...The transmission of female-specific forms of knowledge across generations seems to have come unstuck, across the board. But this isn’t just about parenting: in feminist politics, too, Susan Faludi has written about a “matricidal” tendency within the women’s movement. That is, instead of handing the baton on to younger generations, every wave of feminism rejects the achievements of those women who went before. The result is that, as Faludi puts it, “At the core of America’s most fruitful political movement resides a perpetual barrenness.”
Faludi attributes this phenomenon — which, she points out, wasn’t a feature in first-wave feminism — to the colonisation of the women’s movement by the individualistic imperatives of consumer capitalism. But in any case, the upshot is a structural problem for feminism and mothers alike. And it’s grounded in the tension between what’s needed for “personhood” in the modern liberal sense, and what’s most conducive to flourishing as a mother.
...We do so in a social sense, too — when it works. In
Mom Genes, her 2021 book on “the science of moms”, Abigail Tucker shows how the mothers most likely to flourish are those with good support networks — which often means having your own mother close at hand.
...This kind of presence isn’t just for moral support, but has a teaching dimension too. Caring confidently for little children is as much a skill as a matter of instinct. For most of human history, this has been passed on via informal knowledge transfer between generations of women, and within extended families.
...Somehow, passing the matriarchal baton has become hopelessly fraught. And it is within modern liberal feminism that the reason for this comes into focus. Faludi quotes an older feminist attendee at a NOW conference who grumbles: “I’m so sick of these young women treating us like a bunch of old bags who need to get out of the way.”...
...The feminist Victoria Smith denounces the wider political consequences of this in her book
Hags — notably in the political marginalisation of older women. It is, she suggests, powered in part by misogyny, but also by a liberal feminism that is, she tells me, “obsessed with youth”.
Inasmuch as women only really fit the Rousseauean “unencumbered” template while young and child-free, perhaps the obsession makes sense....
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