By Kylie Fritz

After more than a dozen articles, countless conference speeches, and coordination of the new Women’s Studies major, Dr. Amber Kinser, associate professor of communication and director of Women’s Studies at ETSU, has published her first book, Mothering in the Third Wave, which came out in November.

An anthology using 18 writers from a variety of backgrounds and lifestyles, Mothering is a presentation of motherhood as it exists in the Third Wave of feminist evolution.

“In this book, we tried to find ways to talk about contemporary feminism and mothering that don’t further extend the debates about what gets to count as third wave feminism (not that these haven’t been legitimate or useful), but rather get to the point of exploring what feminist mothers right now are struggling with and wrestling through,” wrote Kinser in the introduction of Mothering in the Third Wave.

In an attempt to make the material more accessible, Kinser tried to blend the academic with the narrative.

“Mothering in the Third Wave is an academic work, but it’s purposely written in a way that people who might not affiliate as academics, maybe even people who are strong … powerful mothers, but don’t necessarily see themselves as feminists, could dig,” Kinser said.

Although the writers left room open for a broader audience, feminist ideals lay at the heart of the anthology. Kinser’s personal definition of "feminism" is very telling about the book's underlying theme.

“Feminism is a commitment to the life principle that women are human beings first and should be treated with equal human rights, and a simultaneous recognition that that’s still a radical idea,” Kinser said.

“It’s radical in that it still flies in the face of common understandings of women. She’s a mother first, she’s a body first, she’s a womb first, she’s a sexpot first. She’s not a human thinking individual first in the culture’s mind.”

But feminism, as it is presented in relationship to mothering, is not simply an idea or a feeling, Kinser said.

“It’s a way of living. [It’s] how you see things, how you view things, how you argue things, and making choices about how you’re presented.”

Kinser made choices about the raising of her own children with feminist principles in mind.

“[I] work hard to make sure that the things I expect of my daughter and son are grounded more in what is good for a person to learn than whether or not they're a boy or a girl,” said Kinser, who encourages open talks about clothes, television, the body and sex in her home. “[I] try to have a healthy, open attitude about sex talk.”

Kinser’s openness to discussion of the body and sex extends beyond her children to her own writing from Mothering in the Third Wave, which focuses on the separation that has occurred between maternity and sexuality, and how that separation should be discarded.

“We try to pretend like mothering has no sensually charged intimacy,” Kinser said. “We should … embrace that the level of intimacy (lots of times) between a mother and child is on a sexuality continuum. It’s not on the same end as adult sexual behavior or on the same plane as incestuous behavior, but it is a kind of deep level intimacy.”

Even though Kinser’s main piece of writing was on the intimate relationship between mother and child, she found the hardest part in creating this anthology was to disconnect from being a mother and her own intimate relationships with her children in order to do so.

“In order to write about mothering and feminism, or edit a book on mothering and feminism, I had to pull away from mothering,” Kinser said. “That was a little bit tricky to give myself permission to pull out of mothering a bit so I could write about mothering. That felt difficult and contradictory.”

This ambiguity is something to be expected in mothering in the third wave. “Embracing contradictions is really a third wave mantra,” Kinser said. “Being comfortable with the fact that you’re ambivalent, that you want to be with the kids and you sort of don’t want to be with the kids, and that you don’t have to purge one or the other.”

Kinser was able to separate her time between work on the book and on being a mother and turn it into an example of being a strong feminist. “Part of what I was doing was being reflective about my mothering behavior … and also modeling for my children that women have a right to pursue their own interests and become successful,” Kinser said.

Kinser’s daughter, Chelsea, 16, has been encouraged to pursue her interests and be strong and successful all her life. “It opens your eyes to a different type of world,” Chelsea said. “She has helped me to become independent and helped me to express my views and thoughts … It’s good having a strong feminist mother because then I’m going to grow up to be a strong feminist mother.”

The demands placed on mothers in today’s environment have forced women to be not only strong, but able to work many roles all at once, Kinser said. “We don’t really talk about women struggling with mothering because it’s too beautiful and pure,” Kinser said.

“We don’t talk about the struggle because then we have to admit that we’re asking unreasonable things of mothers to be full-time workers and full-time homemakers and full-time 24/7 childcare givers.”

Mothering in the Third Wave provides the needed discussion about the difficulties of motherhood in today’s age. “My book was really about creating a space where we could admit that mothering is hard, that feminist mothering is harder, that feminism doesn’t fix mothering and make it easy suddenly, and that that isn’t a weakness of feminism; it just is,” Kinser said.

Kinser’s book, Mothering in the Third Wave, can be purchased at www.yorku.ca/arm/demeterpress.