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.

@PurplePlain

If you're brought up to believe things it can be very difficult to reframe your thoughts. I'm 51 and my supposedly liberal parents said ridiculous things to me - women don't get bored like men so they should do all the housework and dreary tasks, men have bigger brains and are more intelligent, if a woman gets hysterical (or frustrated at being dismissed!) a slap will calm her down, women can't be funny, etc. Because I was a child I took a lot of these beliefs on until my late teens/twenties, and sometimes I still have to stop myself from victim blaming.

My mum was constantly worrying about 'what will the neighbours say'and being judged so perhaps some of it is insecurity.

I don't think your parents sound 'liberal' at all! They sound from the Stone Age frankly.

You are probably talking about a generation that had these opinions dinned into them. I'm in my 60s, suffered sexual harassment at work, you thought it was just something that happened. Life was very different when I grew up and you have to remember in my day, there was zero workplace legislation that protected women. However, I am glad to see times are changing and that women will not be treated like doormats any more.

@Babdoc

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.

I'm the same age as you, @Babdoc, and whilst I wasn't radical, I was definitely a feminist as a student, and seem to have instilled not just feminist, but anarchist, principles in my own daughter, which I'm rather proud of! My own mother, born in 1925, remains an enigma to me, she had a very interesting, quite adventurous life in a way, and worked full-time until retirement, but somehow wasn't quite with me on feminism, sexism or racism and had to be told my little brother wasn't necessarily better than me just because he was a male! But she often reminded me, and I think quite rightly, that she and the rest of her generation had lived through an awful lot of change, from WWII to colour television to the internet and beyond, during their life-times, and that wasn't necessarily easy for them to adapt to.

Some opportunities have changed, but a great many attitudes haven't

Of course they haven’t because we’re all the product of our times. It’s so depressing that every generation is so fast to condemn the preceding one(s) without taking into account the very different climate that formed them.

My mother was born at a time when women didn’t have the vote. She was literally raised by a Victorian. Despite having a successful career as a result of women’s conscription in 1942 she became a 1950s housewife and she never lost the attitudes that formed her as she grew up in the 1930s.

I came of age in the 70s and have seen so much incredible progress for women - equal pay (at least in theory), maternity leave and pay, widely available childcare, financial independence and autonomy - the list goes on. I’m so proud of my generation for achieving those things. I consider myself a feminist and always have. Yet on MN I’m a dinosaur and have been accused of misogyny because I can’t bring myself to care about a computer deciding I’m Mrs, not Ms.

I think some of you will find yourselves mystified in a decade or two by the way you’re viewed by younger generations and you might have a little more sympathy with your older female relatives. I have.

Urgh. No excuse my 70 something mother is definitely not like this.

She notices in her peers though - the weird vitriol of her 70 something female friends against Meghan Markle particularly friends with sons. As mum said “what exactly has she done?!” They couldn’t really answer just think she personified uppity daughters in law...

@MsTSwift My mother thinks Meghan Markle is the spawn of satan and blames her for it all, and that Harry should never have been 'allowed' to marry her...particularly as she was divorced. In my mother's case it's a healthy dose of misogyny mixed with racism...

Seriously, the way many people (principally women) talk about MM you'd think she'd confessed to killing and eating kids for kicks, and making Harry do it too, rather than merely "not knowing her place".

I think some of you will find yourselves mystified in a decade or two by the way you’re viewed by younger generations and you might have a little more sympathy with your older female relatives.

I am not sure why this post was written as a response to me personally. I have plenty. One of my maternal great-grandmothers was a suffragist who worked in a munitions factory. I remember her from early childhood: a real firebrand and a fine-spirited lady. She fought a good fight at a time where most of us would have struggled in the face of widescale opposition. My maternal grandmother was a stoic, strong, courageous woman who always urged me to use my vote because other women had fought for me to have it. My mother and I extremely close because of what we'd suffered at the hands of my abusive father. These women were my nurturers and protectors: they were survivors who all had known real grief and hardship in their lives. Incidentally, none of them ever encouraged my to race home from my professional job in order to cook a man his dinner. I'm proud of them all.

