Communion by bell hooks

Author:bell hooks [hooks, bell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780060938291
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Published: 2021-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

Nine

Sisterhood: Love and Solidarity

MOST women search for love hoping to find recognition of our value. It may not be that we do not see ourselves as valuable; we simply do not trust our perceptions. When I was a girl, I thought I had marvelous traits. I was perpetually surprised that so much that I believed was grand and delightful in myself was hateful and suspect in the eyes of my parents, especially my mother. Still, she was full of contradictions. One day my mother might mock my love of reading and threaten to take all the books away, and another day she might speak with pride about the same passions that had been previously mocked, used to shame and humiliate me.

In her book Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women, Andrea Dworkin describes her mother’s telling her often “that she loved me but did not like me.” Women of all races and classes offer testimony of being told this by their mothers. Its impact was to make them feel as though something was deeply wrong about them. Describing her relationship with her mother, Dworkin recalls, “She experienced my inner life as a reproach. She thought I was arrogant and especially hated that I valued my own thoughts. When I kept what I was thinking to myself, she thought I was plotting against her. When I told her what I thought, she said I was defiant and some species of bad: evil, nasty, rotten. She often accused me of thinking I was smarter than she.” Again and again I hear testimony from gifted women about their mothers’ accusations of arrogance. My mother continually berated me for what she perceived to be my thinking that I was smarter and better than she.

Feminist scholarship has helped us to understand that women who suppress their own unique gifts in the interest of being dutiful daughters, wives, and mothers are often filled with rage. Whereas it would seem logical that a woman who feels thwarted in her own development might be thrilled to see her daughter become actualized, all too often her eroded self-esteem leads to mixed feelings or full-on expressions of competition and rage. At its worst this mother-daughter warfare may actually lead parents to commit acts of soul murder, wherein they systematically try to destroy a daughter’s self-esteem so that her gifts will never be realized.

Patriarchal thinking normalizes competition between mothers and daughters, as well as the girl child’s rebellion. Luckily, progressive feminist mothers who have either unlearned cripplingly low self-esteem or who were provident enough to be raised in families where their growth was nurtured are daily raising wonderful daughters without competing with or devaluing them. Their experience stands as direct challenge to any notion that jealousy and competition are naturally present in mother-daughter bonds. In the presence of this group of self-loving girls, our woman spirit is uplifted. Their personal power is intoxicating and awesome. They exude it like a strong and heady perfume. And it is

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.