The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  The attitude was aggressively antisentimental, a caustic solvent to pieties about female destiny and child raising. The best-known summa of women’s liberation, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), described pregnancy as “the temporary deformation of the body of the individual for the sake of the species.” Firestone, a founding member of New York Redstockings, hoped for artificial wombs, “cybernation” that would free women from dangerous biology. Nor did she see things improving once the babies were born. Firestone made explicit what was a widely shared assumption in women’s liberation, that the mother–child bond damaged both parties: She titled one chapter “Down with Children.” Firestone’s polemic pushed to the outer reaches of matrophobia, but regardless, the point is that no one publicly distanced women’s liberation from these views. In other writings, too, childhood and femininity were crippled companions. “Wow! Listen, kids—liberation is just around the corner! No more moms oppressing you,” advised the menacingly titled Boston journal No More Fun and Games, with a scary stab at playful prose. The family was the template of deforming demands, turning mothers into oppressors of their own children. “ ‘Mother love’ can usually be translated as a woman finding her identity through another person. That’s a terrible burden on the child.” “I feel that the more responsibility any one person bears for raising a child, the more anger that person will have for the child,” one mother testified.92

  Such doleful views were offshoots of the New Left’s condemnation of the family as the incubator of individuals who would fit capitalist requirements. These conclusions were only explicit on the far left of women’s liberation, but the angle of vision was common. In Germany, the New Left animus was ferocious, and led to even more draconian experiments in communal living and parenting. In the United States, feminism’s dissent from motherhood was in some ways assimilable to the mainstream, providing a political rationale for an overall trend toward fewer children that had been going on since 1960. A radical vision of fewer children or no children meshed with the structural requirements of a society where more and more women were working full-time. Mainstream culture, too, inquired if motherhood was destiny. In 1970, Look magazine, a bellwether of the mass American psyche, published “Motherhood, Who Needs It,” an astonishingly cavalier dismissal that today, in our zealously pro-natal times, could hardly be discussed politely, so incendiary does the question seem.93

  “Most radical feminists were not anti-child, they simply ignored children,” recounts Rosalyn Baxandall, in New York women’s liberation at the time, who had a small son. And indeed, the tone seems to have differed from city to city: In Seattle and Cambridge, Massachusetts, for instance, there was organized pressure on universities to provide child care. But for women’s liberation as a whole, the child-care issue, while important in theory, seemed remote. True, both radicals and liberals voiced a demand for twenty-four-hour free child care. But it was a demand in name only, since munificent child care on this model existed nowhere in the world except for the Israeli kibbutzim and was never a realistic goal in a country that lacked strong traditions of public support for workingwomen and families.94

  More modest centers for children during the workday were possible at a time when the country was fascinated by ideas of early childhood development: The federally funded Project Head Start, created in 1965, remained a popular holdover from LBJ’s Great Society. Child-care centers, however, would not bring the dazzling revolution that the toughest radicals wanted. Firestone scorned even twenty-four-hour child care, because “day-care centers buy women off. They ease the immediate pressure without asking why that pressure is on women.” Mothers along with feminist fathers did organize parent-run facilities that in the radical spirit prided themselves on loose bohemian arrangements and lack of professional staff. They were determinedly separate from anything that might be construed as workplace-based child care. “As radicals we must understand that our goals for children are in conflict with those of the institutions—corporations and universities—from whom we will be demanding day care services.” These centers instilled feminist principles: Boys and girls were to use both the Housekeeping Corner and the Carpentry Corner, and if the girls were playing with dolls but the boys weren’t, a parent or two helpfully intervened. Yet their appeal was limited, since they demanded huge amounts of time from parents, more than people working eight-hour days could afford. They addressed the needs of students, artists, and the self-employed but not workingwomen who needed a standard routine. “The objection seemed to be that our nursery was non-institutional,” acknowledged Baxandall, whose son was in a feminist/left-wing center. “Emphasis was placed on free play rather than structured learning. One Black mother did join the group but left because she didn’t feel at ease with the other mothers who seemed like hippies to her.”95

  The most influential book on motherhood that came out of this construct of motherhood, Adrienne Rich’s beautiful Of Woman Born (1976), both pulled at and confirmed the association between maternity and women’s infirmities. Rich saw motherhood as the basis for all relations between human beings—mothers taught children what it was to be human. It was the mother’s love, not the father’s, that made the difference: The sensuous bond spun by suckling, holding, and soothing came from a maternal essence that was much superior to the paternal capacity to nurture. Rich lovingly evoked the exquisite details of a “continually changing dialogue between mother and child, crystallized in such moments, as when, hearing her child’s cry, she feels milk rush into her breasts … when the child’s mouth, caressing the nipple, creates waves of sensuality in the womb where it once lay; or when, smelling the breast even in sleep, the child starts to root and grope for the nipple.” But Rich believed that patriarchal institutions deformed this natural capacity. The crushing isolation of mothers; the overwhelming burdens of children’s dependencies; society’s denigration of maternal work; the devaluation of women’s longings independent of their identity as mothers: All these created anger and resentment that poisoned the generations.96

