The 'Mother-as-Victim' Narrative Predates 1960s Feminism, Rooted in Earlier Therapeutic and Professional-Class Ideology
Source: Chris Bray. "The Story About Lindsay Clancy Being A Victim Is An Old One." September 2, 2026. thefederalist.com
The Gist
The author argues that people feeling sorry for Lindsay Clancy, a mother who killed her children, isn't really caused by 1960s feminism, as some claim. Instead, he traces this 'mother as victim' idea back further, to 19th-century medical and legal ideas that painted women as naturally weak and fragile, plus early feminist writers who framed motherhood itself as a kind of oppression.
Conclusion
The cultural tendency to portray mothers who kill their children (like Lindsay Clancy) as victims of circumstance rather than as culpable agents does not originate with 1960s feminism, but stems from older 19th- and early 20th-century ideas about female weakness, therapeutic culture, and the professionalization of motherhood.
Premises
- In 1954, Constance Fisher drowned her three children and was treated sympathetically as a victim of mental illness rather than prosecuted—decades before 1960s feminism emerged.
- The medical concept of 'neurasthenia' in the late 19th century already framed upper-class women as inherently weak and prone to nervous collapse, requiring rest and intervention.
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 story 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' drawing on her own postpartum experience, established the narrative that motherhood is a form of sickness and oppression—predating second-wave feminism by seven decades.
- Louis Brandeis's Progressive Era legal brief argued for labor protections based on claims that women are 'fundamentally weaker than men,' embedding female weakness into law and policy before 1960s feminism existed.
- Gilman also advocated professionalizing domestic labor (using industrial bread-baking as an analogy), reflecting an early push to replace family caregiving with credentialed 'helping professions.'
- These historical threads produced a lasting contradiction in feminist thought: women are simultaneously portrayed as strong and independent, yet fundamentally undone by motherhood.
- The public reaction to the Lindsay Clancy case—treating her as a victim—reflects this long-standing, unresolved contradiction playing out in contemporary culture.
Assumptions
- The sympathetic reactions to Fisher in 1954 and to Clancy today are meaningfully similar and reflect the same underlying cultural narrative.
- Ideas originating in 19th- and early 20th-century intellectual and legal history directly influence or explain contemporary public sympathy toward Clancy, rather than merely being loosely analogous.
- Feminism can be treated as a continuous ideological lineage despite significant internal differences between its waves and factions.
- Public expressions of empathy for a mother accused of killing her children are primarily ideological performances rather than responses to documented mental illness (e.g., postpartum psychosis).
- The commentators claiming '1960s feminism' caused this phenomenon are a real and significant position worth rebutting.