Thinking about "The Mermaid and the Minotaur"
Ann Snitow
Feminist Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2, Toward a Feminist Theory of Motherhood. (Jun., 1978), pp.
190-198.
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THINKING ABOUT
THEMERMAID AND THEMINOTAUR
ANN SNITOW
Summary of the Argument
"Woman" will always be regarded as dangerous and debased as
long as it is she, and she alone, who first introduces us as infants to
the mixed blessing of being human. This is the core argument of
The Mermaid and the Minotaur, in which Dorothy Dinnerstein
describes the asymmetry between men and women which we experience
at the heart of all our social and sexual life.' To Dinnerstein,
this asymmetry in sexual roles is being crucially reinforced
by the way we continue (though with less and less biological necessity)
to maintain infancy as a kingdom ruled only by mother.
From this core idea proliferates a great number of observations
about our partial, tenuous and deformed humanity. Men and
women have divided up human traits between them and they have
struck a bargain of interdependence.
Men agree to build the world while women agree both to support
them in this struggle and to give vent, like harmless jesters, to the
knowledge both sexes have that "there is something trivial and
empty, ugly and sad, in what he does." A proverb records this
bargain: Men must work and women must weep.
Traditionally both sexes have felt fairly comfortable with this
arrangement because both have been mother-reared. That is to
say, both began life seeing "Woman" as an all powerful provider.
As a result of this first memory of "Woman,"she has always been
defined as a quasi-person,as a sort of infinitely exploitable natural
resource which, like nature, has the power to turn nasty but which
is bounteous when controlled. She bears the guilt for our discovery
as infants that we cannot command the world, that we are flesh.
Our mother's separate subjectivity, which is invisible to us as infants,
later becomes an insult to our childish belief that she is
there to serve us. We continue to feel that she is not, or should
not be, a complete person in herself
Thinking About The Mermaid and the Minotaur 191
Males compensate for their original powerlessness by controlling
women in the adult world. Female infants have the same ambivalent
feelings of passionate love and rapacity toward their mothers,
but since they must ultimately become female figures themselves,
they split these feelings offfrom each other. They join with men
in distrusting female power and share with men a preference for
male leadership in adult life,a leadership they, too, see as cleaner,
more finite than the overwhelming first power of "Mother."
Women often sacrifice sexual impulsivity and many kinds of spontaneous
and natural world-building activity to their fear of overwhelming
men. They recognize the quality and source of male
fear of woman and know that to call this fear forth is to break
the tenuous balance which is the only promise of sexual partner-
ship.
Dinnerstein argues that we are now at a moment in human history
when the elaborate symbiosis between the sexes contributes
to the undermining of our chances for survival as a species. The
male project has gotten out of hand; it's gotten more and more
abstracted and farther and farther away from the original energies
that were progressive in it. And the female absence from the male
world-building project excludes traditions of nurturance from the
public sphere that are now necessary for human survival.
In this crisis,Dinnerstein worries about the mothers. How will
they manage during this period of painful transition? The percentage
of time childbearing and childrearing must play in the
lifespan of women is reduced; the old sexual divisions of labor
are no longer technically necessary and must change if we are
to adapt as a species to our shrinking resources. How will this
enormous pressure toward change be enacted in our daily life?
Right now women are left with their old tasks as mothers; they
are asked to do new ones, to participate more directly than before
in social change, while men, also aware that the old system is breaking
down, are giving women less and less support for either their
old tasks or their new.
Yet The Mermaid and the Minotaur has its own species of qualified
optimism. When a system breaks down, as our old sociosexual
symbiosis is breaking down, there is a human drive to
reconstruct. Dinnerstein offers her book as a suggestive map for
this reconstruction. She puts up sign posts: Here, she says, are
the reasons why women find it hard to work together in groups.
(They fear the powerful mother in each other.) Here are women's
strengths for allying with each other. (They have the deep first
love o f a woman-their mothers-to draw on as a source of intimacy
and real sharing.) Here are the reasons why men are increasingly
192 Ann Snitow
unable to protect and love us. (The world-building project traditionally
theirs is in crisis. They must change their relation to that
other first parent, mother nature, whom they once believed limitless
in bounty, or they-and we all-will die.)
The political implication of Dinnerstein's argument is that men
and women have to raise children together. Both men and women
must guide children through their first encounter with life, through
the pain of being helpless, of not knowing what the world is, of
having to be channeled and controlled. Dinnerstein writes:
When men stcrt participating as deeply as women in the initiation of infants
into the human estate, when both male and female parents come to carry for
all of us the special meanings of early childhood, the trouble we have reconciling
these meanings with person-ness willfinally be faced. The consequence,
of course, will be afuller and more realistic,a kinder and at the same time
more demanding,definition of person-ness.
