Supporting Women When We Don’t Agree

A few days ago I read an article by Natasha Walter in The Guardian about the divisions that have developed within the women’s movement and I found myself thinking about it long after I had finished reading, perhaps because it touched on something I have been noticing for a while but haven’t quite known what to do with.

Walter looks back at a time when women who disagreed on all sorts of things could still find enough common ground to work together. She doesn’t pretend that feminism was ever particularly harmonious because it wasn’t.

Women have always argued about politics, motherhood, sexuality, work, race, class and what equality should mean in practice and some of those disagreements have been fierce. What she questions is whether we are still as able to disagree without the disagreement becoming something more personal, where an opinion on one subject begins to tell us what sort of person someone is and whether she still belongs.

That interested me because there seems to be less room now for saying, “I don’t agree with you about this, although I still respect you”, particularly online, where there can be an expectation not only to care about an issue but to care in the right way, use the right language and make that position publicly known. Sometimes even saying nothing is treated as a statement.

I have been thinking about what that means in spaces created by and for women and particularly what it might mean for doulas.

We have never all agreed

I have been around the doula world since 2002 and doulas have certainly never agreed about everything.

We have debated home birth, hospital birth, induction, caesareans, epidurals, breastfeeding, formula feeding, freebirth, maternity policy and almost anything else connected with pregnancy and birth. I have sat in rooms with women who have completely changed my mind about something and with others who have made arguments that haven’t changed my mind at all.

That is part of being around other people.

The doula world I see on social media today sometimes feels different, not because people have opinions but because the range of subjects on which those opinions are publicly expressed has become much wider and the language around them can be remarkably certain.

Doulas talk about conflicts and events happening around the world, immigration and asylum, questions around sex and gender, inequality, discrimination, vaccination, political parties, climate change and many other subjects that have little specifically to do with being a doula.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. A doula is a whole person and she is as entitled as anyone else to care about what happens in the world and to speak about it.

The part I find more difficult is what happens when speaking begins to feel expected, when another doula’s silence about an issue is interpreted as evidence of what she believes or when disagreement on one subject starts being used to decide whether somebody can be considered a compassionate woman, a feminist or even a good doula.

I think there is a difference between having strong values of our own and expecting everyone around us to arrive at exactly the same conclusions.

The woman we support may not agree with us

I have supported many women over the years whose lives have looked nothing like mine.

I haven’t asked how they vote and I haven’t needed to know their views on religion, immigration or any number of other subjects before being able to support them. Some will undoubtedly have held beliefs I strongly disagree with and there will have been others whose beliefs I never discovered because they had absolutely nothing to do with why I was there.

When a woman asks a doula into her life, particularly around birth, she is allowing someone into an extraordinarily private space.

We may hear things she hasn’t told many other people. We may learn about her fears, her relationships, her previous experiences and the decisions she is struggling to make and for that relationship to work she needs to be able to speak without first working out which version of herself will be acceptable to us.

We understand this quite easily when talking about birth choices. A woman can choose a home birth or an elective caesarean. She can accept an induction or decline one. She can want every form of pain relief available or none at all.

Our own preferences are beside the point.

In fact, respecting autonomy only really asks something of us when somebody chooses differently from the way we would choose ourselves. Respecting a decision we agree with is relatively easy.

I wonder whether there is something in that which reaches beyond birth.

If we believe women should be trusted to make decisions about their bodies, their births and their lives, how much room are we prepared to give them to make up their own minds about the world?

That does not mean pretending that every disagreement is the same or that every belief is harmless. What feels like an abstract political question to one woman may concern another woman’s safety, rights or everyday experience and I am aware that there will be subjects which feel theoretical to me while being deeply personal to somebody else. Asking someone to remain open to an opinion she experiences as threatening is very different from asking two people to tolerate a disagreement about maternity policy or taxation.

Making room for difference doesn’t require anyone to accept hostility, discrimination or behaviour that causes harm.

It does leave us with the more ordinary disagreements though, including the uncomfortable ones, where two women have looked at something and genuinely reached different conclusions.

Can we stay in the room then?

Pregnant women are reading what we write

I wonder about this when I look at doula social media because we often talk as though we are speaking to one another, although the women who might one day contact us are reading too.

Imagine being pregnant and looking for a doula.

You might be anxious about birth or have had a difficult previous experience. Perhaps you don’t feel listened to by the people caring for you. You are trying to find someone you can trust enough to invite into your home, your family and eventually your birth room.

You find a doula who seems warm and knowledgeable, then begin scrolling through her posts and mixed among the information about birth are very strong statements about politics, war, gender, immigration or another difficult subject.

