Benevolent sexism in the guise of last generation of innocent mothers
By Mandavi Mishra
She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draft she sat in it-- in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others... I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self defense. Had I not killed her, she would have killed me.
– Virginia Woolf, Professions-for-women
While scrolling through my feed I find these reels of mothers –
Mothers in the kitchen, sweating profusely and making their son's favourite lunch.
Mothers neatly ironing and packing her grown up son's bag before he leaves for the hostel.
Mothers asking her son to not marry outside his caste in a convincing manner.
Mothers cleaning the whole house before a festival.
Mothers complaining how she was exploited by her in-laws but never said a word.
Mothers not being tech friendly.
I see these videos and I see all these with a common caption on my feed — Last generation of innocent mothers.
This is a common trend in social media these days where men glorify their mothers as last generation of naive and innocent mothers. But why they do this remains the question. Is there more than it shows to this tendency of glorification of innocent mothers that needs to be questioned and understood? The question needs to be asked that why do we as a society celebrate and glorify this kind of motherhood and what does it hide.
These innocent mothers are the women who never got enough opportunities to dream, build a life for themselves and their life's biggest achievement was giving birth to a male child. The obsession with male child in indian households is not new, women become a carrier and proponent of patriarchy and it becomes a matter of reputation in family and society to have a male child, this obsession doesn’t work in isolation but is accompanied by sex determination and infanticide and foeticide on one hand and half a dozen daughters for a male child on the other. We should also remember that there are rituals and practices to get a male child. This male heir is very important to continue their lineage. [1]Research by Pew Research Center based on Union government data indicates foeticide of at least 9 million females in the years 2000–2019. [2]A recent UK government analysis has found a sizeable imbalance in birth sex ratios among Indian-origin families, raising concerns that some parents may be aborting female foetuses because they prefer sons. If not abortion then many families go for a "son-biased stopping rule," where families continue childbearing until they achieve a desired number of sons. [3]The landmark India Economic Survey calculated that this stopping rule created a stock of roughly 21 million "notionally unwanted girls". These are female children born into families that kept having children specifically to ensure a male heir.
So, these docile, naive, and submissive mothers to their sons can also be the first agent of patriarchy in their daughters' life. These women who spoon-feed their sons till adulthood are the ones who start conditioning their daughters to adjust and behave like a girl since she's a kid. This process is called gendered socialization. Through this process of learning and internalizing the social expectations, behaviours and roles associated with a specific gender, a culture works to train young girls to become women who adjust, compromise and serve others.
Psychologist Sandra Bem introduced [4]Gender Schema theory, a cognitive theory that explains how children learn and adopt gender roles and cultural expectations. She argued that children develop mental frameworks or networks of information that help them categorize traits, behaviours, and objects as masculine or feminine. Daughters and sons experience different childhood within the same four walls. Women are deemed as the second sex and as soon as the mother is removed from the scene this daughter or daughter-in-law is expected to take over her roles and now this younger woman in the family is supposed to fit into the shoes of the elderly women. Many young girls face discrimination of all sorts while growing up, from educational opportunities to how they work and behave is decided by their family. From food that is made in the kitchen to who helps in the kitchen and gives up on their dreams when time comes is not something one has to think about.
Benevolent sexism is the rigid assignment of roles, placing men in positions of power and authority while confining women to nurturing, domestic, or supportive roles. It works in a subtle way by putting women on a pedestal from where there is no going back. So, a mother keeps on serving and being this nice sweet and docile person till the time her body gives up. She develops some chronic ailment and succumbs to this burnout.
Now there are two problems with men calling their mothers the last generation of innocent mothers. -
It is sons who feel this way. Daughters grown up in the same homes have had very different experiences: they had to fight their mothers for basic human rights, and their biggest fear was turning into them.
When these men enter relationships, they continue to glorify their mothers' burnout and place unrealistic expectations on their partners, which is an extension of the creepy mother–son enmeshment phenomenon
So these women of the previous generation were not altogether naive and innocent but at times very good at Patriarchal Bargain - they conformed to patriarchy and male dominated systems to maximize their own security, status, or autonomy. Turkish scholar Deniz Kandiyoti coined this term in her foundational 1988 article, Bargaining with Patriarchy, to explain how women navigate through different oppressive social structures without necessarily challenging the overarching system.
“Innocence” is a euphemism under which “Invisibility” is guised. The issue here is that a young girl who has worked hard her entire life to not turn into her mother is expected to turn into her partner's mother later on. Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering argues that women’s role as primary caregivers is socially and psychologically reproduced from one generation to the next. Young girls are conditioned in a way that they themselves start feeling that the ultimate purpose of their lives is to be mother or motherly. We need to understand that there is no single “last generation of innocent mothers”. The unrealistic expectations that men have from their mothers are transferred to their wives and young women who want to claim “Visibility” are often challenged by the set norms and expectations.
Women's sacrifice appears to be normal, desirable and even virtuous and this continues from one generation to another. Any defiance is labelled as careless or selfish, not just by men but also by women around her. In order to get out of this cage where a woman who performs this labour well is remembered as “innocent”, a woman has to fight herself along with everyone else around her.
We can see hundreds of these ads on television, on OTTs,Youtube or while walking down a lane on a huge banner:
A woman is working hard within the house from cooking to cleaning; she's also going outside, leading a team in her office and collecting groceries while returning; all this gives her a back pain which is resolved by the husband putting a balm.
Woman's exhaustion has been normalised and glorified since time immemorial, so much so that it constitutes what a good woman is, she's basically exhausted but a smiling one, any exception to this is a selfish and careless mother and wife. A woman's social worth is attached to the successful performance of repetitive care work, her ability of draining herself everyday and sacrificing her career and ambitions for her family and her roles as a mother.
We as a society need to problematise the glorification of “burnout” and “exhaustion”.
As a researcher, keeping a critical lens on at all times gives me a major headache. The subtle sexism and internalized patriarchy are so deeply rooted that you cannot even convince a woman that there is anything wrong with it. I'd try to convince boomer mothers that domestic labour should not be gender based and they'd throw back the f word (feminist) at me as if it's a cuss word. Even when I had no theory to back up my ideas I knew relatives asking me if I could cook or not was not a form of care. They sold me cooking as a basic life skill when I had no clue about driving as well. At this point nothing can convince me believe that their ignorance is their innocence.
Sacrifice is not goodness, exhaustion is not love and invisibility of an individual cannot be your nostalgia, it's stopping an individual who happens to be your mother to have a “life of her own.”
[1] HOW INDIANS VIEW GENDER ROLES IN FAMILIES AND SOCIETY
[2] SEX RATIO AT BIRTH IN THE UK, 2017-2021 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/sex-ratios-at-birth-in-the-united-kingdom-2017-to-2021/sex-ratios-at-birth-in-the-united-kingdom-2017-to-2021
[3] GENDER AND SON META-PREFERENCE: https://www.indiabudget.gov.in/budget2018-2019/economicsurvey2017-2018/pdf/102-118_Chapter_07_ENGLISH_Vol_01_2017-18.pdf
[4] GENDER SCHEMA THEORY AND ROLES IN CULTURE: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-gender-schema-theory-2795205
Written by :
Mandavi Mishra is a research scholar in English literature at Banaras Hindu University (BHU), where her academic work focuses on feminism and gender studies.
Exceptionally written!