from Bridges Volume 3 Number 2
by Christie Balka
In the past decade, unprecedented numbers of Jewish women have decided to parent openly as lesbians. We are involved in transforming what Adrienne Rich has described as the institution of mother hood, a bedrock of male privilege and control. 1 While much has been written about the impact of parenting on lesbian communities, the subject has been virtually ignored by Jewish communities, except those which are predominantly lesbian or gay.
The fact of lesbian parenthood is nothing new: lesbians have always had children in the context of heterosexual relationships. Once they identified as lesbians, however, legal and social discrimination, and ambivalence about motherhood within the lesbian community itself (neither of which have entirely disappeared) rendered lesbian parents largely invisible until the early 1980s. Prior to that, most activism around lesbian parenthood centered, of necessity, around the issue of child custody.
What's new is that many are choosing to parent as open lesbians for the first time. Numerically, adopted children and those resulting from heterosexual relationships still account for most children of lesbians. Yet the availability of new reproductive technologies (ironically, fueled by conservative pro-natalist policies) coupled with increased social acceptance of alternative families means that children conceived through donor insemination account for the fastest growing population of lesbian mothers in the last decade 2.
Simultaneously, the growth of Jewish lesbian feminism has created possibilities for raising Jewish children which didn't exist a decade ago. While previous generations of lesbian parents faced the choice to either participate in Jewish life while remaining invisible as lesbians, or to opt out of Jewish life altogether, this generation is creating new institutions and placing new demands on Jewish communities for support in raising our children.
Jews account for a large proportion of lesbian parents. In San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia and elsewhere, we swell the ranks of lesbian parents' groups. Many are deeply committed to providing our children with a strong Jewish identity. In cities with large Jewish lesbian populations, we have developed Jewish schools and holiday celebrations for our children. In New York and San Francisco these occur within the established structures of lesbian and gay synagogues. Elsewhere they occur in more informal settings, as independent havurot*, or as part of established religious and cultural organizations.
Jewish identity is meant to be experienced in community with others. Raising Jewish children often brings lesbians, even those who have been estranged from Judaism for most of their lives, into contact with institutional Judaism. Sooner or later, our children's participation in Jewish life forces us to demand that our particular needs --for Jewish education and other services that respect the realities of our family lives--be taken seriously by the Jewish communities in which we live.
What is the impact of lesbian parenthood on Jewish communities? How should these communities respond to lesbian parents and their children? Before trying to answer these questions, I should clarify my own relationship to this issue, because it reveals something about both the questions I ask and the sources of information which I rely on for answers.
For the past seven years I have been a part time co-parent to my lover's children from a previous marriage. An eight-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl, they divide their time between our house and their father's. Before I got to know them, I had no interest in or experience with children. If not for my relationship with their mother, the same might be true today.
There is no doubt that my life has been enriched, not by children in the abstract but by these two in particular. They constantly challenge me to re-think some of the most basic assumptions which I hold about myself and the world in which I live. Since my relationship with them began, the center of gravity and the rhythms of my daily life have shifted dramatically. Spontaneous activity has given way to a more structured life, and a certain intensity that I once reserved for endless political meetings has been channeled into relationships with those I call family. Above all, time is always at a premium.
With these changes I have gained access to a whole new set of institutions and privileges which our society confers on a woman-in relation-to-children: bonding around children has meant easier acceptance of this lesbian activist by members of their father's suburban Reform congregation, by mothers of other little league players, and by my lover's octogenarian relatives--religious and political conservatives. It has opened up a world of conversations shared with strangers on buses and in the aisles of Toys R' Us. To the extent that this privilege is based on biological ties, I've also experienced its absence: no automatic legal rights in relation to these children to whom I've become attached, and inadequate recognition of my role in their lives from all-important institutions such as school and camp. At times the pain of this invisibility cuts to the quick. But for much of the past seven years I've benefited enormously from the support of a lesbian mothers group, and from those lesbians who are active in the synagogue which my lover and I co-founded with others five years ago. In this predominantly heterosexual community, I've had the unique experience of being fully appreciated as a lesbian parent from the start.
This is how I arrived at parenthood. Other lesbians of my generation have become parents as a result of donor insemination, heterosexual intercourse, adoption and foster care.3 The observations in this article are based on my experience; on conversations with others who have taken diverse routes to parenthood, some of whom are involved in predominantly lesbian, or lesbian and gay Jewish communities; and on my reading of popular and professional literature on the Jewish family.
When I first considered writing this article several years ago, it was in an effort to under stand the seismic changes which were occurring in my own life. In particular, I wanted to understand what felt like an extraordinary amount of privilege that I was accorded every time I appeared in public with children, especially in Jewish settings. This privilege resulted from people ignoring my lesbian identity when confronted with the fact that I'm also a parent. As the years have passed, however, I've grown more accustomed to this new social role. I've also grown accustomed to the privilege which is reserved for mothers in our society, although I'm still not used to the automatic assumption of heterosexuality by strangers. My thoughts turn more often these days to what it might mean to parent on more of a full- time basis.
Yet this last question is primarily an academic one for me. I have no great desire to have a child of my own, although I'm aware of messages from the dominant North American culture, from Jewish culture and increasingly from lesbian culture, telling me that I should. Being a step-parent has shielded me from some of this pressure to have children, and enabled me to avoid challenges to my female identity which, in the popular imagination, is still equated with nurturing children.
