ADRIENNE RICH

OF WOMAN
BORN MOTHERHOOD AS
EXPERIENCE AND INSTITUTION

W · W · NORTON & COMPANY • New York · London

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 To my grandmothers
Mary Gravely Hattie Rice
whose lives I begin to imagine
and to the activists
working to free women’s bodies
from archaic and unnecessary bonds

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CONTENTS

Introduction: 1986
Foreword
I Anger and Tenderness
II The “Sacred Calling”
III The Kingdom of the Fathers
IV The Primacy of the Mother
V The Domestication of Motherhood
VI Hands of Flesh, Hands of Iron
VII Alienated Labor
VIII Mother and Son, Woman and Man
IX Motherhood and Daughterhood
X Violence: The Heart of Maternal Darkness
Afterword
Notes
Index

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 . . . ma per trattar del ben ch’i vi trovai,
diro dell’ altre cose, ch’io v’ho scorte.

(. . . but to treat of the good that I found there,

I will tell of other things I there discerned.)

—Dante, Inferno, 1:3

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INTRODUCTION: 1986

There is a peculiar tension between an old idea system from which

the energy is gone but which has the heaped-up force of custom,
tradition, money, and institutions behind it, and an emerging cluster
of ideas alive with energy but as yet swirling, decentralized,
anarchic, constantly under attack, yet expressing itself powerfully
through action. In our century there are several old ideas cohabiting
in the enclave of their privileged status: the superiority of European
and Christian peoples; the claim of force as superior to the claims of
relation; the abstract as a more developed or “civilized” mode than
the concrete and particular; the ascription of a higher intrinsic
human value to men than to women.
This book was written more than ten years ago in resistance to all—but
especially the last—of these ideas. I wrote it as a concrete and particular
person, and in it I used concrete and particular experiences of women,
including my own, and also of some men. At the time I began it, in 1972,
some four or five years into a new politicization of women, there was
virtually nothing being written on motherhood as an issue. There was,
however, a movement in ferment, a climate of ideas, which had barely
existed five years earlier. It seemed to me that the devaluation of women in
other spheres and the pressures on women to validate themselves in
maternity deserved exploration. I wanted to examine motherhood—my own
included—in a social context, as embedded in a political institution: in
feminist terms.*
Of Woman Born was both praised and attacked for what was sometimes
seen as its odd-fangled approach: personal testimony mingled with
research, and theory which derived from both. But this approach never
seemed odd to me in the writing. What still seems odd is the absentee
author, the writer who lays down speculations, theories, facts, and fantasies
without any personal grounding. On the other hand, I have felt recently that
the late 1960s Women’s Liberation thesis that “the personal is political”
(which helped release this book into being) has been overlaid by a New Age
blur of the-personal-for-its-own-sake, as if “the personal is good” had
become the corollary and the thesis forgotten. Audre Lorde asks in a recent
poem:
What do we want from each other
after we have told our stories
do we want
to be healed do we want
mossy quiet stealing over our scars
do we want
the all-powerful unfrightening sister
who will make the pain go away
the past be not so†
The question of what we do want beyond a “safe space” is crucial to the
differences between the individualistic telling with no place to go and a
collective movement to empower women.
Over the past fifteen years a vigorous and widespread women’s health-
care movement has grown up, challenging a medical industry in which
women are the majority both as clients and as health workers (most in low-
paying, horizontally segregated jobs)—a system notable for its arrogance
and sometimes brutal indifference toward women, and also toward poverty
and racism as factors in illness and infant mortality.‡ In particular, the
women’s health-care movement has focused on gynecology and obstetrics,
risks and availability of birth control and abortion, women’s claiming of
decision power over their reproductive life. Its activists have made strong
political connections between knowledge of our bodies, the capacity to
make our own sexual and reproductive decisions, and the more general
empowering of women. If this movement began with women telling their
stories of alienated childbirth, botched illegal abortions, needless
caesareans, involuntary sterilizations, individual encounters with arrogant
and cavalier physicians, these were never mere anecdotes, but testimony
through which the neglect and abuse of women by the health-care system
could be substantiated and new institutions created to serve women’s
needs.§
 An early landmark institution, for example, was the Los Angeles
Feminist Women’s Health Center, founded in 1971 by Carol Downer and
Lorraine Rothman, where women were taught how to do cervical self-
examination with a flashlight, mirror, and speculum. This teaching was both
practical and symbolic; it overturned the orthodox assumption that the
gynecologist examining a supine woman in stirrups on a table should be
more familiar with her reproductive system than the woman herself.
Activists like Downer and Rothman held that this imbalance of knowledge
added to the mystification of women’s bodies and sexuality. In learning to
know her vulva and cervix and trace their changes through the menstrual
cycle, a woman became less alienated from her body, more aware of her
physical cycles, more capable of decision-making, and less dependent on
the “experts” of the obstetrical/gynecological profession.
The movement to demedicalize childbirth—to treat it as an event in a
woman’s life, not as an illness—became a national one, with an increase in
home births, alternative birthing practices, and the establishment of “birth
centers” and “birthing rooms” in hospitals. Professional midwives were
initially at the forefront of this movement, along with women who wanted
to experience birth among family and friends with the greatest possible
autonomy and choice in the conduct of their labor. To the extent that the
alternative-childbirth movement has focused on birth as a single issue, it
has been a reform easily subsumed into a new idealism of the family. Its
feminist origins have been dimmed along with its potential challenge to the
economics and practices of medicalized childbirth and to the separation of
motherhood and sexuality.¶ Birth centers have not necessarily remained as
originally envisioned; nurse-midwives have been replaced by obstetricians
who refuse to accept clients on welfare; expensive “obstetrical” beds have
replaced simple furnishings.#
A movement narrowly concerned with pregnancy and birth which does
not ask questions and demand answers about the lives of children, the
priorities of government; a movement in which individual families rely on
consumerism and educational privilege to supply their own children with
good nutrition, schooling, health care can, while perceiving itself as
progressive or alternative, exist only as a minor contradiction within a
society most of whose children grow up in poverty and which places its
highest priority on the technology of war.
 In the ten years since this book was published, little has changed and
much has changed. It depends on what you are looking for. A generation of
politically active women had shaped much of the climate and hopes of the
1970s, working for quality low-cost child-care, for woman-and-child-
centered birth instead of medicalized labor and obstetrical high tech, for
equal pay for equal work, for the legalization of free and safe elective
abortion, for the prevention of sterilization abuse, for the rights of lesbian
mothers to custody of their children, for the recognition of rape, including
marital rape, as an act of violence, for the recognition of sexual harassment
in the workplace as sex discrimination, for affirmative action, for an overall
health-care system responsive to women, for changes in the masculine bias
of the social sciences and the humanities, and for much else. Yet all these
have been at best partial victories, having to be won over and over in the
courts and before the public conscience. Enough did change so that for
some women—those almost entirely white and of educated background,
and most likely to be featured in the media—the conditions of their lives
were apparently light-years better than those of their mothers and
grandmothers, even their elder sisters.
In 1976, a young woman with a college education could experiment
sexually using the pill, enter law school, move in with a boyfriend,
postpone childbearing with abortion—legal and safe—as a backup. By
1986, married and working as an attorney, she could decide to have a baby
as part of a two-income household, give birth at home with a midwife and
supportive obstetrician, find that while the early impetus of women’s
liberation had given support to her choices in the seventies, a society
increasingly obsessed with family life and personal solutions now gave her
a great deal of approval for being a mother. She had eaten her cake, she
said, yet was having it, too. She was postfeminist, born free. **
Or, the media reported, she was saying that liberation didn’t solve
anything. Perhaps there were too many choices. The professional world of
law (or corporate finance or administration or marketing) was cutthroat,
relentless, too competitive if you aimed high; it forced you to bend your
private life, put too much strain on relationships. There was more
autonomy, more real freedom in full-time motherhood. Or so she was
quoted as saying.
Had enough changed for her? Even for her the seemingly wider choices
were strictly limited. She had the choice to compete in an economic system
in which most paid women’s work was done in the horizontally segregated
female ghetto of service and clerical work, cleaning, waitressing, domestic
labor, nursing, elementary-school teaching, behind-the-counter selling by
women with less education and fewer choices. And the glossy magazines
did not ask those women about their feelings of conflict, their problems
with child-care. Rather, they interviewed middle-class white men about
“parenting,” about “male mothering,” the luxury of caring for a baby whose
mother chose to work outside the home.
By 1980 a new wave of conservatism—political, religious, deeply
hostile to the gains made by women in the 1970s—was moving across the
country. Although an ever-increasing majority of families in the United
States do not fit the “nuclear” pattern, the ideology of the patriarchal family
system was again ascendant. The 1980s “war against the poor” has been
above all a war against poor women and their children, woman-headed
households from whom, relentlessly, federal services and supports have
been withdrawn. Antihomosexual and antiabortion campaigns, heavily
funded by the Right and by the churches, have eroded the grounds of choice
widened by the gay rights movement and the 1973 Supreme Court decisions
on abortion. The working mother with briefcase was, herself, a cosmetic
touch on a society deeply resistant to fundamental changes. The “public”
and the “private” spheres were still in disjunction. She had not found herself
entering an evolving new society, a society in transformation. She had only
been integrated into the same structures which had made liberation
movements necessary. It was not the Women’s Liberation movement that
had failed to “solve anything.” There had been a counter-revolution, and it
had absorbed her.
Enough changes did not occur for the 61 percent of poor adults in 1984
who were women.†† For the single mother imprisoned for a nonviolent
crime—petty theft, writing a bad check, forgery—forbidden to see her
children or even know where they had been taken.‡‡ For the Chicana
mother and cannery worker, trying to feed her children for the duration of a
strike (not for higher wages but against wage reduction), evicted for falling
behind in her rent. For the Black domestic worker and community
organizer, taking in her unemployed daughter and grandchildren to her tiny
apartment. For the many others who, under the 1980s cuts in programs for
mothers and children, and rising unemployment, found themselves not just
poor but desperate and, increasingly, homeless. For the working-class
lesbian couple trying to raise their children in a climate of intensified gay-
hating and a depressed economy. For the blue-collar mothers once proud of
their ability to cope, finding themselves on line outside the soup kitchen
with their children. Women without briefcases, many of them refugees in
the swirl of displacement, a new language, a new culture.

Some ideas are not really new but keep having to be affirmed from the
ground up, over and over. One of these is the apparently simple idea that
women are as intrinsically human as men, that neither women nor men are
merely the enlargement of a contact sheet of genetic encoding, biological
givens. Experience shapes us, randomness shapes us, the stars and weather,
our own accommodations and rebellions, above all, the social order around
us.
As I write this, the assault on women’s right to safe and affordable
abortion is in loud crescendo. The library of texts—pro and con, legal,
theological, ethical, political—relating to abortion has doubled since I wrote
the final chapter of this book. Self-described antiabortion pacifists and
antiabortion feminists, as well as terrorists, have joined the fray, along with
or including Christian fundamentalists with strong Right Wing convictions
about the nuclear family and strong objections to interference by the State
in the sphere of family life. “From their point of view, the family is both
beleaguered and sacred, and any policy that seeks to address the members
of a family as separate entities, rather than as an organic whole, is a priori
harmful.”§§
Arguments against abortion have in common a valuing of the unborn
fetus over the living woman. If “the debate about abortion is a debate about
personhood,”¶¶ the Women’s Liberation movement is also a movement
about personhood (as is every liberation movement). The living, politicized
woman claims to be a person whether she is attached to a family or not,
whether she is attached to a man or not, whether she is a mother or not. The
antiabortion stand seeks to drive a single monolithic wedge into a cluster of
issues such as male sexual prerogatives, prescriptive heterosexuality,
women’s economic disadvantage, racism, the prevalence of rape and
paternal incest. The woman is thus isolated from her historical context as
woman; her decision for or against abortion is severed from the peculiar
status of women in human history.## The antiabortion movement trivializes
women’s impulses toward education, independence, self-determination as
self-indulgence. Its deepest unwritten text is not about the right to life, but
about women’s right to be sexual, to separate sexuality from procreation, to
have charge over our procreative capacities.
Allowing the “discrete act” of abortion to be treated as the real issue,
some advocates have fallen back on the barren ground of arguing that it is
“simply a surgical procedure.” But the overall feminist position has been
more complex, having to do with contexts, with social transformation, with
the use and abuse of power, with relationships freed from domination-
submission models. For all its claims to a higher moral stance, antiabortion
rhetoric shrinks the scope and richness of moral choice. It does not look at
the world beyond the fetus unless in the slippery-slope argument that in
countenancing the killing of fetuses we will go straight on to killing the old,
the mentally retarded, the physically handicapped*** But the imbalance
between concern for women and concern for fetuses is twinned by the
imbalance between the attention antiabortionists accord the fetus and that
accorded the most vulnerable people already living under terrible pressures
in American society—the old, the homeless, the differently abled, the
darker-skinned, the one out of four children of preschool age living in
poverty, the abused child or children in the nuclear family.
An antiabortion morality that does not respect women’s intrinsic human
value is hypocrisy. But so is an antiabortion morality that is lavished upon
the rights and values of the fetus, yet can condone the cynical indifference
to the full spectrum of human life which is now official policy in the United
States.
I would not end this book today, as I did in 1976, with the statement
“The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential
change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by
workers.” If indeed the free exercise by all women of sexual and
procreative choice will catalyze enormous social transformations (and I
believe this), I also believe that this can only happen hand in hand with,
neither before nor after, other claims which women and certain men have
been denied for centuries: the claim to personhood; the claim to share justly
in the products of our labor, not to be used merely as an instrument, a role, a
womb, a pair of hands or a back or a set of fingers; to participate fully in the
decisions of our workplace, our community; to speak for ourselves, in our
own right.
 Most of the labor in the world is done by women: that is a fact. Across
the world, women bear and care for children, raise, process, and market
food, work in factories and sweatshops, clean the home and the office
building, engage in barter, create and invent group survival. Procreative
choice is for women an equivalent of the demand for the legally limited
working day which Marx saw as the great watershed for factory workers in
the nineteenth century. The struggles for that “modest Magna Carta,” as
Marx calls it, came out of a time when the employer literally owned the
lifetime of the laborer. The Factory Acts did not end capitalism, but they
changed the relation of the workers to their own lives.††† They also
replaced the individual worker’s powerlessness with a realization that
collective confrontation could be effective.
For centuries, women also have acted, often without direct
confrontation, from a collective understanding that their bodies were not to
be exploited. Orlando Patterson reports that in Jamaica under slavery, “not
only was the mortality rate abnormally high but, more extraordinarily, slave
women absolutely refused to reproduce—partly out of despair and outrage,
as a form of gynecological revolt against the system, and to a lesser extent
because of peculiar lactation practices.” Angela Davis reports similar
patterns under Afro-American slavery. Michael Craton notes that although
slave women in Jamaica could be relieved of heavy field labor by having a
certain number of children and raising them, they yet remained childless or
had very few children. After emancipation the birthrate increased.‡‡‡
Angela Davis emphasizes that although “Black women have been
aborting themselves since the earliest days of slavery,” abortion has not
been seen as “a stepping-stone toward freedom,” but as an act of
desperation “motivated ... by the oppressive conditions of slavery.”§§§ With
due respect to Davis, I think that she may underestimate the degree to
which white women have also resorted to abortion as an “act of
desperation” within the context not of chattel slavery, but of other
pressures: rape, sexual betrayal, familial incest, total lack of support for the
unmarried mother, poverty, failure of attempts at birth control, and
ignorance or unavailability of birth-control possibilities. Abortion can be an
act of economic desperation under an economic exploitation which, though
less total and overtly violent than slavery, offers women minimal options
both in the workplace and the home. If the right to abortion is a stepping-
stone toward freedom, it can be so only along with other kinds of stepping-
stones, other kinds of action. And, as Davis points out, a feminist
movement for reproductive rights needs to be very clear in dissociating
itself from the racism of “population control” and eugenics movements, and
in making opposition to involuntary sterilization an integral part of its
politics.¶¶¶
As a white, middle-class, educated woman who in the late 1950s had
had to plead and argue for sterilization after bearing three children, I
understood at first only that sterilization on demand was as necessary as
free and legal abortion. I vividly recall the impact of the contradiction that
emerged in the seventies: while the medical establishment was reluctant to
sterilize women like myself, the same professionals and the federal
government were exerting pressure and coercion to sterilize large numbers
of American Indian, Black, Chicana, poor white, and Puerto Rican women.
A thirty-year policy under the U.S. Agency for International Development
resulted in the sterilization of 35 percent of Puerto Rican women of
childbearing age.### Between 1973 and 1976, 3,406 American Indian
women were sterilized; at one Indian Health Services hospital in Oklahoma,
one out of every four women admitted was sterilized—194 in a single year.
(In 1981, 53.6 percent of teaching hospitals in North America still made
sterilization a requirement for abortion.) Suits such as those brought by the
Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of the Relf sisters (see page 75n) or
Madrigal v. Quilligan on behalf of ten Mexican-American women against
the Los Angeles County Hospital in 1974 dramatized the contradiction and
led to sterilization-abuse activism demanding the release of HEW
(Department of Health, Education, and Welfare) guidelines for voluntary
sterilization.**** Up to the release of the guidelines, HEW was financing
100,000 sterilizations a year through Medicaid and family-planning
agencies.††††
In 1977, the Hyde Amendment cut off the use of Medicaid funds for
abortions but continued funding for sterilizations. In the same year, at the
National Conference on Sterilization Abuse, a broad-based coalition—
American Indian, Black, and Latina women, feminist health activists,
alternative media, religious and community social-action groups—
pressured HEW to issue regulations for all federally funded sterilizations.
“Informed consent about the procedure and alternatives was to be provided
in the preferred language of the client; consent could not be obtained during
labor; a thirty-day waiting period was mandated; and there was a
moratorium on sterilizing people under the age of twenty-one.”‡‡‡‡ (The
majority of people targeted for involuntary sterilization are women. )§§§§
A storm of opposition came from hospital administrators, obstetricians,
gynecologists, and a range of family-planning and also feminist
organizations. The National Organization for Women and the National
Abortion Rights Action League took the position that the regulations were
an undesirable form of protective legislation, detracting from female
autonomy¶¶¶¶ Many white feminists could not understand that the facilities
for “sterilization on demand,” with no waiting period, could and did easily
turn into sterilization abuse if a woman was dark-skinned, was a welfare
client, lived on a reservation, spoke little or no English, was a woman
whose intelligence and capacity to judge for herself were assumed to be
below par for any of the above reasons. I myself had to struggle with this
contradiction. Drawing on my own experience, I had not felt the other edge
of the policies in question. The sterilization issue did bring home to me how
race and class make a difference of even the most basic shared experiences
among women—the experience of having our reproductive choices made
for us by male- dominated institutions. ####
With the promulgation of HEW regulations in 1978, many sterilization-
abuse groups disbanded or regrouped around the abortion issue. But
regulations have not been a solution to the structural problems surrounding
the issue. Shapiro found in 1985 that while “minorities, until recently, were
sterilized in substantially greater proportions than whites,” currently
the poor are sterilized at disproportionately high rates. . . . Sterilization against minorities has
not declined. Instead, sterilizations among whites are increasing. . . . Furthermore, the “catch-
up” appears to come among poorer whites on welfare.*****

Engrained attitudes about women (discussed in Chapters IV, V, and VIII of

this book), about poor people, about people of color; an ever-growing
reliance on medicine and technology to solve social problems; a neo-
Malthusian population-control mindset that focuses on “overpopulation”
instead of the just allocation of resources—these persist. As Shapiro has put
it, “The state makes it easier for a mother on welfare to obtain a sterilization
than to keep warm in winter, find child care, or provide nourishing meals
for her children.”†††††
The linking of abortion rights with sterilization abuse is very powerful
because it connects women’s reproductive issues across lines of class and
race and because it dramatizes the necessity for women, whoever they are,
to decide how their bodies shall be used, to have or not have children, to be
sexual and maternal as they choose. Abortion may be criminalized again
within the next half-decade or less. If so, thousands of women will die in
pain and loneliness from botched illegal abortions or self-abortions. Poor
women will suffer most and have the highest mortality. Racketeers of
abortion will make thousands of dollars, and conscientious practitioners
willing to risk themselves (including women helping other women) will go
to, or risk, prison. But today there is a critical mass of women who
collectively know far more than most women have known in this century
about physical caring for themselves and each other. There exists not
simply a nearly two-decades-old political movement of women, but a
movement of women’s self-education and health education which has
created a wealth of resources. The struggle will be carried on, above- and
underground, by women and some men fully aware that this is not an
isolated issue or a simplistic one, that the availability of safe abortion on
demand is merely one of the issues on which we must come together, that
the stakes are not abortion per se, but the power of women to choose how
and when we will use our sexuality and our procreative capacities, and that
this in all its many implications opens the gate to a new kind of human
community.

