Remembering the Mothers who Might have Been

Once again it is Mother's Day, the day we have set aside in North America to honour our mothers and show them our appreciation with breakfasts in bed, chocolates, roses, and the canned sentimentality of Hallmark cards. This Mother's Day I would like for us to take the time to remember the mothers who might have been or at least one particular subset of that group. There are many factors that might intervene to prevent a woman from becoming the mother she would otherwise have been – early death, physical infertility due to illness or injury, entering a convent and taking a vow of celibacy, finding her erotic attraction limited to that of the Sapphic variety, etc. The might-have-been mothers I wish for us to think about today, however, are those who entered womanhood capable of bearing children, with the natural desire that they would one day do so, but who were deceived by the lies of the enemy of motherhood and femininity, feminism.

These victims of feminism have been on my mind as of late, ever since I learned that one of the iconic figures of second-wave feminism would be coming to town to speak later this week. As you may be aware, a few years ago a prominent Jewish family in Winnipeg that made its fortune in telecommunications, talked the government into dropping millions of the taxpayers’ dollars into constructing a monstrous eyesore near the Forks in the heart of the city. It is officially called the Canadian Museum of Human Rights but regarded by various groups who feel that their own historic suffering has been slighted or overlooked by the planners of the museum as being just another monument to the Jewish Holocaust. There will be an official opening later this year but already lectures are taking place there. On the fourteenth of May, the guest speaker will be Dr. Germaine Greer. I learned about this, oddly enough, in an opinion piece published by the Winnipeg Free Press on the third, written by an Athena Thiessen who objects to Greer’s appearance at the CMHR because Greer does not accept that people like Thiessen, who rejected the male body parts their Y chromosomes gave them for the imitation female body parts surgery could provide, are real women. Although this has nothing to do with my topic I cannot help but note the irony that the person making this complaint has adopted the Greek name of Minerva, goddess of wisdom.

Dr. Germaine Greer is an Australian born academic who became a feminist luminary in 1970 with the publication of her book The Female Eunuch. Although the title could mislead one into thinking she was writing about female genital mutilation of the barbaric type practiced in many African countries and certain suburbs of Toronto, a subject she did tackle in a later book, it was actually a diatribe about how traditional gender roles and the traditional family had deprived women of their sexuality. The book became a best-seller and its author hit the lecture circuit and became the darling of the media. She developed the reputation of being men’s favourite feminist. Her wit, sharp tongue, and foul mouth undoubtedly contributed to this, as did the fact that while she was a Marxist academic she was not a cold, doctrinaire, intellectual like Simone de Beauvoir. Nor did she give the impression of having just flown in from a Walpurgisnacht’s revel with the devil on Bald Mountain like Betty Friedan. Most importantly, the message which she both preached and modelled to young women, about finding their sexuality through multiple lovers and an avoidance of commitment and pregnancy happened to coincide perfectly with the adolescent fantasies of a generation of males who did not want to and in many cases refused to grow up.

Greer wrote several other feminist books but in 1999 put out The Whole Woman, a direct sequel to The Female Eunuch. In this book she made some interesting admissions. For example she wrote “In The Female Eunuch I argued that motherhood should not be treated as a substitute career: now I would argue that motherhood should be regarded as a genuine career option, that is to say, as paid work and as such an alternative to other paid work”. (p. 260) While this is not exactly a recantation and to equate motherhood with “paid work” is still demeaning it indicates that Greer had had something of an epiphany.

The personal struggle that lay behind this came out in an article that appeared in the inaugural issue of a women’s magazine, Aura, that was launched by Parkhill Publishing in Britain the following year. The headline was “I Was Desperate for a Baby and I have the Medical Bills to Prove It”. I have been unable to track down the full text of the article probably due to the fact that Aura seems to have folded after the first two or three issues, but Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer discussed it shortly after it appeared, quoting Greer as confessing “I still have pregnancy dreams waiting with vast joy and confidence for something that will never happen”. (1) Krauthammer wisely commented that Greer was a victim of her ideology, “In modern times we suffer not for our sins (sin having been abolished) but for ideology”, and that she was not the only one.