  Of Woman Born evoked a tone established early in the 1970s, motherhood bleeding into injury and defeat. “Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feeling toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance,” Rich quoted from her 1960 journal of her days with three young sons, close in age. “Their voices wear away at my nerves, their constant needs, above all their need for simplicity and patience, fill me with despair at my own failures, despair too at my fate, which is to serve a function for which I was not fitted.” She recorded desolation, monstrous antagonism, barely suppressed rage, which fueled debilitating depression. “And yet at other times I am melted with the sense of their helpless, charming and quite irresistible beauty.” Rich’s argument was not about motherhood itself, but the institution of motherhood as shaped by a society that put the entire burden of child rearing on women. Yet even so, this stunning poet of ordinary life could find little that was redemptive in the ordinary round of motherhood as women knew it in the here and now: meals given, confidences received, stories read, achievements praised. Motherhood in all its banality was the soil of tragedy.97

  Since the turn of the century, the hallmark of New Womanhood, one secret sign of belonging, was the determination to live a life different from the mother. The 1960s revolt threw daughters into a headlong flight, propelled by a matrophobia that much more intense. The disinterest in maternity turned into dislike when feminists looked at their own mothers. When women’s liberation investigated the scene of the patriarchal crime, it was mothers, not fathers, who were the chief suspects.

  Disdain for the mother and sometimes outright mother-hating were set pieces of feminist novels of the 1970s, mass-market books that won popular audiences. “My love for her and my hate for her are so bafflingly intertwined that I can hardly see her,” Erica Jong’s wisecracking heroine of the bestseller Fear of Flying (1973) explains of her mother. “The umbilical cord which connects us has never been cut so it has sickened and rotte
d and turned black.” Mothers were aggressive and emotionally stinting. “Any honor I received was tainted by a suspicion I saw in her eyes that the honor might not have been deserved,” complains the heroine in Sara Davidson’s lightly fictionalized memoir Loose Change (1977), about the intertwined lives of three footloose girls in Berkeley and New York in the 1960s.

  Injured, thwarted mothers injured and thwarted their own daughters. In the most extreme formulations, old mothers and new mothers were locked in a death-dealing embrace. “It was as if I had got a sense of waste with my mother’s milk,” confessed a New York woman, “a sense of despair that women never seem to move as if they were in their own element.” “I am angry at my mother for not mothering me,” acknowledged Susan Griffin in 1974. Writing with halts and jerks, as if she could barely prise out of herself what she was admitting, she turned on her own daughter. “There, it is said. I am angry—this is harder to say—at my daughter for always interrupting me. Generation after generation it is the same story. My daughter says to me one night, ‘You don’t like me because I always bother you.’ I carry this around with me, these words, a sorrow so deep to express it would be to fly apart.”98

  Matrophobia was a white woman’s sentiment; among African-American and (later) Chicanas/Latinas, such views were unthinkable. Alice Walker’s beautiful short essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens,” first published in 1974 in Ms., can be read at one level as a retort to white matrophobia, at another as laying a claim to an exemplary African-American feminism anchored by the mother–daughter bond. The essay tapped conventions of reverence for mothers and grandmothers that abound in black culture, but Walker’s achievement was to bundle up those tributes and make them into the daughters’ treasure.

  Walker rehearsed the litany of black women’s labors, honoring those who wore themselves out in poverty and overwork in the fields, the white kitchens and their own households, their creativity crushed by fatigue, worry, and the contempt piled on them—the “dear Mama” so embedded in black culture that one heard it later in hip-hop lyrics. But she pressed beyond, to reimagine the sainted figures as artists “who died with their real gifts stifled within them.” At the end of the line of creative spirits stood Walker’s own mother, a poor Southern farm woman who worked from dawn to dusk. “There was never a moment for her to sit down, undisturbed, to unravel her own private thoughts, never a time free from interruption.” Yet she prevailed. In a lyrical culmination, Walker described her mother’s beautiful garden as art. “A garden so brilliant with colors, so original in its design, so magnificent with life and creativity, that to this day people drive by our house in Georgia—perfect strangers and imperfect strangers—and ask to stand or walk among my mother’s art.” As a mother, she gave unstintingly—sewing every stitch of clothing the children wore, quilting their blankets, battling landlords—but she gave as an artist, too: The legacies were fused. There was no bitter daughter’s struggle for autonomy, no fight to claim from the world what the mother, being denied herself, would deny her. The daughter carries on where the mother left off—“in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.”99

  Later, Chicanas and Latinas picked up the valedictory strain in a “woman of color” feminism they distinguished from white women’s liberation. In a 1981 collection that brought these efforts to a public beyond the founding circles of militants, Cherrié Moraga spoke of her connection to her mother as the bridge connecting her feminism to solidarity with all Mexican-Americans. “My mother. On some very basic level, the woman cannot be shaken from the ground on which she walks.” Others chimed in.100 Ironically, these essays became icons for white feminists, as if praise for the mother could exist only at a safe remove, contained and idealized within black and Hispanic culture.

