The Mothers of the Cornell Seven: Are Women Responsible for the Men They Love?
I recently found myself in a Signal conversation with a group of feminists discussing the seven young men named in a civil lawsuit involving allegations that a young woman was drugged and sexually assaulted at Cornell University in October 2024.
Then the conversation took an unexpected turn.
One of the women had close personal connections to a family associated with the case. She had decided to sit out Cornell-related demonstrations. She made clear that she opposed sexual violence and wasn’t asking anyone to stop supporting the young woman who reported the assault. She asked that public statements use the word alleged while legal proceedings remained unresolved. What followed was a debate about whether her relationships called her feminist commitments into question, and eventually, whether she should remain in leadership.
We have spent generations fighting the idea that women should be defined by the men in their lives. Yet here we were, in a feminist space, debating whether a woman should be judged by her relationship to a family connected to allegations of sexual violence.
I started thinking about the mothers of the Cornell Seven. Their grandmothers, aunts, sisters, and the other women who raised and loved them. And I kept coming back to one question:
When did loving a man who has caused harm become evidence that a woman has betrayed other women?
I’ve Seen These Mothers in Courtrooms
I have sat in courtrooms where men who committed terrible crimes against women were being sentenced. I have listened to survivors describe what happened to them.
And I have watched the mothers of those men stand before judges and beg for leniency. Some cried. Some spoke about the little boys they had raised and the good they still believed existed in their sons.
I could recognize the suffering of the survivors while also recognizing the anguish of the mothers sitting a few feet away. Their pain was not the same. Their circumstances were not equivalent. And the mothers’ grief did not erase the harm their sons had caused.
But their grief was real.
A mother begging for mercy is not necessarily a mother denying justice. Sometimes she is simply a mother who knows exactly what her son has done and loves him anyway.
Women Are Not Extensions of the Men in Their Lives
For generations, feminists have fought the assumption that wives were responsible for their husbands’ behavior, that mothers were to blame for their sons’ failures, and that women should carry the shame of men’s misconduct. So why do we resurrect those expectations when the subject is sexual violence?
If a woman’s son is accused of rape, does she become suspect simply because she loves him? If she asks for fairness, is she undermining survivors? If she cannot bring herself to protest against someone she has known since childhood, does that make her less of a feminist?
I don’t think so.
There is an enormous difference between loving someone who has caused harm and excusing that harm. Between asking for due process and discrediting a survivor. Between declining to participate in an advocacy campaign and actively working to undermine it.
When a man commits violence, someone inevitably asks where his mother was. Rarely do we ask the same question about his father. And we almost never examine the culture that teaches boys that masculinity is measured by dominance, sexual conquest, and the approval of other men. A young man can grow up surrounded by strong, feminist women and still absorb messages from his peers, fraternities, and social media that contradict everything he was taught at home.
Accountability belongs to the person who caused the harm. It should not automatically extend to his mother, grandmother, aunt, sister, or wife simply because she refuses to stop loving him.
When Feminist Solidarity Becomes a Loyalty Test
Feminist organizations should never allow influential families or personal friendships to determine whether survivors receive support. Conflicts of interest should be disclosed and managed. But refusing to join a particular demonstration is not the same as interfering with another woman’s pursuit of justice. And asking an organization to use accurate legal language is not the same as discrediting someone who reports sexual assault.
The word alleged is not an insult to survivors. It describes the status of a claim that has not yet been legally established.
What concerns me is how quickly a disagreement about participation can become a judgment about belonging. A woman should not have to publicly condemn someone she loves simply to retain her place in a feminist community. Nor should her love for that person give her permission to undermine someone else’s pursuit of justice.
Both things can be true.
What About the Other Mother?
There is another family in this story. Somewhere, the young woman who reported the assault has a mother, grandmother, aunt, sister, or chosen family member watching strangers debate her credibility, her decisions, and her private life. Or perhaps she has told no one in her family at all. We do not know.
These women are not necessarily enemies. Their experiences are different, and their responsibilities are not identical. But we do not have to diminish one woman’s experience to acknowledge another woman’s humanity.
What This Has to Do With SWOP Behind Bars
Sex workers understand these contradictions particularly well because we are routinely blamed for the behavior of men. When men purchase sex, women are blamed for creating the demand. When men commit violence against sex workers, we are blamed for putting ourselves in danger. Many of the women we work with are also mothers, daughters, sisters, and partners of incarcerated people. They know what it means to be judged for the behavior of men they love.
And somehow, the proposed solution is almost always more criminalization.
We cannot criminalize our way to better masculinity. We cannot arrest our way to consent, prosecute our way to empathy, or punish our way into a culture where men understand that women are autonomous human beings.
If feminism is serious about ending violence against women, it must stop making women responsible for fixing men — and start demanding that men take responsibility for themselves.
A Feminism Big Enough for the Truth
I never confused those courtroom mothers’ love with innocence. I never believed their grief erased the suffering of survivors. And I never thought they should have to stop loving their children to prove they cared about the women their children had hurt.
I feel the same way about the women connected to the Cornell Seven.
The young woman who reported the assault deserves to be heard, supported, and treated with dignity. The allegations deserve a thorough and impartial examination. If responsibility is established, meaningful accountability should follow.
But the women who love the accused deserve dignity, too. They are not defendants.
We cannot spend decades telling women they are not responsible for men’s behavior and then make exceptions when the men behave badly.
We cannot insist that women deserve autonomy and then dictate whom they must love, whom they must abandon, or how they must demonstrate their loyalty to other women.
And we cannot build a movement committed to ending violence by turning compassion into a competition.
A mother should not have to prove her feminism by abandoning her son. But neither should she have to prove her love by abandoning the truth.
If we believe women are more than their relationships to men, then we need to practice that belief even when it makes us uncomfortable.
Especially then.
