La madre al servicio de la libertad

I am going to work through two contradictions that I know through my own experience: 1) The non-freedom of the mother, according to the daughter; 2) The non-freedom of the daughter, according to the mother. Because women’s history is not a straight line of progress, it is not a simple question of going from worse to better, but is rather a history that, like life, is made up of broken lines, of advances, of sideways steps, of going backwards, of peering into unexplored abysses whose direction is an unknown, of falls that are advances. When a woman is young, she sees the lack of freedom in her mother’s life. This usually opens up in her a contradiction with her own desire for freedom, a painful contradiction, because she realizes that she yearns for something that her mother cannot teach her and that, because of this, can endanger her relationship with her. Often, as mothers too, we see a lack of freedom in our daughters’ lives, in spite of loving them intensely; and we open up contradictions, with their resultant suffering. I think that for a daughter today to be free before her alive mother, it is necessary for the emancipated mother to take on an inheritance of those teachers of civilisation that are
housewives, and to recognise the political value of the relationship of service: of putting herself –the emancipated mother– at the service of her daughter’s fecundity, at the service of her daughter’s creativity. Recognising in her daughter her plus.