As a movement, second-wave feminism or “Women’s Lib” was not united in its vision of what it wanted to accomplish. Some hoped to achieve women’s independence of men, others aimed at women’s social, political, and economic equality with men. Some wanted to advance women as a class, others wanted to “emancipate” women as individuals. Then there were those who merely preached hatred of men and demanded a revolutionary overthrow of the family and in some cases of sexual reproduction itself. What the feminists did agree upon was that whatever their future goals for women were, the traditional ideal of woman as wife and mother stood in their way and had to go. They demanded that abortion be made “safe and legal” and so paved the highway to the future they wished to build with the blood and bones of millions of unborn children. In this, they resembled the Communist movement, the Marxist ideology of which many of their founders shared, but their message to young women was expressed in the language of liberal capitalism. They told young women that the path to finding and fulfilling themselves lay in the pursuit of ambitious, high-paying, careers, and that if they still wanted a husband and children they would have plenty of time for that later.

This, of course, was a lie, because women have a much more limited window of opportunity to reproduce than men do, with the optimal child-bearing years coinciding with those in which an ambitious career is usually established, to say nothing of the fact that abortions, even “safe and legal” ones, do not exactly enhance fecundity. So, many young women, bewitched by the message of “you can have it all”, put off their dreams of motherhood only to find that when they finally arrived at the date they had set aside in their planner for their appointment with Mother Nature, she, justifiably insulted at being put off so long, stood them up.

In The Whole Woman, Greer wrote that “The immense rewardingness of children is the best-kept secret in the western world.” (p. 415) The only people trying to keep what is otherwise universal knowledge a secret, however, were feminists like Greer herself, who did an excellent job of keeping it a secret from themselves. While it is a pity that Dr. Greer learned this “secret” too late for it to do her any good, I must say that I feel far more sorry for all those women who will never know the joys of motherhood because they bought into the lies she peddled.

These are the mothers who might have been and this Mother's Day, let us remember them as well.

(1) http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer051500.asp

"The Crimes of Motherhood"

Elle ravale ainsi l'écume de sa haine,
Et, ne comprenant pas les desseins éternels,
Elle-même prépare au fond de la Géhenne
Les bûchers consacrés aux crimes maternels. – from “Bénédiction”, in Les Fleurs de Mal, by Charles Baudelaire

The subject of discussion announced in the title of this essay may strike you as being rather odd or even grossly inappropriate for the second Sunday in May which is, after all, Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day is a day set aside to honour our mothers, to express our affection and love towards them, to show our gratitude for them and for all they have given us and done for us. It is not the time to break open their closets and bring out the skeletons, to drag them before the assizes and draw up indictments against them. Would it not be better to write a glowing eulogy about the virtues of motherhood?

There would be countless ways of doing it. One could approach the subject from an historical angle and show how the influence of mothers has time and again steered the ship of human events away from hazards and perils to flow smoothly down a safe course. An example might be the devotion of Susanna Wesley, and how the pious upbringing she gave her sons John and Charles contributed to the evangelical revival of the eighteenth century that helped spare England from the horrors of the revolution in France.  Or we could turn to the Confessions of St. Augustine, where we can read about how he grieved his mother by turning away from the true faith to the Manichean heresy and a life of sin, but how the prayers of St. Monica for her wayward son eventually bore triumphed in the conversion of the man who laid the intellectual foundation for Western Christendom.

Or, if we were not in the mood for history, we might comb the pages of mythology and classic literature for illustrations of motherhood at its best. Perhaps Rhea, the Titan queen who saved her youngest son from her husband’s barbaric culinary tastes by handing over a well-swaddled boulder and then smuggling her son away, would come to mind. In Homer’s Iliad we would find Thetis pleading the cause of her son Achilles’ before Zeus and obtaining from the king of the Olympians the promise that the tide of the Trojan War would not swing back towards the Greeks until Agamemnon gave her son the honour that was due him. Later, when Achilles has sworn to avenge the fallen Patrocles against Hector of Troy, Thetis, burdened with the foreknowledge that if her son persists in this course he too will shortly fall, obtains for him armour fashioned by the gods’ own smith, in a loving, if vain, struggle against fate.

Perhaps, however, it is from Holy writ that we wish to find recourse in our quest for positive inspiration. That would not pose a problem for here there is ample material for positive portrait studies of virtuous motherhood. The New Testament alone is full of examples. There is the Canaanite woman who persisted in pleading with Jesus for the healing of her daughter until she got what she asked. There are Eunice and Lois, the godly mother and grandmother of Timothy, from whom he learned the Christian faith. There is St. Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist and, of course, the ultimate example of motherhood, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Son of God.

With all of these possibilities for a positive approach to motherhood, of the kind one expects to hear or read on Mother’s Day, why choose a topic like “the crimes of motherhood”?

