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

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.