“Institutionalized motherhood demands of women maternal ‘instinct’ rather than intelligence, selflessness rather than self-realization, relation to others rather than the creation of self. Women are still experiencing motherhood as institution, as a set of rules and regulations imposed by outsiders. He said, “This could have been written in 2012. I confirmed its publication in 1976 and its reprinting in 1986. As I read parts of it to my husband, he listened thoughtfully and then said, “When was this written?” I read excerpts of this book as part of my culture and politics of motherhood class, and finished the rest of it over the break between semesters.
She explored her own experiences as a mother, the institution of motherhood as reinforced by patriarchy, and possible solutions to this type of motherhood that doesn’t seem to treat women as people. In 1976, poet Adrienne Rich explored motherhood in her book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Institution and Experience. and to make sense of what has been a difficult and confusing role for ME to handle. This is my best attempt to summarize an academic book for future use on my comprehensive exams for my Ph.D. An enormous, improbable, deserving subject selectively researched and passionately presented.Note: Please do NOT be offended by this post, especially if you are a friend or a family member. Dynamic, woman-centered, frequently persuasive and even disarming, this is certain to spark controversy for its uncompromising stance and its more surprising, documented findings (""Maternal infanticide was 'the most common crime in Western Europe from the Middle Ages down to the end of the eighteenth century'""). Insistently she argues for self-determination for all women, for a choice in having children, in observing the rituals of childbirth, in determining attitudes toward child care.
She documents other attitudes toward mothering from prepatriarchal religions to Judaeo-Christian theology to the proscriptions of modern socialism, seeing a subversion from mother goddess to functionary in the patriarchal interest she finds residual ambivalences in modern mother/son and mother/daughter relationships owing to such interference and manipulation. A mother three times in four years (in the 1950s when full-time motherhood was in flower), she remembers her own feelings of isolation and anger, passion and fulfillment. Adrienne Rich, poet and feminist, draws evidence from many fields to explore the contrast between the functional myth of the mother-serene, instinctual, ecstatic (as in Raphael's madonnas)-and the harsher reality of unwanted pregnancies and thwarted human potential. A recognition of motherhood that embraces its many contradictions and an indictment of motherhood as it exists in a patriarchy, a pawn in a male power game.
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