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Opinion | Michael Bloomberg and the Long History of Misogyny Toward Mothers

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Opinion|Michael Bloomberg and the Long History of Misogyny Toward Mothers

The Democratic presidential candidate’s alleged comments about his employees are part of a legacy of societal resentment toward women for having children.

Elizabeth Bruenig

Ms. Bruenig is an Opinion writer.

Credit…Craig Lassig/EPA, via Shutterstock

On the Nevada debate stage last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren flayed the billionaire Michael Bloomberg for Trumpish reviews of women’s looks. In South Carolina on Tuesday, she focused on a former employee’s allegation that Mr. Bloomberg told her to “kill it” upon hearing of her pregnancy. She was referring to a subgenre in the history of Mr. Bloomberg’s sexist remarks — one concerned specifically with mothers. In a 1998 lawsuit, a former employee alleged that Mr. Bloomberg demanded, “What the hell did you do a thing like that for?” of a newly pregnant employee. The suit also says he cruelly dismissed another employee’s difficulty finding child care, saying of an infant: “It doesn’t know the difference between you and anyone else! All you need is some black who doesn’t even have to speak English to rescue it from a burning building!” The lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed sum.

Misogyny reserved specifically for mothers is a curious thing. Discussions about sexism these days usually involve the consequences women face for being insufficiently feminine — for transgressing their prescribed roles by being too loud, too angry, too big, too strong, too much. But the great paradox of misogyny is that its object is womanhood itself — not traditional womanhood or nontraditional womanhood, but the very fact of being a woman. One can’t dodge it by hewing to her place. Even in the archetypally feminine role of mother, women can find themselves the subjects of that old and storied hatred.

There are many species of mother-hatred. I suspect the oldest is the libertine style, in which motherhood is reviled for turning previously pert and nubile young women into softer, saggier, less sexually available versions of their prior selves. The ur-libertine the Marquis de Sade fantasized about inflicting torture and murder upon pregnant women, mothers and their infants. Most telling in his oeuvre is this line from his exhausting 18th-century novel “Juliette”: “Picture her giving birth, this treasure of your heart; behold that shapeless mass of flesh squirm sticky and festering from the cavity where you believe felicity is to be found.” So much for love or growth or even the future of the human race; the libertine has no time for such things, and neither does the libertine style of appraising women, which finds meager value in the sexually interesting and available, and none at all in the mother.

Then there is the psychoanalytic style in mother-hatred. This is a bit passé now, but there was a day when everyone from vaunted intellectuals to middlebrow bourgeois New Yorker perusers suspected Freud had the right idea about sex and society. In this telling, overbearing mothers routinely emasculate their male children with their nagging and guilting, eventually inspiring a misogynistic backlash among their sons, either in an effort to recover lost dignity or establish a separate masculine identity. As the late feminist sociologist Miriam M. Johnson wrote in her 1990 book, “Strong Mothers, Weak Wives”: “The devaluation of women (by both women and men) is not an inevitable reaction formation to women’s prominence in early child care. It is a choice.” That her obvious intervention was needed on that count is an indictment of a warped moral framework as much as any odd fashion in psychology.

More familiar to we of the social media era is a type of mother-hatred that emanates primarily from fathers — a particularly noxious jealousy of one’s own children. “I resent my children for stealing my wife’s love,” went one confessional essay in The Daily Mail. (Of course, the resentment discussed therein falls primarily upon the wife, not the couple’s lucky offspring: “Here was another man about the house for my wife to adore more than she did me,” the father fumes over his baby son.) In this species of momphobia, mothers are condemned for shifting their energies from fulfilling the needs of men to fulfilling the needs of children, and perhaps for asserting themselves in so doing, as the poet Adrienne Rich argues in her book “Of Woman Born.” “The idea of maternal power has been domesticated,” she warns, as it poses a threat to the exploitation of women.

And then there are the uniquely modern forms of mother-hatred: The eugenic sort, which vilifies poor, disabled and nonwhite women who have children for daring to increase the ranks of those whom the elites consider unfit. And there’s the capitalist sort, which holds mothers in contempt for needing time off from work (not to mention pay) to deliver and care for children, and some accommodations when they return to the office.

Consider the case of Angela Ames, who was promised a lactation room to pump breast milk after her return to Nationwide Insurance from maternity leave. Once Ms. Ames arrived back at work, however, she was told she couldn’t access the space because she had failed to file paperwork. When Ms. Ames asked her supervisor to help her find a place to pump, she claimed, she was told it might be best to go home and be with her babies. Ms. Ames sued Nationwide, but the courts found in the company’s favor — because Ames had left the company voluntarily, in defeat, instead of lingering until she was fired.

In a country with no federally mandated paid maternity leave, it seems Mr. Bloomberg isn’t alone in his corporate distaste for motherhood — and that matters. The point of underscoring the species of Mr. Bloomberg’s sexism is to posit that it’s not simply the result of businesslike pragmatism, but part of a long legacy of historical hostility to mothers. That it serves capital instead of libido makes no difference. Mr. Bloomberg’s misogyny is synecdoche for the grander phenomenon, and it’s disturbing that despite it all, he’s still able to gin up Democratic support.

In his infamous anthology of what its editor generously called “Wit and Wisdom,” Mr. Bloomberg is said to have followed announcements of employees’ impending nuptials with the question: “Are you pregnant?” I can’t imagine he meant to offer congratulations.

Elizabeth Bruenig (@ebruenig) is an Opinion writer.

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