stefhyena's review
5.0
This is an old one but I feel it's findings and problems remain in the too hard basket and people are trying to ignore that this stuff is unresolved. Meanwhile many mothers and some in "caring professions" feel deep ambivalences and the trapped feelings this book attempts to unpack (no I am not only speaking for myself, LOL)
I don't completely buy into their interpretation of interactions between mothers and daughter but I think the meanings they are trying to uncover are ones we all learn to hide or repress, the unmentionable truths that many women feel resentful and trapped in "caring roles" even if they find satisfaction, pride and joy in them whenever they can. I remember my mother being almost driven mad by us and the confines of her life but also making a sort of feature, her life work was mothering (until later when she had a career and was perceptively a lot happier). Despite claiming that motherhood was important she always tried to push me to do anything but that (I was stupid enough to rebel).
When she died my dad made a feature of how motherhood had been the most important thing about her. I went along with the fiction but I wanted to scream.
There is this conspiracy that we all collude in. We say "parents...[ie mothers] are a child's first teachers" We talk about how "important" working with children is and we pay people so little for hard work and tedium. This book while coming across as almost paranoid struck a chord with me as if a pain I had tried to pretend I wasn't feeling was being at least recognised by someone. At the same time what Walkerdine and Lucey have to say about democracy (compliance, neurosis, "feelings") is hard to take. The idea of being able to progress beyond conflict is a seductive one, an ideal as cherished as motherhood itself. At the same time I have experienced the sort of toxic "niceness" that many women of color say white, middle-class women use to silence dissent and to bury uncomfortable truths.
Walkerdine and Lucey are balanced in that in showing the inequity which works against working class girls they are not demonising middle-class girls who have a different experience but are still oppressed (and perhaps neurotic). I feel this is a text I will come back and back and back to as I attempt to wrestle with related contradictions.
I don't completely buy into their interpretation of interactions between mothers and daughter but I think the meanings they are trying to uncover are ones we all learn to hide or repress, the unmentionable truths that many women feel resentful and trapped in "caring roles" even if they find satisfaction, pride and joy in them whenever they can. I remember my mother being almost driven mad by us and the confines of her life but also making a sort of feature, her life work was mothering (until later when she had a career and was perceptively a lot happier). Despite claiming that motherhood was important she always tried to push me to do anything but that (I was stupid enough to rebel).
When she died my dad made a feature of how motherhood had been the most important thing about her. I went along with the fiction but I wanted to scream.
There is this conspiracy that we all collude in. We say "parents...[ie mothers] are a child's first teachers" We talk about how "important" working with children is and we pay people so little for hard work and tedium. This book while coming across as almost paranoid struck a chord with me as if a pain I had tried to pretend I wasn't feeling was being at least recognised by someone. At the same time what Walkerdine and Lucey have to say about democracy (compliance, neurosis, "feelings") is hard to take. The idea of being able to progress beyond conflict is a seductive one, an ideal as cherished as motherhood itself. At the same time I have experienced the sort of toxic "niceness" that many women of color say white, middle-class women use to silence dissent and to bury uncomfortable truths.
Walkerdine and Lucey are balanced in that in showing the inequity which works against working class girls they are not demonising middle-class girls who have a different experience but are still oppressed (and perhaps neurotic). I feel this is a text I will come back and back and back to as I attempt to wrestle with related contradictions.
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