Title: Memoirs of an Unfit Mother
Author: Anne Robinson
Date: 2001
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 0-7434-4896-0
Length: 325 pages
Illustrations: black-and-white photo insert
Quote: “[T]his book...is meant for all women who have struggled with motherhood, with a career, with trying to do the right thing.”
Sigh. It’s not that television has stopped exploiting women’s talents and energy to cater to men’s sexual fantasies. It’s merely that television has expanded and made room for more different ones. Modern television offers not only Doris Day, Liz Taylor, and Maureen O’Hara, but more unusual fantasy figures. There was a market for fifty-year-old British redheads in black leather. Who knew? Anyway, some readers probably remember a game show called “The Weakest Link.” Anne Robinson was the British redhead who told somebody after each show, “You are the weakest link. Goodbye.”
It was, she said in her memoir, the reward for a lifetime of putting up with sexist bigotry, at first in the traditional well-off British manner of drinking self-destructive quantities of alcohol, then by getting sober and enjoying the benefits of Britain’s quiet and gradual movement toward enlightenment. I think it’s because Robinson never was a militant feminist that reading her memoirs made me feel like one.
The aggressive, angry party within feminism always got attention but, as Robinson both explains and demonstrates, it has not in fact represented “women” very often or very well. The appeals to a popular model of “biology” that’s always leaped to embrace gender stereotypes based on incredibly weak evidence, that does not in fact fit either animal behavior or human behavior as well as its enthusiasts want to think it does, reflect a basic human tendency that’s not actually all that well correlated with gender. While a few feminist theorists still bewail the process of socialization by which women are “feminized” into accepting a little denial of our aggressive instincts as the price for a cozy domestic life, in observed fact it doesn’t take any really heavy or systematic oppression to sell that deal to men, either. When disappointed by her first husband’s sexist, judgmental immaturity, Anne Robinson had no trouble finding a sweet, supportive man who didn’t mind a bit letting her climb higher up the corporate ladder than he did and support his financial irresponsibility, and in fact, she tells us, her first husband and their child appreciated good old Johnny’s just-love-me-cos-I’m-cute personality too.
While baby-boomer women were quietly sailing past men in school and on almost every kind of performance-based measurement of promotability, the commercial media were squalling at us, “But...but...but...you don’t waaant to be smart, competent, hardworking, promoted, and rich! You’ll be looonely! A biological clock” (remember those purely theoretical biological clocks?) “will go off and one day when you’re thirty-five you’ll run out of the office screaming ‘I want to stay home and have babies!’ You’ll all come down with chronic fatigue syndrome!” (I am not making this up. When a “chronic” form of mononucleosis spread through measles vaccine affected a large group of young adults in the Northern States and Canada, a short-lived theory that the men at the vaccine companies must have loved was that more women than men got the disease because women just weren’t built to take the stress of competing with men in offices or universities.)
And the majority response, the most truly “feminine” response if “feminine” means “characteristic of women, or of a majority of women,” was: Anne Robinson’s. Yes, she says, of course most women would rather have a husband than not, would prefer a husband who can support them while they stay home with at least one baby through at least five “wonder years,” probably do care more about their success as mothers and grandmothers than about their successes in work or school. And they’re still good enough at work and school to move past most of the men. And they might even be just loyal and loving enough to stay with sweet, supportive, less successful husbands. Albeit, if he’s less successful because he’s less careful with money, in separate homes where he can’t jeopardize her investments...
I expected this book to be funny. It’s not, particularly. I think I chortled audibly once while reading it. But it’s true to the way so many women seem to feel, however different from Anne Robinson we may be and however different our careers may be. I suspect that for a lot of Robinson’s generation the best laugh is going to come at the end, where she mentions the fans who fantasize about her “with a whip.” Is that not the way it goes? When you hit fifty, if you’re still trim and healthy and therefore attractive to young men, but they do notice that you’re “a little older” than they are, their fantasies kink up. They want you to be the sexually abusive nanny or teacher they did not actually have. Many of us are willing to spank a silly boy for a price, because that scenario is not sexually interesting to us...
But if you remember the history, it’s worth adding another voice to the chorus. Robinson was told she was “not actually an unfit mother,” just not fit enough to get custody of the child, because she worked (fewer hours than her first husband) and was unfaithful to their marriage (less blatantly than her first husband)—but not because she was an Irish-type genetic alcoholic rapidly developing a “drink problem,” although she was. With Alcoholics Anonymous-level candor, no bitterness or denial of responsibility, she revels in the irony that during the child’s wonder years she did give up full-time work. By being unfit to do it. She coped with sexist exploitation while young and depended on the very imperfect loyalty it spawned to keep a job during her descent to “the bottom” of self-induced physical disability. The years when she was sobering up, recovering her health, and enjoying her seniority as corporate doors opened to more women, were the years when the daughter was in school and was tactful enough not to want to hurt Daddy’s feelings by spending too much more time with Mommy.
One section of the story I did not like was Robinson’s memories of the 1980s, when she was getting paid to be frankly bitchy and she—and her employers—overdid it. Even making allowances for the defective conscience that seems to cause extroversion, someone should have told her...People can respect, even admire, news commentary that jabs and slashes at the weak points in policies and those who impose them. Robinson was a dare-to-be-trendy left-winger who provided loyal opposition for Mrs Thatcher. When the Prime Minister blithely told young people (many of whom were unemployed welfare dependents) “to buy a BIG house at the very beginning. Then they won’t have to move when they have a family,” and Robinson was the “hound” who retorted that “not everyone can afford a big house” and Mrs Thatcher replied “You’ve made some money out of houses,” that was a fair “game, set and match.” British audiences loved it. Robinson did not share the mainstream British adoration of the royal family. Well, if she didn’t she didn’t; Americans generally think it’s adorably British that most Brits like having a royal family and peers, although this web site keeps a wary eye on some U.S. citizens whose taste for things British embraces any tendencies toward British elitism. The question of how much the Queen ought to be paid just for being an admirable old lady was fair game. Robinson had a right to score whatever points she could score off that...but a half-grown girl who married too young, whose late-adolescent hormones were raging in a physically dangerous imbalance, going through all that and being a mother too, was not fair game. Robinson of all people should’ve known enough to leave Diana Spencer alone. When she confessed just a few of the things she’d said about the Princess, I wanted to take a whip to Robinson. Yes, most humans of both sexes do have some degree of mean-spiritedness, but we should all be helping one another to repress it.
So...Robinson's talent for cheerful verbal cruelty was transferred first to daytime TV talk shows and then, as she had a talent for television, to the game show that made her an international TV star. And I will say for Robinson that she does recognize that the men who steered her newspaper career the wrong way didn’t get to enjoy that piece of luck and compensation, as she did. She had to smash her way through appalling amounts of bigotry, but she avoided the trap of thinking that everything was all about bigotry, that women always get the short end...Robinson, as an individual, just happened to be able to make a demotion into a promotion. Cheers.
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