The Unnecessary Mother
November 10, 2010
HOW DOES one leap from the observation that women sometimes use their children as status symbols and indulge grandiose expectations of their own nurturing abilities to the conclusion that mothering is unnecessary? Leave it to a feminist warhorse like Erica Jong to make this connection, assuring us that communal child-rearing, the sort of thing found in primitive African villages or Stalinist daycare centers, is superior to the atmosphere of the Western nuclear family. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, she says:
The first wave of feminists, in the 19th century, dreamed of communal kitchens and nurseries. A hundred years later, the closest we have come to those amenities are fast-food franchises that make our children obese and impoverished immigrant nannies who help to raise our kids while their own kids are left at home with grandparents. Our foremothers might be appalled by how little we have transformed the world of motherhood.
Dreamed of communal kitchens and nurseries? The number of women who have dreamed of such atrocities is infinitesimally small. No one who experienced a communal kitchen in Soviet Russia would have dared to call it an “amenity” except in contrast to no kichen at all.
Jong is right, however, that mothers today often engineer their children. Women are forced to acquire a masculine way of thinking in their pre-mothering years. Through no fault of their own, they bring this intense rationality and the missionary spirit of the efficiency expert to the free-flowing, serendipitous art of mothering. This phenomenon is not due to the overvaluing of motherhood, but to the underestimation of it.
— Comments —
Lisa writes:
Even the toys in Toy Story 3 knew the daycare center was not a good place to be.
Lisa writes:
“Jong is right, however, that mothers today often engineer their children. Women are forced to acquire a masculine way of thinking in their pre-mothering years. Through no fault of their own, they bring this intense rationality and the missionary spirit of efficiency expert to the free-flowing, serendipitous art of mothering. This phenomenon is not due to the overvaluing of motherhood, but to the underestimation of it.”
This is so very true. After a brief pre-motherhood stint in a military environment on top of an already masculinizing feminized upbringing, I realized one day that I was trying to “manage” my young children instead of “nurture” them.
Laura writes:
Motherhood can never be mastered in the way a job or career can. It is a radical culture shock to go from full-bore career to motherhood. It is such a jolt to the system that some women immediately flee, as if their very lives depended on it. They give up before they have ever really given domesticity a chance. It’s not their fault in many ways. They are totally unprepared.
Josh F. writes:
It is the inherent self-refuting logic of devout dykism (masculine “feminism” aka radical autonomy) in matters of homosexual adoption/IVF to render the “unnecessary mother.”
Devout Dykism asserts absolute male/female equality. So much so, that two male homosexuals adopting a child make the mother “unnecessary.” Likewise, two devout dykes, unrepentant rejectors of the mother’s procreative force, make way like “masculine” females and make mother “unnecessary.”
When a radical homosexual says all a child needs is a “loving environment,” he is really just asserting the “truth” of the “unnecessary mother.”
