Mothers who Complain

From a long, mostly tedious rant about how feminism has been undermined by hypersexuality and the "You Go Girl" attitude, by Charlotte Raven, I extract this interesting paragraph:

Mothers are now more able to portray themselves as victims of their children. Brett Paesel says she was prompted to write her memoir Mommies Who Drink by the silence around motherhood and women's unwillingness to bear witness to their subjugation, "which feels like complaining". No one dares convey the rage evoked by the maternal requirement to put someone else's needs above their own? None except Stephanie Calman, author of Confessions of a Bad Mother; Kate Long, author of The Bad Mother's Handbook; Mel Giedroyc, author of Going Ga Ga – Is There Life After Birth? and so on and on. These controlling mothers seem to feel wronged by the autonomy of the people in their orbit. The fact that their children are separate beings with their own beliefs and habits seems like a dreadful affront. Female confessional writers seldom pay much mind to how it feels to be them. Far from being a golden age of female self-expression, this is the opposite. Real self-expression requires dialogue. With the other point of view excluded, candid authors are communicating nothing.

I recall reading, back in the 1980s, a little diatribe against mothers who complain about what a drag children are, but I do admit that there seems to have been a surge in maternal "frankness" over the past decade. But I doubt this represents a change in motherhood. Surely it is just another example of our cult of self-exposure, our insistence in telling everybody everything about our selves, especially the bad stuff. Surely many mothers have always found the job unpleasant -- Bleak House features a mother who completely ignores her children in favor of her efforts to civilize Africa -- but decent people didn't talk in public about such feelings. Now decency of that sort is hopelessly old-fashioned, and we all let everything hang out all over, including our resentment at having to get yet another cup of juice.