For the same reason that one, intent on gazing upon the constellations of stars that appear in the firmament at night, does not choose as his viewing point, a balcony immediately below a street-lamp in a large, well-lit city. To fully appreciate the beauty of the heavenly lights one must view them against a background of pure darkness. Indeed, even the elimination of artificial light is not enough for some people. Wordsworth compared the fairness of his deceased Lucy to that a star “when only one is shining in the sky.” So, to gain a full appreciation of just how wonderful true and virtuous motherhood is, one must occasionally view it against the backdrop of its opposite.

The phrase we are using to express the opposite of virtuous motherhood, “the crimes of motherhood”, can be interpreted in several ways.   In the right context, it could be imputing crime to motherhood itself.  Or it could be suggesting that mothers are prone to certain types of crimes.   It could mean that in certain circumstances, motherly duty requires the commission of acts that are technically crimes.   Or it could speak of crimes committed by mothers that are in direct violation of motherly virtue and duty.

It is in this last sense that we will be speaking of “the crimes of motherhood”.  This would seem to be the way in which the man from whom we have borrowed the expression used it.  You may have recognized it as a translation of the last two words in our epigram.   That epigram is the fifth stanza in the poem “Bénédiction” by nineteenth century French poet Charles Baudelaire, which is the first poem in the first section of his magnus opus, Les Fleurs de Mals, first published in 1857.  “The crimes of motherhood” is from the translation by Francis Scarfe.  An earlier translation by Roy Campbell (1), renders the fifth stanza like so:

She swallows down the white froth of her ire

And, knowing naught of schemes that are sublime,

Deep in Gehenna, starts to lay the pyre
That's consecrated to maternal crime.

“Bénédiction” resents the life of a poet whose experience would seem to be anything but the blessing alluded to in the presumably ironic title. It begins with his entry into the world by a providential decree, against which his appalled mother blasphemously rails, declaring that she would rather have birthed a brood of vipers and vowing to pass on to her son the hatred she feels God has bestowed upon her. This is what leads up to the fifth stanza in which she swallows her hatred and heaps fuel upon the flames awaiting her for her maternal crimes in hell.

In this context, “the crimes of motherhood”, would appear to be referring to a mother’s instinctive and persistent hatred of her son.  Since a mother’s instinct is supposed to be to love her children this would be a crime against the very nature of motherhood. (2)

The Holy Scriptures, as we noted earlier when considering alternative, more positive, Mother’s Day themes, provide several examples of saintly mothers.  Since one of the main overarching themes of the Holy Scriptures is human sin and depravity, we would expect it to provide plenty of the opposite examples as well.   Examples of sinful and criminal behaviour on the part of mothers are not necessarily examples of the crimes that violate the very nature of motherhood, however.

The sin of Eve, for example, could arguably be described as the ultimate example of a mother’s crime for it brought the curse of sin upon all generations of her descendants.  Eve, however, clearly did not intend harm upon her children in partaking of the forbidden fruit.  For this reason, and because it would be the ultimate act of impiety to impeach the first mother of us all, we will not lay this charge against her. 

An example of a mother who does possess mens rea, whose crimes against her son were clearly committed with malice aforethought, is Rebecca, the wife of Isaac.   It might come as a shock to find her mentioned.  She is not ordinarily thought of as a bad mother. The reason for that is that her story is told as part of the backstory of the Israelites, the descendants of her son Jacob.  One ordinarily reads the text from their point of view, which is Jacob’s point of view, and to Jacob she was a good mother.  The text, however, does not exclude the possibility of an alternate reading, from the perspective of her other son Esau.  From his point of view, his mother’s actions appear quite different.  She conspired against him with his youngest brother to deprive him of what was due him by right as the firstborn.  It was a malicious act towards her older son, but not exactly the example we are looking for.

There is, in Scripture, a story that apart from one tiny but not insignificant detail would be the perfect example.  That would be the story of the two prostitutes who came before Solomon the wise with a dispute over a child.  Each claimed that the child was her own and that the child of the other had died.   Solomon’s ruling was that the child should be cut in half and one half given to each.  We will have to excuse the prostitute who agreed to this ruling on a technicality.  She was not, as Solomon’s ruling was intended to demonstrate in the first place, actually the child’s mother.

None of the three Scriptural examples we have considered are quite what we are looking for, although the third comes closest, having been snatched away from us by a mere technicality.   Let us see if we fare better in our search for the archetypical criminal mother among mythological and classical sources.

