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  Not Her Mother's Feminism

  Two things bother me about the Rebecca Walker essay (which last week stirred up a hot intergenerational discussion on a feminist listserv I'm on). First is her conflation of her mother and feminism. I'm sorry, but when did Alice Walker become the spokesperson for and avatar of the second wave? One older (in her 60s, I think) feminist writer on that listserv wrote that her version of feminism didn't posit motherhood as slavery; rather, her feminism meant trying to enlarge the world so that men and women didn't have to divide up the worlds of work and family because each would be involved in both. In that vision of feminism, men and women both would be important in children's lives--as would some social responsibility for children's futures, including early childhood education, flextime, and all the other things necessary to allow families to integrate work and childrearing (and, let me add, being human). That's the feminism that I learned and subscribe to. Walker, instead, personalizes her mother's mistakes (or her perception of those mistakes--hard to know whether memoirists are reliable narrators) as if Alice Walker's bad behavior stood for the mothering failures of the entire second wave. Um ... nope.

  Second is the way Walker elides her relationship with Meshell (note: new spelling). Of course her past life is public and all over the Internet; there's no way she can pretend she has only been heterosexual. But in this Daily Mail piece, her lesbian "phase" is elided from her neotraditionalist narrative, in which she is lost until she finds full life satisfaction from mommy + daddy = baby. Oy. (Note for later blog post: Today California begins marrying same-sex couples! Hurray for the Golden State!)

  My novice impression is that the younger Walker is melting down and has some institution in her future. But I don't know the woman, and who am I to psychologize without a license? Her mental state is none of my business. Her politics ... well, it isn't even a politics. It's just whining.

  Published Monday, June 16, 2008 3:07 PM by E.J. Graff

  Filed under: feminism, lesbian, family, motherhood, same-sex marriage

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.