Academic

More Rebecca Walker

By Ann Bartow

In addition to her insights about Barack Obama destroying feminism for its own good (with multiple part analogizing of feminism to Wal-Mart), now Rebecca talks about how Alice Walker was a terrible mother and it is mostly feminism’s fault.

This is the same Rebecca Walker who wrote a book that featured a chapter about how she loved her second son a lot more than her first, according to this WaPo article, which states in pertinent part:

“It” would be her memoir, “Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence” and a certain c”hapter where she describes the difference between her love for her teenage stepson, Solomon — whom she still parents with her ex, the singer-musician (and D.C. native) Me’shell Ndegéocello — and her love for her biological son, Tenzin.

In it, she wrote: “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.”

See also this NYT article profiling her, which noted:

The most incendiary notion in ?Baby Love? may be that, for Ms. Walker, being a stepparent or adoptive parent involves a lesser kind of love than the love for a biological child.

In an interview, Ms. Walker boiled the difference down to knowing for certain that she would die for her biological child, but feeling ?not sure I would do that for my nonbiological child.?

?I mean, it?s an awful thing to say,? said Ms. Walker, who in a previous relationship helped rear a female partner?s biological son, now 14. ?The good thing is he has a biological mom who would die for him.?

Ms. Walker acknowledged that her idea of blood being thicker than water runs contrary to her own philosophy in ?Black, White and Jewish,? in which she writes that ?all blood is basically the same.?

That must be really painful for her “first son” Solomon and I don’t understand why she would want to hurt him that way, but obviously she did. I realize it is kind of a nasty thing to point out here, but her hypocrisy in complaining about maltreatment she received as a child while inflicting something like that on another child that she purports to love strikes me as pretty contemptible. As a general matter, she does not strike me as a person others should take parenting advice from. But of course I am a feminist, part of an evil cabal that according to Walker prevents other women from having children, according to this interview, which quotes her as saying:

The ease with which people can get divorced these days doesn’t take into account the toll on children. That’s all part of the unfinished business of feminism.

Then there is the issue of not having children. Even now, I meet women in their 30s who are ambivalent about having a family. They say things like: ‘I’d like a child. If it happens, it happens.’ I tell them: ‘Go home and get on with it because your window of opportunity is very small.’ As I know only too well.

Then I meet women in their 40s who are devastated because they spent two decades working on a PhD or becoming a partner in a law firm, and they missed out on having a family. Thanks to the feminist movement, they discounted their biological clocks. They’ve missed the opportunity and they’re bereft.

Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating.

Welp, I’m off to celebrate the graduations of a bunch of children of feminists. Oddly their mothers are of the same approximate generation as Walker, but happily they don’t much care what Walker says or thinks about their kids or lives, and that is an example of stunning common sense I probably ought to follow.

–Ann Bartow

Full post as published by Feminist Law Professors on May 26, 2008 (boomark / email).