Wednesday, as we were reeling from the aftereffects of the election, my dear sister Eleanor sent me a care package. It contained two of our mother’s candy-colored bed jackets that she wore sitting up in bed, a breakfast tray on her knees, the day’s newspaper spread out. Eleanor remembers her wearing white gloves for this operation; I don’t.
All these garments are too small for me. Our mother, dead these many years, was physically a tiny woman, barely over five feet tall and due to strenuously dieting probably never weighing more than 100 pounds. She was large in every other dimension and that is how we remember her.
When I tried on her nightgown, I felt constricted. It was way too tight everywhere. Impossible to imagine lying down to sleep in what felt like a black lace straight jacket. It fit her; it never had and never would fit me.
The nightgown led me to wonder in how many ways we contemporary women are still constricted by the rules and roles of our mothers and even our grandmothers. Even without consciously deciding it, we may continue to project late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century stereotypes on our daughters and especially on our sons.
Our daughters, so much larger these days, may—due to the fires of rebellion escape these strictures—but our sons? After all, most of the rules of conventional white society exist to protect the privileges of the patriarchy and of the white men who inherit those privileges.
Mr. Trump was re-elected by a coterie of “bros,” including African-American and Latino men. How many of these young men were raised by mothers who wanted to protect their “masculine identity”—the identity that with luck allows them to benefit from their position in the hierarchy?
I am certainly one of that large group of feminists who, as mothers of sons, failed to pass on our radical values, our changed perceptions of how men should be and should behave.
It would have meant strenuously going against the grain, especially in the upper-class white South where I lived when my sons were growing up. My values as a feminist were at odds with everybody and everything around us—and this was true not only in the South.
We were preaching revolution and no one and no country is comfortable with revolution, especially when it is preached, however tentatively, by women.
All of us love our sons. We want “the best for them,” and that may mean for some of us sheltering them from the changes that the women’s movement had brought to expectations about what it means to be a male. Those changes are painful, and we want to protect these young men from pain. These changes, embraced, may make it extremely difficult for enlightened men to fit in the patriarchy, may cause alienation from other men and block certain avenues of advancement. Not an easy or comfortable thought for mothers whose role, historically, has been to smooth the way for our males.
For example, a story in Thursday’s New York Times quoted several people, men and women, at Mr. Trump’s victory rally. One 42-year-old man in Austin, Texas, asked why he’d voted for Mr. Trump, said it was because “he still acts like a guy, which is what got him in trouble, maybe” and because “he is better for the population of men” a population long out-numbered by women in this country.
Yes, groping and assaulting women and obsessing about the size of male genitalia is what the bro brotherhood understands and endorses.
So where did we, as mothers, go wrong? Of course we can’t bear all the blame for the resurgence of the right; “each pot on its own bottom” according to an old saying. But we do need to consider where our protection for our sons intersects with the demands of the patriarchy, where protecting them as far as we can from self-questioning and failure creates another member of the bro brotherhood, scornful of women (even of mothers), full of unearned confidence in its place by right of gender at the top of the totem pole.
As for the women who supported Mr. Trump and hope to gain from his presidency (they may be disappointed), it’s not possible to analyze their motives without factoring in the large number of women of all classes and races who are dependent on a male for their economic survival. Emotional dependency almost inevitably follows.
This of course is one of the rules of the thriving patriarchy of which Mr. Trump, “a true man”, is the exemplar. Until we manage to pass the Equal Rights Amendment and raise the minimum wage across the country so that women, who are the majority of low-paid employees in health care, child care, and retail, can earn enough to be free of a man, our dependency will continue to encourage us to train up sons to be “true men” in the model of Mr. Trump.
By the way, I’m calling the president-in-waiting Mr. Trump because I’ve decided to stop using the flamboyant denigrating terms that have become as familiar on the left as on the right.
The office, if not the office holder, deserves our respect.
Now as I fold away my mother’s too-small nightgown while admiring its pretty black lace, I remind myself of the straight jacket too many of us women wear: “sweetness,” “loveliness,” soother of all wounds to the male ego, especially in our sons.
To some degree this has brought us the nomination of Mr. Trump.
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