Like much radical-feminist writing of its period, this book relies heavily
on the concept of patriarchy as a backstop in which all the foul balls of
history end up. I tried in these pages to define patriarchy as concretely as
possible, not let it slide into abstraction. But I didn’t, and most certainly
today don’t, want to let “patriarchy” become a catchall in which specific
areas of women’s experience get obscured. The problem of framing
women’s specific oppression as women has been taken up in various ways
by different groups of feminists. For example, in Capitalist Patriarchy and
the Case for Socialist Feminism, a volume of essays published in 1979 and
edited by Zillah Eisenstein, you can see the difficulties white Marxist-
feminists have encountered in trying to bring together both a feminist and
class analysis—“dissolving the hyphen” in Rosalind Petchesky’s phrase. In
the same collection, in “The Combahee River Collective: A Black Feminist
Statement” you can see Black women working both to separate out and to
reconnect the battle fronts of class, race, and sex.‡‡‡‡‡”
 Patriarchy is a concrete and useful concept. Whether it is considered as
a phenomenon dating from capitalism or as part of the precapitalist history
of many peoples, which must also be confronted under existing socialisms,
it is now widely recognized as a name for an identifiable sexual hierarchy.
We are not in danger of losing our grasp on patriarchy as a major form of
domination parallel and interconnected to race and class. But to view
patriarchy as a pure product, unrelated to economic or racial oppression,
seems to me today to skew the lines of vision along which we proceed to
act.
The other side of patriarchy-as-catchall is the idealization of women.
White feminists have not, it seems, found it easy to express a feminist
vision without tripping on the wires of that realm known as “women’s
culture” which so often corresponds strongly to the “separate sphere” of the
Victorian female middle class. As mothers, women have been idealized and
also exploited. To affirm women’s intrinsic human value in the face of its
continuing flagrant and insidious denial is no easy thing to do in steady,
clear, unsentimental terms. For white middle-class women in particular, the
mystique of woman’s moral superiority (deriving from nineteenth-century
ideals of middle-class female chastity and of the maternal) can lurk even
where the pedestal has been kicked down.
In this regard I find myself dubious about the politics of women’s peace
groups, for example, which celebrate maternality as the basis for engaging
in antimilitarist work. I do not see the mother with her child as either more
morally credible or more morally capable than any other woman. A child
can be used as a symbolic credential, a sentimental object, a badge of self-
righteousness. I question the implicit belief that only “mothers” with
“children of their own” have a real stake in the future of humanity.
And this is surely one of the lines on which, in the United States,
American Indian and Black women have had a very different understanding
rooted in their respective community history and values: the shared concern
of many members of a group for all its young.
I treated such differences insubstantially, if at all, in my chapter
“Motherhood and Daughterhood.” There, I was trying to scan the territory
using instruments then most familiar to me: my own experience, literature
by white and middle-class Anglo-Saxon women (Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe
Hall, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood), and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s
analysis of white middle-class female relationships in the nineteenth-
century eastern United States. While I did not confine myself solely to these
materials, they became the lens for viewing my subject, to such a degree
that even personal testimony was skewed. In writing, for example, of
having been cared for by a Black nurse, I tried to blur that relationship into
the mother-daughter relationship. But a personalized “understanding” did
not prevent me from gliding over the concrete system within which Black
women have had to nurture the oppressor’s children. (See my 1986 note to
this passage, p.255.) Moreover, relying on ready-to-hand Greek mythology,
I was led to generalize that “the cathexis between mother and daughter”
was endangered always and everywhere. A consideration of American
Indian, African, and Afro-American myth and philosophy might have
suggested other patterns.
A rich literature by Afro- and Caribbean-American women, and more
and more by American Indian, Asian-American, Latina women, offers the
complexity of this different perspective. In Alice Childress’s play Florence,
the mother is both fiercely protective of her daughter and fiercely
determined to support her daughter’s aspirations in a world which wants her
daughter to be nothing but a domestic worker. Pauline Breedlove, in Toni
Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, has herself been so damaged by internalized
racism that she can neither love nor try to protect her own child, while
doting on her employer’s blonde children. Toni Cade Bambara’s story
“Medley” is written in the voice of a mother “just now getting it together,”
“an A-i manicurist” unfooled and unfazed by men. Doing the nails of a big-
time cardsharp or scat-singing in the shower with her boyfriend, her
declared agenda “is still to make a home for my girl.” In the title story of
Bambara’s The Sea Birds Are Still Alive, the mother, a revolutionary in
some part of the world suggestive of Vietnam, hands her daughter over to a
woman comrade to keep safe till the liberation of the city, in which the
maternally schooled child will also do her part. Though the characters are
not ostensibly Black, the story has behind it the history of nineteenth-
century slave rebellions and the Underground Railroad. Intense conflict
between mother and daughter, in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brown
Stones, marks what Mary Helen Washington has called “the most complex
treatment of the mother-daughter bond in contemporary American
literature.” Eva Peace, in Morrison’s Sula, is forced to pour all her forces
into fighting for her children’s survival; her maternal love expresses itself in
action to the last, in a context so basic in its stringencies that it allows for no
“female world of love and ritual.” In Zami, Audre Lorde depicts a West
Indian immigrant mother raising three daughters in the alien world of
Harlem, U.S.A.; she is strict, self-contained, loyal to her husband,
unaffectionate save at the time of her daughter’s first menstruation. It is her
house that the daughter must leave to become a poet and a lesbian. But even
in this short list, specific cultural differences mediate mother-daughter
interactions—Afro- American, West Indian, urban, rural.§§§§§

Consider the implications of Joyce Ladner’s statement that To be a Black

and female head of household does not mean possessing wider social and
political power, though it can often imply leadership and responsibility
within the community. It involves the diverse tasks of providing, protecting,
teaching, setting goals, always in the antagonistic and often violent context
of racism. Gloria I. Joseph, who has done pioneering studies on Black
mother-and-daughterhood, amplifies Ladner in finding that
Black females are socialized ... in early life to become strong, independent women who
because of precarious circumstances growing out of poverty and racism, might have to
eventually become heads of their own households.¶¶¶¶¶
there is a tremendous amount of teaching transmitted by Black mothers to their daughters that
enables them to survive, exist, succeed, and be important to and for the Black communities
throughout America. These attitudes become internalized and transmitted to future
generations.#####

Joseph also notes that it is typical in the Black family for mothering to
be done by many, including siblings.
Black women play integral parts in the family and frequently it is immaterial whether they are
biological mothers, sisters, or members of the extended family. From the standpoint of many
Black daughters it could be: my sister, my mother; my aunt, my mother; my grandmother, my
mother,******

Psychoanalysis and psychology have placed a high priority on the

“primal” relationships assumed within the nineteenth- century, European,
nuclear middle-class family, where psychoanalysis arose: male parent,
female parent, female child, male child. But in reading the above comment
by Gloria Joseph, Fm reminded of a poem by Bea Medicine, Lakota
anthropologist:
A woman of many names
all kinship designations—
Tuwin—aunt
 Conchi—grandmother
Hankashi—female cousin
Ina—mother
all honorable,
all good.††††††
In recent writing by women of color in this country the affirmation of the
mother-daughter bond is powerfully expressed, not primarily in terms of a
dyad but as a facet of a culture of women and a group history that is not
merely personal. There are, of course, wide variations of culture and
history, framed by the fact of racism and of the positions occupied by
women of color in a racist and sexist economy. The first bilingual volume
of fiction by Latina women begins:
Most Latinas, in looking to find some kind of literary tradition among our women, will
usually speak of the “cuentos” our mothers and grandmothers told us. . . . For the most part,
our lives and the lives of the women before us have never been fully told, except by word of
mouth. But we can no longer afford to keep our tradition oral—a tradition which relies so
heavily on close family networks and dependent upon generations of people living in the
same town or barrio.‡‡‡‡‡‡

Thus, the mother’s telling, if not the mother tongue, is the source of
literature. The same idea has been expressed by Paule Marshall, by Andre
Lorde in Zami, by Cherrie Moraga in “La Giiera,§§§§§§ and is furiously
explored in Nellie Wong’s poem “On the Crevices of Anger":
Ai ya, yow meng ah! How can we even begin
to know, to understand if we close our ears,
if we shut our eyes to the moon,
crater our own bodies, ignore
the human touch?
I hold my mother now in my arms
though she’s not here.
She never held me
she never held me
but it’s not too late,
not when I breathe and decipher her voice,
though harsh, shrill and calling
through my skin’s flakings.
... I still seek my mother
who knew no fame, no notoriety, who shelled
 shrimps
for pennies a day ....
She wrote some English, some Chinese
and she wept after the birth
of each daughter.
She is the poet who saw and didn’t see me.¶¶¶¶¶¶
In an essay on Asian-American feminism, Merle Woo writes of ending the
silence of Asian women—a manifesto written as a letter to her mother. In
Joy Kogawa’s novel Obasan9 the protective (and self-protective) silence of
the Issei great-aunt is broken by the militant Nisei aunt, the family historian
and fact-seeker. Kogawa examines the decimation of an extended Japanese-
Canadian family through war and racism; yet the child whose mother only
briefly survived Hiroshima has two female guardians, each doing what she
does best—against the grain of years of relocation, dispossession, and
fragmentation,######
Writing of the resistance to the Relocation Act by the Hopi and Navajo
people of Big Mountain, Arizona, Victoria Seggerman underscores the role
played by the “grandmothers”—mature and elder women—both in
extended family life and as leaders of resistance. “Mothers are responsible
for the economic, social and ritual knowledge of their daughters. . . . Grand
mothers hold a special position because they pass on the clan and the
lineage as well as the mythology and ceremonies. . . . Relationships of
power, authority and influence are structured along matrilineal lines;
descent and socialization are the responsibility of the mother’s lineage.
Women are respected for their counsel, their motherhood and their earning
abilities.” Unfortunately, some white feminists have tended to idealize and
expropriate American Indian values, trying to absorb them into an eclectic
and unrooted feminist spirituality or utopianism, with little active concern
for ongoing white destruction of Indian families, tribes, nations, peoples;
the forcible severing of children from their maternal homes; the driving of
people from their grandmothers’ lands; the rates of sterilization abuse on
Indian women. The spiritual and practical power of the mature Indian
woman is cruelly constrained by the coercions of the United States
government.*******
I mention these as a few of the works that have challenged and
amplified my thinking as it existed in Chapter IX.
 In 1986, the visibility and varieties of lesbian motherhood are greater
than they were in 1976. At that time it seemed important to discuss lesbian
mothering as an integral part of the experience of motherhood in general,
not to set lesbian mothers apart, in a separate chapter. Lesbians raising
children from previous marriages, alone or in lesbian couples, were
beginning to be visible, as many women who had formerly identified
heterosexually began to leave marriages and come out as lesbians.†††††††
Perhaps the most overtly painful and divisive issue in the 1970s was
that of sons. Many lesbian communities struggled as to the place of male
children, of whatever age or beyond a certain age, in the actual physical
spaces or the political concerns of the community. At bedrock, the argument
was between the objection to “giving energy” to males, however young, and
the hope that a young male raised in a politically conscious female
community would grow into a new kind of man. As is obvious from
Chapter VIII of this book, I hold to such hopes.
Today, after a decade of court battles for the rights of lesbian mothers to
custody of their children, new issues and new perspectives have emerged.
Many lesbians, in and outside of couples, are having children by artificial
insemination. Women who coparent with lesbian mothers are seeking
recognition as parents, including visitation and custody rights. To sign a
school report card, visit a hospitalized child, or give consent to medical
treatment in the mother’s absence becomes a legal-rights issue for the
lesbian coparent as it does not for a married stepparent. On the death or
incapacity of the biological mother, however long and close the bond
between coparent and child, that child is most likely to be assigned to the
father or any surviving blood relative instead. Meanwhile, biological
lesbian mothers still face homophobic prejudice in any custody challenge.
Sandra Pollack notes that much research on lesbian mothering has come
out of the struggle for custody, and that its emphasis has lain on showing
that “lesbian mothers are just like other mothers—-or at least like other
single mothers.” Where the courts attempt to establish “parental fitness,”
heterosexuality and traditional sex-role stereotyping are held as norms for
the children; the daughter of a lesbian will be seen as healthy and stable if
she wears dresses, plays with dolls, and is seemingly unaffected by her
mother’s nontraditional choices. Pollack challenges this perspective,
suggesting that lesbian mothers are different and that the differences are
complex, having to do partly with societal homophobia and its effects
through housing and job discrimination, anxiety about disclosure, and
lesbian invisibility, but also with an absence of rigid social roles, with
models of independence, self-sufficiency, self-confidence, and cultural and
individual diversity within lesbian households. She urges a research
directed away from the “homogenization” of lesbian mothering into the
heterosexual mainstream and toward the actual lives and needs of lesbians
and their children.‡‡‡‡‡‡‡
It is precisely because the lesbian is different that a value system bent
on prescribing a limited set of possibilities for women can neither tolerate
nor affirm her. It is precisely because difference is so powerful (though the
“different” may be socially disempowered) that it becomes the target of
threats, harassment, violence, social control, genocide. The power of
difference is the power of the very plenitude of creation, the exhilarating
variance of nature. Every infant born is testimony to the intricacy and
breadth of possibilities inherent in humanity. Yet from birth* in most homes
and social groups, we teach children that only certain possibilities within
them are livable; we teach them to hear only certain voices inside
themselves, to feel only what we believe they ought to feel, to recognize
only certain others as human. We teach the boy to hate and scorn the places
in himself where he identifies with women; we teach the girl that there is
only one kind of womanhood and that the incongruent parts of herself must
be destroyed. The repetition or reproduction of this constricted version of
humanity, which one generation transmits to the next, is a cycle whose
breaking is our only hope.
In 1976 I discussed the entrance of men into child-care, both in families
and in comprehensive day-care systems. Today the issue of child-care
seems to me much broader than the project of developing nurturant skills in
men or having children receive primary care from both men and women.
The question becomes more and more pressing: How can we have
nonexploitative child-care in this society, whether staffed and organized by
women or men or both? Franchised day-care centers, commercially
instigated, already abound as increasing numbers of mothers have to enter
the labor force, however they may feel about staying home with children.
Corporate day-care may soon become a multimillion-dollar service
industry.§§§§§§§ If we think of the health-care or educational systems in
this country as possible models, we know that these are organized for the
benefit of those who can pay the most, and even then are weighted more
towards technology than towards respect and caring for the individual. Who
will actually care for children? How will the caregivers be trained? How
much will they be paid in a service profession long denigrated as “women’s
work”? How much will parents determine policies? Who will determine
standards? Whose experience and imagination will be recognized? How
will cultural and sexual diversity be respected in a country whose yet
prevailing norm is the blonde, blue-eyed, stable, nuclear family?
Many Americans have a stereotype of public child-care derived from
Cold War antisocialist propaganda: children at a tender age forcibly severed
from their mothers into the arms of the State; a stereotype of collectivist
uniformity and indoctrination as opposed to maternal/paternal
individualism. In this nightmare, children are turned into tiny robots and
taught to betray their parents. But we know—-have reluctantly been forced
into knowing—that within the individual nuclear American family unit
there has been epidemic sexual violation, usually father to daughter or
brother to sister, sometimes with the mother’s denial or passive
collaboration; there has been child-battering as well as woman-battering;
also, particularly with teenagers, extreme parental rejection leading to the
voluntary abandonment or handing over of youths to the juvenile justice
system. Through her research on serial murders of women and on juveniles
on the street, Jean Swallow has drawn connections between childhood
sexual abuse and adolescent “delinquency” in girls—runaways, prostitutes,
street kids, teenage alcoholics. The battered and violated children of the
unexamined American family are found on the streets of Seattle or St. Paul
as young people trying to survive, dependent on strangers.¶¶¶¶¶¶¶
Between a patriarchal State and the patriarchal family as guardians of
children, there is little to choose. But there is another possibility: the
emergence of a collective movement which is antipatriarchal, which places
the highest value on the development of human beings, on economic
justice, on respect for racial, cultural, sexual, and ethnic diversity, on
providing the material conditions for children to flower into responsible and
creative women and men, and on the redirection and eventual extirpation of
the propensity for violence.

It’s been strange to live closely and critically again with this book. Once
more, I have felt the ardor and necessity which carried me through four
years of research and writing. For the subject did not exhaust itself in me
once the book was finished. I went on to other subjects, but it has continued
in me, underground and in the concrete ways my children and I have been
together and apart. In the concrete ways I and other women have been
together and apart.
I never wished this book to lend itself to the sentimentalization of
women or of women’s nurturant or spiritual capacity. I was chided by a
respected woman mentor for ending the book with a chapter on maternal
violence. She thought that I had given ammunition to the enemy by the very
placement of that chapter. But what I wrote in 1976 I believed: Theories of
female power and female ascendancy must reckon fully with the
ambiguities of our being, and with the continuum of our consciousness, the
potentialities for both creative and destructive energy in each of us. I
believe it still. Oppression is not the mother of virtue; oppression can warp,
undermine, turn us into haters of ourselves. But it can also turn us into
realists, who neither hate ourselves nor assume we are merely innocent and
unaccountable victims.

In preparing this 1986 edition, I chose not to revise into the body of the
book as I originally wrote it, except for a few deletions for brevity; to bring
as many facts as possible up to date in footnotes; and to indicate, both in
footnotes and in this introduction, some places where I today question or
differ with what I wrote ten years ago. This book is the work of one woman
who has continued to learn, reflect, act, and write. It is also a document
grounded in a worldwide political movement which has itself been in
continuous process, travail, and internal debate over the past ten years. I
want this new edition to show the traces of both.
I have again received help from many quarters. For resources and
research, I thank Carolyn Arnold and Toni Fitzpatrick of Stanford
University, Sandra Goldstein of the San Francisco Coalition for the Medical
Rights of Women, and Katherine Olsen, Acting Director of the Women’s
Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. My reconsidering of
some questions was enriched by the members of my San Jose State
University course on women novelists. For splendid typing on very short
deadlines, I thank Kirsten Allrud and Birdie Flynn. For an expert and
informed editorial eagle eye on the manuscript, I am grateful to Carol
Flechner. For scholarly references, critical reading, and ten years of
conversation and comradeship, my deepest debt is to Michelle Cliff.
Santa Cruz, California
March 1986

* This introduction was written for the Tenth Anniversary Edition.

