Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

The day feminist icon Alice Walker resigned as my mother
The Times (UK) ^ | May 4, 2008 | Margarette Driscoll

Posted on 05/05/2008 7:50:19 AM PDT by jalisco555

In the mid-1980s, The New York Times ran a profile of the American writer and activist Alice Walker. Her novel, The Color Purple, had won the Pulitzer prize and was being turned into a film by Steven Spielberg.

The article was illustrated by a photograph of Walker sitting on her teenaged daughter’s knee. It was meant to be a “fun” picture; but, in retrospect, according to Rebecca Walker, the photographer unwittingly portrayed the true nature of her relationship with her mother.

Alice Walker was, and remains, an icon of the American civil rights movement. “People adore her. I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, ‘Your mother saved my life’ and ‘I have an altar to your mother in my bedroom’. They feel a connection to her and revere her greatly,” says Rebecca.

Walker’s success as a campaigner was to her detriment as a mother. Like Dickens’s Mrs Jellyby, who neglects her home and her children as she directs her energy towards the poor of Africa, so America’s icon often went to feminist meetings and rallies and left Rebecca to fend for herself. Her daughter experimented with drugs and became pregnant at 14.

“My mother\did a lot of leaving to go to her writing retreat, which was over 100 miles away — so she’d go there and leave me a little bit of money, leave me in the care of a neighbour,” recalls Rebecca, now 38.

“When I was pregnant at 14, I think it was because I was so lonely that I was reaching out through my sexuality. My mother’s a crusader for daughters around the world, but couldn’t see that her own daughter was having a difficult time. It was me having to psycho-emotionally tiptoe around her, rather than her taking care of me.”

Walker is furious with Rebecca for making such sentiments public, and mother and daughter are estranged with little hope of reconciliation. Rebecca has a three-year-old son, Tenzin, whom her mother has never seen. Their last meaningful exchange, during Rebecca’s pregnancy, ended in Walker sending a terse e-mail in which she resigned from “the job” of being her mother, and told her that in any case their relationship had been “inconsequential” for years.

The depth of her anger was such that she refused to budge even when Rebecca had a difficult birth and Tenzin’s life hung in the balance in a special-care baby unit. “My father called her to tell her what was happening. He couldn’t imagine that she wouldn’t run right over . . . In some ways, I wanted her to — but in other ways, I didn’t. I knew she wouldn’t be able to be there for me in the way I wanted. It would be problematic.”

Walker, the eighth child of poor sharecroppers, grew up in Georgia during segregation. Her extraordinary intellect and determination won her a scholarship to study in New York; and after university she returned to the South and became involved in voter-registration drives and setting up children’s education programmes in Mississippi.

There she met Mel Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. In the midst of the feverish, sometimes murderous, racial politics of the time, they became the first legally married inter-racial couple in Mississippi, defying both their families’ disapproval and death threats from the Ku Klux Klan.

The marriage did not last but it produced Rebecca: a living, breathing, mixed-race embodiment of the new America that they were trying to forge. The problem was that, during her childhood, Rebecca felt precisely that — a political symbol rather than a cherished daughter.

Being progressives, Walker and Leventhal decided on shared parenting but came up with the agreement that Rebecca would alternately live two years with each of them. From the age of eight, she lived in utterly different worlds: with her father and stepmother in New York’s conventional, rich, Jewish, Upper East Side; and with her mother among bohemian, black, mostly poverty stricken activists and feminists in California.

She felt she did not fit into either world. In New York, she was the only black face in the neighbourhood. Yet she felt she was far too steeped in “white privilege” for her mother’s friends’ taste. And, if she tried to talk to her parents about any of this, she was ignored.

“My father had come out of world war two and the Holocaust, my mother from the segregated South. Their attitude was, ‘The Gestapo isn’t after you, you’re not getting beaten up by mobs just for sitting at the lunch counter — what’s your problem?’ ” she says.

