We continue to believe in a “special and exclusive bond between women and children” while “the father-infant pair” is seen as fragile and less substantial, and that belief tends to be self-perpetuating.
It’s taken for granted that the person who attempts the impossible task of satisfying their demands should be the person from whence the baby came and to whom it is so often literally attached-the person with the breast milk, or, failing that, just breasts.Īccording to Dinnerstein, “what makes Motherhood monstrous, atavistic, is that we force these primitive biological underpinnings” to translate to years of acting as a child’s primary care provider-not to mention that the immediate “biological underpinnings” are proven a flimsy excuse when some other, non-lactating woman, like a nanny or grandmother, is slotted into the birth mother’s place. This is an intelligible, even intuitive state of affairs, based on “longstanding biotechnological functions.” New homo sapiens are wells of bottomless need. But it would be disingenuous to deny that in cultures all over the world, the work of caring for the young still falls disproportionately to women if the birth mother is not available, grandmothers or aunts or sisters or (female) hired help fill the role. It’s easy to throw up contrary examples to the book’s foundational premise-what Dinnerstein calls “the female monopoly” on child-rearing-especially forty years after the book’s publication, when “stay-at-home dad” is not an oxymoron, and plenty of gay couples have kids. But so is much of human behavior (and history). If this sounds both epic and ridiculous, well, it is. “Our male-female arrangement,” Dinnerstein writes, “helps us maintain our ambivalence toward the existence of other separately sentient beings,” which allows us to “go on acting out our compulsion to dominate and manipulate.” And that propensity for dominance has reached its pinnacle in the invention and subsequent profusion of nuclear weapons. In other words: being raised almost exclusively by women encourages humans to overvalue masculine qualities, which include a propensity toward brute “mastery” of external circumstances. This in and of itself is not her ultimate concern, exactly her chief preoccupation is with the ways these peculiar neuroses manifest in an apocalyptically exploitative relationship to nature through rampant fetishization of technological enterprise. Dinnerstein’s thesis is that all of us are psychologically and socially disadvantaged by being brought up under asymmetrical parenting roles, and that most sexist convictions can be traced back to the common reality that fathers (men) are mostly absent while mothers (women) are omnipresent.
What exactly are these radical, terrifying arguments? Given the book’s careful and complex execution, distillation is almost criminal, but I’ll make an attempt.
“his will seem to some a presumptuous claim, but not being able to read Mermaid may well be not wanting to meet its hectoring, threatening, inconvenient argument.” Dinnerstein anticipated that her book would “enrage readers,” and even while nearing its conclusion, the text is peppered with disclaimers and pleas for careful reading. Mermaid went out of print until 1999, when, in her foreword to the new edition, Ann Snitow held both male academics and feminists responsible for letting the title languish. But it seems there just weren’t enough proselytizers to spread the word. “Why didn’t sing under my pillow, flag my car down on the highway?” she asked.
Mommy issues in women how to#
In the summer 1979 volume of the academic journal Frontiers, Joanna Russ, author of How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983), lamented the years it had taken her to learn about the book. Upon its publication in 1976, Mermaid was rarely read outside of women’s studies classes, though it received an effusive review from Vivian Gornick in the New York Times. When activist and psychology professor Dorothy Dinnerstein died in a car crash in 1992, she had only one book to her name, the feverishly praised but largely neglected The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise.
Mommy issues in women full#
Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University ( Full version) Charlotte Shane ▪ Summer 2018ĭorothy Dinnerstein. Forty years after its original publication, Dorothy Dinnerstein’s classic study of motherhood still provides a moving portrait of the currents running under interactions between men and women.
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