By the sounds of it, I've been lucky. Because I will never accept that minimising sexual assault or abuse, or encouraging our daughters that 'it just happens' and they should therefore suck it up, is an attitude that ever engenders respect. Generation is irrelevant here.

As for the Gen Z, 'intersectional' feminists coming after us, the ones hellbent on giving away the rights the likes of the above fought hard for, I could say a sight more disparaging things about them.

No one is compelled to respect harmful views because of the generation harping on them at the time.

Oh god yes, my BIL is a violent abusive twat and yet my Mum can’t fail to mention every time his name comes up that he’s a very good business man....or will make a big deal of him paying for a meal (after mentally and financially abusing my Dsis and her kids for weeks on end)....it’s so depressing.

She also once said (of a tv character who had been attacked and who she didn’t think was pretty)...”who would want to rape her”.... which is why as a teenager I didn’t tell her about my own sexual assault. I saw through her all those years ago and knew I had to protect myself from the additional damage of not being believed or made to feel it was my fault. I really hope it’s a generational thing that dies out soon.

My mum too. Always victim blaming with regards to sexual assault and brought us up to be conscious that our actions might instigate an attack.

She also said a couple of weird things a few years ago that I thought very odd. We were talking about Jimmy Saville and she said she his were “a bit older, so not very young children” in a sort of explanatory tone of voice. As if the age of the victims made it less heinous! Another time we were taking about child abuse and she said (of abusers) that she couldn’t “understand the attraction”! Very, very odd.

I am sorry your mum is such an ignorant woman.

Close her down each and every time she brings it up "you know I disagree with you, I don't want to talk about it"

And teach your children better.

@MarieIVanArkleStinks, it wasn’t written to you personally. It was a response to a point you made.

I agree with you entirely that no one is compelled to respect harmful views because of the generation harping on them at the time. You’re absolutely right about that. But it’s unfair to condemn people for holding views that were the cultural norm in their formative years.

"Look at the discussion about WFH. It makes me so sad that so many women think it's a bad thing, when it is patently a good thing for many women and disabled people. Office working is a male construct - that doesn't mean it's a bad thing but it does mean that it shouldn't be maintained for the sake of it."

Absolutely. Sadly, I do see a lof us on here being quite judgmental about women's choices - very often posters are told to ''toughen up and get on with it'' (not in regards to relationships, but in regards to impossible working situations, that are clearly not designed to help women but stem from a misogynistic society). There's a lot of understanding for employers and managers, but for (female) employees who are often stuck between a rock and hard place, in terms of balancing work and childcare, there is shockingly little. It always saddens me to see this. How about we stopped being so passive aggressive, blaming each other as indivduals and instead started actually supporting each other, as women - demanding proper legislation from politicians for flexible working, paid paternity leave and affordable childcare. So many other European countries are already doing this - why not the UK? Legislation about working practices goes to the core of feminism, treating women (and men!) as the resonsible adults they actually are.

So, to cut this short - clearly it's just no the older generation who's doing this.

Yeah I think it’s often a generational thing. The narrative in society back then was that a woman was worth less than a man and I think this seeped into some women’s brains, so they believed it to be fact as well.
Women are bitchy, women are ‘asking for it’, that woman wouldn’t be able for that job, blah blah blah ......
Thank god things have changed.

It's really sad but your mum is undoubtedly a product of the world she lived in and the environment she grew up in. Maybe explore with her why she thinks these things? Might help her to question it and you to understand where she's coming from.

Btw I'm not condoning her attitudes just to be clear! It's just that it seems to be making you sad so maybe if you try to lift the lid on where she got these awful views it might help your relationship. Hope that makes sense

I've thought bit more about all the comments regarding the "generational" thing. Obviously I think of myself as feminist and forward thinking but even I find myself caught out sometimes.

Last year Madonna posted a photo of herself and her daughter, both had clearly hairy armpits. I made a remark along the lines of how gross I thought it looked and my 15 year old son snapped "they can have their bodies how they like, it is nothing to do with you" and I felt properly chastised as he was quite right. It was great to see how the next generation seems even less judgmental and more accepting than my own.

