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.

@Shewholovedthethebanhills

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.

It’s almost as if all women born in 1940 didn’t have the same life experience, isn’t it?

@blossomtoes well yes of course but I'm still interested in understanding what the differentiating factors might be. In my experience (a small sample, of course) it's not explained by class, education or geography, for example. Something around exposure to different views, perhaps? I really don't know.

[quote Nonbibblebibble]**@RedMarauder* '@Nonbibblebibble* was your grandmother worried that if she left anything to her daughters their husbands would take it?'

Nope. The boys were given money from the business to buy new houses outright before she died and afterwards in the 1980s inherited everything else. So it wasn't back in the day when men could take money off their wives or whatever.
My DM ran the office for 25 years without a penny over her very modest salary before she saw sense and left. She adored my GM, they all did.
She literally valued the sons more and everyone knew it.[/quote]
Maybe in some cases more dependant on parent's valuing sons more than daughters etc - but not necessarily anything to do with when parents were born.

My uncle born 1890s split his inheritance equally between his son and 2 daughters. Another uncle 1950s left nieces £10k each, nephews £2k.

My mil's parents, born 1870s left everything ( money, row of houses etc.) to 2 sons - daughters got nothing.

On the other hand a single woman friend 2dds, got zero 10 years ago from her father . Everything went to her brother. He is well off / she's in a council house.

Another woman friend single parent 2 ds, got passed over and everything left to 2 sons. She's struggling, they don't need to work.

Aunt ( born 1890s) left everything to 2 single parent sisters - rest nothing.

Not sure of all the various idiosyncratic logics.

I was horrified recently when my mum was talking about the ""Everyone's invited" website, and how terrible it must be for the poor boys to have those allegations against them.

It didn't seem to occur to her that it might be worse for the girls who were attacked.

When I went to university in the early 70s i opened a student bank account and had to give my father as a guarantor /reference.
This was when only about 10 percent of school leavers went on to university, but well under 50 percent of those were women.
At Oxbridge the male/female ratio was 10:1.

As someone old enough to be the mother of quite a few of you here, I would like to object to your idea that my generation and the one before it were so much worse than you lot.

I and all my friends have always been feminists as was my own mother, while I see some stuff from younger women on mumsnet that is frankly shockingly misogynist, like the woman who was told that she was controlling because she objected to her husband going away for five out of six weekends to weddings and stag nights, while they have a baby and a toddler.

So look out. My generation also thought we were so advanced and the world would be a different place for our daughters.

Not sure where you've got these ideas from [about women needing a man's permission]

Until 1975, it was legal for banks and financial institutions to discriminate against women and they could and did do so A woman often needed to get a man to act as guarantor. If she was married, it was her dh, if she wasn't, it was her dad - although in some cases any man would do

My dad still tells the story of the time, in the late 60s, when the bank manager contacted him to check if he was ok with the cheque that my mum had signed from their joint account which only required single signatures To give my dad his due, he went through the bank manager like a dose of salts, telling him that they were equal partners in the marriage .

Credit card sexism: The woman who couldn't buy a moped

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36662872

Just remembered: in 1988, I had someone come round to quote me to design and install a new kitchen. He had to be persuaded to stay and actually at least give me an indicative quote as he supposedly wasn't allowed to quote unless the "man of the house" was there too (nothing to do with my safety - it was because of the potential for a loan ).

I was a single woman on an excellent salary - no boyfriend around at the time. He couldn't quite grasp this

Needless to say, he didn't get the job!

Many women both old and young will have different experiences.Sadly old attitudes die hard ,and growing up with my mum I remember some of these types of mindsets. "what would they expect dressed like that" "why dont they leave their violent husbands then" and so on .She was born in the early 1930s and as others have said lived through huge social and economic changes .In the 1930s her Schoolfriends Mum was thrown out on the street by her husband .She was left on the pavement with just her clothes she was wearing and a small suitcase! This was perfectly legal!beggars belief now.Another friend newly married in the early 50s had her pearls "confiscated ," by her DH for the shocking crime of saying "Bloody so and so" ,Compare these early events towards having the pill introduced in the 60s ,girls wearing short skirts ,the "permissive" society and so on .She was "allowed" to work PT in the 60s/70s ( 9 to 4 pm!) Many women were shamed if their home was dirty or their cooking not good enough ."Whites" ( net curtains )were beyond the pail if less white than NDN .and women were seen as being "ungrateful" if they didnt "look after their man" women were kept down out of fear of losing their home /reputation and dared not rock the boat.

Sadly, I do see a lot us on here being quite judgmental about women's choices - very often posters are told to ''toughen up and get on with it"

I agree. It's like it's seen that there's only so much goodwill or tolerance of women to go round and there's a fear of others having more than their share, or taking too much and annoying The Men enough that the tolerance will be removed. Or an underlying jealousy resulting in "I had to suffer so why shouldn't you?"

