The mother-daughter wars

I've also written about how many well-known (white) women writers were routinely mistreated as children by "good enough" mothers, and how their mothers mocked and minimized their talents and adult success (Florence Nightingale, Olive Schreiner, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Agnes Smedley -- I could go on).

Let me give just one example here. It is apt, since it describes the relationship between a trailblazing feminist and abolitionist mother and a daughter who not only became quite traditional but also broke with her mother (something Rebecca has not done -- something, in fact, Rebecca alleges Alice has done). However, like Rebecca, the daughter in this 18th-century case publicly attacked her mother's views. Please be patient with all the details. They are important.

Frances (Fanny) Wright was born in Scotland in 1794 to wealthy parents. In 1825, Fanny established a commune in Tennessee to educate emancipated slaves. In 1828, she became the first nonpreacher woman to lecture in public in the United States. In 1830, Fanny quietly left America. Early in 1831, in Paris, she gave birth to her (and William S. Phiquepal D'Arusmont's) daughter, Sylva.

Fanny was the friend and confidante of the Marquis de Lafayette, Jeremy Bentham, Robert Owen -- and yet she married Phiquepal, who was 16 years her senior, in order to protect her child from "stigma." By 1836, Fanny Wright and William S. Phiquepal were seriously "estranged"; by 1838, Phiquepal took Sylva to Cincinnati, leaving Fanny alone and very ill in New York. Phiquepal then began his legal appropriation of Fanny's fortune.

In 1848, Fanny capitulated and granted Phiquepal her inheritance and property. He promptly announced that he and Sylva were "independent of her, and [can] do without her." He put Fanny on a small "allowance." In 1850, Fanny filed for divorce in an attempt to recover some part of her estate. She claimed that Phiquepal had married her for her money and had "alienated their daughter's affections." Phiquepal retaliated with an open letter to the newspapers.

He wrote: "Your life was essentially an external life. You loved virtue deeply, but you loved grandeur and glory [even more]. Your husband and child ranked only as mere appendages to your personal existence. [I] imposed on [myself] the sacrifice of attending your lectures but could not impose it on [my] child. Sylva's education has been the main object of [my] life, while [you] have often interrupted that education by the life [you] led traveling from one land to another."

In 1851, Fanny was granted a divorce as an "abandoned" wife. Part of her fortune was restored to her. However, she lost Sylva forever.

Sylva never visited her mother in Fanny's last illness. And Sylva became an ardent Christian. In 1874, she testified before a congressional committee against female suffrage. "As the daughter of Frances Wright, whom the Female Suffragists are pleased to consider as having opened the door to their pretensions," Sylva begged the speaker and the members of the House committee "to shut it forever, from the strongest convictions that they can only bring misery and degradation upon the whole sex, and thereby wreck human happiness in America!"

Rebecca conflates feminist views of motherhood (as she perceives them to be) with her own personal experience of Alice's choice or inability to mother in a traditional way. In her interview, Rebecca admits that she prefers her white, Jewish father's second wife, Judy, who bore five children and found meaning as a stay-at-home or ever-available mother. Here is how Rebecca sounds about Judy: "I actually yearned for a traditional mother. My father's second wife, Judy, was a loving, maternal homemaker with five children she doted on. There was always food in the fridge and she did all the things my mother didn't."

Yes, and Alice did all the things that women like Judy don't want to do and can't do: Write great poems and novels, devote oneself to world work, crusade for human and women's rights. Rebecca: Trust me, a woman really cannot do both. The myth that we can is a dangerous one.

I can only imagine the pain of being an artist in thrall to her muse and an activist in service to the world's pain rejected for the more traditional mother/stepmother. Choosing the white over the black family -- come on, this has gotta hurt. It doesn't matter that this is a choice that Alice herself made long ago when she married Rebecca's white father.

The children of greatly talented public figures, as Alice surely is, are often sacrificed to the Great Work. The children can barely breathe in the shadow of -- usually it's the Great Man; in this case, it's the Great Woman. However, great men are allowed every excess and failure; great women are never forgiven for making a single mistake. Great men are allowed their female mistresses, male lovers, wife-secretaries, binges -- and they rarely see their children. Or they exploit and abuse them.

One is commanded to honor one's mother and father. But what if one's parents have been abusive, abandoning, treacherous? If so, it might be important to say so even if it means tearing this ancient religious guideline asunder.

Clearly, Rebecca wants to "talk" to her mother. She has just done so here: publicly, painfully and in a way that is bound to hurt. I wish that I could gentle these two women into repairing their breach. It is one that they will regret forever.