  Within African-American culture, this line of tributes to the mother was rarely challenged or significantly complicated until Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), which turned on the anguished choice of a slave mother to murder her baby daughter, and later A. J. Verdelle’s The Good Negress (1995), written in the voice of a wounded daughter who has escaped both an uncaring mother and a grandmother who cared too much.

  Young black women would have none of the romance of sisterhood. Despite radical feminists’ oft-stated antiracism, African-American militants remained suspicious of calls to sisterly solidarity.101 Across the board, black women were put off by radical feminism’s ideology of oppression, as they had not necessarily been by NOW’s emphasis on job discrimination.

  For one, it was difficult to honor white women’s claims to extreme subordination. Black women were at the bottom of every hierarchy of prestige and status. In the 1970s labor market, they earned less than anyone else: significantly less than white women, and less than half what white men earned. Most telling, even black female college graduates earned less than a white man with an eighth-grade education. For another, middle-class white women were historically the employers of ill-paid black female domestic workers, the Miss Anns who got to be ladies while black women scrubbed their toilets. Black women developed “no abiding admiration of white women as a competent, complete people,” Toni Morrison allowed in a stinging article on women’s liberation in 1971.102 Even though the postwar generation of educated black women was spared that fate, the low assessment of white women’s character was branded in the collective psyche.

  Nor was the vehement anti-male rhetoric appealing. Race politics gave no room for such denunciations, which easily ended up fodder for white condemnations of black men’s failures. The old mantra of African-American female uplift politics, “Lifting as we climb,” still held sub rosa. “Black women tended to want to raise their status and take the whole race with them,” explained Frances Beal. “White women tended to go in a separatist direction and damn the men.”103 In no black power group was women’s liberation welcome. Everywhere in the years following 1968, debate turned on the status of black manhood, with the model of the machismo revolutionary pushed to the fore. Even in the intellectual The Black Scholar, the talk was of guns, warriors, physical confrontation. “Will the real black man please stand up?” the journal’s editors requested in a special issue on African-American men. Racism was described as an emasculating force, which could be countered by an army of proud black men who were backed by women’s love and respect. “The black woman is, can be, the black man’s helper, an undying collaborator, standing up with him, beside her man,” advised this editorial confidently. But “we will not need a black women’s liberation movement.”104 The real black man would restore race pride to the errant young whose crimes were tearing up urban communities and lead the fight to turn the ghettos back into decent neighborhoods.

  From this perspective, feminism was “infiltration,” a white plot to divide black women from men in the name of a spurious female unity. There were family quarrels within black radical circles, rifts and tensions between men and women, but over all the gravitational pull of race solidarity prevailed. Ida Lewis, editor of Essence, declared unequivocally in 1970 that “the role of Black women is to continue the struggle in concert with Black men for the liberation and determination of Blacks.” Gerda Lerner ran into the common wisdom when she spoke in 1969 to a group of black women about sisterhood across the color line. Lerner, long committed to interracial politics, was dismayed by what she heard; she tartly reported to her friend Pauli Murray that she refused to believe “that all black women are: 1) happily submissive to the male 2) emancipated and in a much better position than white women 3) uninterested in this issue.”105 Lerner would likely have heard a party line aimed at a white woman. But Fran Beal, too, a black SNCC veteran who was more sympathetic to feminism than most, insisted that “at this time Black women are not resentful of the rise of the power of Black men. We welcome it.” Black women’s job was supporting men whom white society tried to emasculate: They were partners in the struggle for race pride, as they had been since the 1890s, or, for that matter, the 1830s.106

  Nonetheless, Beal cautioned—
with a black nationalist audience in mind—that men should not ignore women’s needs, blame them for emasculating them, or force them back into the kitchen. Eleanor Holmes Norton, appointed head of the New York City Human Rights Commission in 1970 and one of the most prominent black liberals in the country, similarly rejected automatic race solidarity. Norton called the task of black feminism “delicate”—an unusual word, because the left was deaf and blind to delicacy of any kind. Delicate because Norton wanted white feminists to acknowledge the simultaneous liberation of black women into economic independence and recognize their loneliness, their poverty, and their quarrels with men. Delicate because feminism must forget neither the damaging ways black men used their power over women nor the truths of men’s own injuries.

  Norton echoed the themes of black women in the 1890s—their unique relationship to modern womanhood, precisely because they stood so far outside conventional feminine roles; her convictions also resonated with Toni Morrison’s beautiful tribute that year to black women’s existential solitude and self-invention. Women’s alienation endowed them with the ability, Norton argued, to do something remarkable, along with men and children: “We who are black have a chance for something better.” The family romance of black politics blossomed in her imagination. Brothers and sisters, despite all the quarrels and held-in unhappiness, could lead the way. “We have a chance to pioneer in forging new relationships between men and women. We have a chance to make family life a liberating experience instead of the confining experience it more often has been. We have a chance to free woman and, with her, the rest of us.”107