(1976)
Adrienne Rich is not just one of America’s best feminist poets or one of America’s best woman poets, she is one of America’s best poets. Her most exemplary poems are read not because they are supposed to be good for us, but because they are good, and in some cases (which is all any poet can ask for) they are very good. This is not to deny the feminist content of her poems, or their sometimes overtly polemical intent. At her best, Rich pulls off what few poets with the courage of their convictions can ever manage: she is eloquent, she convinces and inspires. She is a serious writer and an important one, and her prose book on the institution of motherhood is a serious and important book.
“Motherhood?” The very word evokes the trivial. “It’s a motherhood issue,” we say, meaning that no one could be against it. “American as Mom and apple pie,” we say, meaning banal, but comforting, permanent, healthy, a given. But it’s the unexamined assumptions behind phrases like this that Rich is writing about. Such assumptions, she says, are unwarranted; in fact, all assumptions about “motherhood” are unwarranted, because it is something we really know very little about. Science would back her up: even among young primates, such as baboons, “mothering” is not an instinct. It is a learned process, and female primates isolated in youth from models of “mothering” reject their offspring. What then do we learn about mothering, what are we taught? The sum of these things and their hidden rationales constitute motherhood as an “institution;” the way they shape how women live their lives, and the conflicts between what women are taught they should be feeling and doing and what they actually feel and do, constitute motherhood as “experience.”
Rich is writing about pernicious myths. One of the most pernicious, of course, is that mothering is an instinct, that it simply wells up in all “real” women who give birth to children (and according to the same myth, a woman who does not give birth to children is not a “real” woman; she is a cipher). Once a biological mother, you will automatically become a Madonna, a virtuous model of self-sacrifice and devotion. This myth is pernicious because it leaves many women feeling inadequate, baffled or even evil if the promised happiness and fulfillment fail to materialize. It also means that few wish to teach motherhood or even discuss it: why teach an “instinct?” The very suggestion that mothering is not an instinct opens up a number of worm-cans that not only most men but most women prefer to keep tightly closed. To question the institution at all—that set of beliefs which requires mothers to be at once both superhuman and sub-human—is to evoke the most primal and deeply threatening fears going around, fear of rejection by one’s own mother. Yet, as Rich says, we all have mothers; every adult in this society was raised by a person who was expected to be a “mother,” to take primary and largely single responsibility for her children, who felt thwarted by this and projected her resentment onto her children to a greater or lesser degree. Many did not choose motherhood; it was thrust upon them by a society unwilling to provide either contraception or recognized and dignified opportunities for any other occupation but “housewife.” If we learn mothering from our mothers, would it not be better to replace the present institution with one with less built-in resentment?
This seems to me the question at the core of the book, though Rich touches ground elsewhere. There are interesting chapters on historical motherhood, bits of information on such diverse but pertinent subjects as the development of obstetrical forceps, the takeover of midwifery by male doctors, puerperal fever (often caused because the attending physician had come straight from the dissection of corpses without washing his hands), the rise of the factory system and its effects on home life, the segregation of women and children from fathers by the institutions of “work” and “the home.” There are reflections on the paucity of female-centered mythologies, with the Core-Persephone myth cited as a meaningful exception. Rich is most moving on the subject of her own life as a mother. It would be nice to be able to say that her experiences of the fifties —the drugged childbirths, the hostile hospitals, the incredible pressures from relatives, the isolation, the consequent guilt and rage —are things of the past, but notwithstanding the advent of more human obstetrical practices and definitions of “motherhood” that allow more freedom, her experiences are probably still typical for a large part of the female population.
This is an important book, but it is not flawless. One could quibble about many points. Some will question the historical and anthropological material, others the theoretical underpinnings. Some are bound to find the book too harsh on men: if women are objecting to being lumped together as Woman, cannot men be given credit for their individualities too? Aren’t there any nice men? Don’t some men love their children, too? I myself would question the rather sensationalistic last chapter, which takes off from the case of a woman who chopped up her two youngest children on the front lawn of her suburban house and goes on to suggest that such emotions and such actions are possible for all mothers under “the system.” The work of Mary Van Stolk on battered children indicates that this is simply not so, any more than child-battering is a possibility for everyone. (It isn’t, says Van Stolk; only for those who have learned it, often by being battered themselves. But the axioms of our society encourage it, just as they encourage rage in mothers.)
This is a book that can be quarelled with, but it cannot be ignored, or dismissed because of this or that fine point, this or that emphasis. To write a flawless book on this subject would be impossible; to write a popular one would be equally impossible, because Rich is saying a number of things many would rather not hear. However, it was not Rich’s intention to write a flawless book or a popular one; rather, she wished to open a dialogue, a dialogue which must be pursued. There is really nothing less at stake than the future of the human race. If “mothering” is learned, then ways of mothering can be changed; if “mothering” is learned, so is “fathering.” And so are violence, cruelty, aggression, punishment, and war. These things are learned by children, absorbed by them before school age; under the current system, young children are “taught” almost exclusively by isolated, guilty, squashed, trapped, tired, bored and thwarted women, who are taught to believe that they themselves are second-rate failures and children are at once their punishment, their vindication and their fate. How much better if children could be chosen, and loved for what they are, not viewed as an inadequate substitute for a “career” or some kind of parasitic burden?
Rich’s final view is not against mothering. On the contrary:
The mother’s battle for her child—with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life —needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival. But for this to happen, the institution of motherhood must be destroyed…
To destroy the institution is not to abolish motherhood. It is to release the creation and sustenance of life into the same realm of decision, struggle, surprise, imagination, and conscious intelligence, as any other difficult, but freely chosen work.
This book is about “why.” “How” is another question.