3. The Commandant of the Cradle

Women… control the nursery, and because they control the nursery, they can potentially modify any life style that threatens them.²³23 Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches, New York: Vintage, 1978, p.72.

Motherpower is the least baleful form of female power over man. Of course, a badly behaved boy may be disciplined by being smacked, threatened or berated, or by having his dinner withheld. But, all in all, the exercise of kitchen and cradlepower over the boy-child is mild and benign. Because of the sexual incapacity of the baby boy, and because of the incest taboo when the boy reaches puberty, his mother’s wombpower is rarely unleashed on him.

Motherpower over a boy is anchored on his awe for the mysterious ability of the person who gave birth to him; on his gratitude to the nurse who cares for him, who protects him in an unfamiliar and often frightening world; and on his respect for his first teacher. It is exercised through the subtle manipulation of his hunger for mother’s warmth, approval and praise; and through the sometimes unconcealed manipulation of his gratitude. Among the Igbo, as elsewhere,

The final appeal a mother would make to an undutiful and rebellious child would be: ‘Whatever you may become and wherever you may go, I bore you, for nine months, in this my womb; and fed you, till you were weaned, with these my breasts.’ That person must be an exceptionally unimaginative and remorseless child who would not respond with filial repentance and obedience to this irresistible pull at the human heart-strings.²⁴24 Chieka Ifemesia, Traditional Humane Living Among the Igbo, Enugu: Fourth Dimension, (n.d.) p.57.

Such manipulation of guilt feelings is only one of motherpower’s methods for ruling its offspring. According to Helene Deutsch:

Many mothers in their attempts to tie their children to themselves appeal cleverly and consistently to their guilt feelings: ‘You will abandon me, who have suffered so much?’ Others manage to occupy the place of the ego ideal so deeply and permanently that any weakening of the child’s relation to the mother is felt by him to be dangerous for his inner morality. A domineering, matriarchal woman often achieves rule over her children by setting up a common ideology, thus gratifying her tendency to dominate.²⁵25 Helene Deutsch, The Psychology of Women, Vol. II, New York: Bantam, 1973, pp.329-330.

The techniques of motherpower are perhaps best revealed in those battles where adult daughters fight for independence from their mothers. In some cases, we may be privileged to watch two adepts at female power analyse their game, even as they are deep in it. In one such battle, the daughter lists the main techniques by which her mother had controlled her up until her revolt at age 34! Chief among them were:

1. making “supposedly casual comments” which cast slurs on the daughter’s friends and husband;
2. making the daughter “feel pressured, nervous and incapable of ever pleasing you”;
3. making the daughter feel excluded from a family “club which I don’t belong to, don’t want to belong to, but feel that I should belong to. Also a club that I pretend, in your presence, to belong to, and this pretense makes me feel nervous”;
4. making the daughter “feel guilty as hell” if she did something “knowing as I was doing it that I was displeasing you, ‘upsetting’ you”;
5. making the daughter “feel so anxious to please you”;
6. manipulating the daughter’s “little-girl fear of Something Terrible Happening And It All Being My Fault”; her fear of being wrong and being proved wrong: “And when you get into your ‘bad moods’ (which, from my point of view, are unpredictable), this fear runs rampant”;
7. trying “to pull a guilt trip on me by saying I’m ‘discarding’ you”, or by “repeating how ‘hurt’ my letter made you”;
8. using “the maneuver of calling me ‘unliberated’, or anything equivalent”;
9. using “one of the classic maneuvers, used unconsciously by parents everywhere” of saying: “‘I want you to know how much you’ve upset me’; ‘I could tell you a few things — but I won’t’; ‘After all I’ve done for you…’; ‘If you could remember some of the things you did when you were little…’; ‘I see you’ve given up all your (meaning “our”) principles’; ‘I see that husband of yours is poisoning your mind’; ‘But, in spite of it all, I want you to know that you’re very important to us, that we still love you.’”²⁶26 Karen Payne, ed., Between Ourselves, London: Picador, 1984, pp.360-364.

Note how these techniques deftly play on the daughter’s fears, guilt, ignorance, remorse, shame, sense of ineptitude, relief at being forgiven, etc.

