self-respect and dignity; against the validity of any ambition to
accomplishment or excellence outside her allowable sphere.
She polices and punishes herself; but should this internal value
system break down for any reason, there is always a psychiatrist, professor, minister, lover, father, or son around to force her back into the feminine flock.
Now, you all know that other women will also act as agents
of this mammoth repression. It is the first duty of mothers
under patriarchy to cultivate heroic sons and to make their
daughters willing to accommodate themselves to what has
been accurately described as a “half-life. ” All women are supposed to vilify any peer who deviates from the accepted norm of femininity, and most do. What is remarkable is not that
most do, but that some do not.
The position of the mother, in particular, in a male
supremacist society, is absolutely untenable. Freud, in yet
another astonishing insight, asserted, “A mother is only
brought unlimited satisfaction by her relation to a son; this is
altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of
all human relationships. ”5 The fact is that it is easier for a
woman to raise a son than a daughter. First, she is rewarded
for bearing a son—this is the pinnacle of possible accomplishment for her in her life, as viewed by male culture. We might say that in bearing a son, she has had a phallus inside her
empty space for nine months, and that that assures her of
approval which she could not earn in any other way. She is
then expected to invest the rest of her life in maintaining,
nourishing, nurturing, and hallowing that son. But the fact is
that that son has a birthright to identity which she is denied.
He has a right to embody actual qualities, to develop talents,
to act, to become— to become who or what she could not
become. It is impossible to imagine that this relationship is
not saturated with ambivalence for the mother, with ambivalence and with downright bitterness. This ambivalence, this bitterness, is intrinsic to the mother-son relationship because
the son will inevitably betray the mother by becoming a man
— that is, by accepting his birthright to power over and against
her and her kind. 6 But for a mother the
is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. She can watch
him, as a child, play the games she was not allowed to play;
she can invest in him her ideas, aspirations, ambitions, and
values— or whatever she has left of them; she can watch her
son, who came from her flesh and whose life was sustained by
her work and devotion, embody her in the world. So while the
project of raising a boy is fraught with ambivalence and leads
inevitably to bitterness, it is the only project that allows a
woman
son.
The project of raising a girl, on the other hand, is torturous.
The mother must succeed in teaching her daughter
she must force her daughter into developing the lack of qualities that will enable her to pass as female.
