Feminist Icon Alice Walker’s Daughter Talks about her Mother
This article is almost beyond belief (Daily Mail, 5/23/08). Alice Walker's daughter "tells all" about her life with her mother, or rather, as seems to have been the rule, without her. In the process she says a lot about the loony notions we've been sold over the past four decades about motherhood, mothers, fathers, children and families. The article is a year old, but well worth rereading.
According to Rebecca Walker, her mother's staunch feminism constituted an ideological barrier to loving and caring for her daughter in any way that a decent parent would recognize. Why Alice Walker had a child at all is a mystery. In the first place, she viewed motherhood as slavery, a hugely burdened word for an African-American.
Children, to Walker, were an impediment to her own self-actualization. That would have been fine if she hadn't had a child, but she did. And her attitude towards children didn't change when her daughter came into the world; the presence of her daughter in her life didn't move Walker to act much like a parent. From early childhood, Rebecca was on her own, afraid to make any demands on her mother's time or attention. If a problem arose, the girl solved it the best way she knew how. Her supervision was often left to neighbors not much older than Rebecca. She was given money to buy food, because Alice refused to cook for her daughter (more slavery, don't you know).
With a mother who didn't care much for her, it's no surprise that Rebecca became sexually active at the early age of 12, got pregnant and had an abortion (which she arranged herself) at 14. Traumatized by that event and brainwashed against motherhood by Alice, Rebecca was herself fearful of motherhood, but now reports that her son is a delight to her whom she treasures more than anything. Not so Alice; she's never set eyes on her only grandson.
Beyond specifics, Rebecca Walker's description of her mother is of an extreme narcisist, unable to care about anything or anyone but herself and her own greater glory. Even now, Alice seems to resent every success her daughter has as an infringement on her own notoriety. She sees Rebecca's achievements as casting a shadow on her limelight.
But Rebecca Walker is smart enough to understand that her own experiences, horrible as they were, are more than private matters. Her own life turns the old nostrum "the personal is political" against the very type of feminist who coined it. She knows that her childhood was a sort of exhibition of the feminist beliefs of the times, that her own suffering is a part of the suffering of our society.
Alice Walker conducted her life - and necessarily her daughter's life - ideologically. Motherhood enslaved women; it was part of men's evil plot against women's power and freedom; men cynically convinced women that they wanted to be mothers and derived personal satisfaction from motherhood; the family was part of the plot to keep women barefoot, pregnant and chained to the stove. As feminist Phyllis Chesler has said of the times, "most second-wave feminists therefore either condemned or feared motherhood."
In all of this there was no hint that women actually did derive some benefit from motherhood or that, apart from what men desired, wanted the personal, spiritual uplift having children can provide. Gone from the narrative of the times was any concept of children's wellbeing, as if all that mattered were women, their needs and their freedom. Children, it seemed, would take care of themselves, as indeed Rebecca Walker literally did. To a movement that thought little of children, not surprisingly, the fact that they need two hands-on parents was ignored. And in that too, Alice Walker reflected an era and an ethos.
Her daughter's memoir should be read for what it says about her life, but more importantly for what it says about where our society and culture have been these last 40 years. It's an experiment that has failed on many fronts, but if we can be as honest about our past as Rebecca Walker is about hers, there's hope for us yet.
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