When your mother blames the woman...

[anxietyaunt]

My mother is... something else. She’s never been much of an advocate for women’s rights. I’ve always known this so I shouldn’t be affected by some of her comments, but I am.

Despite being a smart woman and (allegedly) knowing the statistics around domestic violence against women, she can’t help herself. She thinks courts are unfairly biased towards women. That women should “stop carrying on” and sort things out themselves. “Deal with it.” “Stop making things up and ruining lives.”

This woman raised me. Sorry, not sure what my AIBU is, but I’m so incredible saddened by it all.

This entire thread makes me very sad. It sounds like a more literate version of arguments moms and teenage daughters have. I would like to say a few things, in no particular order.

• We are all a product of our time, the society and culture we grew up in, the battles we had to fight.
• If we have daughters who can argue back to us in a literate, mature fashion, with strong opinions that they can defend, then we have done our job right.
• We all have unresolved issues in our past. Sometimes the ONLY person you can speak to about them is your daughter, because we made choices at the time and accepted the fall out and were all mature and responsible about it etc. Not everyone is able to access therapy.
• Be kind to your mothers please. Its bad enough having the world judge everything we do or think.

Quorafun

Do some investigation into the Mother Wound.

You ask us to be kind to our mothers- they did our best etc.

Perpetuation of harmful attitudes causes harm- that's the problem.

My mother made me a feminist before Germaine Greer had put pen to paper.

If ever I dared to point out the unfairness between me and my brothers “but you’re only a girl”.

Someone’s had a new baby girl “they must be so disappointed”.

She doesn’t like little girls in particular. Boys and men are generally faultless. My teenage years were hell with very little freedom. Even the suggestion of a girl getting into a car with a boy would mean they’d be shagging on the back seat - she has a filthy mind.

Always has to comment on other females’ appearance.

She encouraged the violence rained down on me by my abusive father, my brothers were untouched.

She is perplexed by the joy I find in my children and grandchildren.

I haven't seen her for years. This suits both of us.

It’s sad to see so many women grew up with mothers like this, like mine.

My mother absolutely rips into other women, for anything and everything. She will instantly take against a woman if she doesn’t like how she looks.

She recently told me while discussing the film ‘Saturday Night Fever,’ that the scene where the young woman is gang raped isn’t bad because it wasn’t violent, and anyway she did ask for it going about like that.

I’m not sure if she blames women for domestic violence but she blames them for not leaving immediately. When I left my violent XH and she found out what had gone on her only response was, ‘I’d never let a man do that to me.’ In the next breath she asked why I hadn’t told her. I wonder why not?

I was raped when I was 12 and sexually assaulted multiple times. I didn’t tell anyone, and I wonder why?

Oh, and when I talk to my mother about her misogynistic attitudes she just says, ‘I’m too old to change now.’ She’s 68 FFS. It’s nothing to do with not being able to change her attitude, it’s just that she believes herself so doesn’t want to try.

@Nonbibblebibble was your grandmother worried that if she left anything to her daughters their husbands would take it?

I know a couple of women who state their husbands "took" the money they inherited from their family. Remember up until the late 1970s a woman's husband had control over whether they had a bank account or even worked.

In one case one of them had to fight alongside her sisters, some of whom weren't married so no husband to "take" the money, to get the money of their brothers in the first place.

Mine too - except it was always alongside purporting to support equal rights and "womens lib" (1970's)
And the "poor little me - I need a man to do X for me" attitude

Maybe she was schizophrenic

My mother age 75 is like this. Thinks that men should get paid more "because they have families to support", that husbands need "looking after" or they will "go off", that mothers should look after their own children and not "farm them out" and that marriages fail because "people don't make enough effort" (when queried it is clear that she means women should make the effort and put up and shut up - men can just get on with being men). I don't hold with any of that and she is astonished that my husband puts up with me and hasn't left yet. She refers to him as "poor [name]" because we take turns doing the cooking/childcare and he irons his own shirts. We've been together 26 years and if he was unhappy I am sure he might have mentioned it by now. Similarly she is appalled that I do stuff like decorating and DIY.

I have told her that an equal marriage was the only type I would contemplate and i would have rather stayed single than compromise. She seems truly astonished by that concept.

The appearances thing is a bit odd. She will sneer at women who are, in her view, overweight or ugly or scruffily dressed. But at the same time she is very disapproving of married mothers who make the effort to stay slim and glamorous. Apparently we should all wear matronly clothes and have a short sensible haircut.

@Nonbibblebibble

My amazing grandmother who ran a business from the 1940s when women rarely did, in a ‘mans’ professional while raising 10 children left the biz to her sons only and not a penny to the daughters. Even tho one of the daughters helped her run the office. She just valued boys over girls. The girls were supposed to find a decent husband with a decent job, the boys she saw as the providers in their home. My uncles are all loaded, never having had a mortgage thanks to the inheritance, my mum, aunts have modest, at best, lifestyles.

I'm sorry bibble. It's the same in our family, my brother will inherit the family home, the women will see nothing from it. He also does very little for mum.

@AgnesNaismith

Same here, it’s always the woman. She also constantly comments on the appearance of women on tv.

I think internalised misogyny really hit that generation hard.

I think you've hit toenail on the head, they struggle to extricate the values conditioned in them when they were young. Even my own, progressive and feminist late DM used to tell me off for looking like a tart.

It’s a generational thing. Obviously not all elderly people, but quite a lot. Same with attitudes towards racism and homophobia. When you’ve grown up in an era where things were more backward than they are today, their mindsets are totally different. It’s like when you have offspring of staunch labour supporters or Tory supporters, who carry on voting that way, because they’ve lived amongst people who have had input into shaping their minds. As people have said, as that generation disappears, you have a new different generation, so racism, homophobia, sexism will slowly be eradicated in the future.

