Many of us often say that Feminists have ‘Daddy Issues’ but Stacy McCain may, I think, be on to something here:
…Having spent more than a year researching radical feminism [BOB: How he’s kept his Sanity while doing so, I’ll never know], however, I always point out that many feminists have even worse “Mommy issues.”
Bob in his office.
You discern this, for example, in Andrea Dworkin’s account of her own youth. She didn’t much seem to mind her father, who worked very hard to support their family, but expressed contempt for her mother. It is easy to find similar expressions of anti-maternal resentments in the autobiographical writings of other feminists. Either the mother is presented as a pathetic figure — weak, ineffective, dominated or brutalized by the father — or else the mother is domineering and manipulative, trying to force her rebellious daughter to comply with a socially approved gender role that the young feminist rejects. From the daughter’s perspective, the mother’s life is unworthy. She rejects her mother as role model, and this refusal to emulate her mother becomes the emotional fuel of the daughter’s feminist politics.
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Grant that there are mothers who are also feminists. Yet the more closely you pay attention to the feminist movement, the more you notice how this anti-maternal sentiment provides so much of the energy of activists….
Intriguing.
Please do take the time to click here and read Stacy’s full post.
