Mothers

A daring and provocative book-length essay on why we both romanticize and vilify mothers

The renowned cultural critic Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers is guided by a simple argument: that motherhood is rendered almost unthinkable by our overinvestment, at once psychic and social, in motherhood itself. Motherhood is the site in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts, of psychic life, of what it means to be fully human. It is the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which it becomes the task—unrealizable, of course—of mothers to repair.

To the familiar cliché that too much is asked of mothers—a long-standing feminist plaint—Rose adds a further dimension. She questions what on earth we are doing when we ask them to carry the burden of everything that it is hardest to contemplate about our society and ourselves. And she argues that by making mothers the objects of licensed sadism, we blind ourselves to the world’s iniquities and shut down the portals of the heart.

To demonstrate this cruel paradox at work, Rose explores investigative writing and policies on motherhood, including newspaper reports, policy documents, and law; drama, novels, poetry, and life stories past and present; social history, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Mothers is an incisive, rousing call to recognize what we are asking mothers to perform in and for the world.