Rebecca Walker: On men and motherhood

On Wednesday February 1^st, acclaimed author and influential speaker Rebecca Walker gave two lectures on campus.

Before the first lecture begins, an energy is present in the room. The audience is brewing with excitement. After a brief introduction by the Womyn’s Resource Center, Walker commences her lecture. Her charismatic personality is apparent as she jokes about her experience at Evergreen being the first time she has ever had to drive herself to a lecture. The room becomes even more lax as Walker tests the microphone with the 100-syllable Vajrasattva mantra instead of the typical “testing 1,2,3.” After throwing in a comment about her concern about diversity at Evergreen and its improvement since her last visit ten years ago, Walker begins.

Walker discusses her book Baby Love, a day by day account of her pregnancy which is structured with nine chapters to mirror the nine months of pregnancy.  Walker prefaces the discussion by outlining the environment in which she grew up. Motherhood was not encouraged; success was. The ideology of longing for a child was not how she was raised.

Catering to the go-with-the-flow vibe of Evergreen, Walker takes questions, rather than choosing to discuss her book first. One audience member questions whether or not an authentic identity can be achieved socially, since it seems that once you become a mother,  being a mother becomes your sole identity. Walker shares an anecdote about successful mothers exemplifying that for many dynamic women, motherhood is a part of their identity but not the whole. To the people worried about changes in their social identity or people contemplating having children, Walker gives a simple yet strong response of  “If you feel you should have a child, then you should have a child.”

After addressing more of the audience’s questions, Walker reads an excerpt from her book. Jumping to Chapter 9, when her son is born, she reads about the issues related to natural childbirth and childbirth with medical support. She pauses momentarily to discuss the pros and cons of both spectrums, explaining that she could have lost her child if she didn’t have a medical team. Overcome by emotions and tears as she reads about the painful and powerful experience of bringing a child into the world, it is apparent how significant motherhood is in her life. Once the lecture comes to an end, I fully understand Rebecca Walker’s message-- that motherhood is not for everyone, but anyone who wants it has the right to obtain it, regardless of pressures, stigmas, or ideologies of society. She closes with this statement: “In order to be free, you have to build a barrier between yourself and all these different ideas. Sometimes that’s lonely, but it’s better to be by yourself than to be controlled by these ideologies.” With these powerful words resonating through my soul, I am driven to attend her next lecture.

In the second lecture, Walker discusses themes of her book What Makes a Man. She outlines the few of the options for boys growing up. They can be warriors, gladiators, or breadwinners. Boys who stray from these molds are bullied or policed back into them, often by their families and communities. Walker’s desire to explore this issue stems partly from her criticism of the first two feminist movements. With traditional feminism, women are encouraged to explore their potential and to be free from limitations that men have put on them. This outlook, she argues, demonizes and wages a war against men.

Society should not force men into the normative of masculinity. Men should have just as much support as women do to be whoever they are without being labeled. Much of the societal responsibility lies to women. Walker explains that many women say they want the deemed “feminine” men, but then they choose the more butch man in the end because masculinity is eroticized. When asked to speak about the queer community, Walker emphasizes that although gay men suffer just as much from the pressures of society, heterosexual men who are not stereotypically masculine have less support and are largely ignored. Walker urges that, for the sake of our men, women need to align what they say they want with what they show they want. Women need to rework their own conceptions of masculinity and eroticize the men they say that they want. Walker brought to light an issue I had never thought about before.

From both of her lectures I gained a broader perspective of how harmful social norms can be to an individual as well as to humanity. The problem with many strides for equality is that divides still remain. We cannot uplift women by demonizing men. We cannot support ethnic minorities by promoting the hatred  of white people. We cannot promote successful women by devaluing mothers. I’m not advocating that we should disregard “what they did to us.” Our history is important, so that we do not return to those places again, but we have to be careful that when fighting for what is right and just, we don’t become oppressors ourselves. To me, that was Rebecca Walker’s most effective message encompassing in her two lectures.