And there would be other consequences. As long as we can use
women as scapegoatsfor our discontents, we need not face the real
tyrants. Dinnerstein insists that "the stone walls that activism runs
into have buried foundations." She suspects that as long as we
have conquered '%lother," the Prst tyrant we know, we are often
content to suffer under other, less primitively frightening tyrants.
Our rebellions are marred by our incomplete grasp of our shared
human condition in which each one of us must both work and
weep, both enterprise and criticize the products of our enterprise.
The old sexual divisions have infantilized us, have bestialized us.
To rebel, we must be more fully human.
* * * * * *
The problem with summarizing Dinnerstein's argument in The
Mermaid and the Minotaur as I have tried to do here is that in both
construction and meaning the book is complex and experimental.
Dinnerstein refuses to simplify. Without ever calling the female
monopoly of child care the cause of misogyny, oppression, tyranny,
or the rape of nature by men, Dinnerstein makes it clear that there
is an organic, dialectical connection among these things, that each
one helps keep the others in place.
Dinnerstein's male mentors such as Freud and Norman 0.Brown
have seen the primacy of "Mother" but they have assumed her symbolic
meaning to infants as a biological constant. Dinnerstein's
feminism has reordered their material, suddenly bringing female
power over children into history and recognizing it as a condition
that is always evolving and that now must be more radically and
consciously altered if we are to develop in ways that we wish-and
that we must-to survive as a species.
Thinking About The Mermaid and the Minotaur 193
Few men have dared to write as circuitously and tentatively as
Dinnerstein. Yet what man has said so much about "the division
of responsibility, opportunity, and privilege that prevails between
male and female humans, and the patterns of psychological interdependence
that are implicit in this division," has stitched so many
bits and pieces together, without succumbing to the temptation
to snip off all the loose ends and neatly present a theory? When
I say that Dinnerstein's writing is circular and invertebrate I mean
that as the beginning of the highest praise. She is so aware that
some things cannot be proved, that oversimplification will get us
nowhere, and that recriminations are in vain, that she has removed
herself from the usual categories of scholarship, science, and political
writing. She is, very simply, one of the great humanists we
have writing now. With this caveat to anyone who hopes that
this summary can be any substitute for the original, rich and complex
argument, let me move on to talk about Dinnerstein in quite
another way.
A Conversation With Dinnerstein
We are mermaids or minotaurs,
only half human. We sense a
monstrosity about ourselves.
Dorothy Dinnerstein
About the maladaptive relations between man and woman which
Dorothy Dinnerstein describes, I, and we all, have much too much
experience.
Take the following scenes:
A male friend I've known well for years turns out to have a daughter. This
fact comes out because I happen to tell him about The Mermaid and the Minotaur;otherwise
I might never have known of it.
"How old is your daughter?"
My friend casts his head back and makes counting gestures with his fingers.
Then he says, with some surprise, "She must be about six now!"
My friend doesn't think of his daughter as a secret; a perfect repression obviates
the need for secrets. After making one hospital visit shortly after she
was born, he has never seen his daughter again.
To me this fact is so stunning that I would like to take Dinnerstein's ideas
about the loss we all sustain through the absence of our fathers during our
first introduction to life and carve them with a cleaver on my friend's smooth
and empty heart.
194 Ann Snitow
Another, pre-Dinnerstein memory:
A man I used to love once confided in me that he didn't think I
would be a whole person, ever, if I didn't have a child. In my journal
I wrote the following fantasy:
I am pregnant. (My lover dislikes birth control; it offends his potency,
which my pregnancy proves.) I give him a choice: an abortion or he keeps
the baby, not hiring some other woman to nurse it but taking care of it himself.
Hating abortion far worse than birth control, he takes the second alternative.
A daughter is born. When my lover brings my daughter to visit me,
the baby cries and he is forced to interrupt himself to go and pick her up.
The baby's schedule keeps him from taking trips or making money. I have
a good job so I give him child support and I say, "A few more years like this,
having the experiences of women, and you'll be the wisest man in America."
For the first time he begins to understand me. I stay away and don't mind
that my daughter cries on the rare occasions I see her; after all, it's a wise
child that knows its blood mother if that mother has the freedom to go
away and lacks the usual guilt to make her stay. Meanwhile, my lover is
bringing up my daughter. This experience is the only one that could make
him into a fit companion.
At the time I made this journal entry, I knew only that my lover
had said something unforgivable, and, worse, something against
which I was powerless to defend myself. Now, reading Dinnerstein
has clarified these emotions: I had half thought I was a whole
human being; my friend reminded me that to him I was not. But,
as Dinnerstein argues, this idea is in itself cruelly inhuman. My
friend was afraid of me as an autonomous creature, his mother
disturbingly off the leash and on the rampage in the world, or, to
use Dinnerstein's metaphor, his mother arisen from the dark, magical
sea to walk on land. My lover told me I would not be a complete
human being without the experience of motherhood. I
wrote my journal entry to contradict him, to claim that it is he
who needs this experience in order to be completely human.
