4. Alice Walker Disowns Her Daughter For Embracing the Anti-Feminist Act of Motherhood
Author Alice Walker spends her days cavorting with Code Pink, demonizing Israel, and caricaturing the people of Africa. Important work, to be sure, but awfully time consuming. If she wanted to live out her dream of becoming an anti-Zionist activist, she had to cut corners somewhere, and disowning her daughter seemed like a good start.
Alice severed ties with her daughter Rebecca in 2004 after learning that her 30-something daughter had committed the most heinous of anti-feminist acts: procreation. On purpose!
I was at one of her homes, sitting, and told her my news and that I’d never been happier. She went very quiet. All she could say was that she was shocked. Then, she asked if I could check on her garden.
After a exchanging a series of emails, Alice wrote to Rebecca to say that their relationship had been “inconsequential for years” and that she was no longer interested in being a mother to her daughter. She later cut Rebecca out of her will.
As Rebecca has since revealed, Alice’s lip service to choice, opportunity, and freedom for women doesn’t allow room for her own daughter to choose motherhood. Unsurprising from a woman whose greatest act of motherly concern was arranging an abortion for Rebecca when she became pregnant at 14. Being a mom might be okay for unenlightened non-Westerners, but damn it, she raised her daughter to abhor motherhood just like she did:
“I very nearly missed out on becoming a mother – thanks to being brought up by a rabid feminist who thought motherhood was about the worst thing that could happen to a woman,” she revealed to British newspaper Daily Mail.
“My mom taught me that children enslave women,” she continued. “I grew up believing that children are millstones around your neck, and the idea that motherhood can make you blissfully happy is a complete fairytale.”
Rebecca shares the painful experience of discovering her mother’s disdain for being a parent:
“I was 16 when I found a now-famous poem she wrote comparing me to various calamities that struck and impeded the lives of other women writers,” Walker noted.
According to Rebecca, Alice spoke of how “Virginia Woolf was mentally ill and the Brontes died prematurely,” then calling her a “delightful distraction, but a calamity nevertheless.” It was something that she said was “a huge shock and very upsetting.”
Alice Walker built her career on striking blows against The Patriarchy ™ on behalf of oppressed women around the world. But even if her feminist credentials weren’t sullied by idealization of Islam, Israel hatred, and lies about the liberating powers of abortion, Alice’s shelf-life as a “feminist” expired when she rejected her own daughter’s choice to embrace motherhood.
Note: The portion of this post about Alice Walker and her daughter is written based on publicly available articles, none of which provide reaction from Alice Walker because she has declined to comment on the issue.
