Sociology journal

I find it interesting that there are so many sub-categories of feminism and that they all seem to have individual disparities in what they promote to be acceptable. There are types of feminism that held beliefs about maternity that seemed to be completely at ends with each other. Some types believed that a woman should value her maternity and express it as a large part of herself. Others saw emphasis on a woman’s maternity as another variety of oppression by the patriarchy.
A local news story has some relation to this topic. A woman was sentenced for the abuse and murder of her young autistic son. Both the father and the Judge became very emotional during the sentencing. The Judge even expressed his disapproval using the following words, “Your role in his life was not only to bring him into the world, but to protect and to nurture him. And I saw more than a callous indifference toward that goal.”
The Judge’s statement expresses the assumption that by giving birth to a child, a woman is automatically supposed to be a good mother. Society seems to express this stereotype frequently. A woman just by virtue of being a woman is expected to be nurturing and caring when this is not often the case. I’m willing to bet that if it had been the boy’s father who had perpetrated the abuse, then no one would have made any statements similar to those the judge made. On the contrary, it is often seen as unexceptional when a man abuses his own children. People are so accustomed to the idea that women are caregivers and men are aggressors that they generally write off a man abusing his children as being a typical, violent male response. However, a woman abusing her children is seen as shocking and wholly unnatural.