[M]otherhood is used in women’s Jan. 6 legal defenses to make women appear more sympathetic, by emphasizing their caretaking roles and status as “good” mothers and grandmothers who are devoted to their husbands and families. Such defense strategies paint a picture of these women as nurturers who love their families and are committed to raising productive citizens in an attempt to outweigh the serious charges they face.My favorite parts of the article: the "historical" context of mothers sewing KKK hoods and homeschooling. My guess is that they're teaching the kids to sew KKK hoods in those homeschools. Thank goodness no one is teaching the tykes anything horrifying in the government schools. There's an even worse image-rehabilitation program afoot: the effort to humanize fetuses by revealing their gender, which makes birthing persons more reluctant to kill them. The new DGB has its work cut out for it.
The devil you say
Next these extremists will start talking about patriotism and the U.S. Constitution.
Way back in 2017 I was interviewed by a similar project at nearby George Mason University -- they don't cite it, so I assume they're not in dialogue. They also were studying specifically the role of women in far-right groups. I told them that I didn't actually know anyone in any sort of far-right groups -- not at least as I would define them, e.g. the actual KKK and such -- and therefore couldn't help them.
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, it was exactly this issue they were interested in: women as support, sustainment, encouragers and nurturers of the far-right. That's two elite universities that have been studying right-wing women as extremists intensely and for a while.
The nerve of the right wing, trying to portray these women as nurturers who love their families.
ReplyDeleteUsually you need a half-truth to sustain a lie, but this is like the chicken soup that a chicken merely walked through, or the proverbial dry martini where you just thought of vermouth. Those were intended as jokes, but they are coming to life here.
ReplyDelete"Are you now, or have you ever been...?"
I can't remember the source, so I can't swear to the accuracy of this story.
ReplyDeleteBut:
In the late 1960s the protest movement for civil rights, womens' rights, ending the draft, etc -- the males would all sit together smoking (something) and talking & planning the protest and the females would all be in another room painting the banners, baking brownies, packing the first aid kits...
I have heard it asserted that one cause of radical anti-male feminism is that the men these women knew in their leftist organizations *really were* as bad as men in general are painted by the extremists.
ReplyDeleteI would suggest that part of the difficulty was A) And they were still smug about their advanced attitudes, and B) They did not even have the compensatory attitude of being polite/chivalrous/honoring because that was old-fashioned. So the women had to rebel one way or another against this, and just chose from a variety of paths.
ReplyDelete