Rebecca Walker On How Her Mother’s Feminism Affected Her Life
Alice Walker’s daughter, Rebecca, discusses life growing up under her mother’s misguided feminism.
“My mother is very ideologically based, and her ideology is much more important in many ways than her personal relationships,” says Rebecca.
“When Rebecca became pregnant at 14, Walker wasn’t shocked: she calmly picked up the phone and arranged an abortion. “Her feminist thing was about empowering me to have an active sexuality and to be in control of my body, and that trumped any sense of boundaries,” Rebecca says.
““People don’t really understand how strong ideology can be,” she says. “I think sometimes of that group and that feminism as being close to a cult. I feel I had to de-programme myself in order to have independent thought. It’s been an ongoing struggle. When you have a cult, you have a cult leader who demands a certain conformity . . . And when you have a celebrity who has cultural-icon status, economic power beyond what you can imagine, you can’t resist that person — if you want to stay in their realm. Because once you start challenging them, they kick you out.”
Click here to watch a good interview of Allice Walker in which she discusses her career and books.
Filed under: Culture, Relationships
She says what J, DV and I have been arguing all this time - feminism is at play when you see 14-year-old girls with active sex lives and getting abortions.
Where are you Roderick to tell us how lucky this woman is to have such an enlightened, “open-minded” mother?
Don’t mess with me today, D. *smile*
I understand this slant on feminism and how it negatively impacted women and how we see ourselves…but can someone please define feminism for me because in my mind it was always about not being treated as second class citizens to men and being able to define ourselves for ourselves…am I missing something…
Soteria, I really didn’t want to comment on this post because I don’t know what type of relationship Rebecca had with her mom and taking anecdotal information and extrapolating it to prove that feminism in and of itself is evil.
Most mother-daughter relationships are fairly volatile and Rebecca seems like a strong-willed woman in her own right so I guess we will never really know the truth about their relationship.
Soteria,
I’ll add my $.02 to try to answer your question.
Feminism is the idea that men and women are competitors, enemies, locked in an eternal struggle against each other. Hence the name of the movement. Instead of seeking solutions to society’s ills WITH men, Western feminism wants nothing more than to destroy the bedrocks of community - religion, masculinity, femininity and culture. They destroy family, religion, etc. and when we see the necessary consequences of that course, they use the results as proof we need to destroy community more.
The example of “feminism” in Islamic countries is a good counterpoint. Because those women respect family, culture and religion, they couch their struggles WITHIN the culture and religion. So, they say, “we love Islam, our families and our men, but we believe that elements of our society are misinterpreting the religion to our detriment.” Their arguments begin and end with the Quran.
Contrast that with American feminism, which hates religion, masculinity and family with a devilish intensity and revels at the opportunity to destroy them all. Have you ever heard a Western feminist say “we respect Christianity but think its tenets may have been misinterpreted or misapplied?”
D, men and women have been at odds since the beginning of time. It’s just a fact.
I guess you haven’t heard what we men say about women amongst ourselves. LOL
Au contraire Roderick,
Men and women have been cooperating since the beginning of time. Society would not have survived without such cooperation, such as marriage or the hunter-gatherer dichotomy that ensured all tasks necessary to survival were covered.
Just goes to reinforce that young people want boundaries set by their parents. And when they do not get them, as adults they are pissed off at their parents for not having clamped down on them when they were children.