Re: [Marxism] In Defense of Nadya Suleman (or, Hetero Breeding Running Amok)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Many commentators, including one person
> here, has made much out of her being
> the recipient of public aid, as if that
> should give public authorities the right
> to interfere with her reproductive decisions.
> A few moments of reflection should lead one
> to see the dangers of following that path,
> since that would give the state the power
> to interfere with the most personal and
> intimate decisions that people make
> concerning their lives.
> 
> Jim F.

I don't agree with David's characterization on "breeding" but he does 
have a point about how far we have come from the woman's liberation 
movement ideals of the 1970s. Back then women were looking for ways to 
adopt roles other than as mothers. Somewhere along the line that has 
become less important. A lot of this has to do with what they call 
"post-feminism". Here's an interesting piece from the atrocious Phyllis 
Chesler, the rabid Zionist and reactionary who was an important feminist 
thinker in the 1970s (and a Bard college grad a couple of years before me.)

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/06/10/walkers/

The mother-daughter wars
Rebecca Walker's denunciation of feminism and her mother Alice Walker 
has a lot to teach us about the choices women make and the daughters who 
judge them.

By Phyllis Chesler

Jun. 10, 2008 | Recently, London's Daily Mail ran an article based on an 
interview with writer Rebecca Walker, daughter of greatly beloved "Color 
Purple" author Alice Walker, about her relationship with her mother that 
saddened me enormously.

In effect, Rebecca accuses her mother of being a cold, selfish, 
child-hating feminist, who wanted nothing to do with Rebecca (or, 
really, with motherhood) while Rebecca was growing up, even less to do 
with her when Rebecca became pregnant, and then, nothing to do with 
Rebecca's son, who is Alice's only grandchild. According to Rebecca, her 
mother even cut her out of her will. Rebecca guesses that her "crime" 
was "daring to question her [mother's feminist] ideology."

Rebecca (who is, herself, one of the most prominent faces of third-wave 
feminism) describes a neglectful, overly permissive and mainly absent 
mother, and she describes a joint custody arrangement in which she spent 
two years with each parent -- in Rebecca's view, a "bizarre way of doing 
things." I agree. According to Rebecca, when she first called her mother 
to tell her that she was pregnant and that "she'd never been happier, 
[Alice] went very quiet. All she could say was that she was shocked. 
Then she asked me if I could check on her garden. I put the phone down 
and sobbed -- she had deliberately withheld her approval with the 
intention of hurting me."

Ah, Rebecca. My mother, a traditional stay-at-home mother, also withheld 
her approval when I told her I was pregnant. Hallmark greeting cards 
aside, this is not an uncommon dynamic between mothers and daughters, 
and it can get a lot worse: For example, mothers can savagely criticize 
their daughters' child-care practices, sue for custody of their 
grandchildren or testify against their daughters in court on behalf of 
ex-sons-in-law. They can also refuse to relate to their daughter and 
their grandchild.

Still, Rebecca's interview is too sad to bear, and although I, too, have 
written about my troubled relationship with my mother, I did not have 
the heart to do so in a major way while she was alive. I waited until 
after her death to do so -- and still I feared that I was both 
committing a sin and tempting fate. Exposing your mother's nakedness in 
public, breaking publicly with the only woman who ever gave birth to 
you, is a tabooed, ungrateful, desperate, perhaps dangerous and always 
complicated act.

The mythic Electra did so, and she is our model for matricide, at least 
psychologically. And fairy tales that feature cruel and evil stepmothers 
are, in reality, only history lessons in fanciful disguise. Many 
biological mothers died in childbirth, and their children were raised by 
strangers. Obviously, the experience was not always delightful. But 
also, in fairy tales, as in life, the very same mother, whether 
biological or adoptive, plays the role of both Fairy Godmother and Evil 
Stepmother.

In this interview, not only does Rebecca denounce her mother, she 
indicts the entire second-wave feminist movement for having betrayed 
women by minimizing or rejecting the importance of motherhood in women's 
lives.

Well, she definitely has a point, and it is one that I have made many 
times. Still, given her age, Rebecca could never have experienced how 
odiously motherhood was once forced upon women and how all other options 
were closed and what courage it took to reject the commandment to marry 
and mother.

While most second-wave feminist leaders and thinkers emphasized abortion 
rather than motherhood, job equity rather than child support, sexual 
violence rather than the importance of family building, there were many 
second-wave feminist leaders (I am one) who consistently valued and 
wrote extensively about motherhood. For example, it was my subject in 
three books ("Child: A Diary of Motherhood," "Mothers on Trial: The 
Battle for Children and Custody" and "Sacred Bond: The Legacy of Baby 
M"). And I was not alone. Second wavers who also wrestled with and 
embraced the themes of pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood and nonsexist 
child rearing include Judy Chicago, Nancy Chodorow, Betty Friedan, 
Joanne Haggerty, Jane Lazarre, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Adrienne Rich, 
Sarah Ruddick, Alice Kates Shulman, Merlin Stone -- and Alice Walker 
("In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens"). And this is not a comprehensive list.

Still, many of the most glamorized, iconic and sexually and 
intellectually radical of second-wave feminist leaders did not become 
mothers or had become mothers long before they became feminist leaders. 
Many had also suffered the drudgery, the poverty, the utter absence of 
support or recognition that often accompanies mothering, and finally, 
paradoxically, they had also suffered the "empty nest syndrome." Most 
second-wave feminists therefore either condemned or feared motherhood.

