The first I actually heard about Rebecca Walker’s “Mommie Dearest”-style expose of the horrors of growing up as well-known feminist author Alice Walker’s daughter was on Michelle Malkin’s website–yeah, I admit, I periodically nip over there, mostly because she’s just so controversial that I just KNOW she must have SOMETHING to say that’ll really wow me…in an interesting and thought-provoking way, not like the time she talked about how she went and stalked that family whose kids were on some kind of government medical assistance, that did wow me, I admit, but not in the way I was LOOKING to get wowed…
It was a fairly short byte on her site–I read it, thought “Sad,” and didn’t give it much more thought til the issue started popping up on the feminist-oriented blogs I like to frequent. The latest entry into the fray I read was Feministing’s Courtney on Alternet: “Alice and Rebecca Walker Clash: Do Feminist Mothers Have to Choose Between Dreams and Diapers?” which included a link to Rebecca Walker’s original article. My own thoughts about my mother, a self-identified feminist, and her raising of me are complex enough that while I suspected in advance that I wouldn’t quite fall entirely in line with Rebecca Walker’s take on feminism specifically, I thought it’d be interesting and thought-provoking (I do spend a lot of time searching for those sensations, I admit) to see what another woman who perceived herself as having a somewhat poor experience being raised by a woman who strongly identified as a “feminist” had to say.
Not much, as it turns out. And she’s a bit old to be rebelling against Mommy’s beliefs because she’s pissed at her, so it isn’t really even excusable on those grounds.
I don’t want to turn this into a woe-is-me! rant about my childhood and adolescence. Really, all I want to say are two things–
1. Being neglected by your mother and then being cut off from her affections because you violated her ideological beliefs has nothing to do with the particular ideological beliefs you violated and everything to do with your relationship with your mother.
2. The fact that you personally are having fertility problems and love to be a stay-at-home mom has absolutely nothing to do with the philosophical validity or lack thereof of the idea that our society should not discriminate against members of it based upon their gender.
Honestly, I had a very similar experience with my mother when my first child was born–she really didn’t care about him at all (the second one, either). However, feminism was not to blame. She was. Not to put too fine a point upon it, but by that time in her life my mother was one fucked-up individual. If she’d been Wiccan, or Mormon, or Fundamentalist Christian, or a satanist, or a Ku Klux Klanner or a member of an anarchistic militia or even a Conservative Republican, she’d have been equally fucked-up. Sad but true.
There are reasons she was all fucked up and some of them even had to do with the opppression of women in general. None of them had to do with feminism. My mother was a very bright woman; she did understand what feminism actually meant and clearly recognized the rightness of that belief system. She was simply incapable of practicing it, crippled as she was by a haze of poorly suppressed rage at the course of her life, probably untreated bipolar disorder and substance abuse problems likely resulting from the same. She tried to seize all the feminist “advantages” she perceived and yet simultaneously tried to bank on the so-called “privileged” status of women in a patriarchy–recognizing the flawed nature of this attempt, she tried it all the same. She even got away with it to some extent, in her youth because she was very beautiful and charismatic, in her older age because she was scary as shit.
I don’t know what Alice Walker is truly like, as a mother or in any other aspect of her intimate personality. I sincerely doubt she ever matched the depths my mother sometimes sunk to and her daughter does not appear to be claiming this, which is a good thing–I’d still love The Color Purple even if she had, but it’d take a little of the joy out of it all the same. I’m sorry that she and her daughter have reached this unpleasant impasse of publicly aired outrage and I hope for both their sakes they pull out of it.
But it doesn’t really have anything to do with feminism.
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