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?

Narcissim Isn't the Whole Issue

Rebecca Walker may be a narcissist, but this quality alone is not what bothers me. Her mother Alice has been called the same, yet in the older Walker’s groundbreaking 1983 novel The Color Purple, she managed to forge some meaningful social commentary. The younger Rebecca has failed to muster career success beyond being a memoirist. In addition to her book Baby Love, Rebecca published a book in 2002 titled Black, White, & Jewish, in which she detailed how difficult it was to grow up the biracial girl of divorced parents, shuffled between coasts and homes.

As a child of divorce, myself, I get awfully tired of reading this stuff by people who blame a lifetime of issues on divorce. It’s a harrowing experience, sure, but does anyone else think Rebecca Walker probably had some issues outside of mom and dad splitting up?

Rebecca notes in the Daily Mail essay how difficult it was for her in 2004 when she told her mother she was pregnant. “[Alice] went very quiet. All she could say was that she was shocked. Then she asked if I could check on her garden,” Rebecca writes. Elsewhere, she whines that Alice vaguely considered her “a calamity,” just as madness was an obstacle for Virginia Woolf and poor health a problem for Zora Neale Hurston.

Instead of moping over how her mother’s feminism ruined her life, the younger Walker should be most concerned with how wholly anti-feminist she herself is. She is apparently incapable of writing outside of her own personal experiences as a woman, which has the effect of making her scope as a writer unusually narrow (as if she is stunted by her pair of X chromosomes). Best to hold off on crafting autobiographies until one has achieved something worthy of reflection. Catfights with mom and years of uncertain sexual identity do not a worthwhile memoir make.

Walker vs. Walker

A few weeks ago, memoirist Rebecca Walker published an essay in the U.K.’s Daily Mail titled “How my mother's fanatical views tore us apart,” which has been making the American Internet rounds in recent days.

The mother in question is Alice Walker, prominent feminist and author of the beloved novel The Color Purple, whom Rebecca paints as a selfish, distant parent more enamored of her radical politics than her own child. Rebecca describes how her mother would leave her behind for days at a time to hole up in her studio, and how she once discovered a cruel poem her mother wrote comparing her to “various calamities that struck and impeded the lives of other women writers.” Alice’s actions left young Rebecca yearning for a “traditional mother” like her stepmother, Judy, “a loving, maternal homemaker with five children she doted on.” (Ouch.)

The crux of Rebecca’s beef with her mom, though, is Alice’s conviction that motherhood is a “form of slavery,” a belief that caused a major rift between the two women when Rebecca announced she was having a child in 2004. The two women have not spoken since Rebecca gave birth to her son, Tenzin, and Alice has reportedly cut her daughter out of her will.

Rebecca, full of the kind of new-mommy bliss that makes us childless singletons simultaneously wistful and a bit queasy, is angry that she almost gave up on this transformative experience because she drank her mother’s “rabid feminist” Kool-Aid. “Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness,” she writes. “It is devastating.”

As opinions pour in about this essay—Is feminism really to blame? Is Alice Walker a raging narcissist? Is Rebecca?—it’s interesting to remember another recent Walker family controversy. When her memoir Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood after a Lifetime of Ambivalence, was published last year, Rebecca lit some crazy fires by confessing that she felt differently about her biological son than she did about the teenage son she raised (and is still parenting) with her ex-lover, Me'shell Ndegéocello:

"It's not the same. I don't care how close you are to your adopted son or beloved stepdaughter, the love you have for your non-biological child isn't the same as the love you have for your own flesh and blood. It's different. ... It isn't something we're proud of, this preferencing of biological children, but if we ever want to close the gap I do think it's something we need to be honest about. ... Yes, I would do anything for my first son, within reason. But I would do anything at all for my second child, without reason, without a doubt."

Note to Rebecca Walker: Easy there—20 years from now, you might be the subject of an aggrieved essay yourself.