Mothers against equality

One of the hardest things to understand when we become feminists is the role of mothers in transmitting sexist values. Countless young women have told me this, explaining that to advance their liberation they not only had to confront the figure of their authoritarian father but also another woman—the one who gave them life. The question we've always asked ourselves is: why do they impose on us the same rules that harmed them? Why, having suffered the ravages of a lack of rights and freedoms, do they want to subject their own daughters to the same system? Perhaps mothers can't teach their daughters to be rebellious, they can't turn them into outcasts if the general context isn't conducive to change. That's why equality is only possible when it's collective. In the case of women of Muslim origin, this transformation is being interrupted and slowed down by various factors. One of those who will now finish burying us in the misery of Islamic patriarchy will be precisely the extreme right, which rails against practitioners of Muhammad's religion for their sexism but silences us and proposes racist measures that will especially affect women. I watch helplessly as Aliança Catalana rises and I feel more like a foreigner than ever in the country I consider my own and which I believed was equipped with more intelligent resources to combat fanaticism than another kind of fanaticism—in this case, identity-based, supremacist, and exclusionary. The redundancy is understandable.

But I return to the mothers, because they are more important than any external discourse that might reach their children. More than once I have met mothers born here or who came here as children, who have had access to education and the opportunities offered by an open democracy, who have risen socially because they have benefited from it, and who, presumably, have also been exposed to the values of equality that govern us. I want to clarify that we're no longer talking about the generation of illiterate women who arrived from the countryside, brought together by their husbands. We're talking about women with their own opinions who, nevertheless, choose to pass on sexism to their children. Or worse: who want to prevent them from receiving feminist messages because they feel they go against their religion or culture. When I've encountered parents boycotting my talks in schools and colleges, it wasn't the men who wanted to cancel me, but the women—the active and involved mothers who believe that a feminist and secular woman of immigrant origin can't address their children or the other students. "You're putting strange things in their heads," one of them told me, and those "strange things" are anti-racist and feminist awareness. If boys experience injustice firsthand when they are insulted because of their skin color, they can also perfectly understand the injustice of their sister having to cover herself from head to toe to go swimming at the beach while they wear the most "Western" swimsuit without endangering their culture or religion. When mothers teach their children that women are more respectable based on how they dress, when they instill gender roles in them, and when they discriminate against their daughters at home, what they are doing is creating new sexists who will hate all women who are not their mothers. Anthropologist Camille Lacoste-Dujardin discussed all of this in Mothers against womenIn that book, I explained how, in traditional North African societies, the primary heterosexual relationship was between mothers and their young sons, who formed an alliance against the other females in the family. What I didn't imagine is that this alliance, now with an Islamist slant, would resurface here and attempt to shield children from feminist discourse.