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My mother, her myths and her life; I decided to get a life different from
hers. I did not want to be dependent like she was; I wanted to be independent
like my father. In this I was not alone. With minor differences it was the
same for three generations of women in the twentieth century – according to
a study by Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen and Monica Rudberg, who interviewed
three generations of women in Norway. 7 It is nearly always positive to be or
want to be like your father, while it is ambivalent if not negative to be like your
mother. One way of understanding this is to examine the division of labour
and the value applied to it; another is the psychological issue of identity. Both
of them are connected to the role of the mother as the first object of love and
the person who does most of the caring. Even if a girl is not as close to her
father as she is to her mother, the father is still praised for being generous,
giving important impulses and strengthening their self-confidence. When the
mother is the invisible Cinderella of the house and the father is the knight
on the white horse coming home now and then with inspiration and money,
it is no wonder that a girl’s relationship with her father is one of love and of
identity: she wants to be autonomous like her father.
Independent or/and dependent
In Simone de Beauvoir – The Making of an Intellectual Woman, Toril Moi tells
how a girl raised in Norway in the 1950-60s only met adult women who were
housewives. Only on reading Beauvoir’s A Second Sex did Toril Moi become
aware that it was possible for a woman to be something else.
More or less I used the glorious example of Simone de Beauvoir as an ideal in
my fight against the future of a housewife that the Norwegian village would
have tried to catch me in if they had had the smallest chance. I had an ideal:
I wanted to become an intellectual, without children, and with a least one
lover at a time. And I would have to go to Paris. To learn French was suddenly
self-evident. The mere thought of becoming a dependent woman, locked up in
a small narrow-minded Norwegian town was unbearable. Now I live abroad,
I have become an intellectual and I have no children. Simone de Beauvoir
helped me to become exactly what I dreamt about when I was fifteen. 8
7
Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen and Monica Rudberg, Moderne Jenter, - Tre generasjoner på vei. (Modern Girls - Three
Generations.) (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2006)
8
Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 8. My translation,
as this is only mentioned in the introduction to the later Norwegian edition.
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