Walker had also joined the early feminist movement — Gloria Steinem is Rebecca’s godmother — and it was her politics, more than anything, that shaped mother-daughter relations. The so-called “first wave” feminists believed that housework was another form of slavery and that women did not have an innate need to nurture but had been conditioned into their subordinate role as wives and mothers through centuries of patriarchy.

“My mother is very ideologically based, and her ideology is much more important in many ways than her personal relationships,” says Rebecca.

When Rebecca became pregnant at 14, Walker wasn’t shocked: she calmly picked up the phone and arranged an abortion. “Her feminist thing was about empowering me to have an active sexuality and to be in control of my body, and that trumped any sense of boundaries,” Rebecca says.

Certainly, Walker believed that what she was doing was right. Leaving her teenaged daughter to “do her own thing” was a way of fostering Rebecca’s independence and avoiding inadvertently passing down patriarchal values.

“Her circle were questioning power relationships and whether a mother had any more knowledge than a child. Some friends of hers were living on communes. I know those kids and they’re totally screwed up.

“Some were sexually abused, all kinds of bad stuff happened, but even those who survived intact don’t want to create communes for their children. They didn’t want to be raised by 10 different parents — again, it was this ideological thing trumping the maternal instinct.”

Towards the end of senior school, an ecstatic Rebecca showed Walker her offer letter from Yale. Instead of celebrating her daughter’s success in landing a place at one of the world’s top universities, Walker asked her coolly why she wanted to go to a bastion of male privilege.

Rebecca went to Yale anyway, and started thinking about feminism for herself. Her first book examined what feminism meant to young women and what role it played in the modern world. “When I began to challenge status quo feminism, my mother started to feel very injured,” she says. “To have a daughter who was questioning feminism — it was seen as a threat. Imagine Margaret Thatcher having a hippie child who wanted to live in India and become a Hare Krishna. It was that kind of schism.

“I keep telling people feminism is an experiment. And just like in science, you have to assess the outcome of the experiment and adjust according to your results, but my mother and her friends, they see it as truth; they don’t see it as an experiment.

“So that creates quite a problem. You’ve got young women saying, ‘That didn’t really work for me’ and the older ones saying, ‘Tough, because that’s how it should be’.”

The debate goes on: Rebecca, who lives in Hawaii with Tenzin and Glen, his Buddhist-teacher father, recently wrote about why she was supporting Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton — and immediately came under fire.

“The response from older feminists was that I, and other young women, were naive in thinking Obama could ever truly represent us, and we should be supporting the female candidate. The belief is that women become more radical as they get older, that we’re naive and we’ll ‘get it’ later on.”

Predictably, Walker was upset at Rebecca’s next publication, Black, White and Jewish — a memoir about growing up in her fractured family. “My father was quite shocked at first, but he got behind me 100%. However, my mother felt very injured,” says Rebecca. “I’m not blameless. I can be very direct and strong in my opinions and I wasn’t as sensitive to other people’s feelings as I could have been.

“My mother is a celebrity, and celebrities need to constantly police their reputation. If you put a chink in their public persona, it can be very dangerous and threatening to them.”

The final showdown happened while Rebecca was pregnant, and is chronicled in her new book, Baby Love — a diary of her pregnancy in which she explores modern women’s dilemmas about relationships and motherhood.

Having been raised to believe that “it’s not nature, it’s nurture”, she was not prepared for the strength of her feelings for her baby. “I adore him,” she says. “He’s really into running and jumping and he’s very attached to me. It’s all, ‘Mommy, Mommy, Mommy’, and it’s very difficult to leave him.”

People she meets constantly express surprise at what’s happened — surely having a child should have brought her closer to her mother, rather than splitting them asunder? She agrees.

“People don’t really understand how strong ideology can be,” she says. “I think sometimes of that group and that feminism as being close to a cult. I feel I had to de-programme myself in order to have independent thought. It’s been an ongoing struggle. When you have a cult, you have a cult leader who demands a certain conformity . . . And when you have a celebrity who has cultural-icon status, economic power beyond what you can imagine, you can’t resist that person — if you want to stay in their realm. Because once you start challenging them, they kick you out.”