An example that comes immediately to mind is Jocasta.    There are two maternal crimes that could be charged to her account.  The one she is most remembered for is that of incestuously marrying her own son Oedipus after he unknowingly killed his own father Laius.  This crime was committed in ignorance, however, as neither she nor Oedipus was aware of their relationship at the time.   The other crime is that of instructing her slave to put her son to death when he was newly born.   In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Oedipus learns from Teiresias that the plague which Thebes, the city over which he rules is suffering from is due to the gods’ displeasure over the fact that justice had not been dispensed to the murderer of Laius.  In the course of his investigation, Jocasta casts aspersions on the oracles by saying they had been wrong before, that they had prophesied that Laius would be killed by his own son who would then marry his mother.  By an odd coincidence, a similar prophecy that he would do just that thing had caused Oedipus to flee from Corinth, thinking that the Corinthian king Polybus who had raised him was the father signified in the prophecy.  A timely messenger then shows up to tell him that Polybus is dead, and identifies himself as the Corinthian shepherd who had given Oedipus to Polybus when he was an infant.  Oedipus, who is not the quickest hare in the race, only clues in to what everyone else has figured out already, when he sends for the Theban slave who had given him to the Corinthian shephered, and the slave fingers Jocasta as the one who turned him over to be exposed in his infancy.

That is a promising start.  What other criminal mothers stalk the pages of the literature of classical antiquity?

There was Clytemnestra, of course.   She was the wife of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae.  While her husband was away fighting at Troy, she had an adulterous affair with his cousin Aegisthus, who believed, not entirely unjustly, that Agamemnon’s father Atreus had robbed his own father of the throne.   In collusion with Aegisthus, she murdered her husband upon his return from Troy.   Her son, Orestes, avenged his father by killing her and her lover, and was then pursued and tormented by the Erinyes, the spirits of vengeance.

The difficulty with using Clytemnestra as an example of the “crimes of motherhood” is that while she was a mother who committed crimes, those crimes were committed against her husband rather than her children.   Indeed, many versions of the story present extenuating circumstances which, while hardly justifying adultery and murder, point to an outraged maternal instinct as the source of her anger against her husband.  Agamemnon, according to these versions, had appeased the anger of Artemis which was preventing his ships departure from Aulis, by sacrificing his and Clytemnestra’s eldest daughter Iphigenia. (3)  The way her story is ordinarily presented, it is not her behaviour towards her children that is called into question, but rather their behaviour towards her.  In the Eumenides, the final play in Aeschylus’ Oresetia trilogy, Orestes is put on trial before an Athenian jury and it boils down to a moral dilemma over which is greater, when the two come into conflict, a son’s duty to his father or his duty to his mother.

Clytemnestra, therefore, although usually considered a less sympathetic character than Jocasta, is not as useful as an illustration of crimes against maternal nature.  There is one more example from classical mythology that we ought to consider and that is Medea.

Medea was a sorceress and the daughter of Æëtes, the king of Colchis, a land on the eastern edge of the Black Sea.  When Jason went to Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece, she fell in love with him, assisted him in the tasks her father had set as conditions of his obtaining the Fleece and fled with him on the Argo, assisting in the escape and in the adventures of the Argo on its trip back to Greece. (4)  She married Jason and when they arrived in Thessaly helped him to get revenge against his uncle Pelias who had stolen the throne of Iolcus that had rightly been his father’s.  The couple then had to flee to Corinth because of the wrath of Acastus, Pelias’ son.

Euripides, in his play Medea, tells what happened after they arrived in Corinth.  Jason proved himself to be rather a jerk.  He dumped her in order to marry the daughter of the Corinthian king.   In response, Medea, after obtaining a promise of refuge from the king of Athens, sent a poisoned dress to the Corinthian princess, and then avenged herself on Jason by murdering their two children.

This is the example we have been looking for. When a mother murders her own children it is the ultimate crime of motherhood. For motherhood is all about the production and sustaining of new life, not about its termination. A mother is the person who conceives a child, bears it in her body, gives birth to it and nourishes it. For the mother to wilfully terminate that same life is an obscenity.


In the classical era, fathers had the legal right of life and death over the members of their households. Exposure, the death to which Laius and Jocesta had condemned the young Oedipus, was the usual means whereby infanticide was carried out. Christianity condemned the practice and as its influence began to spread throughout the Roman Empire it was gradually abolished.

In the twentieth century, as Christianity’s influence over Western civilization has waned more and more, the idea of a legal right to terminate the life of one’s children has begun to re-emerge. This time, however, it is being claimed for mothers rather than for fathers. When the feminist movement was revived in the 1960’s, it asserted that a woman has a right to an abortion and demanded that this right be given legal recognition.

