My next response to Ju's response--taken out of the comments section

First--your comment should have been posted as a post so we don't have to waste time pushing the comment button. That's why we are all authors.

Next, we REALLY read things differently. I read the Ya-Ya Sisterhood as a late coming-of-age novel where a young woman had to learn to accept the past so that she can embrace her future as a wife and mother. The main character was terrified of getting married and becoming a mother because of her own mother's and father's poor examples, so she is taken in hand by a group of "stand-in mothers" to show her how to get a grip on what happened and therefore open up a future for herself WITH a man.

Basically both the Life of Bees and Ya-Ya demonstrate how messed up kids are when they don't have a normal family and especially a healthy, there-for-you mother. And when kids have skewed perspectives of family from their own non-existent or troubled families, it makes it almost impossible for them to have good, healthy families and relationships of their own.

In both books, the mother "stand-ins" try to help the girl in need make sense of her own sad past so that she can embrace a future that involves a healthy relationship with a man and the real possibility of a happy family.

I didn't get anti-male in either of those books, or anti-marriage. In both books, most of the problems in the parent's marriage stem from the mother's problems--not the father's. Also, in both books the father's provided what stability the child had--not the mother's.

The quote about the bees only needing males when necessary was a quote, in my mind, to point out that women shouldn't jump into relationships until they are at a healthy place. But I can definitely see why you saw it the other way.