Feminist Blogger Says It’s OK to Abandon Your Kid for ‘a Better Life’–if You’re a Woman

In Sony Pictures’ new movie “The Pursuit of Happyness” Will Smith plays Chris Gardner, a homeless, hard-luck single father who raises his five year-old son alone after his wife abandons the boy. The movie is based on a true story and co-stars Smith’s eight year-old son as Gardner’s son Christopher. Feminist blogger Sylvia doesn’t like the movie’s treatment of the boy’s mother. In her blog entry “Happpyness Is Spelled Wrong (and other tales)”, she writes:

“Thandie Newton’s mother character got dogged severely. I think the directors tried to give her as fair of a shake as possible (I suspect that the book’s treatment is much worse). However, when she left Gardner and her son for a better life, I could not find it in my heart to condemn her for the decision. My mind drifted to A Doll’s House and Medea, to cruel invectives waged against women who rejected motherhood under certain conditions…”

Sylvia goes on to blame Chris Gardner for his wife’s actions. Somehow I don’t think Sylvia would be quite so sympathetic to a father who chose to abandon his child. Same old double standard–when a man does something bad, we blame him. When a woman does something bad, we blame him, too.

Christopher, who is now 25, sees the situation a little differently than Sylvia. Appearing recently on the Oprah Winfrey Show, he paid his father the greatest compliment any parent could receive:

“I didn’t know we were homeless. I just remember that we were doing a whole lot of moving. I just know that when I looked up, he was there. I looked around, he was there.”
Chris Gardner spoke of his struggles to create a ‘’normal'’ environment for Christopher, even when the two were spending their nights on the floor of a public bathroom in Oakland, explaining:

“We may not have known where we were going, where we were going to eat, or where we were going to sleep, but we were together every day. There are probably a lot of folks whose children live in million-dollar houses who can’t say that.” >Article