This newfound right to an abortion has been expanding ever since. From the right to mercilessly and unceremoniously slaughter your children in the first trimester of a pregnancy, it gradually grew into the right to terminate their existence up until the very moment of birth. This is known as partial-birth abortion and the advocates of abortion rights, who prefer to think of themselves in euphemistic terms as being “pro-choice”, consider it to be dirty pool, down-right unsporting as a matter of fact, for those of us on the opposite side of the issue, to actually have the nerve to try and educate the public about it.

Ah but partial-birth abortion is oh so last season.   In the brave new world of fashionable infanticide, it is after-birth abortion that is all the rage. (5)  It makes perfect sense, after all, that this would be the logical next step.  Why bother with all the fuss and muss of a pre-birth abortion when you can just give birth and have the baby killed immediately thereafter?    What the exciting next chapter in the book of ever-expanding abortion rights will be we will simply have to wait to find out. Rest assured, however, that progressive activists, politicians, and bureaucrats are on the job, ensuring that the march to ever more freedom and equality will continue unabated, until a woman’s right to abort her child up until it reaches the age of majority is enshrined in law.

If this outlook seems dark and gloomy to you, then take comfort in that light which shines ever more brightly in the midst of all this tenebrosity. If you are reading these words then, in this dark age of women’s choice, your mother, bless her soul, did not “choose” to exercise her “women’s right” but instead followed her maternal instinct to give birth to you, love you, and raise you.

Happy Mother’s Day

(1) Francis Scarfe’s translation of the verse of Baudelaire was first published by Penguin in 1961, and then later re-issued by Anvil Poetry Press in 1986. Roy Campbell’s translation was published by Pantheon Books in 1952.

(2) Although the identification is not made explicit, it is fairly clear from the poem that the reader is supposed to identify the unnamed poet with Baudelaire himself. It would be unjust, however, to take the poem as an accurate depiction of the feelings of Baudelaire’s mother as they were or even as he actually perceived them. There had been a falling out between the poet and his mother for which Baudelaire himself was mostly to blame. His prodigal living had led his family to place the estate he had inherited from his father in trust to keep him from blowing it all on booze, women, and magic beans. He was not pleased with this, nor was he ever satisfied with the allowance he was given. His mother was the trustee. Spite, brought about by these circumstances, would seem to be the origin of the astonishing display of filial impiety in these verses.

(3) In the two plays Euripedes devoted to Iphigenia, she actually survived the sacrifice, with Artemis substituting a deer on the altar at the last minute. Clytemnestra, however, did not know of this.

(4) Although the story of Jason and the Argonauts and their search for the Golden Fleece is much older, it is most familiar in the rendition of the Argonautica, a 3rd Century BC epic poem by Apollonius of Rhodes.

(5) http://static.publico.pt/docs/sociedade/JMed%20Ethics-medethics100411.pdf

Some Mother’s Day Reflections

It’s Mother’s Day again in Canada, the United States, and many other countries of the world. I’m pleased to see the holiday is still around. It is a wonder that it was not declared a hate crime to celebrate Mother’s Day decades ago.

After all, it isn’t exactly an inclusive holiday. It excludes all people who are not mothers. That by definition excludes all people who are not biologically female (although pointing that out might be a hate crime in and of itself these days). It excludes plenty of females too, however. What about daughters and granddaughters? What about our sisters and our cousins, whom we reckon up by dozens, and our aunts?* I had started to get the impression that to exclude people was the worst possible thing one could do, a crime of hate so ghastly, so horrible, that is was absolutely unpardonable under any circumstances. At least that is the impression the news and entertainment media, classrooms, and many a pulpit have been giving for decades.

Then there is the fact that Mother’s Day is honouring, well, motherhood. Isn’t motherhood supposed to be degrading to women though? Isn’t that what the great and wise leaders of the Womyn’s Revolution, who brought Enlightenment and Liberation to Personkind back in the 1960’s taught us? That to be a wife and a mother is to be a slave or at best a second class citizen. That motherhood is an inferior choice that keeps women from achieving self-fulfillment through the pursuit of a career.

I suppose that I should not have written the above even in a sarcastic fashion. One doesn’t want to give the humourless dingbats who have created this oppressive cultural climate in which everything ordinary, decent, and honorable in life is degraded and everything weird, indecent, and ignoble is honored any new ideas.