The most sexist person I ever knew in my life was my Aberdonian grandmother, god rest her. As a small child I remember her getting haughty when making a complaint in a shop, refusing to deal with the girl and asking for the mannie (normal Aberdeen phrasing).

I have lifelong bitterness around Easter eggs. My brother got a bigger one than me and my sister because he 'was the boy', and as a young woman my mother bravely addressed my granny's standard dishing of double food portions to men.

My granny was a hard wumman, a true survivor. I loved her so dearly but her self worth was built on her husbands status, and that of her son too.

She made my stepmother stand in a dip on the putting green to make my dad look taller in their wedding pictures :) She accepted a righteous pasting for that one, it was hilarious.

I’m 65. I was a radical feminist back in the 1970’s, and none of my contemporaries at uni would agree with the ghastly misogynistic views of PPs mothers and MILs!
I was a hospital doctor for 36 years and raised my DDs on firm feminist principles.
Please don’t condemn my whole generation - we fought some awesome fights for equal pay, refuges, access to male only jobs, paid maternity leave etc.

@Quorafun

This entire thread makes me very sad. It sounds like a more literate version of arguments moms and teenage daughters have. I would like to say a few things, in no particular order.

• We are all a product of our time, the society and culture we grew up in, the battles we had to fight.
• If we have daughters who can argue back to us in a literate, mature fashion, with strong opinions that they can defend, then we have done our job right.
• We all have unresolved issues in our past. Sometimes the ONLY person you can speak to about them is your daughter, because we made choices at the time and accepted the fall out and were all mature and responsible about it etc. Not everyone is able to access therapy.
• Be kind to your mothers please. Its bad enough having the world judge everything we do or think.

I love my mother. But I cannot and will not have her in my house constantly talking about the impact on "poor" rapists of being prosecuted for their rape.

These attitudes hurt real women, many of them, in a very real and profound way, still, every day. Not least me.

@speakout

Sounds like my mother. She doesn't believe in equal pay or women's rights. She thinks men are better at most things. When I asked for her help in my early 20s because my OH was physically abusing me- punching me in the face, throwing me against a wall etc, she told me I must try not to annoy him so much.

So sorry

My mum was a victim of domestic violence so I’m always down to argue with people who somehow want to pin the blame on her for it. Some people are just alarmingly out of touch.

IMO, they do it to make themselves feel safer. It’s the attitude of: clearly I’m too smart/educated/secure for this to happen to ME- so clearly this other woman did something to bring it on herself and as long as I don’t do That I’m safe from male violence.

It’s bollocks.

My ex’s mother is a bit like this, unfortunately, as she’s my sons grandma. She doesn’t talk about it with me any more because she knows I will fight her on it- but I remember when it was on the news about a teacher absconding to France with a teenage girl and she kept blaming the CHILD for ruining “that poor mans life”.
We had fucking WORDS about that.

I think my mum is the reverse. I have heard and seen the females in my family act appallingly towards the males. Both genders have capacity to act badly .

@bebanjo

It’s interesting isn’t it, you say your mum always blames the women and yet you say your mum is worse than your dad, do you think you have been influenced at all?

Not sure what you mean? Are you suggesting I have internalised misogyny as I am focused on my mother’s comments rather than my father’s? I’m not sure why my father is brought into it at all, but as mentioned my mother is the one who rants. She’s also a woman herself so her lack of compassion for her “own” is shocking. Also, if I ever told my dad a man had assaulted me he would be enraged. At the man. Not me. My mother wouldn’t.

@junipertree2

Can so relate to the messages on this thread (Gen -Xer). Internalised misogyny was very much a thing. My mum used to say of successful women 'one of those oh-so-very EFFICIENT women'' with a real bitter contempt in her voice. My father didn't like women being in the public sphere at all.

I’m Gen X too. I’d be interested to hear from Millennials etc in the hope their mothers are different.

My mother is the same with her bitter contempt for successful women. You can almost see the bile rising.

This is a whole thread of woman-blaming.

Women fight like rats in a sack while men just carry on, ruling the world.

Stop hating on the women who raised you. Start trying to understand.

Are you suggesting I have internalised misogyny as I am focused on my mother’s comments rather than my father’s?

Yes. Think about it, just for a second.

Are some women victims? Or complicit?

My mother's advice to " be nice" and "try not to annoy" ended up me with me staying in a violent marriage, being raped and beaten several more times over another year than was necessary.

Who is the victim? My mother?

@Cinclus

Same here. My DM went on and on about what "happened" to Oscar Pistorius and how dreadful it was that his life was ruined and didn't I feel sorry for him. I said yes but not as sorry as I feel for the woman he killed and her family. And she said, well, you don't know what went on in their relationship, what did she do to make him do it?

This is similar to a conversation we were having the other day about a celebrity who sexually harassed and assaulted several women. She said felt so sorry for him that they had ruined his life.

@Oenanthe

Are you suggesting I have internalised misogyny as I am focused on my mother’s comments rather than my father’s?

Yes. Think about it, just for a second.

I hate this 'think about it' crap, it's usually used by people who can't articulate their views.

I posted upthread about my mum, I don't think I'm bashing my mum, I said I love my mum to bits. I guess she's a product of her time and surroundings.

Even with all her views, I know that she would do anything for me, she has stood up for me many times, and has fought will male relatives on my behalf. That's why her views can sometimes frustrate me.

@Blankspace101

Another woman bashing thread on MN

There’s little more ridiculous than posting that with a confused face.

If you can’t see this thread is the opposite of “woman bashing” then it’s no wonder you’re confused.