public place because sharing my experience as a mother-in-process, as a mother continually learning and evaluating and questioning and contextualizing and theorizing and evolving, may touch someone. It may touch someone who is in a similar emotional place, or in similar circumstances, such as the readers who write me to tell me that what they read makes them feel less alone. Or it may touch someone like my mother-in-law, who is in a vastly different place, a mother with grown kids, a woman for whom feminism is a non-issue – in other words, a person with a completely different viewpoint."

I’d like to tie this back to a discussion that happened on Misbehaving.net about a month ago, about whether women are under-represented in the blogging world.  The thrust of the discussion was that while the pundit blogs that get most of the media attention and that get the most daily hits (especially during the election) are largely written by men (with the notable exception of Wonkette), if you go by sheer numbers, women are quite likely the writers of the majority of all blogs.  And many of the blogs written by women are mothering blogs, focused on "the real, gritty, funny, mundane, sometimes boring, sometimes riveting secret life of mothers." (Buchanan again)

So why aren’t parenting blogs getting more attention?  I think much of the media attention the pundit blogs got over the last year was driven by the presidential election, and will fade now that its done.  Some of the inbalance is mechanical — ratings in both the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem and the Technorati 100 are driven by links from other blogs, and while the political bloggers routinely link to several other blogs a day, many parenting bloggers never post links.

But some of the issue has to do with the very democracy of experience that Buchanan praises; while I enjoy spending a few minutes reading most of the parenting blogs I run across browsing on BlogExplosion or following the chain of blogrolls, unless a blog is especially well-written, I’m unlikely to bookmark it to return to again and again.  The ones that I’ve blogrolled here are all ones that I enjoy reading.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 26th, 2004 at 9:43 pm and is filed under Weblogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.