I know Alice, who is a world-class talent, and I have met Rebecca, a 
beautiful and talented woman in her own right. Assuming every line in 
Rebecca's interview is true -- and it may not be entirely objective -- I 
must remind anyone who's shocked by the interview, or saddened by it as 
I am, that a rift between a talented and successful mother and her 
talented and (differently) successful daughter is routine, not unusual.

I've written in the past about the mother-daughter relationship -- about 
mothers who envy, compete with and seek to psychologically punish, even 
destroy, their daughters and about daughters who reject and abandon 
their mothers and who rebel by preferring their fathers and boldly 
choosing whatever path their mother has not taken. A career mother's 
daughter might have five children and glory in stay-at-home motherhood; 
a stay-at-home mother's daughter might choose the cold, corporate 
career, etc. None of this is surprising. It exemplifies historical 
pendulum swings and the ways in which daughters attempt to differentiate 
themselves from mothers whose shadows loom large.

I've also written about how many well-known (white) women writers were 
routinely mistreated as children by "good enough" mothers, and how their 
mothers mocked and minimized their talents and adult success (Florence 
Nightingale, Olive Schreiner, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, 
Agnes Smedley -- I could go on).

Let me give just one example here. It is apt, since it describes the 
relationship between a trailblazing feminist and abolitionist mother and 
a daughter who not only became quite traditional but also broke with her 
mother (something Rebecca has not done -- something, in fact, Rebecca 
alleges Alice has done). However, like Rebecca, the daughter in this 
18th-century case publicly attacked her mother's views. Please be 
patient with all the details. They are important.

Frances (Fanny) Wright was born in Scotland in 1794 to wealthy parents. 
In 1825, Fanny established a commune in Tennessee to educate emancipated 
slaves. In 1828, she became the first nonpreacher woman to lecture in 
public in the United States. In 1830, Fanny quietly left America. Early 
in 1831, in Paris, she gave birth to her (and William S. Phiquepal 
D'Arusmont's) daughter, Sylva.

Fanny was the friend and confidante of the Marquis de Lafayette, Jeremy 
Bentham, Robert Owen -- and yet she married Phiquepal, who was 16 years 
her senior, in order to protect her child from "stigma." By 1836, Fanny 
Wright and William S. Phiquepal were seriously "estranged"; by 1838, 
Phiquepal took Sylva to Cincinnati, leaving Fanny alone and very ill in 
New York. Phiquepal then began his legal appropriation of Fanny's fortune.

In 1848, Fanny capitulated and granted Phiquepal her inheritance and 
property. He promptly announced that he and Sylva were "independent of 
her, and [can] do without her." He put Fanny on a small "allowance." In 
1850, Fanny filed for divorce in an attempt to recover some part of her 
estate. She claimed that Phiquepal had married her for her money and had 
"alienated their daughter's affections." Phiquepal retaliated with an 
open letter to the newspapers.

He wrote: "Your life was essentially an external life. You loved virtue 
deeply, but you loved grandeur and glory [even more]. Your husband and 
child ranked only as mere appendages to your personal existence. [I] 
imposed on [myself] the sacrifice of attending your lectures but could 
not impose it on [my] child. Sylva's education has been the main object 
of [my] life, while [you] have often interrupted that education by the 
life [you] led traveling from one land to another."

In 1851, Fanny was granted a divorce as an "abandoned" wife. Part of her 
fortune was restored to her. However, she lost Sylva forever.

Sylva never visited her mother in Fanny's last illness. And Sylva became 
an ardent Christian. In 1874, she testified before a congressional 
committee against female suffrage. "As the daughter of Frances Wright, 
whom the Female Suffragists are pleased to consider as having opened the 
door to their pretensions," Sylva begged the speaker and the members of 
the House committee "to shut it forever, from the strongest convictions 
that they can only bring misery and degradation upon the whole sex, and 
thereby wreck human happiness in America!"

Rebecca conflates feminist views of motherhood (as she perceives them to 
be) with her own personal experience of Alice's choice or inability to 
mother in a traditional way. In her interview, Rebecca admits that she 
prefers her white, Jewish father's second wife, Judy, who bore five 
children and found meaning as a stay-at-home or ever-available mother. 
Here is how Rebecca sounds about Judy: "I actually yearned for a 
traditional mother. My father's second wife, Judy, was a loving, 
maternal homemaker with five children she doted on. There was always 
food in the fridge and she did all the things my mother didn't."

Yes, and Alice did all the things that women like Judy don't want to do 
and can't do: Write great poems and novels, devote oneself to world 
work, crusade for human and women's rights. Rebecca: Trust me, a woman 
really cannot do both. The myth that we can is a dangerous one.

I can only imagine the pain of being an artist in thrall to her muse and 
an activist in service to the world's pain rejected for the more 
traditional mother/stepmother. Choosing the white over the black family 
-- come on, this has gotta hurt. It doesn't matter that this is a choice 
that Alice herself made long ago when she married Rebecca's white father.

The children of greatly talented public figures, as Alice surely is, are 
often sacrificed to the Great Work. The children can barely breathe in 
the shadow of -- usually it's the Great Man; in this case, it's the 
Great Woman. However, great men are allowed every excess and failure; 
great women are never forgiven for making a single mistake. Great men 
are allowed their female mistresses, male lovers, wife-secretaries, 
binges -- and they rarely see their children. Or they exploit and abuse 
them.

One is commanded to honor one's mother and father. But what if one's 
parents have been abusive, abandoning, treacherous? If so, it might be 
important to say so even if it means tearing this ancient religious 
guideline asunder.

Clearly, Rebecca wants to "talk" to her mother. She has just done so 
here: publicly, painfully and in a way that is bound to hurt. I wish 
that I could gentle these two women into repairing their breach. It is 
one that they will regret forever.

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