January 29th, 2008
Joanna Russ on power and helplessness
No matter how much being taken care of the TS [trembling sister] manages to wangle out of others, it is never enough. For being taken care of is exactly what she does not need. It reinforces her helplessness, while what she really needs is access to her own effectiveness–and that is something no one can give to another person.
The Trembling Sister, insisting on being given what she doesn’t need and can’t use, becomes more and more deprived, and more and more enraged. The Magic Momma, enraged at her enforced guilt and similar enforced deprivation, sooner or later fails to meet the Trembling Sister’s needs. She may become ill or reveal some human flaw. She may withdraw, or criticize, or get angry. If MM-hood has been bestowed on her without her knowledge and consent, she may not know what’s expected of her and may “sin” in ignorance.
The Trembling Sister can tolerate achievement in women only when such achievement is “unselfish”–i.e., accompanied by visible giving to everyone else and divested of visible satisfaction–and remember, it’s precisely her own effectiveness that she’s suppressing. She now has the unbearably enraging experience of being (apparently) abandoned by someone who is (apparently) enjoying the very sort of effectiveness she has made inaccessible to herself…
Put the MM and the TS together and you get the conventional female role.
You also get trashing.
Trashing in the feminist movement has always proceeded from “below” “upwards,” directed by the Trembling Sister (that is, those who’ve adopted the TS position) at the self-elected (or merely supposed) MM. The hidden agenda of trashing is to remain helpless and to fail, whatever the ostensible motivation. The payoff is to Be Good (though miserable). The TS/MM scenario is predicated on the unrealistic ascription of enormous amounts of power to one side and the even more unrealistic ascription of none at all to the other. It assumes that hurting another woman’s feelings is the worst thing–the very worst thing–the most unutterably awful thing–that a woman can do. In a world where women and men are starved, shot, beaten, bombed, and raped, the above assumption takes some doing, but since the MM/TS script requires it, it gets made. (The script also assumes that the MM has no feelings, or if she does, hurting them is a meritorious act.)
…
Both parties need the confidence that self-love and self-assertiveness are not evil. The MM needs to learn that feelings of guilt are not objective political obligations; the TS needs to learn that feeling intensely conflicted about power has nothing to do with objective helplessness. The MM needs to be helped. The TS needs not to be helped.
No one originally takes either position of her own free will. The Feminine Imperative is forced on all of us. But in adulthood, and certainly within a feminist community, a woman who remains in either position is her own prisoner. The women’s community as a mystically loving band of emotional weaklings who make up to each other by our kindness and sweetness for the harshness we have to endure in the outside world is a description that exactly characterizes the female middle-class sub-culture as it’s existed in patriarchy for centuries–without changing a thing. This is not a revolutionary movement but a ghetto in which anyone seen as having achievement, money, or power is cast as a Magic Momma, whose function is to make up to everyone else for the world’s deprivation and their terror of effectiveness. This is impossible. So the requirement becomes to make others feel good all the time, an especially seductive goal in times of political reaction when activity directed outward at the (seemingly) monolithic social structure is not only frustrating but frighteningly dangerous. So honesty goes by the board, hurt feelings are put at a premium, general fear and paralysis set in, and one by one any woman who oversteps the increasingly circumscribed area of what’s permissible is trashed. Eventually, after the demons of success and effectiveness have been banished, and all the female villains who made everyone else feel miserable have left or been silenced, what happens?
The group disintegrates.
The Feminine Imperative has been faithfully served. The enemy has been driven from the ranks. Feminism has been destroyed.
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From “Power and Helplessness in the Women’s Movement” by Joanna Russ, from Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts (The Crossing Press, 1985).