It is from this vantage point as a participant observer in this generation of lesbian parents that my questions emerge. Let me be clear: my position as a part-time co-parent allows me the best of both worlds. Unlike those who want children but don't have them, the presence of children in my life means that I'm well acquainted with the ups and downs of raising them, making it more difficult to romanticize parenthood. Yet I also have the intellectual, economic and emotional freedom from full-time childrearing to frame these questions, and the time to explore their answers in writing.
This generation of lesbian parents is forcing Jewish institutions to deal with us as lesbians, not as single, divorced or widowed mothers- -statuses usually ascribed to women without men in the Jewish community. In this sense, we are paving the way for more radical changes in the Jewish community.
The separation between lesbians' sexual and reproductive lives means that with the exception of instances of rape, lesbians don't have children unless we decide to--usually only after months, and sometimes years of careful planning. For this reason, choice has become a hallmark of this movement among lesbians. A belief in our ability to construct our own identities--to choose whom we want to be--is basic to lesbian feminism, and meshes with the rhetoric of choice which has colored all discussion of reproduction since birth control became widely available in the early 1960s. Over the past two decades, in which a woman's right to abortion has become so hotly contested, this rhetoric has come into increasingly popular usage in discussions of a range of reproductive issues, including abortion, sterilization, adoption, childlessness and contraception. It is hardly surprising, then, that lesbians are framing the issue of parenthood in terms of individual choice.
Yet this generation's insistence on adhering to choice as the defining characteristic of lesbian motherhood separates it from previous generations, as well as from the current generation of lesbians who became parents in heterosexual relationships. And by emphasizing individual choice, this generation ignores the complex interplay of individual and social forces which result in women having children.
As with all women, lesbians' decisions to parent are both intensely personal and political. In addition to increased acceptance of alternative families, we have been subject to the same factors which have contributed to a baby-boom among heterosexuals in the last decade, including an economic and political crisis of catastrophic proportions, attended by a sharp increase in repression. Lesbian authors have described how motherhood has functioned for them as a substitute for constructive political activity in the 1980s. They've also described its appeal as an antidote to the impermanence of a community based on shared identity--the elusive "lesbian nation." 4
Motherhood has the potential to sanitize lesbianism. In her study of the lesbian novel, Bonnie Zimmerman observed that "some writers -- all in the 1980s--assert the natural, normal status of lesbianism by celebrating the lesbian mother. If sterility and non-procreativity "prove" that lesbianism is unnatural, then the lesbian mother represents a contradiction"--and a way to fit in.5 Motherhood raises questions of how our children provide us with the cover of heterosexuality, and forces us to confront our relationship to others, both lesbian and heterosexual, who don't have this cover.
While lesbian parenthood holds the promise of conformity, it also holds the threat of intense disapproval for trying to combine sexual autonomy and family life.6 The fact that lesbians continue to parent while risking uncertain legal status and censure from a host of social institutions suggests the need for a complex understanding of parenthood--one that acknowledges that our choices are based on highly personal as well as large-scale political changes.
The conclusion of this article appears in BRIDGES Volume 3 Number 2
Christie Balka is co-editor of Twice Blessed: On Being Lesbian or Gay and Jewish. She lives in Philadelphia, where she works as Executive Progaram Officer of the Pennsylvania Humanities Council and is a part-time doctoral student. The synagogue which she helped found is affiliated with the Reconstructionist movement.
*havurot: Hebrew, friendship circles. [Back to article.]
1. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution laid the groundwork for feminist discussions of motherhood when it was published in 1978. Except when paraphrasing others, I have chosen to use the word "parenthood" rather than "motherhood" throughout this article because it seems to be less emotionally laden and more inclusive of cultural, in addition to biological roles in reproduction. [Back to article.]
2.This information is taken from Kath Weston's study,
Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (Columbia University
Press, 1991), which helped shape many of the insights in this article
Not surprisingly, the types of conception most widely recognized are those
used by middle-class, white lesbians. Use of new reproductive technologies
is a costly process which is not covered by most forms of health insurance.
I suspect that a much higher percentage of lesbians than we know of, particularly
those who are working class avail themselves of less expensive alternatives
including "turkey baster" technology and heterosexual intercourse.
[Back to article.]
3.Politics of the Heart: A Lesbian Parenting Anthology, edited by Sandra Pollack and Jeanne Vaughn (Ithaca: Firebrand, 1989) contains articles discussing each of these options. [Back to article.]
4. "Lesbians Choosing Children: The Personal Is Political, Revisited" by Nancy N. Polidoff; and " and "Women Without Children/ Women Without Families/Women Alone" by Irena Klepfisz in Politics of the Heart. [Back to article.]
5.Bonnie Zimmerman, The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969-1989, (Boston: Beacon, 1990) p. 45. [Back to article.]
6. See Rosalie G. Davies and Minna F. Weinstein, "Confronting the Courts," in Politics of the Heart and Minnie Bruce Pratt Crime Against Nature (Ithaca: Firebrand, 1988) for discussion of the legal and social consequences of lesbian parenthood. [Back to article.]
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