Deeply depressing.

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

I’m a millennial.

My mum “feels sorry” for Prince Andrew.

She thinks that if a woman doesn’t leave an abusive man after the first incident, then any further abuse is her own fault.

A woman should only be “allowed” one abortion, or in her words “one mistake”.

She thinks that historic abuse cases should be left in the past and “feels sorry” for those accused.

Actually, her victim blaming isn’t limited to women.

These views have only surfaced as she has gotten older. Or perhaps she is just more vocal now.

Either way, I am increasingly disgusted by the words that come out of her mouth at times.

For an interesting mindset google Caroline Norton. Married in the 19C to an abusive husband in her teens she had 3 children with. She left him but her earnings from writing were confiscated by him while she was still his wife and the courts agreed. When she petitioned for divorce, he forbade her (as was legal) from seeing her children, one of whom was 4. She campaigned for maternal rights (successfully) and for the Married Women's Property Act. YET she wrote to Queen Victoria saying of course women were subservient to men and women's suffrage was ridiculous. She could have course have been playing a political game with the Queen ... but if not, it's the typical behaviour of someone mentally torn apart by experience.

"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. "

it's totally shit for me and I will battle against it as much as I can!
I thought women fought hard to not be confined to the home.

My mum is terrible for slagging off other women but hers seem to come from a place of jealousy and insecurity as she has never been happy with herself. I have some friends who had kide young so their daughters are grown up now. I showed her a pic of the daughters and rather than say something complimentary she says "She looks like a whore/slut". She has always been incredibly weird about sex though and when she found out I was sexually active at 16 she didn't speak to me for a week and my dad had a word with me about how to conduct myself and 'giving myself to boys too early'

@speakout

*Remember to also feel sympathy for women that feel like this, they may be part of the problem but to live their whole life feeling so much lesser than men must be awful for them.

Is it though? They have a choice whether to be a hapless handmaiden.
My mother wouldn;t have it any other way. She gets to duck out of adult responsibility and be a 6 year old forever.

I agree these women have a choice.

I think you might be right about ducking out of responsibility. My mother is the same. It saddens me hugely that in the 1960s, when she was a newly married woman in her 20s, a graduate, perfectly literate and articulate, instead of thinking and learning about feminism she was bending over backwards to take on board all the teachings of the Catholic Church. (Which she actually joined as an adult in 1961). I think she likes being told what to do and doing it because then, if the advice turns out to be unsound, she then gets to say "But that was the advice I was given!"

Her comments about DV, rape etc just appal me. She has absolutely no sense of consent, or of women having any agency. She seems to think that rape is simply a case of men sometimes being overwhelmed by their sexual urges. When an acquaintance of hers bought herself a rape-alarm (this was in the 80s, I think they were quite new then) my mother was scornful: "Why on earth would X want a rape-alarm? She's far too ugly."

My father was abusive to her. Maybe she thinks she deserved it? She certainly never left him and defended him right up to his death and does so even now.

I don't try and discuss any of this with her now: no point. She hasn't got a f clue. And she mixes with other women, similar age-group, who are pretty much the same.

TurquoiseLemur

Sounds siilar to my mother.
And she is deeply religious too- which further compounds the helpless female idea.

Similar

Gosh I know this comment will be unhelpful.

But I never realised that my mother was such a closet feminist until I read this thread.

I'm so grateful for it.

@TurquoiseLemur Yes, my mother who has much the same views is a practicing Catholic. She used to force myself and my two brothers to go to Mass every Sunday...right up until I left home at 21! She's horrified that none of us are still practicing Catholics- and that none of us have given her grandchildren! (She'd probably spontaneously combust if I told her I'd had two abortions...)

It's sad, because of her beliefs I've never had a very close relationship with her as an adult. There's a huge part of my life that she has no idea about....because she is so closed minded that she wouldn't be able to accept (or empathise with) any decision or belief I hold that would differ from her own.

The first words out of my mother's mouth after I told her about my (now ex) H and his affair was ......" well you must have done something wrong, why else would he have gone off with her?"

@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.

I’m 58 and if any of my children said that to me about their partner I’d have them out of there in a flash! I am so sorry your Mother behaved this way. And I’m so sorry that all these other Mothers do too.

@Blankspace101

Another woman bashing thread on MN

No none is bashing women generally, just narrow minded misogynistic women. Why do you have a problem with that?

Why is this thread all about our mums? Do we all have feminist dads?

My mother is very similar. I’ll never forget the day she told me it’s so much worse for a man if he gets raped than it is for a woman because for me it has the added effect of humiliating them 🙄

*men