HERE’S another piece by a self-celebrating feminist who boasts of neglecting her children and home. Katrin Bennhold, of London, left her two young daughters and husband while she went on a year-long fellowship at Harvard. While she was away, she discovered that mothers aren’t really necessary. Fathers can be mothers too!

As in so many of these self-congratulatory essays by the Revolutionary Mom, Bennhold glosses over the details. Interestingly, she barely mentions the nanny at all. The truth is, this other woman took Bennhold’s place too. Who was she? What kind of influence did she have? Did she put the children in front of the TV for much of the day (as is common with even highly-paid nannies) so while Bennhold was at Harvard her children were dredging the lower depths of daytime TV? We never learn the answer because Bennhold is busy telling us that sex roles are unnecessary. Nor do we find out who made dinner (you know, dinner, that relic of the oppressive past) or who did the laundry and paid the bills and bought the family clothes. Perhaps the ten-month-old dined on Chinese take-out while Mrs. Bennhold was in Cambridge. One wonders how her husband’s work fared during this stressful Harvard interlude and whether he himself ate Chinese take-out day after day or perhaps he spent the evenings at the gym while the nanny fed the children and put them to bed, after one more show.

Bennhold seems to have had weak maternal attachment to her children to begin with, but a year away cannot have helped her understand and relate to them better. A woman who is strongly attached to her children can discipline them with a simple look, while mothers who are estranged from them often find that no matter what they do, their children ignore them. In any event, Bennhold will probably pass her children on to long days at school soon. Perhaps one day she will look back and wonder whatever possessed her to leave her home when her children needed her (as a friend of mine who left her children to attend graduate school recently bemoaned) or maybe she is too shallow for such thoughts.

Also, Bennhold doesn’t mention how her husband dealt with the lack of physical interaction with his wife for much of the year or say how this affected their marriage. As with most feminists, she doesn’t seem too concerned about the quality of her marriage. Nor does she mention what exactly she learned at Harvard that she couldn’t have learned at the local library.

— Comments —

Bill R. writes:

You say it so well, Laura! Your poignant examples do more than simply say feminists are shallow and self-absorbed, they show exactly how they are. I imagine even her no-doubt properly meek and submissive feminist husband might eventually find enough manhood to resent those Chinese take-out dinners but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Even if he does he’ll probably ascribe the resentment solely to some flaw in himself.

And how right you are that that precious Harvard fellowship will mean nothing to those children in the years to come. What memories can they ever possibly have of it? On the other hand, they might very well and for a very long time remember the mother that was never there, for I’m sure after this one she’ll find herself another “fellowship” of one kind or another to skip off to, and then another and another. This is the kind of woman who never really comes home, let alone to stay, doesn’t know how, and can never hope to learn because she’s incapable of recognizing it as a valuable thing to do, and they sure as hell won’t be trying to teach it to her at Harvard.

If I have any slight criticism at all of your post it’s that in the title you didn’t put “mother” in quotation marks. (I’m being facetious, of course; it’s for the reader to add those marks; Mrs. Bennhold could erase them but somehow I don’t think she will. She’d have to know they were there for starters.)

 Laura writes:

Thank you.

I doubt anyone at Harvard questioned her choices and I doubt anyone looking over applicants for the Nieman Fellowship, which she won, thought maybe it’s immoral to take a mother away from her children. They probably thought it was neat and she may even have been favored because she had young children. By the way, I know people (including my husband before we were married) who’ve been on Nieman Fellowships. They are basically glorified academic vacations.

Mary writes:

The final frontier of the deconstruction/rebuilding of society can be found in the negation of the value of blood ties. This story illustrates but one way this idea is being promoted.

Several trends – absent mothers, same-sex “marriage,” easy divorce, and single parenthood, among them – conspire to suggest that our civilization will be able to sustain itself even as adults repeatedly break the primary bonds of human society. These trends promote the radical idea that in the mad pursuit of personal happiness adults will be able to reinvent themselves, by opting out of marital commitments and taking part in lifestyles contrary to the natural order, with impunity; and that the children produced will not suffer but actually thrive in spite of being denied the ideal family setting: one male natural parent and one female natural parent.

It used to be considered a tragedy if a child lost a parent due to untimely death, or was from a broken family, or was adopted, or had to have a step parent for one reason or another. One could make the best of a bad situation but it was universally agreed that these children were at a disadvantage. The attempt today is to deny that there is any such disadvantage to being raised with only one natural parent, or with no natural parents at all; to undervalue or even deny that the essential bonds between parents and children are superior and uniquely meaningful (and therefore worthy of government support/protection).

Any clear-thinking person can see that this idea puts the desires of the adults involved above the welfare of the children, for to support this radical idea is to say: every child doesn’t deserve an optimal start in life, a start which, beyond wealth, privilege, position, education, etc. makes the most important contribution to the stability of families, families in which children can best prosper. The bond formed between a man and a woman in marriage, and the one formed between parents and the children produced by that union, cannot be manufactured. The eroding of this simple truth started decades ago, found in Sesame Street and Barney episodes during which songs were sung about how families come in all forms and all were special and equally good. Soft propaganda if you will.