Baby Love by Rebecca Walker is published by Souvenir Press at £15. Copies can be ordered for £13.50, including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

From Rebecca’s diary

June 29, 2004

Two days ago, I checked my e-mail to find a note from my mother threatening to send an attached statement [to a website.] In a nutshell, she took offence to a section of my 2001 memoir, reprinted in a publication two weeks ago, in which I wrote that my parents didn’t protect or look out for me . . . In the statement, she calls me a liar, a thief (because when I was eight, I took quarters from her purse during my parents’ divorce) and a few other discrediting unmentionables . . .

I went over to her house to find out what the hell was going on. Never have I been so frightened by my mother. She sat me down and called me “someone who thinks she is a good person but really isn’t”. She said that because I wasn’t from the South and didn’t have the full memory of slavery (read: I am half white), that I don’t know what it feels like to be sold down the river.

I asked whether she thought it was a little strange that I wrote about my struggle in an attempt to get her to take care of me, but here we were, talking about how I should be taking care of her.

She grew quite vicious. After two hours of trying to convince her of the merits of my existence, I left the house shaking. [My partner] Glen was extremely upset: This is how she treats you when you’re pregnant?

November 24

E-mails have been flying back and forth. I ask her to apologise for the statement she threatened to send [to a website]. She tells me that she and all of her friends think that I have lost my mind. When I write that if she can’t apologise, I don’t want contact because I feel she is too emotionally dangerous for me and my unborn son, she writes that she won’t miss what we don’t have. She [adds] that she has been my mother for 30 years and is no longer interested in the job. Instead of signing “your mother” at the end, she signs her first name.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Philosophy
KEYWORDS: alicewalker; feminism; hypocricy; liberalism; rebeccawalker; thecolorpurple
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-2021-4041-6061 next last
Another prominent leftist who loves The People in the abstract but is horrid to the individuals in her life. The daughter's rejection of feminism is also very interesting. But a very sad story.
1 posted on 05/05/2008 7:50:20 AM PDT by jalisco555
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: jalisco555
Rebecca felt precisely that — a political symbol rather than a cherished daughter.

Hey, a lot of "political symbols" descended from these "progressives" are just outright killed, so consider yourself lucky.

2 posted on 05/05/2008 7:54:36 AM PDT by Izzy Dunne (Hello, I'm a TAGLINE virus. Please help me spread by copying me into YOUR tag line.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: jalisco555

To fems, children are a distraction, at best.

I am thankful everyday for my conservative mother.


3 posted on 05/05/2008 7:55:16 AM PDT by Arm_Bears (Call BR-549)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: jalisco555

Liberals pretend to care for “The Children”, even though they taught it so much. But in actuality, the opposite is usually on display.


4 posted on 05/05/2008 7:55:52 AM PDT by sr4402
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Arm_Bears

To rich liberal feminists, adopted children from the Third World are ornaments. Madonna and Angelina are in a contest to see who can adopt an orphan from the poorest country.


5 posted on 05/05/2008 7:57:28 AM PDT by CholeraJoe (Single woman in Baghdad needs socks. Email: allegra@freerepublic.com)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: jalisco555

Feminists and the Left in general, don’t understand the paramount importance of being a good mom (or dad).

There is no job, not neurosurgeon, CEO, high-powered attorney, butcher, baker or candlestick maker that is more important, not only for individual happiness and emotional health, but the future of western civilization itself.


6 posted on 05/05/2008 7:57:36 AM PDT by EyeGuy
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Izzy Dunne

My wife, a school teacher, works with an educational consultant in her school who is constantly spouting drivel about how we need to do more for the children. However, she has said that she never wants kids of her own and doesn’t understand how we could want children.


7 posted on 05/05/2008 7:58:51 AM PDT by Arkansas Toothpick
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: jalisco555
Like Dickens’s Mrs Jellyby

I read Bleak House many years ago and thought Mrs. Jellyby was a spot-on description of a lot of liberals I know, even though it was written is 1853.

