In 1954, a New England mother named Constance Fisher drowned her three young children in the bathtub. Her husband came home and found his children dead, and discovered that his wife had tried to kill herself. Everyone felt badly for Constance, because she was obviously going through a terrible struggle with her mental health. She escaped prosecution, was hospitalized and released, and then had three more children with the same husband, who had forgiven her.
In 1966, for the second time, Fisher drowned her three children in the bathtub, after which she was sent back to the hospital. Toxic empathy killed children with the predictability of sunrise. One mother, six murdered children in two decades: Oh, that poor woman! How she must have suffered!
A much-discussed theme this week is that the sexual revolution and 1960s feminism caused social derangement and a loss of values, or “feminist victimhood dogma,” leading to the sick moment in which women dressed up in pink cultural uniforms like Manson Girls and fangirled for poor Lindsay Clancy outside the courtroom. But Constance Fisher was granted a shameful and dangerous forgiveness before Gloria Steinem showed up, and the roots of the story in which a mother who kills her children is really a victim go back a lot farther. Early feminism is intertwined with the story, but therapeutic culture and the assault on motherhood started well before the second wave feminism of the 1960s arrived.
Two historical moments defined women as weak, given to emotional collapse, and in need of benevolent intervention. In the decades after the Second Industrial Revolution, the emerging status group of the management class wife was found to be afflicted with nervous exhaustion, or neurasthenia. The cure was bed rest and resort vacations. The early feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman drew on her own postpartum neurasthenia and confinement for bed rest to write the 1892 horror story The Yellow Wallpaper, about a woman locked in a room by her physician husband. Woman has a baby, is imprisoned by her husband, and goes crazy. Motherhood is sickness, despair, and oppression. This is now a well-established narrative on the American political left. Babies ruin you, handmaid.
Soon after, one of the towering landmarks of Progressive Era legal reform advanced the idea of women as weak creatures who needed an imposed benevolence. Arguing before the Supreme Court for the constitutionality of labor laws, the future justice Louis Brandeis delivered the then-unusual “Brandeis brief,” a long argument that drew on the language of supposed science as much as it talked about the law. State regulation of working hours was needed, Brandeis told the court, because experts said that “women are fundamentally weaker than men in all that makes for endurance.” Sociologists have spoken, so government has to be more powerful.
Crippled by the oppression of motherhood and their own weak spirit, women needed liberation, and society needed to rationalize and professionalize the female social role. This isn’t 1960s girlboss empowerment. It’s a deeply strange interweaving of contradictory themes in which the inherently weak female mind of the strong independent woman is set free from the toxicity of responsibility.
Gilman shows up in that story again, writing about motherhood and professional bakers: Bread used to vary in quality from house to house, she wrote, as different women used different techniques and produced a product of varying quality. But now, industrial-scale commercial bakeries have standardized the loaf. Taking a function out of the home made it more consistent. “The baker is not in the same industrial grade with the house-cook,” Gilman wrote, “though both make bread. To specialize any form of labor is a step up: to organize it is another step. Specialization and organization are the basis of human progress, the organic methods of social life. They have been forbidden to women almost absolutely.” Bakers make better bread, so credentialed social workers make better children.
The historian Christopher Lasch described this professionalization of the pieces of motherhood as “the socialization of reproduction,” replacing families and parenthood with the credentialed work of the “helping professions.” Lasch thought that the story of the twentieth century was about the long assault on the family as a social and moral center, the place where you learn to be a person.
What we have now is a contradictory and incoherent muddle: the powerful woman who doesn’t need a man because she’s strong and fierce, but she collapses into an oppressed state if someone inflicts a baby on her hormone-addled mind. Women can have it all, women can do anything, babies absolutely destroy them. Feminism doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. In part, the Clancy madness is a manifestation of the war between second wave and fourth wave feminism, much like the conflict between pro-trans feminists and TERFS, or trans-exclusionary feminists. Several different movements marching behind the label of feminism have delivered us to a cultural condition centered on things that can’t all be true: You’re so mentally weak that babies will destroy you, powerful girlboss! And the contradictions are widely noticed.
We’re going through a period of reconciliation, in which the contradictions have to be cooked out so we can figure out where we’re going. In Massachusetts this week, that cultural argument is producing some remarkably ugly spectacle.
