Rebels in White Gloves by Miriam Horn

Author:Miriam Horn [Horn, Miriam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77389-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Balancing Work and Family

When it was first published in 1899, Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening was branded a threat to woman’s virtue and the nation’s good. “Too strong drink for moral babes,” one critic wrote, “should be labeled poison.” Now revered as an early classic of feminist literature, the novel tells the story of a married woman with two young sons who finds her creativity awakened outside of her marriage and struggles between her responsibility to others and her imperative to be true to herself. “Think of the children,” the heroine is told by the “good mother” of the novel. And Edna Pontellier does think of the children, understanding that “wanting my own way is wanting a great deal when you have to trample upon the lives, the hearts, the prejudices of others.” In the end, she decides that her “husband and children could not possess her body and soul,” and steps out of the shelter of her husband’s home and into the wider world, a rebellion against convention clearly admired by the author. Finally, being a creature of a less-tolerant century, Edna walks into the sea.

Whether a woman can fulfill herself within the family; whether she ought even to seek her own fulfillment; what it might mean to “think of the children”—a century after The Awakening, these questions remain unresolved. They are not, strictly speaking, only women’s questions: The tension between freedom and responsibility is the central American story. But for a woman, that tension has been felt most often at home, because it is within the family that she has been expected to work out her destiny.

The analysis of the family has therefore been from the beginning a core preoccupation of feminism. Even while drafting the Declaration on the Rights of Woman demanding suffrage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton avowed that “the whole question of women’s rights turns on the marriage relation.” The remaking of family life was necessary not only to secure women equality at home, but also as an essential precedent and template for the remaking of power relations between men and women in the world. “The public and the private worlds are inseparably connected,” wrote Virginia Woolf. “The tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.”

While feminists undertook to reinvent the family, their alarmed detractors saw them out to destroy it. Their warnings grew particularly vehement when Hillary Clinton first stepped onto the national stage. Christian leader Pat Robertson preached that “feminism encourages women to leave their husbands and kill their children” (and also to “practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians”). Others of slightly more temperate mind cast Hillary and the women she stood for as man-haters who “throw away marriages like paper towels,” sanction illegitimacy, devalue the role of fathers, and disparage cookie-baking moms. Critics found in the recent abundance of memoirs and novels and self-help treatises propaganda against the family as a site of violence and incest and little more. They saw these women suckering their young,

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