Digital Analogue

Anonymous motherhood

I was reading today's funnies, and against my better judgement I actually read Family Circus this week. The actual content of it had Dolly musing about alternate mothers and Billy imagining a thought bubble with drawings of other funnies-pages moms. Which is a little odd, and I guess funny for some, but what annoyed me was that the little inset box explaining the joke captions the images as follows: "(clockwise starting at upper left) Blondie, Dennis the Menace's mom, Hagar's wife, and the moms in "Baby Blues", "Luann", "Zits", and "For Better or For Worse". (There is then a "happy mom's day to all mothers" balloon coming from the authors' signatures.)

Other than Blondie, who presumably got named because the comic strip is eponymous, all these characters have no identity of their own here. They can't really blame space considerations, because there would've been plenty of space to say e.g. "Blondie from 'Blondie'; Alice Mitchell from 'Dennis the Menace'; Helga from 'Hagar the Horrible'" and so on. And honestly, probably nothing would have even registered if they'd just gone the shorter route and said, "Moms from: 'Blondie', 'Dennis the Menace', ...". But the actual phrasing they used sort of made it sound like these fictional women have no character or relevance except in relationship to other people.

Thinking about it, the one that really started me off on this path was the "Hagar's wife". Hagar gets a first-name reference, and Helga is then identified only in relation to her man, not even by her motherhood (which might arguably be defensible given the message of the strip). Which highlighted the fact that none of the fictional women shown were actually named other than Blondie. And the fact that the actual body of the strip is pretty much devoid of content, except to say that mothers are basically interchangeable. And largely anonymous.

Which, in a lot of cases, I suppose they are. But rather than raising this as a troubling issue, the strip just follows along. I know I'm overreacting, but the whole thing bugs me. I guess that's what I get for reading Family Circus.

But, happy Mothers' Day, everyone!

"You have to be awfully desperate to leave your home behind, risk the crushing daytime heat and the cold nights of the desert, and set out for a country that wants your cheap labor but not the economic burden of educating your children and caring for your sick." --Carol Marin