† Audre Lorde, “There Are No Honest Poems about Dead Women,” in Our Dead behind Us (New
York: Norton, 1986).
‡t See, e.g., Nancy Stoller Shaw, Forced Labor (New York: Fergamon, 1974); Barbara Ehrenreich
and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (New York:
Anchor Books, 1979); Michelle Harrison, Woman in Residence (New York: Penguin, 1983).
§ For a detailed historical overview of the women ’s health-care movement and a listing of present
organizations, see “The New” Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women’s Health Book
Collective (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984). See also Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women’s
Liberation (New York: David McKay, 1975), p. 158.
¶ “The Christian Homesteading School offers two Homebirth Courses. . . . We believe and have
found through our experience that most births belong at home and that parents can leam all they need
for safe home-birth. . . . When you are at the Christian Homesteading School, ... we ask you to refrain
from alcoholic beverages, profanity, non-marital sex, drugs, and the use of such gadgets as transister
radios,-recorders, flashlights and cameras. We also ask men to wear long pants and women ankle
length dresses” (Janet Isaacs Ashford, ed., The Whole Birth Catalogue: A Source-book for Choices in
Childbirth [Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1983], p. 119).
# See Catherine Olsen, In-Hospital Birth Centers in Perspective (B.A. thesis, Board of Studies in
Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1981). In April 1986 the California legislature
will review in committee a bill to set up a licensing process to bring lay midwives into the health-care
system. The movement for midwife-attended birth has been strenuously opposed by the medical
profession, despite statistics showing dramatically lower rates of complications and perinatal death in
midwife-attended home birth?. Lay midwifery is currently legal or unregulated in thirty-six states.
(Janet Isaacs Ashford, “California Should Legalize Lay Midwives,” San Jose Mercury, March 31,
1986.)
** On September 9, 1984, the New York Times ran as the cover story of the Sunday magazine an
article on “The Working Mother as Role Model.” The “working mothers” in question were young
professional women with briefcases. All were white. Though the article endorsed their decision to
work while raising children, it nagged at the familiar question of possible “psychological effects” on
children.
†† See James Reston, “Do We Really Care?” New York Times, February 16, 1986.
‡‡ Laura Boytz, “Incarcerated Mothers Kept from Children,” Plexus: West Coast Women’s Press,
Vol. 11, No. 9 (December 1984), p. 1.
§§ See Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley, Calif.: University of
California Press, 1984), p. 173. Luker goes on to note that “this explains the frequent opposition of
pro-life people to ... free school lunches, day care centers, extra nutrition for pregnant mothers, and
anti-child abuse programs . . . not because they are necessarily opposed to the content of such
programs but because they resist the idea of letting the state into the sacrosanct territory of the
home.” The “pro-life” movement also considers birth control by all means but one “abortifacient”
(i.e., causing abortion). Only “Natural Family Planning"-an elaboration of the earlier “rhythm
system"-or abstinence is considered acceptable as birth control. See Luker, pp. 165-66.
¶¶ Ibid., p. 5.
## In Our Right to Choose: Toward a New Ethic of Abortion (Boston: Beacon, 1983), Beverly
Wildung Harrison calls “the disvahiation of women” an “unacceptable moral heritage that requires
correction” (p. 7). She notes that “unless procreative choice is understood as a desirable historical
possibility, substantially conducive to every woman’s well-being, all debate concerning abortion is
morally skewed from the outset. Yet no question is more neglected in the moral evaluation of
abortion than the question of whether women should have procreative choice” (p. 41).
*** For discussion of attitudes toward abortion on the part of differently abled women, seen Michelle
Fine and Adrienne Asch, CARASA News, Committee for Abortion Rights and against Sterilization
Abuse (New York: June-July, 1984). See also in “The New” Our Bodies, Ourselves “Abortion,
Amniocentesis and Disability,” p. 303.
††† Karl Marx, Capital (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1906), I, pp. 255-330.
‡‡‡ Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1982), p. 133; Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Random House,
1981), p. 205; Michael Craton with Garry Greenland, Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and
Plantation Life in Jamaica (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 96. See also Linda
Gordon, “The Folklore of Birth Control,” in Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of
Birth Control in America (New York: Grossman-Viking, 1976), pp. 26-46.
§§§ Davis, pp. 204-5.
¶¶¶ Ibid., pp. 202-21. See also Sterilization: Some Questions and Answers (1982; Committee for
Abortion Rights and against Sterilization Abuse, 17 Murray Street, Fifth Floor, New York, NY
10007); Helen Rodriguez’s comments on sterilization propaganda in Helen B. Holmes, Betty B. Hos-
kins, Michael Gross, eds., Birth Control and Controlling Birth: Woman-centered Perspectives
(Clifton, N.J.: Humana Press, 1980), pp. 127-28; and Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence:
Selected Prose 1966-1978 (New York: Norton, 1979), pp. 266-67, and Committee for Abortion
Rights and against Sterilization Abuse, Women under Attack: Abortion, Sterilization Abuse, and
Reproductive Freedom (New York: CARASA, 1979)-
### Sterilization: Some Questions and Answers, p. 9.
**** Thomas M. Shapiro, Population Control Politics: Women, Sterilization, and Reproductive
Choice (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985), PP-91-93
††††Ibid., p. 115.
‡‡‡‡ Ibid., pp. 137-42.
§§§§ See Robert H. Blank, “Human Sterilization: Emerging Technologies and Re-emerging Social
Issues,” Science, Technology and Human Values, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Summer 1984), pp. 8-20.
¶¶¶¶ Shapiro, p. 139.
#### In a 1983 essay “Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization
and the State,” Cisela Bock deals with this issue as it manifested itself in the Nazi period (and,
according to her essay, as it is again surfacing in Germany). She suggests that “where sexism and
racism exist, particularly with Nazi features, all women are equally involved in both, but with
different experiences. They are subjected to one coherent and double-edged policy of sexist racism or
racist sexism (a nuance only of perspective) but they are segregated as they live through the dual
sides of this policy, a division that also works to segregate their forms of resistance to sexism as well
as to racism. ... As far as the struggle for our reproductive rights-for our sexuality, our children and
the money we want and need-is concerned, the Nazi experience may teach us that a successful
struggle must aim at achieving both the rights and the economic means to allow women to choose
between having or not having children. . . . Cutbacks in welfare for single mothers, sterilization
abuse, and the attacks on free abortion are just different sides of an attack that serves to divide
women. Present population and family policy in the United States and the Third World make the
German experience under National Socialism particularly relevant” (Renate Bridenthal, Atina
Grossman, Marion Kaplan, eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi
Germany [New York: Monthly Review Press New Feminist Library, 1984], pp. 271-96).
***** Shapiro, pp. 98-103.
††††† Ibid., p. 189.
‡‡‡‡‡ Zillah Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1979). See also Gloria I. Joseph, “The Incompatible Menage a Trois:
Marxism, Feminism, and Racism,” in Lydia Sargent, ed., Women and Revolution (Boston: South End
Press, 1981).
§§§§§ Alice Childress, Florence, in Masses & Mainstream, Vol. Ill (October 1950), pp. 34-47; Toni
Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Pocket Books, 1972, 1976); Toni Cade Bambara, The Sea
Birds Are Still Alive (New York: Random House, 1077); Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brown Stones
(New York: Feminist Press, 1981); Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Bantam, 1974); Audre Lorde,
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Trumansbuig, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1982). For a valuable
analysis of the mothers and daughters in Toni Morrison’s fiction, see Renita Weems, “ ‘Artists
without Art Form’: A Look at One Black Woman’s World of Unrevered Black Women,” in Barbara
Smith, ed.. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color
Press, 1983).
¶¶¶¶¶ Joyce Ladner, Labeling Black Children: Some Mental Health Implications, V (Washington,
D.C.: Institute for Urban Affairs and Research, Howard University, 1979), p. 3; quoted in Gloria I.
Joseph, “Black Mothers and Daughters: Traditional and New Populations,” SAGE: A Scholarly
Journal on Black Women, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall 1984), p. 17.
##### Gloria I. Joseph and Jill Lewis, Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist
Perspectives (New York: Anchor Books, 1981), pp. 75-186. Joseph’s work is particularly rich in its
analysis of cultural styles and cultural institutions such as “Mother’s Day,” and maternally
transmitted attitudes toward men and marriage.
****** Ibid., p. 76. In her 1984 article in SAGE, Joseph examines both lesbian and teenage
motherhood. She calls on Black communities to accept lesbian mothers and their children, and she
suggests the part played by racism and poverty as well as sexism in dispossessing poor young Black
women of other possible aspirations besides an infant of their own.
†††††† Bea Medicine, “Ina 1979,” in Beth Brant, ed., A Gathering of Spirit: Writing and Art by
North American Indian Women (Montpelier, Vt.: Sinister Wisdom Books, 1984), pp. 109-110.
‡‡‡‡‡‡ Alma Gomez, Cherrie Moraga, Mariana Romo-Camma, eds., Cuentos: Stories by Latinas
(New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983), p. vii.
§§§§§§ Cherrie Moraga, “La Giiera,” in Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, eds., This Bridge
Catted My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color
Press, 1981), pp. 27-35.
¶¶¶¶¶¶ Nellie Wong, “On the Crevices of Anger,” Conditions, Vol. i, No. 3 (Spring 1978), pp. 52-57.
“Yow meng ahl” (have mercy!).
###### Merle Woo, “Letter to Ma,” in This Bridge Called My Back, op. cit., pp. 140-47; Joy
Kogawa, Obasan (Boston: Godine, 1981, 1984).
******* Victoria Seggeiman, “Navaho Women and the Resistance to Relocation,” off our backs
(March 1986), pp. 8-10. See also Kate Shanley’s “Thoughts on Indian Feminism,” Beth Brant’s “A
Long Story,” and Lynn Randall’s “Grandma’s Story,” in A Gathering of Spirit, op. cit., pp. 213-16,
100-7, and 57-60, respectively.
As this manuscript goes to press, Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in
American Indian Traditions has just been published (Boston: Beacon, 1986). Allen treats in depth
Indian attitudes towards motherhood and mothering-attitudes so different from white and Christian-
influenced ones that they are almost inevitably bent and distorted when reported on by white sources,
or shallowly expropriated into white, nontribal ideas of gynocracy. See especially her essays
“Grandmother of the Sun” (pp. 13-29), “When Women Throw Down Bundles” (pp. 30-42), “Where I
Come From Is like This” (pp. 43-50), and “Who Is Your Mother? Red Roots of White Feminism”
(pp. 209-21).
††††††† Sandra Pollack has noted, however, that in the mainstream mind the lesbian mother is still
in a “theoretically impossible category, while in the early 1970’s open lesbians working in the
women’s movement were often ‘closet mothers.’” As of 1976, it was estimated that 10 percent to 20
percent of adult women were lesbians and that 13 percent to 20 percent of these were mothers
(Sandra B. Pollack, “Lesbian Mothers: An Overview and Analysis of the Research, a Lesbian
Feminist Perspective,” to appear in a book on lesbian parenting, coedited by Sandra B. Pollack and
Jeane Vaughan and published in 1987 by Firebrand Books, Ithaca, N.Y.). The statistics quoted by
Pollack are from Nan Hunter and Nancy Polikoff, “Custody Rights of Lesbian Mothers: Legal
Theory and Litigation Strategy,” Buffalo Law Review, Vol. 25, No. 691 (1976), p. 691.
‡‡‡‡‡‡‡ Pollack, op. at.
§§§§§§§ See, e.g., “Corporate Child Care Grows Up,” San Jose Mercury News, June 10, 1986, p. 1E.
¶¶¶¶¶¶¶ See Jean Swallow, “Not So Far from Here to There,” unpublished essay, 1986. Recent works
on incest include Louise Armstrong, Kiss Daddy Goodnight: A Speakout on Incest (New York:
Pocket Books, 1979); Sandra Butler, Conspiracy of Silence: The Trauma of Incest (San Francisco:
New Glide Publications, 1978); Judith Herman and Lisa Hirschman, Father-Daughter Incest
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Toni McNaron and Yarrow Morgan, eds., Voices in the
Night: Women Speaking about Incest (Minneapolis: Cleis Press, 1982); and Florence Rush’s
pioneering book The Best-kept Secret (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980). See also Wini Breines and
Linda Gordon, “The New Scholarship on Family Violence,” Signs, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Spring 1983), pp.
495-531, for an important analysis of “the family as the historical locus of sharp struggles between
the two sexes and different generations.”

OceanofPDF.com
OF WOMAN BORN
OceanofPDF.com
FOREWORD

All human life on the planet is born of woman. The one unifying,
incontrovertible experience shared by all women and men is that
months-long period we spent unfolding inside a woman’s body.
Because young humans remain dependent upon nurture for a much
longer period than other mammals, and because of the division of
labor long established in human groups, where women not only bear
and suckle but are assigned almost total responsibility for children,
most of us first know both love and disappointment, power and
tenderness, in the person of a woman.
We carry the imprint of this experience for life, even into our dying. Yet
there has been a strange lack of material to help us understand and use it.
We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the
nature and meaning of motherhood. In the division of labor according to
gender, the makers and sayers of culture, the namers, have been the sons of
the mothers. There is much to suggest that the male mind has always been
haunted by the force of the idea of dependence on a woman for life itself,
the son’s constant effort to assimilate, compensate for, or deny the fact that
he is “of woman born.”
Women are also born of women. But we know little about the effect on
culture of that fact, because women have not been makers and sayers of
patriarchal culture. Woman’s status as childbearer has been made into a
major fact of her life. Terms like “barren” or “childless” have been used to
negate any further identity. The term “nonfather” does not exist in any
realm of social categories.
Because the fact of physical motherhood is so visible and dramatic, men
recognized only after some time that they, too, had a part in generation. The
meaning of “fatherhood” remains tangential, elusive. To “father” a child
suggests above all to beget, to provide the sperm which fertilizes the ovum.
To “mother” a child implies a continuing presence, lasting at least nine
months, more often for years. Motherhood is earned, first through an
intense physical and psychic rite of passage—pregnancy and childbirth—
then through learning to nurture, which does not come by instinct.
A man may beget a child in passion or by rape, and then disappear; he
need never see or consider child or mother again. Under such
circumstances, the mother faces a range of painful, socially weighted
choices: abortion, suicide, abandonment of the child, infanticide, the rearing
of a child branded “illegitimate,” usually in poverty, always outside the law.
In some cultures she faces murder by her kinsmen. Whatever her choice,
her body has undergone irreversible changes, her mind will never be the
same, her future as a woman has been shaped by the event.
Most of us were raised by our mothers, or by women who for love,
necessity, or money took the place of our biological mothers. Throughout
history women have helped birth and nurture each others’ children. Most
women have been mothers in the sense of tenders and carers for the young,
whether as sisters, aunts, nurses, teachers, foster-mothers, stepmothers.
Tribal life, the village, the extended family, the female networks of some
cultures, have included the very young, very old, unmarried, and infertile
women in the process of “mothering.” Even those of us whose fathers
played an important part in our early childhood rarely remember them for
their patient attendance when we were ill, their doing the humble tasks of
feeding and cleaning us; we remember scenes, expeditions, punishments,
special occasions. For most of us a woman provided the continuity and
stability—but also the rejections and refusals—of our early lives, and it is
with a woman’s hands, eyes, body, voice, that we associate our primal
sensations, our earliest social experience.

2
Throughout this book I try to distinguish between two meanings of
motherhood, one superimposed on the other: the potential relationship of
any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children; and the
institution, which aims at ensuring that that potential—and all women—
shall remain under male control. This institution has been a keystone of the
most diverse social and political systems. It has withheld over one-half the
human species from the decisions affecting their lives; it exonerates men
from fatherhood in any authentic sense; it creates the dangerous schism
between “private” and “public” life; it calcifies human choices and
potentialities. In the most fundamental and bewildering of contradictions, it
has alienated women from our bodies by incarcerating us in them. At
certain points in history, and in certain cultures, the idea of woman-as-
mother has worked to endow all women with respect, even with awe, and to
give women some say in the life of a people or a clan. But for most of what
we know as the “mainstream” of recorded history, motherhood as institution
has ghettoized and degraded female potentialities.
The power of the mother has two aspects: the biological potential or
capacity to bear and nourish human life, and the magical power invested in
women by men, whether in the form of Goddess-worship or the fear of
being controlled and overwhelmed by women. We do not actually know
much about what power may have meant in the hands of strong,
prepatriarchal women. We do have guesses, longings, myths, fantasies,
analogues. We know far more about how, under patriarchy, female
possibility has been literally massacred on the site of motherhood. Most
women in history have become mothers without choice, and an even greater
number have lost their lives bringing life into the world.
Women are controlled by lashing us to our bodies. In an early and
classic essay, Susan Griffin pointed out that “rape is a form of mass
terrorism, for the victims of rape are chosen indiscriminately, but the
propagandists for male supremacy broadcast that it is women who cause
rape by being unchaste or in the wrong place at the wrong time—in
essence, by behaving as though they were free. . . . The fear of rape keeps
women off the streets at night. Keeps women at home. Keeps women
passive and modest for fear that they be thought provocative.”* In a later
development of Griffin’s analysis, Susan Brownmiller suggests that
enforced, indentured motherhood may originally have been the price paid
by women to the men who became their “protectors” (and owners) against
the casual violence of other men.t If rape has been terrorism, motherhood
has been penal servitude. It need not be.
This book is not an attack on the family or on mothering, except as
defined and restricted under patriarchy. Nor is it a call for a mass system of
state-controlled child-care. Mass childcare in patriarchy has had but two
purposes: to introduce large numbers of women into the labor force, in a
developing economy or during a war, and to indoctrinate future citizens.† It
has never been conceived as a means of releasing the energies of women
into the mainstream of culture, or of changing the stereotypic gender-
images of both women and men.

3
I told myself that I wanted to write a book on motherhood because it was a
crucial, still relatively unexplored, area for feminist theory. But I did not
choose this subject; it had long ago chosen me.
This book is rooted in my own past, tangled with parts of my life which
stayed buried even while I dug away at the strata of early childhood,
adolescence, separation from parents, my vocation as a poet; the
geographies of marriage, spiritual divorce, and death, through which I
entered the open ground of middle age. Every journey into the past is
complicated by delusions, false memories, false naming of real events. But
for a long time, I avoided this journey back into the years of pregnancy,
childbearing, and the dependent lives of my children, because it meant
going back into pain and anger that I would have preferred to think of as
long since resolved and put away. I could not begin to think of writing a
book on motherhood until I began to feel strong enough, and unambivalent
enough in my love for my children, so that I could dare to return to a
ground which seemed to me the most painful, incomprehensible, and
ambiguous I had ever traveled, a ground hedged by taboos, mined with
false-namings.
I did not understand this when I started to write the book. I only knew
that I had lived through something which was considered central to the lives
of women, fulfilling even in its sorrows, a key to the meaning of life; and
that I could remember little except anxiety, physical weariness, anger, self-
blame, boredom, and division within myself: a division made more acute by
the moments of passionate love, delight in my children’s spirited bodies and
minds, amazement at how they went on loving me in spite of my failures to
love them wholly and selflessly.
It seemed to me impossible from the first to write a book of this kind
without being often autobiographical, without often saying “I.” Yet for
many months I buried my head in historical research and analysis in order
to delay or prepare the way for the plunge into areas of my own life which
were painful and problematical, yet from the heart of which this book has
come. I believe increasingly that only the willingness to share private and
sometimes painful experience can enable women to create a collective
description of the world which will be truly ours. On the other hand, I am
keenly aware that any writer has a certain false and arbitrary power. It is her
version, after all, that the reader is reading at this moment, while the
accounts of others—including the dead—may go untold.
This is in some ways a vulnerable book. I have invaded various
professional domains, broken various taboos. I have used the scholarship
available to me where I found it suggestive, without pretending to make
myself into a specialist. In so doing, the question, But what was it like for
women? was always in my mind, and I soon began to sense a fundamental
perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for
which “sexism” is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which
might be named “patrivincialism” or “patriochialism”: the assumption that
women are a subgroup, that “man’s world” is the “real” world, that
patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the “great”
or “liberalizing” periods of history have been the same for women as for
men, that generalizations about “man,” “humankind,” “children,” “Blacks,”
“parents,” “the working class” hold true for women, mothers, daughters,
sisters, wet-nurses, infant girls, and can include them with no more than a
glancing reference here and there, usually to some specialized function like
breastfeeding. The new historians of “family and childhood,” like the
majority of theorists on child-rearing, pediatricians, psychiatrists, are male.
In their work, the question of motherhood as an institution or as an idea in
the heads of grown-up male children is raised only where “styles” of
mothering are discussed and criticized. Female sources are rarely cited (yet
these sources exist, as the feminist historians are showing); there are
virtually no primary sources from women-as-mothers; and all this is
presented as objective scholarship.
It is only recently that feminist scholars such as Gerda Lerner, Joan
Kelly, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg have begun to suggest that, in Lerner’s
words: “the key to understanding women’s history is in accepting—painful
though it may be—that it is the history of the majority of mankind. . . .
History, as written and perceived up to now, is the history of a minority,
who may well turn out to be the ‘subgroup.’ ”*
 I write with a painful consciousness of my own Western cultural
perspective and that of most of the sources available to me: painful because
it says so much about how female culture is fragmented by the male
cultures, boundaries, groupings in which women live. However, at this
point any broad study of female culture can be at best partial, and what any
writer hopes—and knows—is that others like her, with different training,
background, and tools, are putting together other parts of this immense half-
buried mosaic in the shape of a woman’s face.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are people I need to thank. Without my three sons, this book might
not have existed; but in particular their love, intelligence, and integrity have
been resources for me since we first began to talk to each other. There are
so many women with whom I have talked, as mothers and as daughters, that
it is impossible to acknowledge all my debts. Phoebe DesMarais and Helen
Smelser have generously shared their experiences and their wisdom with
me since our undergraduate days, regardless of time zones, distances,
children, husbands, lovers, and lifestyles. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and
Albert Gelpi, both in argument and in support, have each freely contributed
their perceptions of the visions we share. Jane Cooper’s imagination and
insight have been activating and healing forces in my work and my life.
With Robin Morgan I had vital conversations during the book’s gestation;
her mind and her affection have been important to me throughout. Jane
Alpert, under the most difficult personal conditions, has generously
encouraged and criticized. Mary Daly has given emotional and intellectual
comradeship; I cannot separate one from the other. Susan Griffin has
criticized at the deepest, most loving level. Tillie Olsen sternly and tenderly
demands, through her work and her example, that we all search more
relentlessly into our hidden life as women, and the language in which we
name it. Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie provided insights, crucial
resources, and the spur of emulation, through their friendship and their
work. Janice Raymond began as a vital critic and has become a friend as
well. Kenneth Pitchford gave me the benefit of a sensitive critique of
Chapter VIII. Richard Howard gracefully recreated in English the words of
a seventeenth-century French midwife for Chapter VI. John Benedict, my
editor, contributed a close, honestly responsive reading, and many
suggestions which helped me to clarify the structure of the book; he more
than once said the right words at the right time, and more than once have
we argued the themes pursued here. I have all along been fortunate in the
support of W. W. Norton, my publishers.
Lilly Engler read, reread, and commented on the manuscript; she
translated afresh for me the lines quoted from Rilke’s “Third Duino Elegy”
in Chapter VIII; and she has been with this book, in the deepest possible
sense, from the first.
Throughout the writing of the book I also received help, in the form of
references, unpublished papers, reprints, letters, encouragement, and
counsel, from women, many of whom I had not met or barely knew, who
are working along some of the same lines, both within and outside the
academic world. Books were lent, work-in-progress shared, with a
generosity that made me realize concretely how much I was part of a
working community of women. I want to thank in particular Alta, Kathleen
Barry, Emily Culpeper, Nancy Fuller, Liselotte Erlanger Glozer, Mary
Howell, Brigitte Jordan, Jane Lazarre, Jane Lilienfeld, Helen McKenna,
Marian diner, Grace Paley, Alice Rossi, Florence Rush, Myra Schotz,
Elizabeth Shanklin, Patricia Traxler; and Karyn London and Fabi Romero-
Oak of Woman- books, West Ninety-second Street, New York, for
bibliographical resources, correspondence, and conversation. Rhoda
Fairman and Lisa George not only typed the manuscript at various stages;
they made me feel it was worth reading. Finally, Simone de Beauvoir and
Shulamith Firestone created pioneering feminist insights to which I shall
always stand in debt.
Needless to say, I owe much to many people unnamed here. No one
whom I thank necessarily shares all my opinions and conclusions; the final
responsibility throughout is my own.
Of course I am indebted to libraries: to the Schlesinger Women’s
Archives at Radcliffe College, the New York Public Library, the Library of
the New York Academy of Medicine, the A. A. Brill Collection of the New
York Psychoanalytic Institute, the New York Society Library, the Widener
and Countway Libraries of Harvard University, the Douglass College
Library at Rutgers University; to Joseph Hickerson of the Music Division of
the Library of Congress; and to the libraries of my friends. The Ingram
Merrill Foundation kindly provided a grant to cover research expenses,
typing, and other practical costs; I am grateful to them for understanding
that this book was as important for me to write as the poetry they would
have preferred to encourage.
Finally, I cannot imagine having written this book without the presence
in my life of my mother, who offers a continuing example of transformation
and rebirth; and of my sister, with and from whom I go on learning about
sisterhood, daughter- hood, motherhood, and the struggle of women toward
a shared, irreversible, liberation.

New York City

February 1976

OceanofPDF.com
I ANGER AND TENDERNESS

. . . to understand is always an ascending movement; that is

why comprehension ought always to be concrete. (one is
never got out of the cave, one comes out of it.)
—Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks

Entry from my journal, November 1960

My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have
any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous
alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and
blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in
my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of
selfishness and intolerance. Their voices wear away at my nerves,
their constant needs, above all their need for simplicity and patience,
fill me with despair at my own failures, despair too at my fate,
which is to serve a function for which I was not fitted. And I am
weak sometimes from held-in rage. There are times when I feel only
death will free us from one another, when I envy the barren woman
who has the luxury of her regrets but lives a life of privacy and
freedom.*
And yet at other times I am melted with the sense of their helpless,
charming and quite irresistible beauty—their ability to go on loving
and trusting—their staunchness and decency and
unselfconsciousness. I love them. But it’s in the enormity and
inevitability of this love that the sufferings lie.

April 1961
 A blissful love for my children engulfs me from time to time and
seems almost to suffice—the aesthetic pleasure I have in these little,
changing creatures, the sense of being loved, however dependently,
the sense too that I’m not an utterly unnatural and shrewish mother
—much though I am!

May1965
To suffer with and for and against a child—maternally, egotistically,
neurotically, sometimes with a sense of helplessness, sometimes
with the illusion of learning wisdom—but always, everywhere, in
body and soul, with that child—because that child is a piece of
oneself.
To be caught up in waves of love and hate, jealousy even of the
child’s childhood; hope and fear for its maturity; longing to be free
of responsibility, tied by every fibre of one’s being.
That curious primitive reaction of protectiveness, the beast
defending her cub, when anyone attacks or criticizes him—And yet
no one more hard on him than I!

September 1965
Degradation of anger. Anger at a child. How shall I learn to absorb
the violence and make explicit only the caring? Exhaustion of anger.
Victory of will, too dearly bought—far too dearly!

March 1966
Perhaps one is a monster—an anti-woman—something driven and
without recourse to the normal and appealing consolations of love,
motherhood, joy in others . . .

Unexamined assumptions: First, that a “natural” mother is a person without

further identity, one who can find her chief gratification in being all day
with small children, living at a pace tuned to theirs; that the isolation of
mothers and children together in the home must be taken for granted; that
maternal love is, and should be, quite literally selfless; that children and
mothers are the “causes” of each others’ suffering. I was haunted by the
stereotype of the mother whose love is “unconditional”; and by the visual
and literary images of motherhood as a single-minded identity. If I knew
parts of myself existed that would never cohere to those images, weren’t
those parts then abnormal, monstrous? And—as my eldest son, now aged
twenty-one, remarked on reading the above passages: “You seemed to feel
you ought to love us all the time. But there is no human relationship where
you love the other person at every moment.” Yes, I tried to explain to him,
but women—above all, mothers—have been supposed to love that way.
From the fifties and early sixties, I remember a cycle. It began when I
had picked up a book or began trying to write a letter, or even found myself
on the telephone with someone toward whom my voice betrayed eagerness,
a rush of sympathetic energy. The child (or children) might be absorbed in
busyness, in his own dreamworld; but as soon as he felt me gliding into a
world which did not include him, he would come to pull at my hand, ask for
help, punch at the typewriter keys. And I would feel his wants at such a
moment as fraudulent, as an attempt moreover to defraud me of living even
for fifteen minutes as myself. My anger would rise; I would feel the futility
of any attempt to salvage myself, and also the inequality between us: my
needs always balanced against those of a child, and always losing. I could
love so much better, I told myself, after even a quarter-hour of selfishness,
of peace, of detachment from my children. A few minutes! But it was as if
an invisible thread would pull taut between us and break, to the child’s
sense of inconsolable abandonment, if I moved—not even physically, but in
spirit—into a realm beyond our tightly circumscribed life together. It was as
if my placenta had begun to refuse him oxygen. Like so many women, I
waited with impatience for the moment when their father would return from
work, when for an hour or two at least the circle drawn around mother and
children would grow looser, the intensity between us slacken, because there
was another adult in the house.
I did not understand that this circle, this magnetic field in which we
lived, was not a natural phenomenon.
Intellectually, I must have known it. But the emotion-charged, tradition-
heavy form in which I found myself cast as the Mother seemed, then, as
ineluctable as the tides. And, because of this form—this microcosm in
which my children and I formed a tiny, private emotional cluster, and in
which (in bad weather or when someone was ill) we sometimes passed days
at a time without seeing another adult except for their father—there was
authentic need underlying my child’s invented claims upon me when I
seemed to be wandering away from him. He was reassuring himself that
warmth, tenderness, continuity, solidity were still there for him, in my
person. My singularity, my uniqueness in the world as his mother—perhaps
more dimly also as Woman—evoked a need vaster than any single human
being could satisfy, except by loving continuously, unconditionally, from
dawn to dark, and often in the middle of the night.

2
In a living room in 1975, I spent an evening with a group of women poets,
some of whom had children. One had brought hers along, and they slept or
played in adjoining rooms. We talked of poetry, and also of infanticide, of
the case of a local woman, the mother of eight, who had been in severe
depression since the birth of her third child, and who had recently murdered
and decapitated her two youngest, on her suburban front lawn. Several
women in the group, feeling a direct connection with her desperation, had
signed a letter to the local newspaper protesting the way her act was
perceived by the press and handled by the community mental health system.
Every woman in that room who had children, every poet, could identify
with her. We spoke of the wells of anger that her story cleft open in us. We
spoke of our own moments of murderous anger at our children, because
there was no one and nothing else on which to discharge anger. We spoke in
the sometimes tentative, sometimes rising, sometimes bitterly witty,
unrhetorical tones and language of women who had met together over our
common work, poetry, and who found another common ground in an
unacceptable, but undeniable anger. The words are being spoken now, are
being written down; the taboos are being broken, the masks of motherhood
are cracking through.
For centuries no one talked of these feelings. I became a mother in the
family-centered, consumer-oriented, Freudian- American world of the
1950s. My husband spoke eagerly of the children we would have; my
parents-in-law awaited the birth of their grandchild. I had no idea of what I
wanted, what I could or could not choose. I only knew that to have a child
was to assume adult womanhood to the full, to prove myself, to be “like
other women.”
 To be “like other women” had been a problem for me. From the age of
thirteen or fourteen, I had felt I was only acting the part of a feminine
creature. At the age of sixteen my fingers were almost constantly ink-
stained. The lipstick and high heels of the era were difficult-to-manage
disguises. In 1945 I was writing poetry seriously, and had a fantasy of going
to postwar Europe as a journalist, sleeping among the ruins in bombed
cities, recording the rebirth of civilization after the fall of the Nazis. But
also, like every other girl I knew, I spent hours trying to apply lipstick more
adroitly, straightening the wandering seams of stockings, talking about
“boys.” There were two different compartments, already, to my life. But
writing poetry, and my fantasies of travel and self-sufficiency, seemed more
real to me; I felt that as an incipient “real woman” I was a fake. Particularly
was I paralyzed when I encountered young children. I think I felt men could
be—wished to be—conned into thinking I was truly “feminine”; a child, I
suspected, could see through me like a shot. This sense of acting a part
created a curious sense of guilt, even though it was a part demanded for
survival.
I have a very clear, keen memory of myself the day after I was married:
I was sweeping a floor. Probably the floor did not really need to be swept;
probably I simply did not know what else to do with myself. But as I swept
that floor I thought: “Now I am a woman. This is an age-old action, this is
what women have always done.” I felt I was bending to some ancient form,
too ancient to question. This is what women have always done.
As soon as I was visibly and clearly pregnant, I felt, for the first time in
my adolescent and adult life, not-guilty. The at mosphere of approval in
which I was bathed—even by strangers on the street, it seemed—was like
an aura I carried with me, in which doubts, fears, misgivings, met with
absolute denial. This is what women have always done.
Two days before my first son was born, I broke out in a rash which was
tentatively diagnosed as measles, and was admitted to a hospital for
contagious diseases to await the onset of labor. I felt for the first time a
great deal of conscious fear, and guilt toward my unborn child, for having
“failed” him with my body in this way. In rooms near mine were patients
with polio; no one was allowed to enter my room except in a hospital gown
and mask. If during pregnancy I had felt in any vague command of my
situation, I felt now totally dependent on my obstetrician, a huge, vigorous,
paternal man, abounding with optimism and assurance, and given to
pinching my cheek. I had gone through a healthy pregnancy, but as if
tranquilized or sleep-walking. I had taken a sewing class in which I
produced an unsightly and ill-cut maternity jacket which I never wore; I had
made curtains for the baby’s room, collected baby clothes, blotted out as
much as possible the woman I had been a few months earlier. My second
book of poems was in press, but I had stopped writing poetry, and read little
except household magazines and books on child-care. I felt myself
perceived by the world simply as a pregnant woman, and it seemed easier,
less disturbing, to perceive myself so. After my child was born the
“measles” were diagnosed as an allergic reaction to pregnancy.
Within two years, I was pregnant again, and writing in a notebook:

November 1956
Whether it’s the extreme lassitude of early pregnancy or something
more fundamental, I don’t know; but of late I’ve felt, toward poetry,
—both reading and writing it—nothing but boredom and
indifference. Especially toward my own and that of my immediate
contemporaries. When I receive a letter soliciting mss., or someone
alludes to my “career", I have a strong sense of wanting to deny all
responsibility for and interest in that person who writes—or who
wrote.

If there is going to be a real break in my writing life, this is as good

a time for it as any. I have been dissatisfied with myself, my work,
for a long time.

My husband was a sensitive, affectionate man who wanted children and

who—unusual in the professional, academic world of the fifties—was
willing to “help.” But it was clearly understood that this “help” was an act
of generosity; that his work, his professional life, was the real work in the
family; in fact, this was for years not even an issue between us. I
understood that my struggles as a writer were a kind of luxury, a peculiarity
of mine; my work brought in almost no money: it even cost money, when I
hired a household helper to allow me a few hours a week to write.
“Whatever I ask he tries to give me,” I wrote in March 1958, “but always
the initiative has to be mine.” I experienced my depressions, bursts of anger,
sense of entrapment, as burdens my husband was forced to bear because he
loved me; I felt grateful to be loved in spite of bringing him those burdens.
But I was struggling to bring my life into focus. I had never really given
up on poetry, nor on gaining some control over my existence. The life of a
Cambridge tenement backyard swarming with children, the repetitious
cycles of laundry, the night-wakings, the interrupted moments of peace or
of engagement with ideas, the ludicrous dinner parties at which young
wives, some with advanced degrees, all seriously and intelligently dedicated
to their children’s welfare and their husbands’ careers, attempted to
reproduce the amenities of Brahmin Boston, amid French recipes and the
pretense of effortlessness—above all, the ultimate lack of seriousness with
which women were regarded in that world—all of this defied analysis at
that time, but I knew I had to remake my own life. I did not then understand
that we—the women of that academic community—as in so many middle-
class communities of the period—were expected to fill both the part of the
Victorian Lady of Leisure, the Angel in the House, and also of the Victorian
cook, scullery maid, laundress, governess, and nurse. I only sensed that
there were false distractions sucking at me, and I wanted desperately to strip
my life down to what was essential.

June 1958
These months I’ve been all a tangle of irritations deepening to
anger: bitterness, disillusion with society and with myself; beating
out at the world, rejecting out of hand. What, if anything, has been
positive? Perhaps the attempt to remake my life, to save it from
mere drift and the passage of time . . .
The work that is before me is serious and difficult and not at all
clear even as to plan. 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. So far the only beginning I’ve been able to make is to
waste less time. That is what some of the rejection has been all
about.

By July of 1958 I was again pregnant. The new life of my third—and,

as I determined, my last—child, was a kind of turning for me. I had learned
that my body was not under my control; I had not intended to bear a third
child. I knew now better than I had ever known what another pregnancy,
another new infant, meant for my body and spirit. Yet, I did not think of
having an abortion. In a sense, my third son was more actively chosen than
either of his brothers; by the time I knew I was pregnant with him, I was not
sleepwalking any more.

August 1958 (Vermont)

I write this as the early rays of the sun light up our hillside and
eastern windows. Rose with [the baby] at 5:30 A.M. and have fed
him and breakfasted. This is one of the few mornings on which I
haven’t felt terrible mental depression and physical exhaustion.
... I have to acknowledge to myself that I would not have chosen to
have more children, that I was beginning to look to a time, not too
far off, when I should again be free, no longer so physically tired,
pursuing a more or less intellectual and creative life. . . . The only
way I can develop now is through much harder, more continuous,
connected work than my present life makes possible. Another child
means postponing this for some years longer—and years at my age
are significant, not to be tossed lightly away.
And yet, somehow, something, call it Nature or that affirming
fatalism of the human creature, makes me aware of the inevitable as
already part of me, not to be contended against so much as brought
to bear as an additional weapon against drift, stagnation and spiritual
death. (For it is really death that I have been fearing—the crumbling
to death of that scarcely-born physiognomy which my whole life has
been a battle to give birth to—a recognizable, autonomous self, a
creation in poetry and in life.)
If more effort has to be made then I will make it. If more despair has
to be lived through, I think I can anticipate it correctly and live
through it.
Meanwhile, in a curious and unanticipated way, we really do
welcome the birth of our child.

There was, of course, an economic as well as a spiritual margin which

allowed me to think of a third child’s birth not as my own death-warrant but
as an “additional weapon against death.” My body, despite recurrent flares
of arthritis, was a healthy one; I had good prenatal care; we were not living
on the edge of malnutrition; I knew that all my children would be fed,
clothed, breathe fresh air; in fact it did not occur to me that it could be
otherwise. But, in another sense, beyond that physical margin, I knew I was
fighting for my life through, against, and with the lives of my children,
though very little else was clear to me. I had been trying to give birth to
myself; and in some grim, dim way I was determined to use even pregnancy
and parturition in that process.
Before my third child was born I decided to have no more children, to
be sterilized. (Nothing is removed from a woman’s body during this
operation; ovulation and menstruation continue. Yet the language suggests a
cutting- or burning-away of her essential womanhood, just as the old word
“barren” suggests a woman eternally empty and lacking.) My husband,
although he supported my decision, asked whether I was sure it would not
leave me feeling “less feminine.” In order to have the operation at all, I had
to present a letter, counter-signed by my husband, assuring the committee of
physicians who approved such operations that I had already produced three
children, and stating my reasons for having no more. Since I had had
rheumatoid arthritis for some years, I could give a reason acceptable to the
male panel who sat on my case; my own judgment would not have been
acceptable. When I awoke from the operation, twenty-four hours after my
child’s birth, a young nurse looked at my chart and remarked coldly: “Had
yourself spayed, did you?”
The first great birth-control crusader, Margaret Sanger, remarks that of
the hundreds of women who wrote to her pleading for contraceptive
information in the early part of the twentieth century, all spoke of wanting
the health and strength to be better mothers to the children they already had;
or of wanting to be physically affectionate to their husbands without dread
of conceiving. None was refusing motherhood altogether, or asking for an
easy life. These women—mostly poor, many still in their teens, all with
several children—simply felt they could no longer do “right” by their
families, whom they expected to go on serving and rearing. Yet there
always has been, and there remains, intense fear of the suggestion that
women shall have the final say as to how our bodies are to be used. It is as
if the suffering of the mother, the primary identification of woman as the
mother—were so necessary to the emotional grounding of human society
that the mitigation, or removal, of that suffering, that identification, must be
fought at every level, including the level of refusing to question it at all.

3
“Vous travaillez pour l’armée, madame?” (You are working for the army?),
a Frenchwoman said to me early in the Vietnam war, on hearing I had three
sons.

April 1965
Anger, weariness, demoralization. Sudden bouts of weeping. A
sense of insufficiency to the moment and to eternity . . .
Paralyzed by the sense that there exists a mesh of relations, between
e.g. my rejection and anger at [my eldest child], my sensual life,
pacifism, sex (I mean in its broadest significance, not merely
physical desire)—an interconnectedness which, if I could see it,
make it valid, would give me back myself, make it possible to
function lucidly and passionately—Yet I grope in and out among
these dark webs—
I weep, and weep, and the sense of powerlessness spreads like a
cancer through my being.

August 1965, 3:30 A.M.

Necessity for a more unyielding discipline of my life.
Recognize the uselessness of blind anger.
Limit society.
Use children’s school hours better, for work & solitude.
Refuse to be distracted from own style of life.
Less waste.
Be harder & harder on poems.

Once in a while someone used to ask me, “Don’t you ever write poems
about your children?” The male poets of my generation did write poems
about their children—especially their daughters. For me, poetry was where
I lived as no-one’s mother, where I existed as myself.
 The bad and the good moments are inseparable for me. I recall the times
when, suckling each of my children, I saw his eyes open full to mine, and
realized each of us was fastened to the other, not only by mouth and breast,
but through our mutual gaze: the depth, calm, passion, of that dark blue,
maturely focused look. I recall the physical pleasure of having my full
breast suckled at a time when I had no other physical pleasure in the world
except the guilt-ridden pleasure of addictive eating. I remember early the
sense of conflict, of a battleground none of us had chosen, of being an
observer who, like it or not, was also an actor in an endless contest of wills.
This was what it meant to me to have three children under the age of seven.
But I recall too each child’s individual body, his slenderness, wiriness,
softness, grace, the beauty of little boys who have not been taught that the
male body must be rigid. I remember moments of peace when for some
reason it was possible to go to the bathroom alone. I remember being
uprooted from already meager sleep to answer a childish nightmare, pull up
a blanket, warm a consoling bottle, lead a half-asleep child to the toilet. I
remember going back to bed starkly awake, brittle with anger, knowing that
my broken sleep would make next day a hell, that there would be more
nightmares, more need for consolation, because out of my weariness I
would rage at those children for no reason they could understand. I
remember thinking I would never dream again (the unconscious of the
young mother—where does it entrust its messages, when dream-sleep is
denied her for years?)
For many years I shrank from looking back on the first decade of my
children’s lives. In snapshots of the period I see a smiling young woman, in
maternity clothes or bent over a halfnaked baby; gradually she stops
smiling, wears a distant, halfmelancholy look, as if she were listening for
something. In time my sons grew older, I began changing my own life, we
began to talk to each other as equals. Together we lived through my leaving
the marriage, and through their father’s suicide. We became survivors, four
distinct people with strong bonds connecting us. Because I always tried to
tell them the truth, because their every new independence meant new
freedom for me, because we trusted each other even when we wanted
different things, they became, at a fairly young age, self-reliant and open to
the unfamiliar. Something told me that if they had survived my angers, my
self-reproaches, and still trusted my love and each others’, they were strong.
Their lives have not been, will not be, easy; but their very existences seem a
gift to me, their vitality, humor, intelligence, gentleness, love of life, their
separate life-currents which here and there stream into my own. I don’t
know how we made it from their embattled childhood and my embattled
motherhood into a mutual recognition of ourselves and each other. Probably
that mutual recognition, overlaid by social and traditional circumstance,
was always there, from the first gaze between the mother and the infant at
the breast. But I do know that for years I believed I should never have been
anyone’s mother, that because I felt my own needs acutely and often
expressed them violently, I was Kali, Medea, the sow that devours her
farrow, the unwomanly woman in flight from womanhood, a Nietzschean
monster. Even today, rereading old journals, remembering, I feel grief and
anger; but their objects are no longer myself and my children. I feel grief at
the waste of myself in those years, anger at the mutilation and manipulation
of the relationship between mother and child, which is the great original
source and experience of love.
On an early spring day in the 1970s, I meet a young woman friend on
the street. She has a tiny infant against her breast, in a bright cotton sling;
its face is pressed against her blouse, its tiny hand clutches a piece of the
cloth. “How old is she?” I ask. “Just two weeks old,” the mother tells me. I
am amazed to feel in myself a passionate longing to have, once again, such
a small, new being clasped against my body. The baby belongs there,
curled, suspended asleep between her mother’s breasts, as she belonged
curled in the womb. The young mother—who already has a three-year-old
—speaks of how quickly one forgets the pure pleasure of having this new
creature, immaculate, perfect. And I walk away from her drenched with
memory, with envy. Yet I know other things: that her life is far from simple;
she is a mathematician who now has two children under the age of four; she
is living even now in the rhythms of other lives—not only the regular cry of
the infant but her three-year-old’s needs, her husband’s problems. In the
building where I live, women are still raising children alone, living day in
and day out within their individual family units, doing the laundry, herding
the tricycles to the park, waiting for the husbands to come home. There is a
baby-sitting pool and a children’s playroom, young fathers push prams on
weekends, but child-care is still the individual responsibility of the
individual woman. I envy the sensuality of having an infant of two weeks
curled against one’s breast; I do not envy the turmoil of the elevator full of
small children, babies howling in the laundromat, the apartment in winter
where pent-up seven- and eight-year-olds have one adult to look to for their
frustrations, reassurances, the grounding of their lives.

4
But, it will be said, this is the human condition, this interpenetration of pain
and pleasure, frustration and fulfillment. I might have told myself the same
thing, fifteen or eighteen years ago. But the patriarchal institution of
motherhood is not the “human condition” any more than rape, prostitution,
and slavery are. (Those who speak largely of the human condition are
usually those most exempt from its oppressions—whether of sex, race, or
servitude.)
Motherhood—unmentioned in the histories of conquest and serfdom,
wars and treaties, exploration and imperialism—has a history, it has an
ideology, it is more fundamental than tribalism or nationalism. My
individual, seemingly private pains as a mother, the individual, seemingly
private pains of the mothers around me and before me, whatever our class
or color, the regulation of women’s reproductive power by men in every
totalitarian system and every socialist revolution, the legal and technical
control by men of contraception, fertility, abortion, obstetrics, gynecology,
and extrauterine reproductive experiments—all are essential to the
patriarchal system, as is the negative or suspect status of women who are
not mothers.
Throughout patriarchal mythology, dream-symbolism, theology,
language, two ideas flow side by side: one, that the female body is impure,
corrupt, the site of discharges, bleedings, dangerous to masculinity, a source
of moral and physical contamination, “the devil’s gateway.” On the other
hand, as mother the woman is beneficent, sacred, pure, asexual, nourishing;
and the physical potential for motherhood—that same body with its
bleedings and mysteries—is her single destiny and justification in life.
These two ideas have become deeply internalized in women, even in the
most independent of us, those who seem to lead the freest lives.
In order to maintain two such notions, each in its contradictory purity,
the masculine imagination has had to divide women, to see us, and force us
to see ourselves, as polarized into good or evil, fertile or barren, pure or
impure. The asexual Victorian angel-wife and the Victorian prostitute were
institutions created by this double thinking, which had nothing to do with
women’s actual sensuality and everything to do with the male’s subjective
experience of women. The political and economic expediency of this kind
of thinking is most unashamedly and dramatically to be found where sexism
and racism become one. The social historian A. W. Calhoun describes the
encouragement of the rape of Black women by the sons of white planters, in
a deliberate effort to produce more mulatto slaves, mulattos being
considered more valuable. He quotes two mid-nineteenth- century southern
writers on the subject of women:
“The heaviest part of the white racial burden in slavery was the African woman of strong sex
instincts and devoid of a sexual conscience, at the white man’s door, in the white man’s
dwelling.” . . . “Under the institution of slavery, the attack against the integrity of white
civilization was made by the insidious influence of the lascivious hybrid woman at the point
of weakest resistance. In the uncompromising purity of the white mother and wife of the
upper classes lay the one assurance of the future purity of the race.”1

The motherhood created by rape is not only degraded; the raped woman is
turned into the criminal, the attacker. But who brought the Black woman to
the white man’s door, whose absence of a sexual conscience produced the
financially profitable mulatto children? Is it asked whether the “pure” white
mother and wife was not also raped by the white planter, since she was
assumed to be devoid of “strong sexual instinct?” In the American South, as
elsewhere, it was economically necessary that children be produced; the
mothers, Black and white, were a means to this end.
Neither the “pure” nor the “lascivious” woman, neither the so-called
mistress nor the slave woman, neither the woman praised for reducing
herself to a brood animal nor the woman scorned and penalized as an “old
maid” or a “dyke,” has had any real autonomy or selfhood to gain from this
subversion of the female body (and hence of the female mind). Yet, because
short-term advantages are often the only ones visible to the powerless, we,
too, have played our parts in continuing this subversion.

5
Most of the literature of infant care and psychology has assumed that the
process toward individuation is essentially the child’s drama, played out
against and with a parent or parents who are, for better or worse, givens.
Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother, one
of those givens, when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself. That
calm, sure, unambivalent woman who moved through the pages of the
manuals I read seemed as unlike me as an astronaut. Nothing, to be sure,
had prepared me for the intensity of relationship already existing between
me and a creature I had carried in my body and now held in my arms and
fed from my breasts. Throughout pregnancy and nursing, women are urged
to relax, to mime the serenity of madonnas. No one mentions the psychic
crisis of bearing a first child, the excitation of long-buried feelings about
one’s own mother, the sense of confused power and powerlessness, of being
taken over on the one hand and of touching new physical and psychic
potentialities on the other, a heightened sensibility which can be
exhilarating, bewildering, and exhausting. No one mentions the strangeness
of attraction—which can be as single-minded and overwhelming as the
early days of a love affair—to a being so tiny, so dependent, so folded-in to
itself—who is, and yet is not, part of oneself.
From the beginning the mother caring for her child is involved in a
continually changing dialogue, crystallized in such moments as when,
hearing her child’s cry, she feels milk rush into her breasts; when, as the
child first suckles, the uterus begins contracting and returning to its normal
size, and when later, the child’s mouth, caressing the nipple, creates waves
of sensuality in the womb where it once lay; or when, smelling the breast
even in sleep, the child starts to root and grope for the nipple.
The child gains her first sense of her own existence from the mother’s
responsive gestures and expressions. It’s as if, in the mother’s eyes, her
smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message: You are there!
And the mother, too, is discovering her own existence newly. She is
connected with this other being, by the most mundane and the most
invisible strands, in a way she can be connected with no one else except in
the deep past of her infant connection with her own mother. And she, too,
needs to struggle from that one-to-one intensity into new realization, or
reaffirmation, of her being-unto-herself.
The act of suckling a child, like a sexual act, may be tense, physically
painful, charged with cultural feelings of inadequacy and guilt; or, like a
sexual act, it can be a physically delicious, elementally soothing experience,
filled with a tender sensuality. But just as lovers have to break apart after
sex and become separate individuals again, so the mother has to wean
herself from the infant and the infant from herself. In psychologies of child-
rearing the emphasis is placed on “letting the child go” for the child’s sake.
But the mother needs to let it go as much or more for her own.
Motherhood, 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. The housewife in her mid-forties may jokingly say, “I
feel like someone out of a job.” But in the eyes of society, once having been
mothers, what are we, if not always mothers? The process of “letting-go”—
though we are charged with blame if we do not—is an act of revolt against
the grain of patriarchal culture. But it is not enough to let our children go;
we need selves of our own to return to.
To have borne and reared a child is to have done that thing which
patriarchy joins with physiology to render into the definition of femaleness.
But also, it can mean the experiencing of one’s own body and emotions in a
powerful way. We experience not only physical, fleshly changes but the
feeling of a change in character. We learn, often through painful self-
discipline and self-cauterization, those qualities which are supposed to be
“innate” in us: patience, self-sacrifice, the willingness to repeat endlessly
the small, routine chores of socializing a human being. We are also, often to
our amazement, flooded with feelings both of love and violence intenser
and fiercer than any we had ever known. (A well-known pacifist, also a
mother, said recently on a platform: “If anyone laid a hand on my child, I’d
murder him”)
These and similar experiences are not easily put aside. Small wonder
that women gritting their teeth at the incessant demands of child-care still
find it hard to acknowledge their children’s growing independence of them;
still feel they must be at home, on the qui vive, be that ear always tuned for
the sound of emergency, of being needed. Children grow up, not in a
smooth ascending curve, but jaggedly, their needs inconstant as weather.
Cultural “norms” are marvelously powerless to decide, in a child of eight or
ten, what gender s/he will assume on a given day, or how s/he will meet
emergency, loneliness, pain, hunger. One is constantly made aware that a
human existence is anything but linear, long before the labyrinth of puberty;
because a human being of six is still a human being.
In a tribal or even a feudal culture a child of six would have serious
obligations; ours have none. But also, the woman at home with children is
not believed to be doing serious work; she is just supposed to be acting out
of maternal instinct, doing chores a man would never take on, largely
uncritical of the meaning of what she does. So child and mother alike are
depredated, because only grown men and women in the paid labor force are
supposed to be “productive.”
The power-relations between mother and child are often simply a
reflection of power-relations in patriarchal society: “You will do this
because I know what is good for you” is difficult to distinguish from “You
will do this because I can make you.” Powerless women have always used
mothering as a channel—narrow but deep—for their own human will to
power, their need to return upon the world what it has visited on them. The
child dragged by the arm across the room to be washed, the child cajoled,
bullied, and bribed into taking “one more bite” of a detested food, is more
than just a child which must be reared according to cultural traditions of
“good mothering.” S/he is a piece of reality, of the world, which can be
acted on, even modified, by a woman restricted from acting on anything
else except inert materials like dust and food. †

6
When I try to return to the body of the young woman of twenty-six,
pregnant for the first time, who fled from the physical knowledge of her
pregnancy and at the same time from her intellect and vocation, I realize
that I was effectively alienated from my real body and my real spirit by the
institution—not the fact—of motherhood. This institution—the foundation
of human society as we know it—allowed me only certain views, certain
expectations, whether embodied in the booklet in my obstetrician’s waiting
room, the novels I had read, my mother- in-law’s approval, my memories of
my own mother, the Sistine Madonna or she of the Michelangelo Pietà, the
floating notion that a woman pregnant is a woman calm in her fulfillment
or, simply, a woman waiting. Women have always been seen as waiting:
waiting to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not
come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work, waiting for
children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.
In my own pregnancy I dealt with this waiting, this female fate, by
denying every active, powerful aspect of myself. I became dissociated both
from my immediate, present, bodily experience and from my reading,
thinking, writing life. Like a traveler in an airport where her plane is several
hours delayed, who leafs through magazines she would never ordinarily
read, surveys shops whose contents do not interest her, I committed myself
to an outward serenity and a profound inner boredom. If boredom is simply
a mask for anxiety, then I had learned, as a woman, to be supremely bored
rather than to examine the anxiety underlying my Sistine tranquility. My
body, finally truthful, paid me back in the end: I was allergic to pregnancy.
I have come to believe, as will be clear throughout this book, that
female biology—the diffuse, intense sensuality radiating out from clitoris,
breasts, uterus, vagina; the lunar cycles of menstruation; the gestation and
fruition of life which can take place in the female body—has far more
radical implications than we have yet come to appreciate. Patriarchal
thought has limited female biology to its own narrow specifications. The
feminist vision has recoiled from female biology for these reasons; it will, I
believe, come to view our physicality as a resource, rather than a destiny. In
order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies
(though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of
our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal ground of our
intelligence.
The ancient, continuing envy, awe, and dread of the male for the female
capacity to create life has repeatedly taken the form of hatred for every
other female aspect of creativity. Not only have women been told to stick to
motherhood, but we have been told that our intellectual or aesthetic
creations were inappropriate, inconsequential, or scandalous, an attempt to
become “like men,” or to escape from the “real” tasks of adult womanhood:
marriage and childbearing. To “think like a man” has been both praise and
prison for women trying to escape the body-trap. No wonder that many
intellectual and creative women have insisted that they were “human
beings” first and women only incidentally, have minimized their physicality
and their bonds with other women. The body has been made so problematic
for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a
disembodied spirit.
But this reaction against the body is now coming into synthesis with
new inquiries into the actual—as opposed to the culturally warped—power
inherent in female biology, however we choose to use it, and by no means
limited to the maternal function.
 My own story, which is woven throughout this book, is only one story.
What I carried away in the end was a determination to heal—insofar as an
individual woman can, and as much as possible with other women—the
separation between mind and body; never again to lose myself both
psychically and physically in that way. Slowly I came to understand the
paradox contained in “my” experience of motherhood; that, although
different from many other women’s experiences it was not unique; and that
only in shedding the illusion of my uniqueness could I hope, as a woman, to
have any authentic life at all.

* The term “barren woman” was easy for me to use, unexamined, fifteen years ago. As should be
clear throughout this book, it seems to me now a term both tendentious and meaningless, based on a
view of women which sees motherhood as our only positive definition.
† 1986: the work of the Swiss psychotherapist Alice Miller has made me reflect further on the
material in this chapter and in Chapters IX and X. Miller identifies the “hidden cruelty” in child-
rearing as die repetition of “poisonous pedagogy” inflicted by the parents of the generation before
and as providing the soil in which obedience to authoritarianism and fascism take root. She notes that
“there is one taboo that has withstood all the recent efforts at demystification: the idealization of
mother love” (The Drama of the Gifted Child: How Narcissistic Parents Form and Deform the
Emotional Lives of Their Talented Children [New York: Harper & Row, 1981, p. 4). Her work traces
the damages of mat idealization (of both parents, but especially the mother) upon children forbidden
to name or protest their suffering, who side with their parents against themselves. Miller notes, “I
cannot listen to my child with empathy if I am inwardly preoccupied with being a good mother; I
cannot be open to what she is telling me” (For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Childrearing and
the Roots of Violence [New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983], P*258). Miller explores the
sources of what has been defined as child abuse—i.e., physical violation and sadistic punishment—
but she is equally concerned with the “gentle violence” of child-rearing, including that of
“antiauthoritarian” or “alternative” prescriptions, based on the denial and suppression of the child’s
own vitality and feelings. Miller does not consider the predominance of women as primary care-
givers, the investment of authoritarian or fascist systems in perpetuating male control of women’s
sexuality and reproductivity, or the structural differences between father-as-parent and mother-as-
parent. She does acknowledge that in America, women especially “have discovered the power of
their knowledge. They do not shrink from pointing out the poisonous nature of false information,
even though it has been well-concealed for millennia behind sacrosanct and well-meaning labels”
(For Your Own Good, p. xii).

OceanofPDF.com
II “THE SCARED CALLING”

One of the letters quoted in Margaret Sanger’s Motherhood in

Bondage (1928) comes from a woman seeking birth-control advice
so that she can have intercourse with her husband without fear, and
thus carry out her duties both as mother and wife: “I am not
passionate,” she writes, “but try to treat the sexual embrace the way
I should, be natural and play the part, for you know, it’s so different
a life from what all girls expect.”1 The history of institutionalized
motherhood and of institutionalized heterosexual relations (in this
case, marriage), converge in these words from an ordinary woman
of half a century ago, who sought only to fulfill the requirements of
both institutions, “be natural and play the part"—that impossible
contradiction demanded of women. What strategy handed from
ashamed mother to daughter, what fear of losing love, home,
desirability as a woman, taught her—taught us all—to fake orgasm?
“What all girls expect"—is that, was it for her, more than what the
institution had promised her in the form of romance, of transcendent
experience? Had she some knowledge of her own needs, for
tenderness, perhaps, for being touched in certain ways, for being
treated as more than a body for sex and procreation? What gave her
the courage to write to Margaret Sanger, to try to get some modest
control over the use of her body—The needs of her existing
children? Her husband’s demands? The dim, simmering voice of
self? We may assume all three. For generations of women have
asserted their courage on behalf of their own children and men, then
on behalf of strangers, and finally for themselves.
The institution of motherhood is not identical with bearing and caring
for children, any more than the institution of heterosexuality is identical
with intimacy and sexual love. Both create the prescriptions and the
conditions in which choices are made or blocked; they are not “reality” but
they have shaped the circumstances of our lives. The new scholars of
women’s history have begun to discover that, in any case, the social
institutions and prescriptions for behavior created by men have not
necessarily accounted for the real lives of women. Yet any institution which
expresses itself so universally ends by profoundly affecting our experience,
even the language we use to describe it. The experience of maternity and
the experience of sexuality have both been channeled to serve male
interests; behavior which threatens the institutions, such as illegitimacy,
abortion, lesbianism, is considered deviant or criminal.
Institutionalized heterosexuality told women for centuries that we were
dangerous, unchaste, the embodiment of carnal lust; then that we were “not
passionate,” frigid, sexually passive; today it prescribes the “sensuous,”
“sexually liberated” woman in the West, the dedicated revolutionary ascetic
in China; and everywhere it denies the reality of women’s love for women.
Institutionalized motherhood demands of women maternal “instinct” rather
than intelligence, selflessness rather than self-realization, relation to others
rather than the creation of self. Motherhood is “sacred” so long as its
offspring are “legitimate”—that is, as long as the child bears the name of a
father who legally controls the mother. It is “woman’s highest and holiest
mission,” according to a socialist tract of 1914;2 and a racist southern
historian of 1910 tells us that “woman is the embodied home, and the home
is the basis of all institutions, the buttress of society.”3
A more recent version of the argument comes from the British critic
Stuart Hampshire, who equates the “liberated woman” of today with Ibsen’s
panic-driven, suicidal heroine Hedda Gabler (who also refuses
motherhood), in the following melancholy prophecy:
An entirely enlightened mind, just recently conscious of its strength and under-employed,
finally corrodes and bleaches all the material of which respect is made—observances,
memories of a shared past, moral resolutions for the future: no stain of weak and ordinary
sentiment will remain, no differentiation of feeling and therefore no point of attachment. Why
carry on the family, and therefore why carry on the race? Only a feminine skepticism, newly
aroused, can be so totally subversive.4

Patriarchy would seem to require, not only that women shall assume the
major burden of pain and self-denial for the furtherance of the species, but
that a majority of that species—women—shall remain essentially
unquestioning and unenlightened. On this “underemployment” of female
consciousness depend the morality and the emotional life of the human
family. Like his predecessors of fifty and a hundred and more years ago,
Hampshire sees society as threatened when women begin to choose the
terms of their lives. Patriarchy could not survive without motherhood and
heterosexuality in their institutional forms; therefore they have to be treated
as axioms, as “nature” itself, not open to question except where, from time
to time and place to place, “alternate life-styles” for certain individuals are
tolerated.

2
The “sacred calling” has had, of course, an altogether pragmatic reality. In
the American colonies an ordinary family consisted of from twelve to
twenty-five. children. An “old maid,” who might be all of twenty-five years
of age, was treated with reproach if not derision; she had no way of
surviving economically, and was usually compelled to board with her kin
and help with the household and children.5 No other “calling” was open to
her. An English working-woman whose childhood was lived in the 1850S
and 1860s writes that “I was my mother’s seventh child, and seven more
were born after me—fourteen in all—which made my mother a perfect
slave. Generally speaking, she was either expecting a baby to be born or
had one at the breast. At the time there were eight of us the eldest was not
big enough to get ready to go to school without help.”6 Under American
slavery,
... it was common for planters to command women and girls to have children. On a Carolina
plantation of about 100 slaves the owner threatened to flog all of the women because they did
not breed. They told him they could not while they had to work in the rice ditches (in one or
two feet of water). After swearing and threatening he told them to tell the overseer’s wife
when they got in that way and he would put them on the land to work.7

Both the white pioneer mother and the Black female slave worked daily
as a fully productive part of the economy. Black women often worked the
fields with their children strapped to their backs. Historically, women have
borne and raised children while doing their share of necessary productive
labor, as a matter of course. Yet by the nineteenth century the voices rise
against the idea of the “working mother,” and in praise of “the mother at
home.” These voices reach a crescendo just as technology begins to reduce
the sheer level of physical hardship in general, and as the size of families
begins to decline. In the last century and a half, the idea of full-time,
exclusive motherhood takes root, and the “home” becomes a religious
obsession.
By the 1830s, in America, the male institutional voice (in this case that
of the American Tract Society) was intoning:
Mothers have as powerful an influence over the welfare of future generations, as all other
earthly causes combined.. . . When our land is filled with pious and patriotic mothers, then
will it be filled with virtuous and patriotic men. The world’s redeeming influence, under the
blessing of the Holy Spirit, must come from a mother’s lips. She who was first in the
transgression, must yet be the principal earthly instrument in the restoration. It is maternal
influence, after all, which must be the great agent in the hands of God, in bringing back our
guilty race to duty and happiness. (Emphasis mine.)

The mother bears the weight of Eve’s transgression (is, thus, the first
offender, the polluted one, the polluter) yet precisely because of this she is
expected to carry the burden of male salvation. Lest she fail, there are
horrible examples to warn her:
It was the mother of Byron who laid the foundation of his preeminence in guilt. ... If the
crimes of the poet deserve the execration of the world, the world cannot forget that it was the
mother who fostered in his youthful heart those passions which made the son a curse to his
fellow-man.8

But female voices, also, swell the chorus. Maria McIntosh, in 1850,
describes the ideal wife and mother:
Her husband cannot look on her . . . without reading in the serene expression of her face, the
Divine beatitude, “Blessed are the pure in heart". Her children revere her as the earthly type
of perfect love. They learn even more from her example than from her precept, that they are
to live, not in themselves, but to their fellow-creatures, and to the God in them. . . . She has
taught them to love their country and devote themselves to its advancement . . .9

Certainly the mother serves the interests of patriarchy: she exemplifies in

one person religion, social conscience, and nationalism. Institutional
motherhood revives and renews all other institutions.
The nineteenth-century “mother at home” seems, however, to have
suffered from certain familiar evil traits, such as ill- temper.
. . . can a mother expect to govern her child when she cannot govern herself? . . . She must
learn to control herself, to subdue her own passions; she must set her children an example of
meekness and of equanimity. . . . Let a mother feel grieved, and manifest her grief when her
child does wrong; let her, with calmness and reflection, use the discipline which the case
 requires; but never let her manifest irritated feeling, or give utterance to an angry
expression.10

This from the male expert. The Mother’s Book (1831), by Lydia Maria
Child, advises:
Do you say it is impossible always to govern one’s feelings? There is one method, a never-
failing one—prayer. ... You will say, perhaps, that you have not leisure to pray every time
your temper is provoked, or your heart is grieved.—It requires no time.—The inward
ejaculation of “Lord, help me to overcome this temptation” may be made in any place and
amid any employments; and, if uttered in humble sincerity, the voice that said to the raging
waters, “Peace! Be still!” will restore quiet to your troubled soul.11

Such advice to mothers gives us some sense of how female anger in

general has been perceived. In Little Women, Marmee tells Jo, the daughter
with an “Apollyon” of a “temper”:
I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo; but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope
to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so.12

I recall similar indoctrination in my own girlhood: my “temper” was a dark,

wicked blotch in me, not a response to events in the outer world. My
childhood anger was often alluded to as a “tantrum,” by which I understood
the adult world to mean some kind of possession, as by a devil. Later, as a
young mother, I remember feeling guilt that my explosions of anger were a
“bad example” for my children, as if they, too, should be taught that
“temper” is a defect of character, having nothing to do with what happens in
the world outside one’s flaming skin. Mother-love is supposed to be
continuous, unconditional. Love and anger cannot coexist. Female anger
threatens the institution of motherhood.