These angry fantasies come naturally during our era of breakdown
in what Dorothy Dinnerstein calls our "asymmetrical sexual
arrangements." The female desire to carve a political tract on the
unresponsive male heart, the self-defeating fantasy of giving a child
away-these extremities are the products of desperation, dizzy
efforts to correct an increasingly pathological imbalance in the
roles of the sexes.
Motherhood is a condition in crisis. Whichever fantasy each one
of us has, either dreaming of leaving the baby with father forever
or dreaming of taking the baby back from father (from patriarchal
control) and never letting him come near it again, either way we
Thinking About The Mermaid and the Minotaur 195
must eventually find whatever is irreducible in motherhood, and
whatever is malleable in it, and make a radical change.
The two stories I have told are Dinnersteinian fables. In the first
we see a man who forgot the existence of his daughter. Her needs
can have no modifying influence on what he does in the world.
He is Dinnerstein's minotaur, "mindless, greedy." He has escaped
from mother, and from the mother in himself.
The women in this first story are almost invisible: one is the
mother who has been left alone with her child; the other is the
writer who wants to carve the truth of the mother's oppression
and the child's abandonment on the cold father's heart. But
neither really knows how to beard the minotaur in his far-off den.
They are Dinnerstein's mermaids, able to love the child but too
socially powerless to do more than impotently rage at its father.
In my second story, the mother is now so angry that she refuses
to become Dinnerstein's "treacherous mermaid, seductive and impenetrable
representative of the dark and magic underwater world
from which our life comes." She tries to become like the man in
the first story; she leaves her child, ignores it when it cries. The
woman in this story is the revolutionary, running fast because she
knows the old world is just behind her. But to enter the male
world which is "free from the chagrins of the nursery," she must
sacrifice other human parts of herself. She outruns her own
strengths; she exhausts herself. She needs to be nurtured by the
love and support of the man and of the child she has left behind,
just as for generations they both have flourished by being nurtured
by her. If the father has been humanized by mothering, has become
at last "a fit companion"' then she can enjoy being fully
human herself. If he cannot be made a true parent, she is endlessly
drawn toward one of two extremes-either total immersion in
motherhood or total renunciation of it-in a seesawing effort to
create a human balance.
In the world Dinnerstein describes and in the world of my stories
there is not as yet a well-established middle ground where the humanness
of the minotaur's world-building project and the humanness
of the nurturant mother can meet. In her interest in the extremes,
mermaid and minotaur, Dinnerstein is not saying there is
no such middle ground in our actual social life, between these
mythic, half-human roles. (In fact, she always insists that actual
men and women do not, and luckily cannot, fit comfortably or
neatly into these sexual roles.) Rather she is using the myths as
metaphors to illustrate the barriers we put between ourselves and
change: Dinnerstein is showing us the boxes so we can see how
much time we actually spend outside them. Both sexes live inside
196 Ann Snitow
the roles and outside them, but it is of course women who now
feel this coiltradiction most sharply. When women struggle to
create a human, middle position, to combine work, mothering and
loving mother-reared men, we are in a condition of terrible stress.
(It will surprise no one that Dorothy Dinnerstein once wrote an
essay about Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid who, to
gain the love of the prince, gives up her tail and gets legs, a sign
of wanting to grow up, love man, and be fully human. Andersen's
Little Mermaid ends tragically; her prince is not human enough,
not yet a fit companion; he doesn't recognize her for who she is
and on his wedding day to another, she dies.)
I offer these two anecdotes from my journal almost at random.
For me, Dinnerstein throws light everywhere. Speaking primarily
about one class in one country, middle-class America, she nevertheless
diagnoses social symptoms which I suspect further scholarship
will confirm are present, and have been present, in very different
classes and cultures. Many women have complained about The
Mermaid and the Minotaur that they have heard this diagnosis before:
Once again it is all the mother's fault; the powerful matriarch
must be overthrown in order for civilization to progress. We have
already heard more than enough about the fear of woman and very
little about how to extricate ourselves from this labyrinth of feeling.
Dinnerstein's unique contribution is that she has given this traditino
of the powerful mother its full and crushing weight in our history
without finally being overwhelmed by it. She has an explanation
for the fear and rejection of mother that makes sense. Without
making light of the myth of the terrible mother she nevertheless
demythologizes it. Without claiming that mother-centered childcare
is the cause of inequalities between men and women, she
nevertheless sees how it confirms us in these inequalities, makes
us comfortable with them.
