JANET BENTON in The New York Times, of all places, writes a moving account of the maternal neglect she suffered when her mother became a feminist. Benton doesn’t disavow feminism — she points out that her homemaking grandmother “flew into rages” — but she recognizes the great misery feminism causes and nicely describes why the presence of a woman in the kitchen goes beyond mere food. She writes:

For my mother, the kitchen felt like a trap. When the women’s movement blossomed in the late 1960s, she was ready. She vanquished the spirit of homemaking the way Virginia Woolf had killed her “Angel in the House.”

And then a tidal wave of rage, disappointment and raw desire overtook her. I saw it in her vehemence toward my father and in the raucous consciousness-raising groups that met in our living room. I saw it in the changed contents of our dinner plates: a dried-out chicken leg, a potato collapsed inward from overbaking.

When my mother banged out work correspondence on an electric typewriter way past bedtime, my needs had no standing. On other nights I would lie awake for hours, unable to sleep until she came home at midnight.

Complaining got me nowhere. My mother was an unstoppable force, powerful, beautiful and finally happy. As her days and nights expanded to include solo shows, romance and the founding of feminist organizations, I could see in her radiant face and laughter that she was fulfilling her potential. Her red hair grew ever upward, a hood of curls that shouted out her freedom.

This is a good description of the energizing nature of feminism. It’s a raw and dazzling form of energy, as is all revolutionary fervor. It shoots across the sky of a woman’s life and falls to the ground. Compare it to the “boredom” of homemaking, which is an invisible anchor that holds all in place.

— Comments —

Sheila C. writes:

How sad that Ms. Benton still claims pride in her mother’s selfish search for “fulfillment” at the expense of her own children.  One sees this so often – and not all the women wear the feminist label.  There was a woman at our former church – very friendly and helpful to me and a good, informal spiritual adviser – whose daughter used to babysit for our older son.  Her mother decided, when her daughter was perhaps 15, that she wanted to go to seminary.  I remember the young girl bitterly speaking about how her mother was never home, never cooked dinner, and so forth.  I can’t speak to the actual details of what happened, but in that case the actual “facts” were irrelevant.  That daughter felt uncared for and abandoned, and she got into all sorts of trouble in high school.  It made me look far more carefully at those church women who are so caring and helpful and always available – but at what cost to their family?  Surely that should be their primary concern and duty.  That’s one of the reasons I loathe reading of one of the left’s “saints” – Aung Kyi, who abandoned her husband and two sons in England to spend years under house arrest in her native Burma, for the sake of her “people.”  Her two sons didn’t count – after all, they weren’t suffering under military dictatorship.  She had more important things to do than be a mere mother.

Why should it be so necessary to remind people that children need stability, routine, dependability, and daily care?  Why does the myth of “quality time” endure?  I spent the summer after my sophomore year in college as a nanny to a very wealthy family in Boston.  The mother ended up leaving more and more of her two young sons’ care to me . . . but she always went in to say goodnight.  Then came the evening when the older boy (her clear favorite) wanted me to tuck him in and say goodnight.  After all, I was the one who dressed and bathed and fed him and spent all day with him – the daily grind of childcare that so many women scorn.  No, it’s not always fun and it can certainly grow repetitive and boring, but it’s essential to a child’s emotional well-being.  I also recall a young British girl for whom I was a nanny for a year in Moscow (her parents were divorced and her father had custody).  She used to ask me why I loved her, when none of her other nannies ever had.  She also shared with me that she had two favorite beds in the world – one at her mother’s apartment, and the one I made for her in Moscow.  Obviously, she wasn’t speaking of the specific quality of the blankets or the particular laundry detergent I used.  She felt safe and secure and cared for in that bed, because I ensured the sheets were clean and the bed was made and her favorite stuffed animal was waiting there for her.  That bed was where I read her a story and kissed her good night and tucked her in.  It was a perfect symbol of my physical care for her – and that physical care was a tangible demonstration of the emotional care I gave her, which she was so sorely lacking.

I’m far from a perfect mother, and my children (the 21-year-old in particular) still accuse me of numerous crimes against them.  However, my older son also remembers that I taught him to ride a bike, or I took him on this or that adventure, and he still remembers the words to some of the lullabies I used to sing to him.  Even amidst our “hostilities,” he knows I love him – and what he remembers is not me saying the words (although I certainly did) or by physical affection (he was never short on hugs), but the way I showed it in his daily care.