Backed into a corner by this exposure of her tactics, the mother countered:

I don’t know what to say. If I question some of your statements, it might sound as if I were challenging you. If I ask for clarification, it would sound as if I were getting bogged down on petty details. If I talk about feeling, it might seem that I’m hurt. If I deny what you ascribed to me, it puts you on a guilt trip. If I stand on my principles or quote from my heroines or heroes, it might sound pompous or self-righteous. Nonetheless, I do have to say a few things. I wasn’t ‘hurt’ (although I may have said that to you).

Having here practically admitted that her claim of being ‘hurt’ was a ruse, she goes on:

My immediate feeling was humiliation, a powerful wave of humiliation that almost knocked me over. A few days later, this changed to anger. But all the time, I was thinking. I read your letter, sentence by sentence, and made copious comments in the margins. I racked my lousy memory to recall some of the things you wrote about. One bitter day, I listened to a Mozart quintet. Tears dropped into my lap, one after another, and I wrote a note to you and put it in my will. Well, time passed. I erased the comments and tore up the note. We talked a little and saw each other. I know that I love and care for you, perhaps as Johann says at the end of Scenes from a Marriage, ‘in my inadequate way’, and I think you love and care for me, too. So what more is there to say?

In parading her humiliation, anger, bitterness and tears, as well as her “love and care”; and in hinting at her power to amend her will, the mother inadvertently authenticated her daughter’s list of her weapons of control.

Many a son is only vaguely aware of being ruled, through such precise techniques, by his mummy dearest. A vague awareness makes it unlikely that he will ever stand up to his mother; and even if, by some miracle, he did, he is not likely to battle effectively against a power he hardly understands. With a daughter, matters are different. As her mother’s apprentice, a daughter learns the game, is privy to its techniques, and could effectively counter her mother’s moves if she got up the courage. The result of such knowledge is that the average daughter can, at some point, shake off her mother’s authority, whereas the ignorant son cannot. Her hold over him usually lasts till his death; even if she dies before him, her hold is maintained through his ingrained desire to please her memory.

The classic example of the man who is ruled all his life by his mother is the great macho dictator presented in so many Latin American novels, most notably in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch. Though a bloodthirsty and ruthless dictator; though a generalissimo and the everlasting patriarch of his nation, he always felt for his mother the obedient, babyish awe he learned to feel for her when he fed at her breast.

But what is motherpower used for? The primary objectives of motherpower are to prepare boys so they can be ruled by their future wives, and to train girls to rule their future husbands. To this end, the main tasks of motherpower are these:

1. to lay the appropriate personality foundations in the children: narcissism in girls, and heroism in boys;
2. to secure kitchen power and cradle power for girls; and
3. to magnify wombpower by teaching sexual restraint to girls, through codes of modesty, while undermining sexual self-control in boys by addicting them to the female body.

Consider a beautiful girl and a strong boy. When they are successfully reared by motherpower, they mature into their respective gender-ideals: the dolly bird and the macho. To bring this about, the girl is taught self-worship or narcissism; the boy heroism or self-sacrifice. Her narcissism induces an absolute self-centredness which smothers those self-sacrificing impulses which are fostered in the boy by male codes of honour, gallantry and heroism. When they grow up, the dolly bird will worship herself; but the macho will worship woman and serve her, even to the point of sacrificing his life to preserve hers.

The future dolly bird is trained in narcissism on the principle that a woman must worship herself if she is to inspire worship, and so elicit service from men. Narcissism is taught her by everything around her. The general admiration she receives is explained to her, in the American case, by the children’s verse which says:

Sugar and spice and everything nice Are what little girls are made of.

For good measure, the verse concludes with a thorough devaluation of boys:

Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails That’s what little boys are made of.

This doctrine is reinforced by the sort of admonitions a girl is usually given: that “boys want only one thing” — the jewel box between her thighs — “and nice girls don’t give it to them”;²⁹29 Ibid., p.25. that her virginity is precious; that to lose it before marriage is to dishonour the family; that it must be protected by all, and defended, even to their death, by her male relatives. The general message — that she is precious beyond measure — is driven home by the behaviour of mothers and fathers who mount guard over their daughter, jealously protecting their property’s value. Now, whose sense of her worth would not be inflated by such fussing? Whose sense of self-preservation would not be made absolute by such protectiveness?