The honouring of motherhood in Mother’s Day seems to be pleasantly out of sync with contemporary Western culture. On an ordinary day of the year the only kind of motherhood that seems to be honoured in our society is single-motherhood. Single-motherhood is honoured today because in traditional culture, our society regarded having a child outside of wedlock as being both sinful and shameful.

That, of course, is completely unacceptable to people living today. Contemporary society likes to justify its rejection of the standards of the past by saying that those standards were unfair.

“It placed an unfair stigma upon the child born out of wedlock. Why should he be blamed for the actions of his parents”.

“It reflects a double standard. The mother who had a child out of wedlock was judged far more harshly than the father of the child if he was judged at all”.

There is some truth to these judgements. All error must be mixed with truth if it is to become widespread and popular. Unmixed error deceives very few. There is much however, that people who make these judgements gloss over, and much that they are simply wrong about. The way traditional society behaved towards men who got unmarried women pregnant, for example, is grossly misrepresented.

It is often forgotten that the social purpose of the stigma against unmarried pregnancy was not to punish the child but to deter people from having children outside of the bonds of marriage. Likewise, the social purpose of seeking to prevent people from having children outside of marriage was not to prevent young people (or anyone else) from “having fun”. Rather it was to promote responsible behavior and stable families. A child raised by a father and mother who are married to each other stands a far better chance of doing well in every area of life than a child in any other situation. Society as a whole is much better off when children are raised by their fathers and mothers in traditional homes than when they are raised in other situations.

Implicit within traditional standards is the concept that we as members of societies have duties to our societies that must govern and take precedence over our personal desires and pursuits. That is a concept that is not well liked today and is widely rejected. It’s current unpopularity, however, does not make it false.

Now, the category of single-motherhood covers more than just women who have gotten pregnant outside of wedlock. It also includes women whose husbands have died or abandoned them. The shame that society attached to out-of-wedlock pregnancy should never have been allowed so spill over onto such women.

This, however, is only a minor consideration in contemporary society’s decision to simultaneously lower the status of traditional motherhood within the context of marriage and elevate the status of single-motherhood. What it really demonstrates is that we have lost our sense of the value of parents, family, and the home. Money, science and technology, and the material resources the latter can provide, are all we value these days. We assume that by having society provide resources for the raising of children through government social programs that we can replace stable marriages, legitimacy, and the home, and get rid of all the rules that supported such things while interfering with our freedom to pursue our pleasure in whatever way we saw fit.

In our rejection of our society’s traditional standards we are saying that we think we know better than our parents, grandparents, and all the generations of great-grandparents prior to them.(1) On this day, devoted to the honouring of one of our parents, we may wish to reflect upon the significance of that. Is such arrogance honouring to our fathers and mothers?

It is God, of course, who tells us to honour our fathers and mothers in the fourth commandment. Some churches, today, have started to address God as Mother rather than Father, or to combine Mother and Father in a single title “Mother-Father God”. This is yet another product of the same collective brain rot afflicting our society that I have been discussing.

Now, someone might object and say “What is wrong with calling God Mother?” Assuming that the objector professes to believe in Jesus Christ and Christianity my answer would be that while feminine images of God do exist in Scripture, and while God is Spirit which cannot be categorized according to biological sex, God in His revelation of Himself has called Himself Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. To call God Mother is to presumptuously read contemporary egalitarian and inclusivistic ideas into Christianity at the risk of confusing our God with a contemporary rival deity, the Mother Goddess of neo-paganism. What we will end up with if we do so is a version of “Christianity” that bears about as much resemblance to traditional, historical, Biblical Christianity as neo-paganism bears to traditional, historical, pagan religions, i.e., almost none.

If I felt the compelling need to address a prayer to a female personage I would rather address a prayer to Mary, the Blessed Virgin, Mother of God, than to the “Mother-Father God” of contemporary liberal “Christianity”. Although I am a Protestant I would consider it less blasphemous and it at least has the benefit of centuries of tradition behind it.

God the Father commanded us to honour our fathers and our mothers. We are not doing very well with that commandment these days. We have built nursing homes for our elderly parents, where the government pays strangers to look after them, while we go about our daily lives and forget about them. We have developed a culture that glorifies youth and refuses to honour the wisdom that comes with age. Within the last few decades children have developed the disrespectful habit of addressing their parents by their first names.

It is a good thing, therefore, that the Gestapo of contemporary, egalitarian, inclusivistic, multicultural, democratic liberalism has not yet gotten around to banishing Mother’s Day. We need that one day of the year to honour our mothers. We aren’t allowed to honour them any other day any more.

Lord have mercy upon us.


*Apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan

(1) The problem is a few generations old already but if that sentence were adjusted to reflect that fact it would sound extremely awkward.

Happy Mother’s Day

Written by Gerry T. Neal on May 10, 2009.

A country’s holidays are an important part of its culture and identity. They commemorate important events, people, and things. The two most important holidays in the Christian calendar have historically been Christmas and Easter, commemorating respectively the birth and resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. These remain important to this day, although in the new calendar of secularism Christmas has become the Great Feast of corporate consumerism presided over by Santa Claus, and Easter now commemorates the resurrection of the Easter Bunny who died to bring us chocolate eggs.

Mother’s Day, at least as celebrated in North America, is a more recent holiday. It started in the United States in the early 20th Century and has been picked up in Canada and several other countries around the world. It too has become highly commercialized. Despite its recent origins that which it honors and celebrates has been honored and celebrated in every culture around the world from time immemorial – and rightly so.

Mother’s Day commemorates mothers and motherhood – the women who carried us, gave birth to us, nursed us, and watched over, trained, and cared for – in short mothered us, as we grew up. Everybody has a mother – even the Son of God. Without mothers and motherhood no society could survive beyond the present generation. The human species itself could not survive without mothers.

Motherhood, is by far the most important calling a woman could ever have. It used to be we didn’t shy from saying that. We do nowadays largely because of a small group of highly vocal ideologues who have been attacking wives, mothers, motherhood and femininity for the last 50 years. These fanatics call themselves “feminists”.

To say that motherhood is the highest calling of women is not remotely the same thing as saying that woman’s place ranks lower than that of men or that other things women may do are not important in and of themselves. That is what the feminist hears in such a remark but that is only because of her warped perspective.

In a healthy, functioning society women bring up their daughters to be women, and at some point men take over the training of their sons, who they train to be men. That is the common sense, practical, rational, and traditional way of doing things. Men, in training their sons, do not teach them to wish they were girls or to envy a woman’s position. Similarly women, in bringing up their daughters right, do not teach them to wish they were boys or to envy a man’s position. Both sexes, if properly raised, are taught a respect for the other sex – a respect mingled, ordinarily, with a healthy degree of contempt for their ways

A man, properly brought up, holds women in the highest esteem – but considers their ways to be beneath him. A woman, properly brought up, feels the same way about a man. Man looks at the bearing and raising of children, and thinks “That’s all fine and good for women, but how can it compare in importance to what I do – the building, maintaining, and advancing of great civilizations?” Woman, in response, smirks at man’s self-importance because she knows that the building and leveling of cities is beneath her. How could any of that compare in importance to bringing a new life into the world, nurturing it, and caring for it?

Which of the two is right? Why both are of course! Every society, and the species as a whole, needs a next generation. Only mothers can provide this, and so motherhood is essential to society in way which can be said of nothing man does . On the other hand, the contributions men have made and continue to make to civilization are what make it something worth passing on to a next generation in the first place.

God and nature have made us in such a way that our lives begin within the bodies of women, grow there for about 9 months, and following birth remain dependent upon the body of the mother for nourishment for some time. Motherhood, encompasses a heck of a lot more than just that biological minimum, but that biological minimum is such, that only a woman can fill the role of mother. Since motherhood is absolutely necessary, and since only woman can be mothers, it follows that for women as a group nothing else they do can possibly be more important. Likewise, since men cannot be mothers, it follows that for men, the things they do will be more important than the bearing and raising of children.

The woman’s point of view is absolutely correct – for women.

The man’s point of view is absolutely correct – for men.

What is wrong, is the feminist point of view that tells women that they should take the man’s point of view and value the bearing and raising of children less than the building and leveling of civilizations, contributions to medicine, law, science, literature, and thought, or even menial labor for a minimum wage.

This nutty way of looking at things, began like so many other wrong-headed movements, in the 1960’s. True, its basic concepts go back further than that, finding their source in the writings of 18th and 19th Century leftists like Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. An important founding text of feminism, The Second Sex by Jean Paul Sartre’s much-abused consort Simone de Beauvoir first appeared in 1949. But the movement itself began with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963, and the establishment of the National Organization of Women 3 years later.

This movement, contrary to its claims for itself, had nothing to do with the women’s movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which achieved, among other things, the right of women to vote. In addition to securing property and voting rights for women, these movements fought, in an age when industrializing was moving work off the farms and into factories in large urban centers, for a “family wage”, i.e., a wage large enough for a man to support his wife and children on a single income. These women’s movements alliance with the industrialists in the cause of prohibition was correlated to the family wage – they wanted to be sure the men brought that income home instead of spending it in the bars.