8 posted on 05/05/2008 7:59:17 AM PDT by murdoog
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: jalisco555

Ben Stein said it best during the Murphy Brown controversy...liberals hate kids.


9 posted on 05/05/2008 8:00:30 AM PDT by y6162
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: jalisco555

Liberals in English Departments love her black woman voice - sames goes for Maya Angelou. Neither have written much quality in the last decade or so.


10 posted on 05/05/2008 8:00:30 AM PDT by AD from SpringBay (We deserve the government we allow.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: jalisco555
Just another in a long line of leftists who cared about every family in the world but their own.

It's a lot less work that way. You don't have to remember birthdays.

11 posted on 05/05/2008 8:00:40 AM PDT by CaptainK (...please make it stop. Shake a can of pennies at it.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: jalisco555

This is written from the daughter Rebecca’s perspective, of course, but she does appear to be a strong, intelligent, and loving woman who has her priorities straight. Her mother, Alice, appears to be a liberal and feminist who bought the propaganda entirely and refuses to recognize the damage it does.


12 posted on 05/05/2008 8:00:45 AM PDT by American Quilter (AIDS....drugs.......abortion......don't liberals just kill you?)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: jalisco555
My mother and sister have the opposite relationship. My mother was attentive and responsible, but accidentally raised a rabid liberal idealogue (more her husband's doing than my parents') who won't let my mother see her grandchildren any more.

I suppose a malignant narcissism is at fault for both these sad situations! Certainly seems that Alice Walker and my sister are two of a kind...

13 posted on 05/05/2008 8:05:41 AM PDT by To Hell With Poverty (Obama hates you.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: CholeraJoe

And what happens to the poor kids when the novelty wears off?


14 posted on 05/05/2008 8:06:08 AM PDT by Arm_Bears (Call BR-549)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 5 | View Replies]

To: jalisco555

“Mommie Leftist” Alice Walker, another classic Lefty who prefers the abstract (it’s always cleaner and clearer) over the Concrete (hey,it’s messy!). This was all going along so
well, until the daughter identified herself as an Obama
supporter.So they’re both Lefties, and the daughter distinguishes herself from her mother, by moving farther left. They’re both equally deluded, it seems. Leave them all, mother, daughter, husbands, etc. to their politically-defined realities. They both and all have a highly inflated sense of how important they are.


15 posted on 05/05/2008 8:08:51 AM PDT by supremedoctrine ("Time is the school in which we learn that time is the fire in which we burn")
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: jalisco555
“People don’t really understand how strong ideology can be,” she says. “I think sometimes of that group and that feminism as being close to a cult. I feel I had to de-programme myself in order to have independent thought. It’s been an ongoing struggle. When you have a cult, you have a cult leader who demands a certain conformity . . . And when you have a celebrity who has cultural-icon status, economic power beyond what you can imagine, you can’t resist that person — if you want to stay in their realm. Because once you start challenging them, they kick you out.”

Food for thought.

16 posted on 05/05/2008 8:09:47 AM PDT by GOPJ
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Arkansas Toothpick

It ought to be a requirement that, before you are licensed to “help the children”, you should raise some of your own.


17 posted on 05/05/2008 8:13:22 AM PDT by Izzy Dunne (Hello, I'm a TAGLINE virus. Please help me spread by copying me into YOUR tag line.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 7 | View Replies]

To: jalisco555

I can see why Alice is upset. But she should be upset at herself, for being a monster. I’ll pray for Alice.


18 posted on 05/05/2008 8:17:26 AM PDT by Fox_Mulder77 (McCain's FR tag: McLlort)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: jalisco555

So she gave birth to a boy 3 years ago huh? She must have been very shocked to learn the true nature of men.


19 posted on 05/05/2008 8:21:46 AM PDT by The Toll
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: jalisco555

Liberalism is a mental disease and this story just illustrates how a histrionic and narcissistic borderline personality neglected and abused her own child in the name of celebrity femininsm. Typical.


20 posted on 05/05/2008 8:30:20 AM PDT by Valpal1 (OW! My head just exploded!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-2021-4041-6061 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson