adrienne rich of woman born motherhood as experience and institution

Since it was shelved in the “Feminist Studies” section of the bookstore and had been written almost 30 years ago, I expected it to be dry, somewhat remote, and maybe even a bit tedious. When I was asked to write a review for this book, I was pleased to have an excuse (and a deadline) to read Of Woman Born. But although I knew Rich had written Of Woman Born and other prose, I had never read beyond her poems. Even before I started writing poems of my own, I kept a quote of hers - “You can call on beauty still and it will leap from all directions” - on my computer screen when I worked on the 32nd floor of an office building in the middle of a city that seemed to be trying to defy her words at every turn. So far the only beginning I’ve been able to make is to waste less time.” Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (28).Īdrienne Rich has been a pivotal influence on me for years. An enormous, improbable, deserving subject selectively researched and passionately presented.“Discipline of mind and spirit, uniqueness of expression, ordering of daily existence, the most effective functioning of the human self - these are the chief things I wish to achieve. 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.

Adrienne rich of woman born motherhood as experience and institution