Now one might not necessarily agree with all of the reforms these movements sought, or at least their pursuit through political means, but these women were no feminists. These movements were filled with Christian women and their leaders honored the things that feminism attacked - marriage, family, and motherhood.

Feminism did not arise in countries where women were really oppressed by cruel practices like clitoridectomy or infibulation. It did not arise in countries under Islamic law where women had no rights whatsoever. Feminism began at a time and in a part of the world where women had the right to vote and own property, had long had the opportunity for a full education, were free to work for pay outside the home, and had the right to decide who and when they would marry. It was in such a country, at such a time, that Betty Friedan claimed that women were being oppressed by TV commercials, stories and ads in women’s magazines, and classes in schools and universities, which presented a glorified vision of the happy housewife/mother as part of a government conspiracy to get women to return home so the jobs they had filled during WWII could go to the returning soldiers. As a result, Friedan argued, women were turning to drugs and alcohol in record numbers, as they found their education and talents going to waste. The only solution was for women to put their own self-fulfillment as individuals ahead of everything else, and the way to do that was through a glamorous, paid career.

Ironically, by the end of the 60’s Friedan was beginning to look moderate in her views. Even more radical versions of feminism arose, as the female adherents of black power groups, anti-Vietnam war groups, student radicals, and other leftist movements of the time, grew sick of being treated poorly by the male revolutionaries and struck out on their own. Some promoted lesbianism as the ideal lifestyle for the “liberated” woman, others argued that rape was not a crime by individual men against individual women but a means by which men as a class oppress women as a class (Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Wills) or even that all heterosexual intercourse was demeaning to women and would be as long as power was unevenly divided between the sexes (Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse). And this was before things really got crazy in the 90’s!

Needless to say these radicals were no friendlier to motherhood than Friedan. Friedan, tried to distance herself from the radicals and present her version of feminism as more family-friendly (this was what The Second Stage was all about) but do not be deceived. The feminist movement, while Friedan was its acknowledged leader, made as its agenda the legalization and subsidization of abortion, and state provided daycare centers to free up mothers of young children to pursue careers. It promoted the sexual revolution, promiscuity, and no-fault divorce. It promoted the world Aldous Huxley described in Brave New World as its vision for the future.

The fight between feminism and the traditional family and social order was never about such trivial things as jobs, salaries, and household chores. Economic arrangements change. What men and women do in a hunting/gathering tribal economy will widely differ from what they do in a primarily agricultural economy, which will again widely differ from what they do in an industrialized economy. In the latter kind of economy – such as ours – a great variety of jobs are open to men and women alike. These kind of arrangements come and go. The family, the basic building block of society in which man and women come together to raise their children, is a permanent thing. Motherhood is – as long as mankind lasts – a permanent thing.

Despite its presentation of itself as being the movement for women’s choice, feminism is against women’s choice. For as long as women keep choosing to have children and raise them themselves instead of trusting them over to a cold, state institution, and keep choosing careers that will assist them in their choice – part time jobs, jobs close to home and school, or jobs after the children are born and in school – feminism’s goal of a world where women and men are equally represented at every level in every career in every field can never happen. It is these choices made by women that create the so-called “wage gap” (in which women’s wages are represented as a percentage of men’s). The gap disappears when never-married women and men of the same age and same career are compared.

The reason feminism can never truly win is because women will never stop choosing to be wives and mothers. They know, even many who will not verbalize it, that motherhood is the highest calling they or any other woman could ever aspire to. They know this, not because of some conspiracy among all males to keep them in second-class status by deceiving them into valuing motherhood over careers. They know this because it is in their hearts and natures and they cannot help it. It is to women such as these that I say:

Happy Mothers’ Day.

Today I will be posting another old essay.  Today is Mother's Day and this essay entitled "Happy Mother's Day" I wrote and posted to Facebook on Mother's Day of last year.  It is a political essay, basically intended to give the feminist movement a good slap in the face.  Some may question the propriety of attacking feminism on Mother's Day of all days.  To attack feminism, however, is not to attack women.  Auberon Waugh put it this way many years ago:

"It is a great cliché of the feminist movement — by definition composed of women who are unhappy in the feminine role — that men who oppose it are misogynists or woman-haters. The truth, of course, is that it is men who love women who are distressed to see them making such fools of themselves."

Feminism is anti-woman and anti-motherhood.  There can be no more appropriate day to point out its follies than Mother's Day.