A beautiful girl so brought up (and all the others who take her as the model of womanhood) inevitably gets the notion that she must be worth all the gold in the world and more; that she is god’s gift to all male humanity. By the time puberty arrives to trigger her nest-making drives, she has already acquired that narcissism which will guide her conduct as maiden, wife, mother, widow and dowager.

The narcissist personality is what makes a woman take it as a matter of course that a man should offer goods and services to her for her contribution to their joint sexual pleasure. He gives her pleasure, she gives him pleasure, but he pays: to her, that is fair! The narcissist personality is what makes a peasant girl of 15 take it as quite natural that a general or tycoon three times her age should lay all his hard-won power and riches at her feet when he courts her. It does not occur to her to ask if she is worth such tribute: she knows, in her womb-sure narcissism, that she is worth much more, that she holds the most precious thing in her suitor’s world, and should be paid for it with all that he has in the world. This narcissist personality enables a divorced woman to have no doubt that it is fair for her to collect alimony for services she no longer renders to her ex-husband.

Whereas the mother equips the future dolly bird with a narcissist personality, she equips the future macho with a heroic personality. The hero is a servant who performs extraordinary duties for family, community or humanity: as warrior or protector, as organizer of wealth, or as bringer of vital knowledge. He is, at heart, a sentimental fool who takes great risks, carries out great labours, all in exchange for such vanities as medals, ribbons, statues, and being mentioned in talk and song.

In the course of his training, the future macho is taught to regard women as the weaker sex, to adore dolly birds, and to consider it heroic to provide for and protect his womenfolk. He is also taught that being given a beautiful woman to husband is the most precious reward for heroism. If he is a Fulani or Maasai herdsman in Africa, he learns that lesson from the flogging contests whose victors are rewarded with admiration and love by beautiful maidens. If he will fight and be wounded to earn a wreath; if he will fight and die for posthumous praise; how much more will the macho sacrifice to earn a beautiful bride? It is in this way that he acquires that heroic personality which seeks wealth, honour, power and fame with which to pay for the love of a woman.

This woman-fixated personality makes a macho consider it right and proper for him to give a woman sexual pleasure and pay her too. It prevents a love-smitten general or tycoon from entertaining the thought that the strumpet he is wooing might not be worth one millionth of what he is deliriously offering her for the right to help her put her womb to work.

These two types of personality (heroic macho and narcissist dolly bird) are complementary in serving female power. Narcissism imbues the dolly bird with a sense of her natural right to be worshipped and served by men; heroism imbues the macho with a sense of his natural duty to serve women. She displays the self-confidence and self-centredness appropriate to an absolute ruler; he the self-diffidence and self-sacrifice of a loyal serf. When a boy so trained and a girl so trained do encounter, isn’t it obvious who shall rule who?

The time-hallowed channelling of girls to home-making activities, and of boys toward adventure outside the home, is a method whereby the mother, as commandant of the cradle, secures kitchen and cradle power for her girls.

It is kitchenpower that mothers set out to secure for women when they bring up girls to cook, but boys to disdain cooking. As a result, when a boy grows into a macho, he will shun the kitchen, and depend upon his wife to cook for him. And his wife shall then control his stomach. If a man should, nevertheless, learn to cook, and should dispense with the kitchen services of his wife, even his own mother would be unhappy. Consider the story of a Nigerian man who could not even boil an egg at the time his wife walked out on him. Some time later, he invited friends to his home for lunch. According to one of his women guests, the man surprised everybody. Part of the post-prandial conversation went like this:

‘Nice meal’, I complimented him afterwards. His mum snorted with disapproval. ‘Didn’t you enjoy the meal?’ I asked her.

‘Do you think that any woman in her right mind would enjoy bragging about her son’s cooking when he should have a wife in the home? The sooner he gets married again, the happier I’ll be,’ she said sadly.³⁰30 Bunmi Fadase, op.cit.

Thus, as a custodian of female power, the man’s own mother would not be happy at his independence, and would want some woman to rule her son’s stomach!

