Something Fishy: Adrienne Rich, Motherhood, and Me

I am sitting in a coffee shop and it is pouring outside. The rain is actually a nice break from the humidity that has been pressing down all day. The moisture in the air has been so thick today that it felt like we were breathing pudding. I know relief won't last for long, but hopefully the rain makes the air a little less sticky--if only for an hour or two.

From my spot in the coffee shop, I have watched the afternoon unfold over a small table and a grouper sandwich. I am constantly surprised by what food I can get where. Coffee and fish? I would have told you in another life no way, but it was actually delicious. I meant to make it last me all day (or at least an hour) so I could justify my table, but I shoveled it in my mouth. It's hard to have self-discipline sometimes, you know?

So with sticky air and sticky fingers, I started Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976). I will first say this: lady loves a good footnote. Even the introduction was flooded with footnotes. I don't mind, though. The more evidence to support what women have known for years without articulation the better.

Anyways, I am reading the first half of Rich's text and my study partner, Books and Boots, is reading the second half. We'll be compiling our notes and sharing our thoughts in our discussion this week. In the meantime, these are my lecture notes to help us both prepare.

And now, with a full stomach, I can soothe myself with the sound of the stormy rain while reading this text. I know I'll need all the comfort I can get going into this.

Overall, these are my thoughts:

There are some problematic aspects to the text, but that's the risk of Second Wave feminism. Rich does a better job than many other Second Wave feminists of trying to create an intersectional text so you have to give her credit for that.

Rich lays out her theory and her foundation in the first five chapters before exploring the more concrete history. A lot of it sounds familiar at this point, but that's only because it remains--unfortunately--pertinent. In her foreword, Rich outlines the difference between mother-as-individual versus mother-as-institution. It is the mother-as-institution which Rich is critiquing--not the individual experiences of mothers.

In chapter one, Rich establishes that mother-as-institution is often an isolating and negative experience because the expectations and obligations are created by our culture. Much like Judith Butler later argues that gender itself is a construction, Rich implies that our understanding of motherhood is a construction. Rather than empower and elevate them, this construction manifests from patriarchal systems of powers and serves to control women by limiting their identities to that solely of mother. As Rich notes, "Mother, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time." When women's identities are limited to the singular experience of motherhood, the ways patriarchal societies establish and maintain power are reflected in the relationship between mother and child and the means maternal/parental power is established and maintained. We need to reclaim motherhood and female bodies as a place of feminine and feminist power (rather than a manifestation of the patriarchy).

As Rich continues in chapter two, she begins to explore the ways motherhood is forced upon women. In some ways, she predicts her later essay, "Compulsory Heterosexuality," by making clear that motherhood is compulsory for the majority of women. Motherhood-as-institution perpetuates economies, cultural values, and systems of power. The necessity for motherhood both requires and continues the two separate spheres: the public/paternal sphere and the private/maternal sphere. Relegation to the private sphere furthers the isolation of mothers, but it allows patriarchal systems to flourish .

But what is this patriarchal power? Rich defines this in chapter three--along with our understandings of its feminine counterparts. According to Rich, a patriarchal culture is one in which men control all of the property and dominate the legal, cultural, and economic systems. Rich explains that these systems follow the structure of the family; that is, they mirror the father-son relationship in which the father controls the son (and the son's mother). Rich locates the original version of this pattern in monotheism. A gynocracy--as Robert Briffault defines it and Rich explains--would be the female version of the patriarchy. A matriarchal society, on the other hand, is one in which female creative power is pervasive and women have equal economic power to men. Women have a natural authority within the society. But because this is a patriarchal society, women do not have equal economic power; instead women are used as vessels to transfer property to a man's descendants. Furthermore, women are used to pass down cultural values to their children, thereby perpetuating the established norms and systems. There are limited ways for women to challenge these patriarchal systems because any questioning results in their dismissal as "irrational" or even "hysterical."

Despite the challenges of questioning, many women, nevertheless, desire a tradition of female power as means of validation and example of alternative systems; in chapter four, Rich asks what would feminine power look like? A feminine power would not be like the patriarchal power (power over others) but a transformative power (power to create). Motherhood, historically, precedes wifehood and we can locate images of power in pre-historic and ancient depictions of motherhood, such as moon goddesses. That said, these early depictions and female-based communities were eventually turned into taboos.

By making female-centric images, customs or rites suspect, the primacy of the mother was diminished in favor of the patriarch. As Rich discusses in chapter five, the development of our understanding of dualities led to a focus on binaries--including the binary of men and women and then our subsequent categories of women. If mothers were creators of life then they were also harbingers of death; men must conquer these violent mothers (Medusa, Medea, dragons, etc.). But even in more diluted forms, patriarchal monotheism "strips" the world of divine femininity; women become essentially inferior and are only allotted divine power through motherhood. Even then, mothers are meant to submit to fathers and fathers have the ultimate rule. Overall, the domestication of the feminine/Mother seems to come from a transformation of feminine acts, icons, symbols, etc. as negatives.

Things become much more historic here. She traces the medicalization of pregnancy/childbirth. As midwifery/obstetrics become professionalized, women are encouraged to take an increasingly passive role during childbirth. As Rich explains, "The female hands of flesh that had delivered millions of children and soothed the labor of millions of mothers were denied the possibility of working with the tools later developed to facilitate the practice of obstetrics . . . The masculine 'hands of iron'--the forceps--were, and still are, often used with mechanistic brutality." Because care was increasingly seen as a profession, it was determined to be a masculine pursuit. The dialogue surrounding this issue continued, though, primarily informed by cultural beliefs that the woman's body was corrupted by sin, given to temptation and tempting, and simply gross. These ideas led to some not-so-healthy ideas about pregnancy in general, which Rich explores in chapter seven. Rich explains, "The dread of giving birth to monsters… has to do with ‘the crystallization of deep-seated feelings of guilt’. The girl wants to punish herself, to wipe away her guilt by atonement-- by producing this monstrosity from within her own body, the living embodiment of her own evil."

Yes, Rich has some ideas about pregnancy and consent that make me uncomfortable. I think she ignores or dismisses the notion that women may enjoy or desire heterosexual desire and that women may initially desire to be impregnated. It reminded me, at times, of Natalie Barney's assertion that heterosexual love is degrading because it separates a woman from her body through childbirth whereas homosexual love affirms a woman's identity and elevates her body.

But that said, Rich is pointing out some really troubling things in our understandings of motherhood an the way it shapes our relationships. She's right: something is definitely fishy here, and it is primarily in the ways motherhood is an institution that perpetuates other institutions.

I suppose I may have more thoughts later, but that's it for now!

#adriennerich #rich #politicalmother #motherwoman #motherhood #ofwomanborn #queer