It's easy to misread Dinnerstein at this point, to think that
hers is a reductionist's argument: but she offers no primary cause
for female oppression, no simple panacea. Instead her discussion
is a web of connections and descriptions proliferating from what
is, in fact, a rather humble core. Dinnerstein has one thing to say
and she tries to say it keeping all its connections with other matters
intact. Instead of a linear argument, her book is really a grid whose
lines trail off the page where she cannot always follow them,
though one often feels how much she would like to. For this very
reason it is easy to be frustrated by The Mermaid and the Minotaur.
It raises more questions than it can answer. And to make its positive
point, it must again emphasize the negative side of mother in
a world which we feel has done that enough already.
Thinking About The Mermaid and the Minotaur 197
In fact, in many respects this book is a mother it's easy to reject.
There are so many things it cannot do for us. It fails to incorporate
theoretically the enormous ego strength of women, and their
very real contribution to world-building so far. It fails to offer any
material suggestions for how new childrearing structures could
enter our society. It fails to identify clearly (though it often mentions)
the cracks in our present situation which might be the points
at which changes could most easily be made. What about working
class families where the mother is forced to be absent from the
home and is a worker in the world? What about large families
where children rear each other? What about families where the
father is such a tyrant he can never represent for his children an
easier alternative to the first, loved parent? Don't other cultures
offer evidence of politically suggestive variations in childcare
arrangements? Can countercultural experiments really change
the mainstream as Dinnerstein hopes and, if so, by what mechanism?
What is to prevent the experimenters from becoming the
same sort of useless jesters that Dinnerstein says women have
always been? How can we more scientifically assess the metaphoric
power of Mother in the first two years of life? For example,
in a more sexually balanced social environment could the five
year old's discoveries of the social similarities between Mommy and
Daddy eventually change the overall metaphoric meaning of conscious
and subconscious memories? How much can we change the
biological primacy of the mother-child tie in the first year of life
and how much should we change it?2
These are legitimate questions about Dinnerstein's work (in fact,
if one reads closely, The Mermaid and the Minotaur raises each one
of these questions somewhere or other in a box or a note or a parenthesis)
but Dinnerstein cannot answer them. At an interview when
I asked her these questions she asked them back at me. They are,
very simply, our biggest human questionsS3
Some women have told me they think that Dinnerstein is too
accepting of our patriarchal past. (Certainly my two stories are
more unfriendly to men than anything in her book.) Indeed she
grants the past its charms. As she said to Jane Lazarre, "The way
things go between men and women are so deeply tied up with what
we need in a positive way, that we have good reasons for being
reluctant to let go of them. If it were not for the fact that now
our sexual arrangements are part and parcel of what's killing us,
I doubt that we would be tampering with them."4 This is Dinnerstein's
profundity as a social thinker, her wisdom as a psychologist.
She is friendly toward our peculiar double nature: We have beenand
still are-mermaids and minotaurs, but this asymmetry in our
198 Ann Snitow
lives has always frustrated us, has always propelled us out of ourselves
toward new forms of social life:
Our prevailing male-female arrangement is rooted in our biological history; it
is part of what we have always been. Yet the feelings that make us restless
with it-an intolerance of constriction, a resentment of bondage, an urge to
grow-are also part of what we have always been.
Dinnerstein admires the human spirit, our capacity for selftransformation.
A revolutionary thinker, a historical materialist,
she shows us to be always in the process of revolutionizing the
conditions of our social life.
She is also a feminist, one who believes that it is women who
must make the next step in our species' self-creation. Without
calling men villains, Dinnerstein nevertheless believes them to have
too many vested interests in the present system to find the strength
to change it. Women, she says, will be the ones to change it, if it is
to be changed at all.
NOTES
IDorothy Dinnerstein, author of The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements
and Human Malaise (New York: Harper & Row, 1976) is a professor of psychology
at the Institute for Cognitive Studies, Rutgers-Newark.
Dorothy Dinnerstein is presently working on another piece of the vast project of
which The Mermaid and the Minotaur is a part, the project of understanding how our
species' traditional social arrangements are now threatening our species' very life. As
Dinnerstein describes this next project: "What the book will survey-drawing both upon
experimental data and upon descriptive analysis of my own and the reader's life experience-is
a number of weaknesses (soft spots or cracks, so to speak) in the human sense
of reality, weaknesses which have not been grave enough to menace our survival in the
past, but which do menace it in the face of the situation we have by this time gotten
ourselves into, and which we may be able to outgrow."
21n the formulation of some of these questions I am indebted to Sara Ruddick, Gail
Kuenstler and Marilyn Werstler, and to Dr. Florence Volkman Pincus who discussed
Dinnerstein's work at the Woman's Salon, November 1977, New York City.
3 ~ ylong interview with Dr. Dinnerstein (Spring 1977) deals with the implications
of her book for women living alone with children, for feminists, etc.
MY thanks to Jane Lazarre who allowed me to transcribe her interview with Dr.
Dinnerstein, aired on WBAI-FM, Listener-Sponsored Radio, New York, Spring 1977.