Perhaps you agree with every word and feel immediately at home.

Perhaps you don’t.

Would it change how freely you spoke to her if you knew she had publicly described people who hold your view in angry or dismissive terms? Would you tell her what you actually thought or would you begin editing yourself?

Different women will answer that differently and some may feel safer precisely because a doula has made her beliefs clear. I think it is still worth asking what our public communication tells women about how much difference we can tolerate.

When we say we want women to feel safe with us, surely part of that safety is being able to speak honestly without fearing that our warmth or respect will disappear when they say something we don’t agree with.

Social media is not a room full of women

One of the things I found most interesting in Walter’s article was what she discovered when she moved away from online arguments and spent time with women doing practical work in their communities.

They were dealing with violence, poverty, housing, childcare, employment, refugee support and the realities women were bringing through their doors. They hadn’t necessarily settled every disagreement between them before they started working together.

They were getting on with what needed doing.

There is something about meeting people properly that makes certainty about them harder.

If I only know someone through a statement she has made online, it is quite easy to decide what sort of person she is. When I have spent several days with her, heard about her children, laughed with her over lunch, watched her comfort somebody who became upset and discovered all the other parts of who she is, reducing her to one opinion becomes much more difficult.

We have met the rest of the woman.

Social media gives us an extraordinary ability to find people who think like us and that can be comforting, particularly when we have felt alone in our views or experiences. It can also mean that, without necessarily intending to, we gradually surround ourselves with versions of our own thinking until disagreement begins to feel unusual or even threatening.

Real relationships have never worked like that.

How much difference can we make room for?

We talk a great deal about diversity within birth work and rightly so. Who is represented matters, whose experiences are heard matters and the inequalities women experience within maternity services matter. Those inequalities aren’t differences of opinion and I don’t want to suggest that they are.

Alongside that, I think there also needs to be room for women within our community to think differently from one another without every disagreement becoming a question of whether somebody belongs.

That doesn’t mean every idea deserves equal weight and it doesn’t mean harmful behaviour should go unchallenged. There will be occasions when somebody says or does something that crosses a boundary and there will be relationships where the differences really are too great.

There are also many disagreements which don’t fall into that category.

Sometimes thoughtful women look at the same issue and reach different conclusions.

Sometimes compassionate women disagree.

Sometimes we hear another person’s argument, understand it perfectly well and still don’t change our minds.

I worry that we are becoming less comfortable with allowing that to happen.

What matters in a doula?

When I train doulas, I am interested in how they listen, how they respond when somebody makes a choice they wouldn’t make and whether they can recognise when their own experiences and beliefs are beginning to influence the support they give.

I want them to understand birth, physiology, maternity care, trauma, boundaries and the practicalities of supporting a family. I also want them to become comfortable with not being the person who knows what another woman should do.

That takes a surprising amount of self-reflection because doula work continually brings us up against ourselves.

A doula might have spent years advocating for physiological birth and find herself supporting a woman who wants a planned caesarean. She might feel strongly about breastfeeding and support a mother who has decided before the birth that she will formula feed. She might believe home birth is wonderful and support someone who feels safest in an obstetric unit.

She doesn’t have to stop believing what she believes.

She does need to recognise that those beliefs are hers.

That has always been an important part of doula support and perhaps the same principle has something to teach us about how we relate to one another too.

What kind of community are we creating?

The doula world has changed enormously during the years I have been part of it and many of those changes have made us better at what we do. We understand more about trauma, we talk more openly about inequality within maternity care and women who were not always listened to are being heard. Practices that once went unquestioned are being challenged.

I would not want to lose any of that.

I would also be sad if, in becoming better at recognising difference, we became less able to live alongside it.

I want there to be space in this work for the activist and the woman who isn’t an activist, for women of different faiths and none, for the doula who talks openly about politics and the doula who rarely mentions it. None of those things on their own tells me whether she can listen to a woman, respect her decisions and remain beside her when the choices being made are not her own.

Perhaps that is why Natasha Walter’s article stayed with me.

Away from the arguments, she found women still sitting together and getting things done. They hadn’t resolved every disagreement before they began and they didn’t need to.

Perhaps we don’t need to either.

There will always be lines we aren’t prepared to cross and views we feel strongly enough about to challenge. There should be room for that too.

There should also be room to discover that the woman beside us can be thoughtful, compassionate and committed to supporting women while seeing some parts of the world very differently from us.

For doulas there is an additional reason to think carefully about this because sooner or later the woman who sees the world differently may be the woman who asks us to support her.

Then perhaps the most important question is not whether she agrees with us.

It is whether she can still be entirely herself in our presence.

I hope the answer is yes.