BJH writes:

Having read your blog, I am going to go out and find the biggest, hairy-leggiest feminazi I can and give her a big old hug. I am then going to fall to my knees and thank the “higher power” that I have grown up during a time when antiquated views like yours are in the minority.

I lost my mother to cancer when I was 17. I think about her every day. I miss her smell, her touch, her femininity. I do not, however, miss her strength, because it lives in me and my siblings.

At the height of her career my mother led over 100 people in cutting-edge medical research. Seeing her live her life as a person, not just a house servant, forged in me the certainty that I could, and indeed should, share my talents with the greater family of society, not just my nuclear one at home. I also never doubted that I too could be a great mother.

When I read views like yours, it reinforces my gratitude that my feminine role model was a fully human teacher and not just a slave.

Laura writes:

Thank you for writing. I am saddened by your mother’s early death. I am sure she was a wonderful woman.

Your remarks typify the narcissism and arrogance of feminism. You imply I am not “fully human” and that all the women throughout history who devoted their lives to home and family, including probably your grandmothers and great-great grandmothers, were nothing but slaves. But slaves to whom? Slaves to our husbands? Slaves to our children? Slaves to the people we love and who love us in return?

But everyone in this sense is a slave. We all have bosses and obligations. I don’t see how your mother, with all the immense responsibilities of directing 100 employees, was less of a slave than I am.

Perhaps you mean your great-great grandmothers were slaves because they did not earn their own money.  While it’s true they didn’t have that separate income and could not so easily go off and leave their families or live on their own, they were essentially paid by their husbands. How is being paid by a husband less honorable than being paid by an impersonal entity, such as a corporation or the government?

Or perhaps you mean we are slaves because unlike your mother we do not use our minds in our work, just like cotton-pickers or farm hands. That would be an interesting point, but I just don’t believe it’s true. Raising children is mentally challenging. Sharing in a husband’s life and work is intellectually stimulating. Running a home and managing all its needs is like running a small hotel. When it is entirely in your hands, this is challenging and interesting work. Besides, there are always a few free hours to read and think.

By the way, you might notice that when the world contained more slaves such as me, there was more order and civility, more pleasure and leisure time, less vulgarity and immorality. Children were much less stupid. Could the two things be connected? Could the loss of so many slaves be related to the decline of our culture? I believe it is. But of course your mother is not responsible for this immense cultural change. I would not point to your mother and say, “Aha! Here is an evil woman because she had a successful career.” But, I would say that your mother was evil if if she claimed that homemakers are not “fully human” and are slaves, rather than absolutely essential to civilization.

When you fall on your knees to thank your “higher power,” I hope you will thank him for all the women and men who have made civilization possible. Without them, you would live in a jungle. You are resting on their laurels. 

                                                          — End of Entry —

Mrs. Cote writes:

I related so much to some of the sentiment expressed in this post most especially to these sentences:

“I lost my mother to cancer when I was 17. I think about her every day. I miss her smell, her touch, her femininity. I do not, however, miss her strength, because it lives in me and my siblings.”

I also lost my mother to cancer just two and a half years ago. Like many Latina women, she was Puerto Rican, she always expressed her femininity fearlessly even while working as a caseworker and parole officer for juvenile delinquents. She was tough as nails in her high heels and perfume. From a height of five feet one inch she would make teenage gang members over six feet tall cower with a glance but at the same time they quickly learned she was also not afraid to speak just as fiercely for them in the courts. She fought to get them what they needed to get out from horrible family situations or into school or locked up as the situation required. She was a well educated woman, a Masters in Social Work plus a few years of law school, and she expected that her daughters would be well educated too, which we are.

However, I saw from the inside what all this toughness cost her. She was crushed by divorce and depended on me to help raise my younger sister from the time I was ten. Even before the divorce I never saw her as someone who could relax and let go. I saw the hurt in my father that she never trusted him enough to do that. Much later she remarried someone that she admitted to me she didn’t love so he couldn’t hurt her. Circumstances in that marriage were tragic in a much quieter way than her explosive divorce but I felt her unhappiness. I can’t help thinking the stress she lived under believing she had to be so strong for everyone greatly contributed to her rapid decline from a supposedly very curable cancer. She carried the weight of her family, husband and all.

When I met the man I married I informed him early on that I believed in traditional roles in a marriage. It is not my slavery to him but rather my being able to rely on him, to be able to relax in his arms, and not try to carry the world by myself. He knows I am strong, and smart, and capable. He also knows when to take over to I can let go. My mom actually liked him a lot. We have a marriage quite unlike either of hers but she respected that we are happy together. I think the whole point of this blog is that being a strong, intelligent woman in no way contradicts living in a traditional role. It is because we are practical enough about human needs and limitations that we choose it freely. If we have chosen it it freely how can anyone call it slavery?

Mike writes:

I find a full reply to her insult in your Greetings page.

 BJH is judging you by her narrow, bigoted, postmodern view of womanhood.  Your proactive response has refuted that claim on the basis of its nihilism and subjectivity.  I see no reason to indulge this bitter walking cliché until she offers an at least somewhat original criticism.  All I see here is a damaged woman with a victim complex riding on the accomplishments of her mother.

Fitzgerald writes:

Love your final rejoinder… “You are resting on their laurels.” Exactly. 

Women such as these, and the growing class of chattering feminized men providing cover for them, lack historical and cultural knowledge. They have no sense of the advantages and stature granted to women in the West even before the progressive era. They are, to steal a phrase from Alisdair MacIntyre, beating each other with the severed arms of statues created in a bygone era. 

Such, says MacIntyre, is the present state of moral argument. Some hidden catastrophe has undermined moral reasoning, so that all we have now are words like “good” and “moral” and “useful” ripped from their contexts, surviving only as relics. And so we live like cavemen in a science-fiction future, using tools fashioned for complex moral discourse as crude weapons to carry on our Stone-Age moral battles—like people after a nuclear war using the “severed arms of statues” as clubs. 

Fairness, equality, etc., moral terminology once rooted in tradition and history, disconnected from their source, are now used as so many clubs to beat the other, men and women, down for power and position. The playing out of feminism, now metastasized throughout Western society, is more and more beginning to look like the “Lord of The Flies.”

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