3
The nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideal of the mother and children
immured together in the home, the specialization of motherhood for
women, the separation of the home from the “man’s world” of wage-
earning, struggle, ambition, aggression, power, of the “domestic” from the
“public” or the “political”—all this is a late-arrived development in human
history. But the force both of the ideal and of the reality is so great that,
clearly, it serves no single, simple purpose.
 How did this notion begin? And what purpose does it serve?
From earliest settled life until the growth of factories as centers of
production, the home was not a refuge, a place for leisure and retreat from
the cruelty of the “outside world”; it was a part of the world, a center of
work, a subsistence unit. In it women, men, and children as early as they
were able, carried on an endless, seasonal activity of raising, preparing, and
processing food, processing skins, reeds, clay, dyes, fats, herbs, producing
textiles and clothing, brewing, making soap and candles, doctoring and
nursing, passing on these skills and crafts to younger people. A woman was
rarely if ever alone with nothing but the needs of a child or children to see
to.* Women and children were part of an actively busy social cluster. Work
was hard, laborious, often physically exhausting, but it was diversified and
usually communal. Mortality from childbirth and pregnancy and the loss of
infant lives was extremely high, the lifespan of women brief, and it would
be naive to romanticize an existence constantly threatened by malnutrition,
famine, and disease. But motherhood and the keeping of the home as a
private refuge were not, could not be, the central occupation of women, nor
were mother and child circumscribed into an isolated relationship.
On the Wisconsin frontier, pioneer mothers were innkeepers,
schoolteachers, pharmacists, running a home as a subsistence unit with
perhaps ten to fifteen children, taking in passing travelers and feeding and
lodging them. The mother “collected wild plants, berries, barks, flowers and
roots. . . . These she . . . dried and labeled ... to be used upon short notice. . .
. At times she was a surgeon . . . and fitted and bound together fingers,
hanging on shreds; or removed a rusty spike from a foot, washed the wound
. . . and saved the injured member,”13 The real, depleting burdens of
motherhood were physical: the toll of continual pregnancies, the drain of
constant childbearing and nursing.
The nineteenth century saw crucial changes in Western assumptions
about the home, work, women, and women’s relationship to productivity.
The earliest factories were actually the homes of agricultural workers who
began producing textiles, iron, glass, and other commodities for sale to a
middleman, who might supply the raw materials as well as the market for
the finished goods.14 Women had worked alongside men even at the forges,
had had almost a monopoly of the brewing trade, and the textile industry in
particular had always depended on women; as early as the fourteenth
century in England women had woven not only for the home but outside it.
Gradually those women who still worked at hand-spinning or weaving
in the home were driven into the mills by the competition of power-
spinning machines. There were no laws to limit the hours of labor; a woman
worked for twelve hours, then returned to take up the burdens of her
household. By 1844 a British factory inspector could report that “a vast
majority of the persons employed at night and for long periods during the
day are females; their labour is cheaper and they are more easily induced to
undergo severe bodily fatigue than men.”15
These same women left children at home; sometimes in the care of a
six- or seven-year-old daughter, a grandmother, or a neighbor’s hired child.
Sometimes an older woman would keep infants and young children in her
house for a fee; instead of breast-milk the unweaned babies were fed watery
gruel or “pap,” or the mother, if she could afford it, was forced to buy cow’s
milk for her child. The children were dosed with laudanum to keep them
quiet. The severance of the sphere of work from the sphere of child-raising
thus immediately created disadvantage and hardship for both child and
mother.
These women worked from necessity, to supplement a husband’s
inadequate or nonexistent wages; and because they were paid less, their
employment was seen as threatening to male workers. Women’s work was
clearly subversive to “the home” and to patriarchal marriage; not only
might a man find himself economically dependent on his wife’s earnings,
but it would conceivably even be possible for women to dispense with
marriage from an economic point of view.† These two forces—the
humanitarian concern for child welfare and the fear for patriarchal values—
converged to provide pressure which led to legislation controlling children’s
and women’s labor, and the assertion that “the home, its cares and
employments, is the woman’s true sphere."
The home thus defined had never before existed. It was a creation of the
Industrial Revolution, an ideal invested with the power of something God-
given, and its power as an idea remains unexpunged today. For the first
time, the productivity of women (apart from reproductivity) was seen as “a
waste of time, a waste of property, a waste of morals and a waste of health
and life.” Women were warned that their absence from home did not only
mean the neglect of their children; if they failed to create the comforts of
the nest, their men would be off to the alehouse. The welfare of men and
children was the true mission of women. Since men had no mission to care
for children or keep house, the solution was to get the women out of the
factories.
As public opinion became aroused over the fate of children whose
mothers worked in the mills, some efforts were made to set up nurseries;
but in Victorian and Edwardian England, as in twentieth-century America,
state-supported child-care was opposed on the grounds that it would violate
“the sanctity of the domestic hearth and the decent seclusion of private life.
. . . The family is the unit upon which a constitutional Government has been
raised which is the admiration and envy of mankind. Hitherto, whatever the
laws have touched, they have not dared invade this sacred precinct; and the
husband and wife, however poor, returning home from whatsoever
occupation or harassing engagements, have there found their dominion,
their repose, their compensation for many a care”16
In 1915 the Women’s Cooperative Guild in Britain published a volume
of letters written by the wives of manual laborers about their lives as
mothers and workers in the home. These lives stood as far as possible in
contradiction to the ideal of the home as a protected place apart from the
brutal realities of work and struggle. The average woman had from five to
eleven children with several miscarriages, most of them with no prenatal
care and inadequate diet. “At the time when she ought to be well fed she
stints herself in order to save; for in a working class home if there is saving
to be done, it is not the husband and children, but the mother who makes
her meal off the scraps which remain over, or ‘plays with meatless
bones.’”17 The anxiety and physical depletion of incessant childbearing is a
theme which runs throughout these letters. Many—against their principles,
and often facing a husband’s opposition—took drugs to bring on abortion,
which were usually ineffective and on which the sickliness of the
forthcoming child was blamed. But along with the ill-health, mental strain,
and exhaustion of which the women write, go an extraordinary resiliency of
spirit, the will to make do, and an active sense of the injustice of their
situation.
In my early motherhood I took it for granted that women had to suffer at these times, and it
was best to behave and not make a fuss. ... I do not know which is the worst—childbearing
with anxiety and strain of mind and body to make ends meet, with the thought of another one
to share the already small allowance, or getting through the confinement fairly well, and
 getting about household duties too soon, and bringing on other ailments which make life and
everything a burden.18

Many wrote of the damage done by ignorance, the young woman’s total
lack of preparation for marriage and pregnancy; and even more of the
insensitivity of husbands demanding sex throughout pregnancy or
immediately after delivery:
During the time of pregnancy, the male beast keeps entirely from the female: not so with the
woman; she is the prey of a man just the same as though she was not pregnant. ... If a woman
does not feel well she must not say so, as a man has such a lot of ways of punishing a woman
if she does not give in to him.19
I do not blame my husband for this birth. [The writer had had seven children and two
miscarriages.] He had waited patiently for ten months because I was ill, and thinking the time
was safe, I submitted as a duty, knowing there is much unfaithfulness on the part of the
husband where families are limited. ... It is quite time this question of maternity was taken up,
and we must let the men know we are human beings with ideals, and aspire to something
higher than to be mere objects on which they can satisfy themselves.20

The women were not only pregnant for much of their lives, but doing heavy
labor: scrubbing floors, hauling basins of wash, ironing, cooking over coal
and wood fires which had to be fed and tended. One woman, against her
doctor’s orders, did her ironing and kneading in bed while recovering from
a miscarriage.21 Despite their resentment of the husbands’ sexual demands
and opposition to abortion, the women tried to spare their men, who had
worked hard all day, from further strain in the home:
I dare not let my husband in his precarious condition hear a cry of pain from me, and travail
pain cannot always be stifled; and here again the doctor helped me by giving me a sleeping
draught to administer him as soon as I felt the pangs of childbirth. Hence he slept in one room
while I travailed in the other, and brought forth the liveliest boy that ever gladdened a
mother’s heart 22

But there was no homecoming from work for the women.

Within the home or outside it, reality has always been at odds with the
ideal. In 1860 in America a million women were employed; by the end of
the Civil War there were 75,000 working-women in New York City alone.
In 1973 United States Census reported more than six million children under
the age of six whose mothers worked full time outside the home.23 Without
free, universal, child-care, any woman who has ever had to contrive and
improvise in order to leave her children daily and earn a living can imagine
the weight of anxiety, guilt, uncertainty, the financial burden, the actual
emergencies which these statistics imply. The image of the mother in the
home, however unrealistic, has haunted and reproached the lives of wage-
earning mothers. But it has also become, and for men as well as women, a
dangerous archetype: the Mother, source of angelic love and forgiveness in
a world increasingly ruthless and impersonal; the feminine, leavening,
emotional element in a society ruled by male logic and male claims to
“objective,” “rational” judgment; the symbol and residue of moral values
and tenderness in a world of wars, brutal competition, and contempt for
human weakness.

4
The physical and psychic weight of responsibility on the woman with
children is by far the heaviest of social burdens. It cannot be compared with
slavery or sweated labor because the emotional bonds between a woman
and her children make her vulnerable in ways which the forced laborer does
not know; he can hate and fear his boss or master, loathe the toil; dream of
revolt or of becoming a boss; the woman with children is a prey to far more
complicated, subversive feelings. Love and anger can exist concurrently;
anger at the conditions of motherhood can become translated into anger at
the child, along with the fear that we are not “loving"; grief at all we cannot
do for our children in a society so inadequate to meet human needs becomes
translated into guilt and self-laceration. This “powerless responsibility” as
one group of women has termed it,‡ is a heavier burden even than
providing a living—which so many mothers have done, and do,
simultaneously with mothering—because it is recognized in some quarters,
at least, that economic forces, political oppression, lie behind poverty and
unemployment; but the mother’s very character, her status as a woman, are
in question if she has “failed” her children.
Whatever the known facts,§ it is still assumed that the mother is “with
the child.” It is she, finally, who is held accountable for her children’s
health, the clothes they wear, their behavior at school, their intelligence and
general development. Even when she is the sole provider for a fatherless
family, she and no one else bears the guilt for a child who must spend the
day in a shoddy nursery or an abusive school system. Even when she
herself is trying to cope with an environment beyond her control—
malnutrition, rats, lead-paint poisoning, the drug traffic, racism—in the eyes
of society the mother is the child’s environment. The worker can unionize,
go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their
children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken
the form of physical or mental breakdown.
For mothers, the privatization of the home has meant not only an
increase in powerlessness, but a desperate loneliness. A group of East
London women talked with Hannah Gavron of the difference between
trying to raise children in a street of row houses and in the new high-rise
flats of postwar London: the loss of neighborhood, of stoop life, of a
common pavement where children could be watched at play by many pairs
of eyes.24 In Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1950s, some married
graduate students lived in housing built on the plan of the “lane” or row-
house street, where children played in a common court, a mother could
deliver her child to a neighbor for an hour, children filtered in and out of
each others’ houses, and mothers, too, enjoyed a casual, unscheduled
companionship with each other. With the next step upward in academic
status, came the move to the suburbs, to the smaller, then the larger, private
house, the isolation of “the home” from other homes increasing with the
husband’s material success. The working- class mothers in their new flats
and the academic wives in their new affluence all lost something: they
became, to a more extreme degree, house-bound, isolated women.
Lee Sanders Comer, a British Marxist-feminist, reiterates the classic
Marxist critique of the nuclear family—the small, privatized unit of a
woman, a man, and their children. In this division of labor the man is the
chief or the sole wage-earner, and the woman’s role is that of housewife,
mother, consumer of goods, and emotional support of men and children.
The “family” really means “the mother,” who carries the major share of
child-rearing, and who also absorbs the frustrations and rage her husband
may bring home from work (often in the form of domestic violence). Her
own anger becomes illegitimate, since her job is to provide him with the
compassion and comfort he needs at home in order to return daily to the
factory or the mine pit. Comer sees this division of labor as demanded by
capitalism. But why should capitalism in and of itself require that women
specialize in this role of emotional salvager, or that women and never men
rear children and take care of the home? How much does this really have to
do with capitalism, and how much with the system which, as Eli Zaretsky
points out, predated capitalism and has survived under socialism—
patriarchy?25
The dependency of the male child on a woman in the first place, the
spectacle of women producing new life from their bodies, milk from their
breasts, the necessity of women for men—emotionally and as reproducers
of life—these are elements we must recognize in any attempt to change the
institutions that have germinated from them. Under patriarchal socialism we
find the institution of motherhood revised and reformed in certain ways
which permit women to serve (as we have actually served through most of
our history) both as the producers and nurturers of children and as the full-
time workers demanded by a developing economy. Child-care centers,
youth camps, schools, facilitate but do not truly radicalize the familiar
“double role” of working women; in no socialist country does the
breakdown of the division of labor extend to bringing large numbers of men
into child-care. Under Marxist or Maoist socialism, both motherhood and
heterosexuality are still institutionalized; heterosexual marriage and the
family are still viewed as the “normal” situation for human beings and the
building- blocks of the new society. Lesbianism is announced to be
nonexistent in China, while in Cuba homosexuals are treated as political
criminals.¶ Birth control may or may not be available to women, depending
on economic, military, and demographic pressures; in China women are
pressured to become experimental subjects for new methods of birth control
“for the revolution.”26 There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the
control of women’s bodies by men. The woman’s body is the terrain on
which patriarchy is erected.

* Agnes Smedley, writing of her grandmother at the turn of the century, sketches a vigorous,
powerful woman involved in productive work:
She milked the cows each morning and night with the sweeping strength and movements of a
man. She carried pails of skimmed milk and slopped the hogs; when she kneaded bread for
baking it whistled and snapped under her hands, and her arms worked like steam pistons. She
awoke the men at dawn and she told them when to go upstairs at night. She directed the
picking of fruit—apples, pears, peaches, berries of every kind, and she taught her girls how to
can, preserve and dry them for the winter. In the autumn she directed the slaughtering of beef
and pork, and then smoked the meat in the smokehouse. When the sugar cane ripened in the
 summer she saw it cut, and superintended the making of molasses in the long, low sugar cane
mill at the foot of the hill.
This woman had five children of her own, and eight of her husband’s from a prior marriage.
(Daughter of Earth [Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1973]-PP- 18-19.)
† The social historian A. W. Calhoun suggests that in America the factory opened the way to a new
economic independence for women which they had never had in the colonial period or the opening of
the frontier. The need to keep the family patriarchal was at least one force behind the enactment of
child-labor laws and of laws restricting the hours and conditions of work for women.
‡ 1986: A New York feminist group called “The Matriarchists.”
§ Twenty-six million children of wage-earning mothers, 8 million in femaleheaded households in the
United States by the mid—1970s (Alice Rossi, “Children and Work in the Lives of Women,” a paper
delivered at the University of Arizona, February 7, 1976).
1986: In March 1984 the Current Population Reports, U.S. Bureau of the Census, showed 32.4
million children under eighteen years with mothers in the labor force; 10.4 million “own children”
(by birth, adoption, or stepchildren) were recorded in female—headed households, no husband
present.
¶ 1986: For a more searching look at homosexuality and heterosexism in Cuba, see Lourdes
Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich, “Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution: Notes toward an
Understanding of the Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experience,” SIGNS: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society, Vol. 9, No. 4 (1984), pp. 683-99. See also John d’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay
Identity,” in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds., Powers of Desire: The
Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press New Feminist Series, 1983).

OceanofPDF.com
III THE KINGDOM FATHERS

For the first time in history, a pervasive recognition is developing

that the patriarchal system cannot answer for itself; that it is not
inevitable; that it is transitory; and that the cross-cultural, global
domination of women by men can no longer be either denied or
defended. When we acknowledge this, we tear open the relationship
at the core of all power-relationships, a tangle of lust, violence,
possession, fear, conscious longing, unconscious hostility,
sentiment, rationalization: the sexual understructure of social and
political forms. For the first time we are in a position to look around
us at the Kingdom of the Fathers and take its measure. What we see
is the one system which recorded civilization has never actively
challenged, and which has been so universal as to seem a law of
nature.*
Patriarchy is the power of the fathers: a familial-social, ideological,
political system in which men—by force, direct pressure, or through ritual,
tradition, law, and language, customs, etiquette, education, and the division
of labor, determine what part women shall or shall not play, and in which
the female is everywhere subsumed under the male. It does not necessarily
imply that no woman has power, or that all women in a given culture may
not have certain powers. Among the matrilineal Crow, for example, women
take major honorific roles in ceremony and festival, but are debarred from
social contacts and sacred objects during menstruation. Where women and
men alike share a particular cultural phenomenon, it implies quite different
things according to gender. “Where men wear veils—as among the North
African Tuareg—this remoteness serves to increase the status and power of
an individual, but it hardly does so for women in purdah” “Ultimately the
line is drawn,” as it is drawn, albeit differently, in every culture.1
 Nor does patriarchy imply a direct survival of the father’s power over
the son, although this power-relationship was once culturally unquestioned,
as for example under feudalism, or in the Victorian family. The German
psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich traces the decline of this father-son
relationship under the pressures of industrialization, mass production, and
the specialization of labor: as “work” moves outside the home and society
becomes more complex and fragmented the father becomes a figure largely
absent from the family, one who has lost the “substance” of his old practical
authority. Yet, as Mitscherlich points out, “the patriarchal structural
components in our society are closely associated with magical thought. It
assumes the omnipotence-impotence relationship between father and son,
God and man, ruler and ruled, to be the natural principle of social
organization.” This omnipotence-impotence relationship exists above all
between men and women; and education, social organization, and our own
“magical thought” still bear the imprint of that paternalistic image.2
The power of the fathers has been difficult to grasp because it permeates
everything, even the language in which we try to describe it. It is diffuse
and concrete; symbolic and literal; universal, and expressed with local
variations which obscure its universality. Under patriarchy, I may live in
purdah or drive a truck; I may raise my children on a kibbutz or be the sole
breadwinner for a fatherless family or participate in a demonstration against
abortion legislation with my baby on my back; I may work as a “barefoot
doctor” in a village commune in the People’s Republic of China, or make
my life on a lesbian commune in New England; I may become a hereditary
or elected head of state or wash the underwear of a millionaire’s wife; I may
serve my husband his early-morning coffee within the clay walls of a
Berber village or march in an academic procession; whatever my status or
situation, my derived economic class, or my sexual preference, I live under
the power of the fathers, and I have access only to so much of privilege or
influence as the patriarchy is willing to accede to me, and only for so long
as I will pay the price for male approval. And this power goes much further
than laws and customs; in the words of the sociologist Brigitte Berger,
“until now a primarily masculine intellect and spirit have dominated in the
interpretation of society and culture—whether this interpretation is carried
out by males or females . . . fundamentally masculine assumptions have
shaped our whole moral and intellectual history.”3
 Matrilineal societies—in which kinship is traced and property
transmitted through the mother’s line—or matrilocal societies—where the
husband moves into the house or village of the wife’s mother—exist as
variations on the more familiar western pattern of the patriarchal family
which is also patrinomial, patrilineal, and patrilocal, and in which, without
the father’s name, a child is “illegitimate.” But these variations merely
represent different ways of channeling position and property to the male;
they may confer more status and dignity on women and reduce the
likelihood of polygamy; but they are not to be confused with “matriarchy.”
Nor, as Angela Davis has noted, can a Black woman who is the head of her
household be termed a “matriarch” while she is powerless and oppressed in
the larger society.4
In matrilineal descent groups, women are responsible for the care of
children, and every child is the primary responsibility of a particular woman
even where other women share its care; adult men have authority over
women and children; and descent- group exogamy (marrying out of the
maternal family) is required. David Schneider makes the relative power of
men and women extremely clear: women and children are under male
authority “except perhaps for specially qualifying conditions applicable to a
very few women of the society. Positions of highest authority within the
matrilineal descent group will . . . ordinarily be vested in statuses occupied
by men.”5
The advantages to women of a matrilineal over a patrilineal order are
actually slight. The emotional bonds between a mother and her children are
subject to the strain of the father’s kinship group pulling the child away
from the maternal descent group; particularly in the case of sons,
“economic cooperation and the transfer of property between father and
child” has a compelling effect in weakening the emotional and
psychological authority of the mother. The reverse is not true in patrilineal
societies because the mother, however strongly bonded with her children
emotionally, has no power beyond that relationship which might challenge
the power of father-right (descent and inheritance in the male line) .6
The terms “matriarchy” “mother-right,” and “gynocracy” or “gynarchy”
tend to be used imprecisely, often interchangeably. Robert Briffault† goes to
some pains to show that matriarchy in primitive societies was not simply
patriarchy with a different sex in authority; he reserves the term
“gynocracy” for a situation in which women would have economic
domination and control through property. He points out that the matriarchal
elements in any society have had a functional origin—i.e., the maternal
function of gestating, bearing, nurturing, and educating children; and that
with this function in early society went a great deal of activity and authority
which is now relegated to the male sphere outside the family. Briffault’s
matriarchal society is one in which female creative power is pervasive, and
women have organic authority, rather than one in which the woman
establishes and maintains domination and control over the man, as the man
over the woman in patriarchy. There would be, according to Briffault, a
kind of free consent to the authority of woman in a matriarchal society,
because of her involvement with the essential practical and magical activity
of that society. He thus sees matriarchy as organic by nature: because of the
integration of agriculture, craft, invention, into the life centered around the
mother and her children, women would be involved in a variety of creative
and productive roles.‡ Patriarchy, in Briffault’s view, develops when men
revolt against this organic order, by establishing economic domination and
by taking over magical powers previously considered the domain of
women. “Gynocracy,” like patriarchy, would thus mean a holding of power
through force or economic pressure, and could only exist with the advent of
private ownership and the economic advantage of one group over another.7
At the core of patriarchy is the individual family unit which originated
with the idea of property and the desire to see one’s property transmitted to
one’s biological descendants. Simone de Beauvoir connects this desire with
the longing for immortality—in a profound sense, she says, “the owner
transfers, alienates, his existence into his property; he cares more for it than
for his very life; it overflows the narrow limits of his mortal lifetime, and
continues to exist beyond the body’s dissolution—the earthly and material
incorporation of the immortal soul. But this survival can only come about if
the property remains in the hands of its owner; it can be his beyond death
only if it belongs to individuals in whom he sees himself projected, who are
his.”8A crucial moment in human consciousness, then, arrives when man
discovers that it is he himself, not the moon or the spring rains or the spirits
of the dead, who impregnates the woman; that the child she carries and
gives birth to is his child, who can make him immortal, both mystically, by
propitiating the gods with prayers and sacrifices when he is dead, and
concretely, by receiving the patrimony from him. At this crossroads of
sexual possession, property ownership, and the desire to transcend death,
developed the institution we know: the present- day patriarchal family with
its supernaturalizing of the penis, its division of labor by gender, its
emotional, physical, and material possessiveness, its ideal of monogamous
marriage until death (and its severe penalties for adultery by the wife), the
“illegitimacy” of a child born outside wedlock, the economic dependency of
women, the unpaid domestic services of the wife, the obedience of women
and children to male authority, the imprinting and continuation of
heterosexual roles.
Again: some combination or aspect of patriarchal values prevails,
whether in an Orthodox Jewish family where the wife mediates with the
outer world and earns a living to enable the husband to study Torah; or for
the upper-class European or Oriental couple, both professionals, who
employ servants for domestic work and a governess for the children. They
prevail even where women are the nominal “heads of households.” For,
much as she may act as the coequal provider or so-called matriarch within
her own family, every mother must deliver her children over within a few
years of their birth to the patriarchal system of education, of law, of
religion, of sexual codes; she is, in fact, expected to prepare them to enter
that system without rebelliousness or “maladjustment” and to perpetuate it
in their own adult lives. Patriarchy depends on the mother to act as a
conservative influence, imprinting future adults with patriarchal values even
in those early years when the mother-child relationship might seem most
individual and private; it has also assured through ritual and tradition that
the mother shall cease, at a certain point, to hold the child—in particular the
son—in her orbit. Certainly it has created images of the archetypal Mother
which reinforce the conservatism of motherhood and convert it to an energy
for the renewal of male power.
Of these images, and their implications for the whole spectrum of
human relations, there is still much unsaid. Women have been both mothers
and daughters, but have written little on the subject; the vast majority of
literary and visual images of motherhood comes to us filtered through a
collective or individual male consciousness.§ As soon as a woman knows
that a child is growing in her body, she falls under the power of theories,
ideals, archetypes, descriptions of her new existence, almost none of which
have come from other women (though other women may transmit them)
and all of which have floated invisibly about her since she first perceived
herself to be female and therefore potentially a mother. We need to know
what, out of all that welter of image-making and thought-spinning, is worth
salvaging, if only to understand better an idea so crucial in history, a
condition which has been wrested from the mothers themselves to buttress
the power of the fathers.