My husband wasn’t as attuned to this when our boys were young, although they never doubted their father’s love.  What he has done, now they’re older, is plan and take trips (thus far one with each) planned specifically for each boy, to destinations corresponding with their particular interests.  The long driving hours and even the restaurant meals have proven excellent times for father-son conversations (and I certainly appreciated the break from cooking and parenting).  Although they certainly enjoyed the locales they visited, what mattered more was the time spent, one on one, with their father.

Mary writes:

This is a very touching and heartbreaking piece; I hope it does some good. I won’t get into the conclusions the writer draws about her mother ultimately being an inspiration and how home-cooked meals would have come at the cost of her mother’s misery; in reality this can’t be distilled down to family meals or their absence. It’s much deeper than that. It’s about self-sacrifice as the essence of true parental devotion. This piece reminds me of a book I read years ago when I was struggling to make sense of the world as a young woman. It is called What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman, written by Danielle Crittenden. It was the first time I read anything that gave voice to what has really been lost because of feminism, and in part it describes how many women with homes and children were encouraging their daughters to delay or bypass their homes and children of their own in favor of career; and what it cost those daughters.

I think it’s important to examine some of the ways ground was made fertile for the revolution that feminism became in the ’60s. It didn’t just happen. The beautiful usefulness of motherhood, the duty of it, and the satisfaction it provided, was slowly constricted through the ’50s due to many factors, including the onset of controllable family size through contraception; childbirth treated as modern science; the death of breastfeeding; new convenience foods and time-saving appliances; television as babysitter; and, again through television, a preoccupation with glamour and Hollywood, which helped make the performance of household work, home-sewn clothes, etc. appear to be somehow demeaning and lowly. In reading an article about our area in the ’30s and ’40s it was astonishing to see how many neighborhood households had big gardens and chickens in the yard. A way of life for the most part seemed to die in the ’50s with the New Frontier.

When I had my first baby, some wise person who knew I was breastfeeding wrote in a card: “You will never feel so useful”, and that person was right: right in the sense that I did feel useful in a very unique and profound way, which was unexpected; but also right that being useful is a fundamental good which leads to happiness and satisfaction almost mysteriously. My mother’s description of childbirth in the ’50s/’60s made me, as an expectant mother, laugh in horror: before delivering, a woman could commonly expect to be shaved, receive an enema and then be knocked out cold. When you awoke you received a pill to dry up your breasts, as it was assumed you had no interest in nursing your baby (my mother nursed for 3 months and was considered some kind of renegade). The “miracle” of formula, the ultimate convenience food, was pushed as best for baby and had mothers boiling bottles on the stove day and night. Some Catholic mothers, without the benefit of extended infertility through nursing, had babies literally every year, leading to the prevalence of “Irish twins” (two babies born in the same year). Motherhood was subjected to modern science, rather than the wisdom of the ages, from the day one. Homemaking was subjected to the same treatment.

No doubt there were diabolical forces at work, and revolutionaries behind the scenes moving things along. But the dissatisfaction of women who no longer felt needed and useful as mothers and homemakers for perhaps the first time in history allowed feminism the opening it needed. With feminism they felt useful again. It was thrilling, the opposite of mundane. It lead to extreme feminists like this writer’s mother and Shulie Firestone, who I have concluded was driven mad because she became estranged to an unsustainable degree from the understanding of and belief in the human bonds formed in the natural family, bonds which become the glue that holds mankind together, has done since the dawn of time. The latest movements to deny the supremacy of the natural family – homosexual marriage, surrogacy etc. – are the natural legacy of these feminists. One might ironically call these movements their “children”.

Diana writes:

This post made me think of an obit I read in the NY Times some years ago. It was about a female judge who had just died. First woman to do this, first woman to do that, first woman to do the other thing, rah rah rah. Then came the part where the obit listed survivors: she left one daughter, and nine grandchildren.

Sometimes you can figure things out, you know?

Regarding the article by Janet Benton, I found it moving also but she lost me when she wrote this: ““But the pride she has brought me, and the self-respect and assertiveness she has worked so hard to teach me, have proved far more nutritive than hundreds of perfectly cooked meals.”

Do you believe her? I do not. I also wonder what happened to her brother and to her father.

Laura writes:

Benton’s piece never would have been published in The Times — never — if she had not made some obligatory obeisance to the feminist gods. If she had taken her experience to its logical conclusion and stated that feminism is pitted against the welfare of children, the piece would have been trashed. If she had taken it to its logical conclusion and said that many women have actually been encouraged and even forced into neglecting their children through the marginalizing of the male provider, the piece would have been trashed.

And that’s the beauty of journalism like this.

It’s essential for the Revolution to acknowledge the ways it which it destroys people’s lives — and then say it is all necessary because the alternative (a grandmother who “flew into rages”) is much worse.

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