The Political Power of the Wine Mom

"At school, 'it was a disgrace to have a mother,' Forster wrote in 1939. 'Crabbe's mother, Gob's mother, eeugh! No words were too strong, no sounds too shrill.' The maternal monster might jump out of the shadows at any moment: 'Nearly every little boy had a mother in a cupboard, and dreadful revelations occurred.'"

"It is developmentally appropriate for a child entering adolescence to be humiliated by the very existence of his parents, and to resent them fiercely for making him feel so terrible. Such violent emotions help a boy punch his way out of the chrysalis of selfhood; they fuel the hard and painful work of becoming an independent adult."

"A hallmark of 'imbecile societies,' Forster suggested, is that they reinforce childish and irrational hatreds by virtue of how strongly they are felt, how manfully they are expressed. Prep school was one such imbecile society. So was the England of 1939, which horrified Forster with its antisemitism and politics of Nazi appeasement."

E. M. Forster's experience at an elite English prep school revealed a culture where students were ashamed of their mothers, viewing maternal presence as shameful and humiliating. Forster observed that while adolescent resentment of parents is developmentally normal and necessary for independence, certain societies pathologically reinforce such childish hatreds. He termed these 'imbecile societies'—institutions that validate irrational emotions through their intensity and forceful expression rather than rational discourse. Forster identified both his prep school and 1939 England, with its antisemitism and Nazi appeasement, as examples of such societies. The contemporary relevance of Forster's critique suggests modern America similarly exhibits characteristics of an imbecile society.

Read at The New Yorker