I would tell Ms. Bennhold the same thing I told a male family member who stated his support for lesbian-run families: you undervalue, you actually deny, your place in your children’s lives. It shows a strange lack of parental confidence. Ms. Bennhold may have chosen a perfect nanny, a superwoman who never turned on the TV and cooked fabulous healthy meals for both husband and children. But the point is, Ms. Bennhold, that you weren’t there for your family. You simply weren’t there.

Rita Jane writes:

We’re unfortunately childless, so I can’t comment on that. But my husband and I were forced into a long distance relationship for six months before our wedding and another 12 months after. We both agree it was the hardest, most miserable thing we ever went through, and we were one state, not an entire ocean, apart! I cannot imagine undergoing such a separation from him again for anything but the most dire necessity. Do these people have no love for each other?

Joe A. writes:

You wrote:

Also, Bennhold doesn’t mention how her husband dealt with the lack of physical interaction with his wife for much of the year or whether this affected their marriage.

God bless you for your good old-fashioned quaintness, Laura. Hubby no doubt agreed to this stunt precisely to remove Wifey for an extended period. No doubt Nanny went unremarked for the obvious reason Nanny was everything Wifey was not.

Ahem.

JULY 14, 2013

“Not a Nihilist” writes:

Regarding the mother who spent a year at Harvard, if those children had spent a year living in moderate poverty, liberals would see it as a problem. If the family had been receiving foodstamps and had those benefits reduced for a year, even by a tiny amount, liberals would see it as a problem. If they had spent a year going to a school that didn’t have unionized teachers, liberals would see it as a problem. If the children were teenagers and had to send a year without taxpayer funded contraception in their schools, liberals would see it as a problem. If one of the children was “transgender” and had to go a year without government funded sex-change operation, liberals would see that as a problem.

But if those children have to spend a year without their mother or her love, to liberals that is not a problem. To them it is something to celebrate.

It’s hard to think of anything that reveals so clearly how distorted the priorities of liberals are. They ignore or actively work against the deepest, most fundamental relationships in life while making pet causes out of things of much lesser importance.

They have to do this because the moral universe of liberalism places two concepts above all others, equality and autonomy. These ideas say that a mother must have just as many opportunities to make her own independent choices and travel the world as a childless, unmarried man would. If she didn’t, then that would limit her autonomy and be a source of sexist inequality, and to them that is the worst thing in the entire world. Therefore, the idea that children benefit from having their mother around to love them cannot be allowed to matter, and indeed has to actively denigrated.

The problem is that the deepest relationships in life, the love between parent and child or husband and wife, are based on bonds of sentiment that form without choice and cannot be controlled by choice. (A nanny is not interchangeable with a mother, a single mom’s new boyfriend cannot replace a father.) Nor are these bonds sustained by choice, but by restrictions upon choice, by duty and devotion. But they can be damaged by bad, selfish choices. They therefore cannot be reconciled with unlimited autonomy.

What this shows is that a moral system that puts equality and autonomy over all other concerns is a totally unsuitable basis for society. It is morally impoverished and blind to the most important facts of human life, blind to how the soul works. Autonomy has to adapt itself to the limits set by human nature. Our culture and political policies should encourage that. Once upon a time they did.

 Laura writes:

Thank you.

Very well said.

Diana writes:

Regarding the scandalously selfish choice of the Harvard mother and her ability to abandon her husband, I do have to add that many men today are wimps. He very likely encouraged her. I’d say that many men today are active feminists at least in behavior if not in their minds. When I was in school, I longed for a man who would be a “real man” and seek to provide and protect a wife, but most men I knew openly stated their interest in aggressive, competitive, hyper-achieving, working women. Many women I knew used those career achievements to impress men! And of course it goes the other way, with even traditional men having to pretend to want women like that so they don’t seem “sexist” or offend anyone or go without dates. This woman and her husband were equally selfish, since her husband clearly did not stand up for his marriage or children. So I suppose they achieved their goal of equality.

Marcy K. writes:

I was dusting the shelves on my dresser mirror the other day while my daughter was napping. I came across a small card that I had slid between the mirror and shelf. It was from the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation with a quote on it by Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty. I can’t remember exactly how I got it, but I am guessing it was from a mailing I received awhile ago, and had forgotten about it until now. I stopped from my dusting and read it. I was so moved by the words on the importance of motherhood. Then I instantly thought of Ms. Bennhold who went off to Harvard for a year leaving behind 2 small children. I wondered if maybe she would not have left her family if she had read the quote. Here is what it said:

The Most Important Person on earth is a mother. She cannot claim the honor of having built Notre Dame Cathedral. She need not. She has built something more magnificent than any cathedral- a dwelling for an immortal soul, the tiny perfection of her baby’s body…The angels have not been blessed with such a grace. They cannot share in God’s creative miracle to bring new saints to Heaven. Only a human mother can. Mothers are closer to God the Creator than any other creature; God joins forces with mothers in performing this act of creation…What on God’s good earth is more glorious than this: to be a mother?

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