I was raised, very firmly, to Be Kind. My mother was – is – a proud matriarch. This is not quite the same thing as being a feminist, though it provides lots of the same results, and I would certainly recommend it to any woman in place of being neither.
Along with most of my generation, and like every generation of girls before that, I was raised to put others first, to efface myself, to put my own wants and needs last and make sure the people around me were as content as possible before I attended to whatever my own plans were.
The problem, as Smith lays out for us over the course of a dense but compelling 300 pages, is that we don’t all learn it – or certainly not to the same degree. When I think back to my primary school days, for example, and run my eye over the 30 or so children to whom our teacher was attempting to impart knowledge, it is easy to see which sex had been indoctrinated with the need to keep quiet, and which sex had never been expected to heed the stricture that children should be seen and not heard.
On and on we went thereafter, through shifting iterations of the same principle as we got older. Be kind to boyfriends – they always mean well, the ways of men are often just different, rougher than women’s. (To be fair, this was never, ever a view that my mother herself had any truck with.)
Now that the family I have includes a son, I see with ever-increasing clarity how uniform, how consistent these messages were as I grew up. Every social signal for girls (and women – it’s not like there’s a cut-off at 18 and you’re suddenly initiated into a new world of equality; what a waste of the patriarchy’s hard formative work that would be), every film, TV programme, advert and adult reinforced the message of diminishment.
Mother’s Day is an excuse for our selfish relatives to absolve themselves of guilt
Read MoreIf I had a girl, I would consider it a vital maternal duty to act as a bulwark against the tide of messaging that still threatens to sweep the female half of the population onto a rocky promontory of self-denial.
To run fast and run far from any man who thinks he doesn’t have to be kind to his wife or girlfriend, that he doesn’t have to temper his tongue or his actions because it is her duty to absorb his rudeness or his blows.
But I have a son. And I have a duty to him too. And that is to work perhaps even harder to stop him being gathered up by a tide that wants to sweep him away to a nicer place for him, but a worse place for us all. Including – and I am just realising this as I type – me. And I think… I think I think, maybe, that that… that I… matter too?
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