Raising Citizens in the 'Century of the Child' by Dirk Schumann

Author:Dirk Schumann [Schumann, Dirk]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782381099
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Published: 2013-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

I started weaning my sons at the instant of birth. I was bitterly afraid of “mother love,” though God knows how I love them. They are now as completely independent of me as humanly possible. They enjoy my ideas, regard me as a useful encyclopedia, and like me as a friend. They make up their own decisions, minds, act on their own decisions, even if completely opposite to my expressed opinion, knowing I won’t bat an eye, cheerfully telling me later if I happened to be right … But what now for me? I’ve done my job, and done it well. But it’s done. I can do nothing further for my sons but mess into their lives and fiddle with their souls. Actually they have absolutely no need for me.56

Alert to the debilitating effects of “mother love,” this woman preferred for her sons to regard her as a “friend” or even an inanimate “encyclopedia” than as a mother. Her entire parenting philosophy centered on the idea that she should strive to make herself unnecessary as early as possible—a goal that she believed had been achieved. But now, although her youngest son was still a ten-year-old child, she could no longer foresee a positive role for herself as a mother. Her maternal interest and concern, she feared, would henceforth prove irritating if not dangerous.

Like this respondent, many mothers felt the full force of the momism critique only as their children grew more independent and they themselves approached middle age. Women who had heartily endorsed Wylie’s critique in their youth, often in rebellion against their own mothers, sometimes found themselves having second thoughts as their lives progressed. In 1958, one such woman sent Wylie an unpublished essay, entitled “What Philip Wylie Really Thinks about Women,” recounting how her views had evolved since 1942, when she first encountered Generation of Vipers. At the time, she was “single and childless, a young woman just graduated from the Smith School of Psychiatric Social Work, full of professional jargon, in the midst of my own analysis.” Her job at the Children’s Bureau, where she counseled “disturbed” and “inadequate” mothers seeking child guidance and foster home placement, combined with her “hostility” toward her own mother, “which is always present in the midst of one’s own analysis,” made her receptive to Wylie’s critique: “I embraced Mr. Wylie’s philosophy regarding our cannibalistic matriarchy avidly, in my youthful unsophistication taking all that he said as a literal condemnation of motherhood in its entirety.” But after she married, gave up her career, bore four children in four years (including a set of twins), and found most of her contacts “limited to other moms,” she began to “re-evaluate” her views and to resent “the ever increasing hostility towards American mothers exhibited by most males.” Attributing her initial enthusiasm for the momism critique to her youthfulness and her immersion in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, she now believed that her fluency in psychoanalytic “jargon” had allowed her to adopt a harshly critical attitude toward American mothers that, in retrospect, struck her as misguided and unjust.

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