Likewise, mothers secure cradle power for their daughters by channelling boys toward adventure and away from childcare duties. Later in life, should a husband try to be more than an occasional cradle assistant to his wife, he would be mocked and henpecked away. Even the militant feminist who insists that housework and baby-minding be shared by men, when she herself gets down to breeding, wants her man to be no more than a cradle assistant under her supervision. All mothers, feminist or not, know the value of cradle power, and are loathe to relinquish it.

For the magnification of wombpower, mothers primarily rely on female sexual restraint as taught through codes of modesty. Codes which teach a girl coyness; which train her not to take the initiative in sexual encounters; which teach her to defer her gratification for as long as possible, on pain of seeing herself (and being seen!) as sexually forward, loose or even immoral — such training makes a girl more sexually restrained than she would otherwise be. In some cultures, this training is combined with clitoridectomy, an operation which reduces the sexual excitability of a woman. This restraint, regardless of how achieved, gives a woman an enormous advantage in her dealings with sexually deranged men.

Mothers magnify the advantage of female restraint by not teaching boys to restrain their sexual appetites, and even by teaching them to become hopelessly addicted to the female body. Now, weaning is meant to break a child’s natural attachment to its mother’s milk-bearing teats and warm, comforting body. However, many mothers continue to cuddle their boy children long past weaning time. Some allow them into their beds till they are four years or more. Further training to addict boys to the female body is done quite consciously, not only by mothers, but also by aunts and older girls generally. Consider the following incident.

One evening, in a flat in London, a West Indian woman picked up a 15-month-old boy and tried to teach him to kiss. When she first kissed him, the boy made a sour face, and tried to break free from her embrace. The woman, undeterred, kissed him a second time, and then a third time. After the fourth kiss, the boy began to stick out his tongue for more, grinning with delight, and tossing his arms excitedly in the air. After watching this for a while, I asked the woman:

‘Aren’t you starting him a bit early?’

‘Oh no!’ she replied. ‘The sooner the better actually. After he gets to be thirty, you can’t get him this way.’

‘Oh!’ I said.

In a flash I recognized the motive behind all that hugging and kissing and penis tickling to which small boys are subjected by mothers, aunties, and the admiring women friends of their parents.

A child introduced to carnal pleasures by women’s expert hands will be willing, even eager, in adult life, to do anything required of him in order to get what, for him, would have become the greatest reward on earth. The subconscious memory of that addictive pleasure will drive his behaviour long after he attains puberty.

Addiction to the female body weakens a man’s powers of sexual abstinence; it puts him into the power of whoever can satisfy his cravings. Just as a heroin addict is in the power of his supplier, and will rob or kill to find money to enrich his supplier, so too will the man addicted to the female body do whatever he finds necessary to get his fix.

Given how great is the male biological drive to secure a womb, one might wonder why women bother to reinforce it with an inculcated addiction to the female body. We ought, perhaps, to ponder the possibility that without this extra addiction, the male might be far less sexually desperate. As any negotiator will tell you, the more desperate your opponent is for what you have, the more unfavourable the terms you could get him to accept. Or, as one woman friend told me: “When it comes to sex, the one who wants it less holds the power.” Thus, an addiction which makes a man more desperate for sex increases woman’s power over him.

It is by such habits (restraint in the girl; addiction in the boy) which are learned in the cradle, that wombpower, great as it is, is culturally magnified.

Laying the foundations for heroic personality in boys, and for narcissist personality in girls; training children in role models which secure kitchen and cradle power for girls; and teaching children habits which magnify wombpower — these are the basic tasks which are accomplished by and for female power by a boy’s mummy dearest. A mother who has raised a macho — a heroic son, strong in physique or intellect, inept in the kitchen and cradle, and disdainful of working in them; a mother who has also raised a dolly bird — a narcissist beauty of a daughter who can restrain her own sexual appetite while coyly whetting desire in men, who shuns adventure but is expert in the kitchen and the cradle; a mother who has raised such offspring and sent them forth into the world for the great mating battle between the sexes — the dolly bird all primed to win, and the macho all primed to lose: that is a mother who has contributed her expected quota to the continuation of female power. Great is her joy, and great too is her honour among women.