The XX Factor: What women really think.

Felled by "The Ten-Year Nap"

I'm sure Marjorie is right that we don't know the half of the Walkers' feud—how can we, since we're only hearing Rebecca's side? And I agree with Marjorie and Maureen that feminism should entail a little effort to think from the perspective of a woman who makes a choice that's not your own.

I also think, as others have pointed out, that Rebecca Walker's critique makes us uncomfortable (or at least makes me uncomfortable) because it entwines being an ardent feminist with being a bad mother, at least in one daughter's eyes. I can't stop myself from rushing to state the obvious: Lots of feminists are great mothers! Devoted! But I also have admitted to myself since I started work after my first son was born that there's a cost as well as a benefit from having a job that takes me away from my kids for a good chunk of the day. Tonight (after they went to bed) I picked up Meg Wolitzer's new novel The Ten-Year Nap, and the passage below jumped out at me. Amy, the 40-ish napper of the title, is talking to her second-wave feminist-novelist mother Antonia, who is forever disappointed that her daughter hasn't worked (as a lawyer) since her 10-year-old son was born.

"Oh come on, you're very smart," said her mother, "and very capable. You've always been that way."

"And I expected things of myself," Amy said. "But not everyone is that driven. And not everyone is really talented. And also," she said, "sometimes it's too difficult to make it happen."

Amy recalled herself and her sisters standing outside their mother's door, banging with their fists, telling themselves they were undermothered, when in fact for so long they had been so well and fully mothered by their intellient and creative and adoring mother that surely her mothering would have a long half-life.

But all they knew, then, was that Antonia had said. "This is my time," and that she'd gently closed her door. The girls played Jane Eyre once in a while over the years: they imagined themselves orphaned by their wonderful mother and even, somehow, by feminism itself. 

This, I confess, makes me want to cry. Am I falling down the guilty-mother rabbit hole?