I think there's more to it than just generation. That's a bit of a lazy explanation that doesn't account for women like my DM in her late eighties, who has been a feminist her entire life, influenced by my DGM and her aunts. She has plenty of friends who don't have this internalised misogyny either. There's clearly something else going on.

Sympathy to all those of you whose DMs and MILs do this by the way - it sounds infuriating.

My mother is like this... not particularly about domestic violence but I do remember her once saying to me that she didn’t mind if me or my sister had a job or a career after school because we’d be having babies anyway I have a (so far!) successful career, more so than my brothers actually, and I have 2 DC. She hates MM too. I have tried to talk to her but I think her view is sadly just misinformed and outdated, so now I just stay quiet and change the subject if something like this comes up.

I am going through this exact same experience with my family and I cannot get my head round it at all. I actually posted last week about & I hope you don't mind me linking here (please report if you do / against ruled)

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4241028-AIBU-with-family

Sadly, this phrase you use, is being thrown at me from every angle

"stop carrying on” and sort things out themselves. “Deal with it.” “Stop making things up and ruining lives.”

And don't even get me started on The Rugby Boys...

I also think a lot of women, including young ones, enjoy certain privileges of being female and don't want that to change. With my last baby I shared the parental leave with my husband and it was great, but a lot of acquaintances recoiled in horror exclaiming "I would never allow my husband to have any of MY maternity leave".

Another example, I got embroiled in a thread on here about going up to the bar for drinks (TAAT, sorry) and whilst there were quite a few posters saying they liked doing so and how this is a better era that no one bats an eyelid, there were just as many posters insisting that they much preferred their male partner/husband to go to the bar and buy drinks because it made them feel "like a lady", even if they had actually handed over their own cash for the purpose. I raised that it is a harmful attitude that reiterates the idea that men are heard and seen and do important stuff like handle money whilst womenfolk sit simpering in the corner waiting for the men. It did not go down well and there were comments like "I love feeling like a princess ". BOAK!

If your mum could handle it, I might ask if she's tempted to hold a woman down and shove something in the woman's vagina when she sees "one of those sorts", or has had to stop herself doing that in any situation.
If not, might there perhaps be a difference between her and the type of people that apparently can't help themselves doing this? What might that difference be?

My DM, who would have been 95 by now, was a sahm but also a feminist, who encouraged me to be too.
She had a good, responsible, if underpaid job during and after WW2, but had to leave when I was born (mid-50s). She always resented being less educated than her brothers, unable to get a decent job and she was very clear eyed about the patriarchy. She particularly held the established church in contempt, as a boy's club where women were excluded to ensure less competition. Nothing would have made her more happy than me becoming Archbishop of Canterbury!
But when my exh hit me her first question was what I'd done to provoke him. To be fair, she soon changed her view and supported me wholeheartedly in leaving him. I miss her.

I think i'm probably the same generation as the OP's (and many other posters' mums) and i remember feeling complimented - sometimes -when blokes said things to me in the street in the 70s.
One bowler hatted city gent told me i had the best legs he'd seen in a long time and I smiled and thanked him. 😠😠.
It was a different time and my thinking has changed completely, and i'd say nearly all my friends are also aware of this and are definitely not woman-blaming, thank goodness.
So it's not necessarily a generational thing. I think we realise that in some ways women have it worse these days. (Rape charges and trials spring to mind.)
I could and did definitely call out sexism in the 70s but the problem was we didn't always recognise it as such. Then, it was much more about equal pay, keeping your own name, or opening a bank or loan account without a male guarantor. I remember having a furious argument with a friend who was a trainee bank manager who said he would never give a bank loan to a woman, they weren't credit-worthy.
It's great that younger women are so much more aware of everyday sexism, keep telling your mums how it is. We still have far to go.

[quote RedMarauder]@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.[/quote]
'a woman's husband had control over whether they had a bank account or even worked'

Not true this. I opened a bank account and worked in 1969 - no one asked my husband's permission.

Certainly my mother had a bank account and worked in 1942 - again no one asked my father's permission for either.

Not sure where you've got these ideas from.