ABSTRACT
Lesbian mothers are, almost without exception, themselves products of hetero-mothering. Lesbians raise their children within patriarchy, just like other women. All mammals teach appropriate responses of submission to their young.. In order to keep patriarchy functioning as a self-sustaining heterosystem, daughters must be taught to mistrust females and to attend/depend on males. Mothers teach daughters, even at a preverbal level, that their instinct of self-preservation is best served by the absence of female bonding, the absence of female-to-female entitlement. Radical mothering means involving children in disloyalty to the culture the mother is expected to transmit at the expense of woman-bonding and female empowerment. The fact of lesbian existence as radical lesbians in patriarchy gives their mothering some clear advantages. For instance, lesbian mothers for the most part eschew that bedrock heteromyth which says a child needs a resident father in order to grow up whole.
