Alice and Rebecca Walker Clash: Do Feminist Mothers Have to Choose Between Dreams and Diapers?

By Courtney E. Martin

Rebecca Walker is a well-known third-wave feminist and daughter of author Alice Walker. So why is she adopting anti-feminist talking points?

I meet women in their 40s who are devastated because they spent two decades working on a Ph.D or becoming a partner in a law firm, and they missed out on having a family. Thanks to the feminist movement, they discounted their biological clocks. They've missed the opportunity and they're bereft. Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating.

Who might you guess wrote such a bold denunciation of feminism? Perhaps one of the smug blondes that frequent Bill O'Reilly's lair -- Ann Coulter or Laura Ingraham? Perhaps ol' Atlantic Monthly anti-feminists Caitlin Flanagan or Lori Gottlieb, both of whom seem to think that contemporary women should settle for Mr. Good Enough and get hip to housework?

Nope, think again. These words were penned by none other than feminism's first daughter, Rebecca Walker. It seems that Mother's Day brought back un-fond memories for Rebecca, daughter of The Color Purple author Alice Walker, and she just couldn't resist purging her painful childhood in public. Her vociferous essay, published in London's Daily Mail late last month, describes the ways in which she was neglected as a child -- raised by a mother drunk on feminism's independent ethos, made to feel like a "calamity," according to one of Alice's poems, and generally ignored and resented. Rebecca claims her mother disdained her for having a baby and even cut her only daughter out of her will. But this is not just the grievances of a daughter scorned; Rebecca blames her mother's "religion" -- feminism -- for getting motherhood all wrong.

According to Rebecca, feminism has fooled women into thinking they can delay reproducing, causing them great pain, and, what's more, made women treat the maternal instinct like an antiquated ritual. Like wearing a boy's pin, feminism has fooled women into thinking that involved, emotional, full-time mothering (is there another kind?) is overly romantic and self-sacrificing.

I sympathize with Rebecca's deep pain over her unsatisfying childhood. Whatever the factual details surrounding her relationship with her mother -- who is known widely as the adopter of the word "womanist" in reaction to feminism's racist past -- it is unarguable that she is exposing the emotional truth of what she experienced. It is unsurprising, actually, that Alice, a woman who served as "mother protector" for so many women throughout the world, failed at making her own daughter feel protected. Look at Martin Luther King Jr. -- a man who preached love and commitment, but couldn't stay faithful to his own wife. Look at Eliot Spitzer, Ted Haggard, my old boss who ran a stroke prevention organization while chain smoking long, skinny cigarettes. So many great public figured have led hypocritical personal lives.

What I take issue with, and I am not alone, is Rebecca's black and white take on mothering -- there is her mother, the selfish careerist, and then there is her, the new mom who argues that all that should matter to a young woman with children is "a happy family."

What happened to the self-preserving and child-loving in between? It seems to me that the undone work of feminism is not to convince women like Alice to give up on their worldly dreams and settle down for the sake of the kids, but to change the world so that it better accommodates both dreams and diapers. It is not feminists' independent streaks that need erasing, but rigid gender roles in families and policies that make it difficult for people to be both present parents and fulfilled workers. It is not our biology that is making us sad; it is our thwarted destinies.

I agree that feminism's rejection of the June Cleaver archetype has sometimes led women to underestimate how moving motherhood might be, how transformative and even fun. My own mom -- a hippie of the late 60s who didn't want to have children -- was strong-armed into parenting by my persistent father. She now claims (and I sort of have to believe her) that motherhood is the best thing that ever happened to her. It was also one of the most problematic.

As much as she loved having my brother and me, as much as she was blissfully surprised by how her own personality changed, how her intuition and self-confidence deepened, she felt like she had to give up a lot to be such an involved parent. That wasn't because of my brother and I. That was because of a society that told both of my parents that his job was more important, that she should be flexible because of her gender, that "equal parenting" was a feminist pipe dream. It's not my brother and I that my mom resents; it is the either/or culture that forced her to choose.

Rebecca writes, "I believe feminism is an experiment, and all experiments need to be assessed on their results. Then, when you see huge mistakes have been paid, you need to make alterations." She's right about something -- feminism is strong enough for vigorous critique and constant reevaluation. But she's mistakenly extrapolated feminism's failings from her own mother's mistakes. It is not feminism that made her mother an unsatisfying parent; it is her mother's personality, or at most, her misinterpretation of feminism's vision.

My feminism, the feminism of my mother and the daughters and mothers I know, is one where women get to be whole human beings and committed mothers (if they choose to have children). It is a world where there are no "mommy wars;" both mothers and fathers earnestly struggle to balance family and work together -- with the help of communities, neighbors, extended family members. It is a world where women don't have to put off bearing children until their biological clocks are screaming, because they aren't petrified that they won't be supported to be separate people once that umbilical cord forms. It is not the land of polar opposites -- selfish Alices or self-sacrificing Rebeccas; it is a middle path of happy women.

My feminism doesn't extinguish my burning desire to one day bear and mother my own children. It just makes my commitment to changing the world, so that both my partner and I can be whole while parenting, all the more urgent.