Patriarchy Teaches Daughters To Mother Blame
Patriarchy teaches daughters to blame their mother for their low self-esteem, their anxiety and depression, their disordered eating, their anxious attachment, and their “mother wound”.
As Paula Caplan explains in “The new don’t blame mother”, mother blaming is the norm, the dominant language that we learn to speak and believe in, as if it is speaking the truth.
Karen (not her real name) announced during her mother-daughter therapy session that she struggles with setting boundaries because her mother taught her to be a doormat. Cynthia (not her real name) described during her therapy session that she expects people to not show up for her because her mother wasn’t emotionally available for her when she was young. And Alison (not her real name) told me that she struggles to know what she is feeling and needing because her mother is controlling and emotionally manipulative, and that she adopts other people’s truth because that is how she learned to keep her mother happy.
Though Karen’s, Cynthia’s, and Alison’s issues are very real, blaming their mother as the main and only source of their problem is incorrect. Patriarchy has co-opted Bowlby’s and Ainsworth’s Attachment Theory to justify the blaming of mothers, not fathers, for causing life-long emotional harm if they are not emotionally present enough for their children. It is true as Karen, Cynthia, and Alison surmise, daughters can inherit their mother’s emotional disempowerment and their inability to set boundaries, and emotional neglect does have a long-term impact on how we relate in our relationships. I personally understand how Alison learned to silence her emotional truth and adopt her mother’s truth because that is what I learned to do as a child to keep my mother happy with me. As an adult I had to learn how to claim my own truth and voice.
If Karen, Cynthia, and Alison are encouraged to believe that their mother’s so-called “failings” are the only and whole truth about their struggles and behaviors, they will miss learning about the impact that their wider socio-cultural environment has on the way they live and their mother mothers in. They will miss learning about how the women in their generational family are expected to comply with the Culture of Female Service, which causes women to be doormats, emotionally silent, and controlling.
In “The Mother-Daughter Puzzle”, I write about how the Culture of Female Service is a belief system that treats women, and especially mothers as care givers, not care receivers, as listeners, not speakers, and that caring for, and ensuring other people are happy is a women’s, a mother’s, and a daughter’s calling.
By learning about the beliefs that they, and their mothers have learned to define themselves by as women, mothers, and daughters, Karen will understand why her mother learned to be a doormat, Cynthia will understand why her mother shut down emotionally, and Alison will understand why her mother learned to be controlling and manipulative. By understanding what it means to be female in their generational family, Karen, Cynthia, and Alison will find the answers to the following questions.
1. How do women learn to be a doormat and dismiss their rights and boundaries?
2. How do women learn to be controlling so that they feel in control of their relationships?
3. How did women learn to believe that they shouldn’t say what they feel, think, and need?
4. How are women’s rights and boundaries violated?
5. How are women listened to?
6. How are mothers listened to and supported?
7. How are mothers seen as people first outside of their mothering role?
I have come to recognize that there is a distinct purpose to the way society blames mothers for anything and everything, and how Bowlby’s and Ainsworth’s Attachment Theory focuses its causal blame on a mother’s unavailability. When mothers are targeted for causal blame, patriarchy’s impact on women’s lives and how mothers mother is ignored. Like a magician, mother blaming directs our focus on what mothers aren’t doing so that we don’t see the harm that patriarchy and sexism inflicts on women, girls, mothers, and daughters.
Mother blaming silences the truth that mothers do not mother in a cultural vacuum and mothers and daughters do not grow up in and relate in a cultural vacuum. The socio-cultural environment is the soil mothers mother in, and the quality of the soil impacts how a mother mothers and what mothers and daughters learn to believe about themselves. And if a mother’s socio-cultural soil silences the conversation that asks what women feel, think, and need, and treats women’s needs, and especially a mother’s needs as selfish, needy, unfeminine, bad, and wrong, this silencing and shaming of a mother’s voice and needs directly impacts how she feels about herself as a woman and mother.
If Karen’s mother had grown up with the conversation that asks what she feels, needs, and wants, she would have known how to set her boundaries and been able to teach her daughter how to set her boundaries. If the people around Cynthia were emotionally available to her, she would have learned how to be emotionally available to her daughter. And if Alison’s mother had grown up being asked what she needed, she would not have learned to be controlling.
Karen’s, Cynthia’s, and Alison’s mothers have learned to adapt to the silencing and emotional neglect that surrounded them in their family and wider society. And it feels cruel for a theoretical model and society to blame mothers for trying to survive in an environment where their basic human right of being heard, understood, cared for, and supported is missing. And it also feels cruel that patriarchy co-opts daughters to blame their mothers so that the sexism that has harmed their mothers is ignored and let off the hook.