2
Women are beginning to ask certain questions which, as the feminist
philosopher Mary Daly observes, patriarchal method has declared
nonquestions. The dominant male culture, in separating man as knower
from both woman and from nature as the objects of knowledge,9 evolved
certain intellectual polarities which still have the power to blind our
imaginations. Any deviance from a quality valued by that culture can be
dismissed as negative: where “rationality” is posited as sanity, legitimate
method, “real thinking,” any alternative, intuitive, supersensory, or poetic
knowledge is labeled “irrational.” If we listen well to the connotations of
“irrational” they are highly charged: we hear overtones of “hysteria” (that
disease once supposed to arise in the womb), of “madness” (the absence of
a certain type of thinking to which all “rational men” subscribe), and of
randomness, chaotic absence of form. Thus no attempt need be made to
discover a form or a language or a pattern foreign to those which technical
reason has already recognized. Moreover, the term “rational” relegates to its
opposite term all that it refuses to deal with, and thus ends by assuming
itself to be purified of the nonrational, rather than searching to identify and
assimilate its own surreal or nonlinear elements. This single error may have
mutilated patriarchal thinking—especially scientific and philosophic
thinking—more than we yet understand.
Perhaps an even more fundamental split is that which divides the
“inner” from the “outer.” A concise description of this way of perceiving
can be found in Freud’s essay “On Negation”:
Expressed in the language of the oldest, that is, of the oral instinctual impulses, the alternative
runs thus: “I should like to eat that, or I should like to spit it out,” or, carried a stage further, “I
should like to take this into me and keep that outside of me.” That is to say: it is to be either
 inside me or outside me. . . . From [the point of view of the original pleasure-ego] what is
bad, what is alien to the ego, and what is external are, to begin with, identical.10

As the inhabitant of a female body, this description gives me pause. The

boundaries of the ego seem to me much less crudely definable than the
words “inner” and “outer” suggest. I do not perceive myself as a walled city
into which certain emissaries are received and from which others are
excluded. The question is much more various and complicated. A woman
may be raped—penetrated vaginally against her will by the penis or forced
to take it into her mouth, in which case it is certainly experienced as alien
invader—or, in heterosexual love-making, she may accept the penis or take
it in her hand and insert it in her vagina. In love-making which is not simply
“fucking” there is, often, a strong sense of interpenetration, of feeling the
melting of the walls of flesh, as physical and emotional longing deliver the
one person into the other, blurring the boundary between body and body.
The identification with another woman’s orgasm as if it were one’s own is
one of the most intense interpersonal experiences: nothing is either “inside”
me or “outside” at such moments. Even in autoeroticism, the clitoris which
is more or less external delivers its throbbing signals to the vagina and all
the way into the uterus which cannot be seen or touched.
Nor, in pregnancy, did I experience the embryo as decisively internal in
Freud’s terms, but rather, as something inside and of me, yet becoming
hourly and daily more separate, on its way to becoming separate from me
and of-itself. In early pregnancy the stirring of the fetus felt like ghostly
tremors of my own body, later like the movements of a being imprisoned in
me; but both sensations were my sensations, contributing to my own sense
of physical and psychic space.
Without doubt, in certain situations the child in one’s body can only feel
like a foreign body introduced from without: an alien. (However, in her
monograph, Maternal Emotions, Niles Newton cites studies of vomiting
during pregnancy which suggest that it is related not to aversion to the
pregnancy itself but to the conditions of conception—frequent undesired
sex and the absence of orgasm.11) Yet even women who have been raped
seem often to assimilate that germ of being, created in violence, not as
something introduced from without but as nascent from within. The embryo
is, of course, both. We ovulate whether or not the ovum is to encounter a
sperm. The child that I carry for nine months can be defined neither as me
or as not-me. Far from existing in the mode of “inner space,” women are
powerfully and vulnerably attuned both to “inner” and “outer” because for
us the two are continuous, not polar.
The rejection of the dualism, of the positive-negative polarities between
which most of our intellectual training has taken place, has been an
undercurrent of feminist thought.12 And, rejecting them, we reaffirm the
existence of all those who have through the centuries been negatively
defined: not only women, but the “untouchable,” the “unmanly,” the
“nonwhite,” the “illiterate": the “invisible.” Which forces us to confront the
problem of the essential dichotomy: power/powerlessness.
Power is both a primal word and a primal relationship under patriarchy.
Through control of the mother, the man assures himself of possession of his
children; through control of his children he insures the disposition of his
patrimony and the safe passage of his soul after death. It would seem
therefore that from very ancient times the identity, the very personality, of
the man depends on power, and on power in a certain, specific sense: that of
power over others, beginning with a woman and her children. The
ownership of human beings proliferates: from primitive or arranged
marriage through contractual marriage- with-dowry through more recent
marriage “for love” but involving the economic dependency of the wife,
through the feudal system, through slavery and serfdom. The powerful
(mostly male) make decisions for the powerless: the well for the sick, the
middle-aged for the aging, the “sane” for the “mad,” the educated for the
illiterate, the influential for the marginal.
However the man may first have obtained power over the woman as
mother, this power has become diffused through our society in terms of that
first sexual enslavement. Each colonized people is defined by its conqueror
as weak, feminine, incapable of self-government, ignorant, uncultured,
effete, irrational, in need of civilizing. On the other hand it may also be
savored as mystical, physical, in deep contact with the earth—all attributes
of the primordial Mother. But to say that the conquered are seen in this way
does not mean that they have been truly seen.
To hold power over others means that the powerful is permitted a kind
of short-cut through the complexity of human personality. He does not have
to enter intuitively into the souls of the powerless, or to hear what they are
saying in their many languages, including the language of silence.
Colonialism exists by virtue of this short-cut—how else could so few live
among so many and understand so little?
Much has been written about the effect of this condition upon the
psyche of the powerless, all of it applicable to women, though the writers
have been male, and sexist.13 Powerlessness can lead to lassitude, self-
negation, guilt, and depression; it can also generate a kind of psychological
keenness, a shrewdness, an alert and practiced observation of the oppressor
—“psyching- out” developed into a survival tool. Because the powerful can
always depend on the short-cut of authority or force to effect his will, he
has no apparent need for such insights, and, in fact, it can be dangerous for
him to explore too closely into the mind of the powerless. Southern whites
maintained well into the years of Black civil-rights struggle that “our
Negroes” were really satisfied with their condition. In similar vein, a
complacent husband will announce that his wife is a “liberated woman,”
while male psychoanalysts and philosophers weave fanciful and
uncorroborated theories about women.14 The powerful person would seem
to have a good deal at stake in suppressing or denying his awareness of the
personal reality of others; power seems to engender a kind of willed
ignorance, a moral stupidity, about the inwardness of others, hence of
oneself. This quality has variously been described as “detachment,”
“objectivity,” “sanity”—as if the recognition of another’s being would open
the floodgates to panic and hysteria. E. M. Forster personifies this quality in
his novel Howards End (1910), in the characters of the industrialist Mr.
Wilcox and his son, for whom the personal is both trivial and dangerous:
. . . there was one quality in Henry for which [his wife] was never prepared, however much
she reminded herself of it: his obtuseness. He simply did not notice things, and there was no
more to be said ... he never noticed the lights and shades that exist in the greyest conversation,
the finger-posts, the milestones, the collisions, the illimitable views. Once . . . she scolded
him about it. He was puzzled, but replied with a laugh: “My motto is Concentrate. I’ve no
intention of frittering away my strength on that kind of thing.” “It isn’t frittering away the
strength,” she protested. “It’s enlarging the space in which you may be strong.” He answered,
“You’re a clever little woman, but my motto’s Concentrate.”15

Mr. Wilcox is powerful as one member of a moneyed, imperialist male

establishment, the pre-World War I England already losing itself to urban
sprawl, speculative capitalism, and a peculiarly abstract type of class
relationship. The class oppression in the novel is inextricable from male
contempt and condescension toward women, of which Wilcox and his son
provide innumerable examples. He is also powerful as the head of
household, the dictator of family principle, who is not above suppressing
his first wife’s deathbed letter in the name of keeping her property in the
family. His son—also in the name of protecting family honor and property
—commits manslaughter. Lies, force, but above all a profound disavowal of
the claims of human personality, characterize the Wilcox world. Margaret,
who becomes Mr. Wilcox’s second wife, and her sister Helen, correctly
perceive these men as hollow, as concealing an inner “chaos and
emptiness.” Yet this male power is derived from the power of an ideology: a
structure internalized in the form of tradition and even of religion.
Monotheism posits a god whose essential attribute is that he (sic) is all-
powerful: He can raze Babylon or Nineveh, bring plague and fire to Egypt,
and part the sea. But his power is most devastatingly that of an idea in
people’s minds, which leads them to obey him out of fear of punishment,
and to reject other (often female) deities because they are convinced that in
any contest he will be victorious. He calls himself “Father”—but we must
remember that a father is simply a male who has possession and control of a
female (or more than one) and her offspring. It is not from God the Father
that we derive the idea of paternal authority; it is out of the struggle for
paternal control of the family that God the Father is created. His word is
law and the idea of his power becomes more important than any
demonstration of it; it becomes internalized as “conscience,” “tradition,”
“the moral law within.”¶
The idea of power thus becomes the power of an idea, which saturates
all other notions of power. In both East and West, sexual love is imagined as
power over someone, or the falling under someone else’s power. Arabic
tradition has it that to fall in love is to have fallen under the power of
witchcraft.16 The Occidental lover is similarly “bewitched” or
“fascinated”—i.e., bound: powerless. Once more, responsibility toward the
other, genuine knowledge of the other as person, is unnecessary. The
language of patriarchal power insists on a dichotomy: for one person to
have power, others—or another—must be powerless.
Thus, as women begin to claim full humanity, a primary question
concerns the meaning of power. In the move from powerlessness, toward
what are we moving? The one aspect in which most women have felt their
own power in the patriarchal sense—authority over and control of another
—has been motherhood; and even this aspect, as we shall see, has been
wrenched and manipulated to male control.
Ancient motherhood was filled with a mana (supernatural force) which
has been explored in the work of such writers as Joseph Campbell and Erich
Neumann. Yet the helplessness of the child confers a certain narrow kind of
power on the mother everywhere—a power she may not desire, but also
often a power which may compensate to her for her powerlessness
everywhere else. The power of the mother is, first of all, to give or withhold
nourishment and warmth, to give or withhold survival itself.* Nowhere else
(except in rare and exceptional cases, e.g., an absolute ruler like Catherine
de’ Medici, or a woman guard in a concentration camp) does a woman
possess such literal power over life and death.** And it is at this moment
that her life is most closely bound to the child’s, for better or worse, and
when the child, for better or worse, is receiving its earliest impressions. In
de Beauvoir’s words, “It was as Mother that woman was fearsome; it is in
maternity that she must be transfigured and enslaved.”17 The idea of
maternal power has been domesticated. In transfiguring and enslaving
woman, the womb—the ultimate source of this power—has historically
been turned against us and itself made into a source of powerlessness.

3
Outside of the mother’s brief power over the child—subject to male
interference—women have experienced “power over” in two forms, both of
them negative. The first is men’s power over us—whether physical,
economic, or institutional—along with the spectacle of their bloody
struggles for power over other men, their implicit sacrifice of human
relationships and emotional values in the quest for dominance. Like other
dominated people, we have learned to manipulate and seduce, or to
internalize men’s will and make it ours, and men have sometimes
characterized this as “power” in us; but it is nothing more than the child’s or
courtesan’s “power” to wheedle and the dependent’s “power” to disguise
her feelings—even from herself—in order to obtain favors, or literally to
survive.
The possibility of “power” for women has historically been befogged by
sentimentality and mystification. When the Grimke sisters began to speak
before antislavery societies in the 1830s, they were breaking with a
convention that forbade women to appear on public platforms. A pastoral
letter from the Congregational Church was issued against them, saying:
The appropriate duties and influence of women are clearly stated in the New Testament.
Those duties and that influence are unobtrusive and private, but the sources of mighty power.
When the mild, dependent, softening influence upon the sternness of man’s opinion is fully
exercised, society feels the effect of it in a thousand forms. The power of woman is her
dependence, flowing from the consciousness of that weakness which God has given her for
her protection. But when she assumes the place and tone of man as a public reformer . . . she
yields the power which God has given her for her protection and her character becomes
unnatural . . . (Emphasis mine.)18

It was as if in answer to such sentiments that Olive Schreiner, in her

novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883), made her heroine Lyndall burst
forth in response to her friend Waldo’s remark that “some women have
power”:
“Power! Did you ever hear of men being asked whether other souls should have power or
not? It is born in them. You may dam up the fountain of water and make it a stagnant marsh,
or you may let it run free and do its work; but you cannot say whether or not it shall be there;
it is there. And it will act, if not openly for good, then covertly for evil; but it will act. . . .
Power!” she said suddenly, smiting her little hand upon the rail. “Yes, we have power; and
since we are not to expend it in tunnelling mountains, nor healing diseases, nor making laws,
nor money, nor on any extraneous object, we expend it on you. You are our goods, our
merchandise, our material for operating on. . . . We are not to study law, nor science, nor art;
so we study you. There is never a nerve or fibre in your man’s nature but we know it . . .”19

For a moment, in this passage, Olive Schreiner brushes against a somewhat

different definition of power—but only for a moment. Her Lyndall is a
woman of intense energy, longing for education and for “extraneous
objects” in the form of ideas into which to pour that energy. And she
experiences herself as potentially malign, if that energy is to be denied any
outlet except the “appropriate duties and influence of women.” For
centuries women have felt their active, creative impulses as a kind of
demonic possession. But no less have men identified and punished such
impulses as demonic: the case of Anne Hutchinson being merely one
example.20
Besides men’s power over us, and our own discernment of something
denied and aborted in us, women have also felt man’s powerfulness in the
root sense of the word (posse, potere, or pouvoir—to be able, to be capable)
—expressed in the creations of his mind. In the torsion of a piece of music
or the spatial harmony of a building, in the drenching light of a painting, the
unity and force of an intellectual structure, we have experienced that
powerfulness as the expressive energy of an ego which, unlike ours, was
licensed to direct itself outward upon the world. If we have experienced
man’s brute battle for power as a terror, often visited directly on ourselves
and our children, we have also known this other powerfulness, not our own,
set before us as a measure of human aspiration. And we have often longed
to ally ourselves with that kind of power. (In a high-school yearbook of my
generation one of the most brilliant students listed as her ambition: “To be
married to a great man.”) To have some link with male power has been the
closest that most of us could come to sharing in power directly; to have no
link with any form of male power, however petty and corrupt, has meant
that we lived unprotected and vulnerable indeed. The idea of power has, for
most women, been inextricably linked with maleness, or the use of force;
most often with both.
But we have also experienced, more intuitively and unconsciously,
men’s fantasies of our power, fantasies rooted far back in infancy, and in
some mythogenetic zone of history. Whatever their origins, for most
women these male fantasies, because so obliquely expressed, have been
obscured from view. What we did see, for centuries, was the hatred of overt
strength in women, the definition of strong independent women as freaks of
nature, as unsexed, frigid, castrating, perverted, dangerous; the fear of the
maternal woman as “controlling,” the preference for dependent, malleable,
“feminine” women.†† But that all women might at some profound level be
the objects of men’s fear and hatred has only slowly begun to melt into our
awareness through the writings of some post-Freudians,21 and it is still an
insight which women resist. As Karen Homey remarks:
Is it not really remarkable (we ask ourselves in amazement) when one considers the
overwhelming mass of this transparent material, that so little recognition and attention are
paid to the fact of men’s secret dread of women? It is almost more remarkable that women
themselves have so long been able to overlook it . . 22

She suggests that behind women’s obliviousness of this male dread lie
“anxiety and the impairment of self-respect.” Anxiety there certainly is; the
anxiety of the objectified who realizes that however much she may wish to
render herself pleasing and nonthreatening, she will still to some degree
partake of the feared aspect of Woman, an abstraction which she feels has
nothing to do with her. Since politically and socially men do wield immense
power over women, it is unnerving to realize that your mate or employer
may also fear you. And if a woman hopes to find, not a master but a brother,
a lover, an equal, how is she to meet this dread? If it brings to her
intimations of a power inherent in her sex, that power is perceived as
hostile, destructive, controlling, malign; and the very idea of power is
poisoned for her. We shall have return to this fear of women; for the present
it must be repeated that women’s primary experience of power till now has
been triply negative: we have experienced men’s power as oppression; we
have experienced our own vitality and independence as somehow
threatening to men; and, even when behaving with “feminine” passivity, we
have been made aware of masculine fantasies of our potential
destructiveness.
The resurgence of interest in the work of J. J. Bachofen, Robert
Briffault, Joseph Campbell, Robert Graves, Helen Diner, Jane Harrison, the
response generated by E. G. Davis’s The First Sex, essays in feminist theory
such as Jane Alpert’s “Mother-Right,” have been in part a search for
vindication of the belief that patriarchy is in some ways a degeneration, that
women exerting power would use it differently from men: non-possessively,
nonviolently, nondestructively. A “matriarchal controversy” has arisen
directly from this quest, and has served as a catalyst for reexamining the
reaction against “biology” which was necessarily an early stage in feminist
thought.
Two widely lead women theorists, Helen Diner (first published in
Germany in the late 1920s) and Elizabeth Gould Davis (writing in the
1970s) both drew heavily on earlier writers, notably J. J. Bachofen and
Robert Briffault, to argue that woman’s physiology was the original source
of her prepatriarchal power, both in making her the source of life itself, and
in associating her more deeply than man with natural cycles and processes.
All these writers envisioned a prehistoric civilization centered around the
female, both as mother and head of family, and as deity—the Great
Goddess who appears throughout early mythology, as Tiamat, Rhea, Isis,
Ishtar, Astarte, Cybele, Demeter, Diana of Ephesus, and by many other
names: the eternal giver of life and embodiment of the natural order,
including death.
For Diner and Davis, Woman as Mother naturally led to gynarchy: to
societies headed by and marked with profound reverence for women. Other
writers, including Simone de Beauvoir and Shulamith Firestone, deny that
either a “matriarchal” or “gynocratic” order ever existed, and perceive
women’s maternal function as, quite simply and precisely, the root of our
oppression. Whatever the conclusion drawn, there is an inescapable
correlation between the idea of motherhood and the idea of power.
The sociologist Philip Slater, for example, sees real evidence for an
early matriarchal culture in Greece, supplanted by patriarchy in later times,
although he hesitates to assume a like transition from matriarchal to
patriarchal power in other cultures, since “the ontogenetic experience of
primeval matriarchy is universal, and may provide the source of much of
this tradition” in mythology and folklore. In other words (and this was
Freud’s view) each woman and each man has once, in earliest infancy, lived
under the power of the mother, and this fact alone could account for the
recurrence of dreams, legends, myths, of an archetypal powerful Woman, or
of a golden age ruled by women.23 Whether such an age, even if less than
golden, ever existed anywhere, or whether we all carry in our earliest
imprintings the memory of, or the longing for, an individual past
relationship to a female body, larger and stronger than our own, and to
female warmth, nurture, and tenderness, there is a new concern for the
possibilities inherent in beneficent female power, as a mode which is absent
from the society at large, and which, even in the private sphere, women
have exercised under terrible constraints.24

4
The history of patriarchy is yet to be written—I do not mean the history of
men, but of an idea which arose, prospered, had its particular type of
expression, and which has proven self-destructive. But there are four or five
movements of recent history which seem to intersect here. One is the so-
called sexual revolution of the sixties—briefly believed to be congruent
with the liberation of women. The “pill,” it was believed by some, would
release women from the fear of pregnancy, hence from the double standard,
and would make us sexually coequal with men. For many reasons, this
proved a myth; it did not mean that we were free to discover our own
sexuality, but rather that we were expected to behave according to male
notions of female sexuality, as surely as any Victorian wife, though the
notions themselves had changed. And the “pill” itself is a mechanistic and
patriarchal device, recently proven to have deadly side-effects.25 But the
liberalization of sexual attitudes, the increase in pre- and extramarital sex,
the growing divorce rate, and the acknowledgedly threadbare texture of the
nuclear family, did lead toward a new recognition of the contradictions
between patriarchal theory and practice.‡‡
Also relevant are the movements for ecology and zero population
growth. These have arisen, to be sure, not from any primary concern for
women, but from pressures generated by the wastefulness of technological
society and the misallocation and monopoly of resources on the planet,
which are usually referred to as the problems of famine and overpopulation.
In the ecological analysis there has been some fresh examination of the
values of technologically oriented society, recognition not only of its
capricious unthrift and short-sighted profiteering, but of the increasing
disappearance of certain values such as intimacy, protectiveness toward the
living, respect for variety and variation, and for natural processes. To some
extent this analysis might be seen as a reassertion of prepatriarchal values.
However, these movements do aim, among other things, at a reduction of
the birth rate; and they are presumably prepared to achieve this, if
expedient, by propaganda aimed at evoking guilt in women who wish to
become biological mothers.
Moreover, the control by women of our bodies has never been
recognized as a primary issue in these movements. A report by a British
feminist on the International World Population Conference at Bucharest in
1974 notes that:
Despite lip-service to the idea that couples and families (never women) should have the right
to determine the number and spacing of their children, in no case is this right seen as more
important than the requirements of the economy. A brief look at the history of the developed
countries—both capitalist and socialist—over the past 50 years will confirm that it is always
women who are expected to adjust their fertility to the need for labor or cannon-fodder, never
the economy which must adapt to an increasing or decreasing birthrate.26

In contrast, the Black nationalist movement has declared that birth

control and abortion are “genocidal” and that Black women should feel
guilty if they do not provide children to carry on the Black struggle for
survival. Black women have increasingly rejected this rhetoric, however,
and have criticized “the irresponsible, poorly thought-out call to young
girls, on-the- margin scufflers, every Sister at large to abandon the pill that
gives her certain decisive power, a power that for a great many of us is all
we know, given the setup in this country and in our culture.”27 (This was of
course written before the lethal side- effects of the pill were publicly
acknowledged.) Janis Morris, community organizer and mother, states that
“the Black woman has got to consider what is best for the child during
pregnancy and after birth, and too often she has to bear all the responsibility
alone. So frankly, when the sister tells a brother ‘I’m not going to have this
baby,’ it ain’t nobody’s business but her own.”28
None of these movements, for or against the limitation of births, has the
condition of women at heart as a root of insight; all are prepared to dictate
to women—as patriarchy has always dictated—whether or not and under
what circumstances to “produce” children.§§ As the sociologist Jessie
Bernard puts it:
It was not until the late 1960’s that motherhood became a serious political issue in our
country. Like so many other issues, it came not in clear-cut, carefully thought-through form
but in a murky conglomerate of ecology, environmental protection, and a “welfare mess”. It
took an “antinatalist” slant. The problem posed was how to stop women from having so many
babies. Ecologists frightened us with images of millions suffocating for lack of oxygen and
hostile reformers with images of women—especially black women—having babies in order
to remain on welfare rolls. The first group directed their attack against middle-class women,
the second, against welfare women.29

A third strand in this historical pattern is technological; the genetic

revolution, now in progress in laboratories, which has already developed
the “sperm bank” and artificial insemination, and is now at work on
“cloning” or the controlled reproduction of selected types through the
growing, in a matrix, of cell nuclei transplants from a single “parent,” to
create a series of genetically identical offspring. Shulamith Firestone, an
enthusiastic believer in replacing biological with artificial motherhood, has
observed that the possibilities are terrifying if we envision the choice of
human types, gender, and capacities being controlled by patriarchy.30 On
the other hand, if biological motherhood can become a real choice (as
distinct from being forcibly prescribed or rendered obsolete by fiat) then the
concept of woman as womb, and of “biological destiny” becomes harder to
defend. And these concepts have buttressed the structure of patriarchy from
the first.
 5
In the mid-fifties, a few scattered male writers such as Denis de Rougemont
and Erich Neumann had begun to identify the denial of what Neumann
called “the feminine” in civilization with the roots of inhumanity and self-
destructiveness, and to call for a renewal of “the feminine principle.”31 In
The Flight from Woman, Karl Stern, a Jewish Freudian analyst turned
Catholic, sees the scientific mode of knowledge beginning with Descartes
as a rejection of the “feminine” mode of knowledge associated with
intuition, spirituality, and poetry; and announces “the mystery of
Androgyny . . . manifest in the historical crisis” of the present.32¶¶ More
recently writers ranging from the philosopher Herbert Marcuse to the poet
Robert Bly, have suggested that a return to the “feminine” (Marcuse calls it
“the femalization of man") is the next stage in the development of the
species.33 This “feminine principle,” however, like “androgyny,” remains
for such writers elusive and abstract and seems to have, for them, little
connection with the rising expectations and consciousness of actual women.
In fact, Marcuse and Bly might be likened to the Saint-Simonians and
Shelley, who likewise insisted theoretically on the importance of the
feminine, yet who betrayed much of the time their unconscious patriarchal
parochialism.34
Philip Slater perceives women as the peripheral members of the society,
therefore “in a better position to liberate [it] emotionally”—whatever this
may mean, since he discounts the likelihood that women will actually rise
up against patriarchal values. In his discussion of the “concept of the
tyrannical father” in the American unconscious—displaced, as he notes,
from the actual father onto some abstract authority, fantasy- father, or
technology itself—he implies that patriarchy is the real name of the system
he is describing, and which is ultimately dangerous to human existence—a
conclusion he would be reluctant to draw.35
None of these writers mention the possibility that a “return to the
feminine” may actually involve pain and dread, and hence active resistance,
on the part of men. We do not find in their work any such powerful analysis
of the nature and extent of patriarchy as in Firestone, Millett, and Daly; but
we do find corroboration of a sense that patriarchy, in degrading and
oppressing its daughters, has also at some less overt level failed its sons.
 Such a sense—though unperceived as such—fluttered, at least, in the
“Movement” of the 1960s, despite the profound sexism underlying its
apparent rejection of racist violence and the Vietnam war. Men who refused
to serve in the armed forces, and who underwent imprisonment or exile as
the penalty for their decisions, demonstrated a revulsion against the
patriarchal stereotypes of authoritarianism, militarism, nationalism, “being
a man.” (The “counter-culture” style of unisex clothing, male self-
adornment, gentler manners, long hair, was a more superficial token. Much
might be written on the various costumes in which male privilege and male
supremacism have masked, as well as advertised, themselves in our time.)
The peace movement, sexist as it was (“CHICKS SAY YES TO MEN
WHO SAY NO”), expressed disenchantment with the values of violence,
supertechnology, and imperialism. The student radicalism of the sixties
commonly met with the charge that these young people were in revolt
against their fathers, “acting-out” their Oedipal rage; in fact the “counter-
culture” (most of it, to be sure, soon absorbed into the omnivorous Culture)
did for awhile constitute an unconscious critique of the authority-through-
role or through force which has characterized patriarchy. There was a
fleeting revolt against authoritarian education; the teacher was for the first
time asked to justify himself as a human being rather than a role; obedience
was seen as the reverse of learning. This questioning of the power-
relationship in education often took on an aggressive, anti-intellectual, and
destructive style, thoroughly masculinist in its dehumanization of the
individual teacher facing the classroom. Yet it, too, sprang from some kind
of instinctual resistance to the dehumanization of the student in the learning
process, the sense of being “merely a number” or a bank in which
information is deposited.
But these tendrils of antimasculinism straggled forth quite innocent of
any antimasculinist theory, and easily submerged under the macho ethic of
SDS and Weathermen, with their sexual exploitation of women and their
inherited theories of patriarchal revolution; or under the male homophile
movement.
In the mid-1970s a reaction has made itself felt in the form of what Susan
Sontag has perceived as an eroticization of Nazism, a cult of fascist
aesthetics.## It is no accident, I think, that this fascination with the regalia
of stormtroopers has arisen along with a pervasively changing
consciousness and a new self-definition on the part of women. Nazism had
a clear and unmistakable political formula for women and where they
belonged: mothers of men, kinder, kirche, kuche. It glorified as no other
twentieth-century system has done, the healthy body of the racially “pure”
woman as an incubator of sons and heroes.

6
The mid-twentieth-century wave of feminism has gone further and asked
more than its predecessors. Like patriarchy itself, the extent and influence
of the antipatriarchal women’s movement is difficult to grasp. It is not
defined by specific organizations, groupings, or factions, though these exist
in abundance. It exists in many stages of development throughout the
world, at the most local, pragmatic levels, as a network of formal and
informal communications, as a growing body of analysis and theory, and as
a profound moral, psychic, and philosophic revaluation of what it means to
be “human.” For a movement which has existed in its present form less than
a decade, it has already brought forth decisive shifts of value, relation, and
identity among women of all ages and economic levels, many of whom
would not call themselves feminists. It has opened a new range of choices
to women, many of which seem private and inconsequential yet each of
which, multiplied by the thousands, has helped create a new climate of
perception. Elizabeth Oakes- Smith, an early-nineteenth-century suffragist,
writer, and preacher, had demanded in 1852: “Do we really understand that
we aim at nothing less than an entire subversion of the present state of
society, a dissolution of the whole existing social compact?” By 1970,
Shulamith Firestone was responding: “Rather than concentrating the female
principle into a ‘private’ retreat ... we want to rediffuse it—for the first time
creating society from the bottom up.” And Mary Daly continued, in 1973:
“Only radical feminism can act as the ‘final cause’, because of all
revolutionary causes it alone opens up human consciousness adequately to
the desire for non-hierarchal, nonoppressive society revealing sexism as the
basic model and source of oppression.”***
Where the two powerful shapers of contemporary Western thought,
Marx and Freud, had completed—as if by some tacit collaboration—the
centuries’ process of dichotomizing “man” into mind/body,
psychological/political, Simone de Beauvoir, in 1949, was bringing a
phenomenological approach to bear on “discovering woman":
So ... we reject for the same reasons both the sexual monism of Freud and the economic
monism of Engels. A psychoanalyst will interpret all social claims of women as phenomena
of the “masculine protest"; for the Marxist, on the contrary, her sexuality only expresses her
economic situation in more or less complex, roundabout fashion. But the categories of
“clitorid” and “vaginal”, like the categories of “bourgeois” or “proletarian” are equally
inadequate to encompass a concrete woman. Underlying all individual drama, as it underlies
the economic history of mankind, there is an existential foundation that alone enables us to
understand in its unity that particular form of being which we call a human life.36

Masculine intellectual systems are inadequate because they lack the

wholeness that female consciousness, excluded from contributing to them,
could provide. In taking the “otherness” of the “second” sex for granted,
these systems are erected on an essential intellectual fault. Truly to liberate
women, then, means to change thinking itself: to reintegrate what has been
named the unconscious, the subjective, the emotional with the structural,
the rational, the intellectual; to “connect the prose and the passion” in E. M.
Forster’s phrase; and finally to annihilate those dichotomies. In the being of
a woman sold as a bride, or rejected because she is “barren” and cannot
produce sons to enhance a man’s status, economics and sexuality, legalism
and magic, caste structure and individual fear, barter and desire, coexist
inextricably; only in the outer world of patriarchal categories and
patriarchal denial can they be conceived as separate.
De Beauvoir in 1949 still saw the liberation of women as but one of
many liberations which would come about as the result of socialist
revolution, insofar as socialism promised to do away with private property
and the patriarchal family and to release women into economic equality
with men. Her experience and her analysis have since taken her further.37
But radical feminism is now speaking in terms of “feminist revolution,” of a
“postandrogynous” society, of creating a new kind of human being.

7
Imagine a spectrum, at one end of which is a tar-paper shack in Appalachia
or rural New Hampshire, in which an eighteen- year-old mother of four is
expecting her fifth child, her first menstrual period having been her last.
Her legs are discolored with varicose veins, her abdominal wall
permanently distended, her breasts already sagging, her teeth decaying from
calcium loss: functionally illiterate, she lives from hour to hour and day to
day, her nights splintered by the crying of infants, her energy drained into
the survival of lives which suck on her like mouths. To get to a birth-control
or prenatal clinic would be to command herself into a control of her
existence which she has never had, and of which, as one of eleven children
herself, she has seen no example. She has not been physically away from
her children since the conception of the first child, when she was thirteen
years of age. When her husband rapes her, she does not call it rape, but
somewhere in her memory lingers a distant past of twelve-year-old
restlessness, curiosity, physical energy, and germinating desire—even,
perhaps, some vague imagination that her life might be different from her
mother’s. Her sense of time is vague; impossible to imagine herself as a
being separate from all these lives. Once in a while she looks into the glass
and sees that she is becoming her mother.
At the other end of the spectrum let us imagine a laboratory in which
men—the most powerful men in history, it is said—are engaged in work of
extreme delicacy and precision, preparing a new series of multiple, identical
embryos from cells derived from selected human tissue. The embryos will
come into consciousness with their identity already prepared, for they will
have been selected to provide the patriarchy of a new generation, selected
by the patriarchy of the current generation, to perpetuate its own
characteristics—especially those of rational genius, the gift of abstraction,
and the ability to dissociate “work” from “personal” problems and
disturbances. Females are also being bred, for specific physical
characteristics, and they fall into two categories. One is a body-type, or
range of body- types, capable of producing erections in a range of males,
not for procreation but because impotence is an increasing problem since
the end of physical paternity. The other is a body-type matched with mental
qualities suited for special purposes, such as “manned” space flights
requiring smallness of build, adaptiveness, physical endurance, and a low
level of emotive intensity or desire for interhuman relation. The new males
will be free from the disturbing effects of mother-love and mother-
dominance; and the new females will not suffer from sex-role frustration,
since no Joan of Arc, no Elizabeth I, no Mary Wollstonecraft, no Anne
Hutchinson, no Sojourner Truth, no George Eliot, no Emma Goldman, no
Margaret Sanger, no Gertude Stein or Emily Dickinson has been or will be
chosen for the reproduction of her “type” in quantity. Elite women, chosen
by and working with men, are used not only as intellectual contributors to
social engineering but also as donors of cell nuclei to insure that a token
quantity of women can be produced as required. Thus, it is demonstrated
that females with the proper endowment—though quantitatively much
fewer—are valued as highly as males.
Neither of these two visions is fantastic. A revolution based on
patriarchal socialism might abolish the tar-paper shack, but who could
claim that it would abolish the engineering of society by men? For, however
theoretically men may call for “women’s liberation” in any social order they
may devise, however much they consciously may wish for an end to sexual
caste, they still live in the unacknowledged cave of their own subjectivity,
their denied fears and longings; and few men can bear to confront that
shadow-world. For patriarchy, however much it has failed them, however
much it divides them from themselves, is still their order, confirming them
in privilege. They are protected from seriously addressing the issues of
sexual caste and institutionalized misogyny, in large part by the central
ambiguity at the heart of patriarchy: the ideas of the sacredness of
motherhood and the redemptive power of woman as means, contrasted with
the degradation of women in the order created by men.

* Jane Harrison in 1912, Helen Diner in the 1920s, Virginia Woolf in 1938, all indicated, questioned,
and challenged the prevalence of patriarchal values. Simone de Beauvoir, in 1949, stated
categorically that “this has always been a man’s world"; but her discussion of the widest implications
of this is largely by inference. The first extensive analysis of patriarchy in contemporary American
feminist literature is that of Kate Millett in Sexual Politics (1970). An even more detailed and widely
ramified treatment is found throughout Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of
Women’s Liberation(1973). Daly depicts at length the patriarchal bias which saturates all culture as
an unacknowledged assumption. The earlier writings of men like J. J. Bachofen, Robert Briffault,
Frederick Engels, Erich Neumann, among others, though useful as preliminary steps in identifying
the phenomenon and in suggesting that the patriarchal family is not an inevitable “fact of nature,”
still stop short of recognizing the omnipresence of patriarchal bias as it affects even the categories in
which we think, and which has made of even the most educated and privileged woman an outsider, a
nonparticipant, in the molding of culture.
† The Mothers (1927); for a further discussion of Briffault’s work, see Chapter IV.
‡ See Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970): “One might . . . include the caveat
that such a social order need not imply the domination of one sex which the term ‘matriarchy’ would,
by its semantic analogue to patriarchy, infer. Given the simpler scale of life and the fact that female-
centered fertility religion might be offset by male physical strength, pre-patriarchy might have been
fairly egalitarian” (p. 28).
§ 1986: A bibliography of writings on motherhood and daughterhood—fiction, poetry, memoirs,
essays—by women, produced in the last eight years alone, would fill many pages.
¶ 1986: The Jewish feminist poet and scholar Marcia Falk asserts that “traditional Jewish prayer ... in
its dogmatic naming of an exclusively male God . . . who may be allowed to have feminine attributes
or aspects but whose primary reality is male ... has turned the monotheistic promise into a lie”
(“What about God?” Moment [March 1985], pp. 32-36). For a Christian feminist perspective, see
Nelle Morton, “Beloved Image,” in The Journey Is Home (Boston: Beacon, 1985), pp. 140-46.
# I have never read a child-rearing manual that made this point, or that raised the question of
infanticide.
** Anton Chekov describes in his story, “Sleepy,” the process by which a young nursemaid who has
not slept for days is driven to strangle the child she is nursing.. It is a story of human torture; the
crying of the baby is akin to the sleep-deprivation techniques of brainwashing. Yet even Chekov,
whose human honesty was great, makes the infanticide not the child’s mother but a serf. It is
probable that in his medical practice in early nineteenth-century Russia he encountered many
instances of maternal infanticide.
†† Margaret Mead suggests that the opening of the American frontier required that a different kind of
valuation be placed on female qualities and that “strong women, women with character and
determination, in fact women with guts, became more and more acceptable“ (Male and Female [New
York: Morrow, 1975], p. 225). However, she acknowledges that women were still expected to be
capable of “pleasing men” and as the West was opened and a new leisure class began to establish
itself in the cities, the “strong” female of the frontier declined in value, as Thorstein Veblen and
Emily James Putnam (The Lady, 1910) make abundantly clear.
‡‡ A classic contradiction is the prevalence of rape, which is estimated to be the most frequently
committed violent crime in America today. As one writer points out, rape illuminates the sexual
schizophrenia of the society in which “the masculine man is . . . expected to prove his mettle as a
protector of women/’ while rape is also a measure of virility (Susan Griffin, “Rape: The All-
American Crime,” in Jo Freeman, ed., Women: A Feminist Perspective [Palo Alto, Calif.: Mayfield,
1975]). But it is more than simply an all-American crime. From the Book of Numbers (31: 1436),
which describes the rape of 32,000 Midianite women by order of Moses, to the recent rape by
Pakistani soldiers of 200,000 women of Bangladesh, rape remains the great unpunished war crime in
every culture. As a crime of violence committed by a man against his wife, it is not even legally
recognized.
1986: In twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia, a husband may be prosecuted for a rape
committed on his wife when he was living with her; in twenty-one states, marital rape is still not a
crime (National Clearinghouse on Marital Rape, 2325 Oak Street, Berkeley, CA 94708).
§§ And more than dictate. The involuntary sterilization of poor women on welfare in federally
financed clinics was publicized widely when the Southern Poverty Law Center brought suit on behalf
of the Relf sisters, aged twelve and fourteen, sterilized under a federal program, in Montgomery,
Alabama. Neither of the young women had ever been pregnant. Barbara Segal reports that “In China
. . . women are not given birth control information until after they are married. It has also been
reported that in certain areas women are offered incentives such as clothing and so-called
‘transportation costs’ if they win be sterilized” (off our backs, Vot. $, No.1, .p 11). See also Carl
Djerassi, “Some Observations on Current Fertility Control in China,” The China Quarterly, No.57
(January-March 1974), pp. 40-60.
¶¶ “Androgyny” has recently become a “good” word (like “motherhood” itself!) implying many
things to many people, from bisexuality to a vague freedom from imposed sexual roles. Rarely has
the use of the term been accompanied by any political critique. Carolyn Heilbrun argues in her
Toward a Recognition of Androgyny that an “androgynous” undercurrent runs throughout Western
humanism, which if recognized would help us to free ourselves and society from the role-playing and
division of labor required under patriarchy. Other writers have criticized the reactionary associations
of “androgyny”; as Catherine Stimpson points out, “the androgyne still fundamentally thinks in terms
of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine.’ It fails to conceptualize the world and to organize phenomena in a
new way that leaves ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ behind” (Catherine R. Stimpson, “The Androgyne
and the Homosexual,” Women’s Studies, Vol. 2 [1974], pp. 237–48). See also Cynthia Secor,
“Androgyny: An Early Reappraisal”; Daniel A. Harris, “Androgyny: The Sexist Myth in Disguise”;
Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, “The Politics of Androgyny,” in the same issue; and Janice Raymond,
“The Illusion of Androgyny,” Quest: A Feminist Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Summer 1975). Finally, the
very structure of the word replicates the sexual dichotomy and the priority of andros (male) over
gyne (female). In a truly postandrogynous society the term “androgyne” would have no meaning.
## “Much of the imagery of far-out sex has been placed under the sign of Nazism. More or less Nazi
costumes with boots, leather, chains, Iron Crosses on gleaming torsos, swastikas, have become, along
with meat hooks and heavy motorcycles, the secret and most lucrative paraphernalia of eroticism”
(“Fascinating Fascism,” New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975, p. 29).
*** “I hope my use of ‘final cause’ is clear: In ‘tradition’ the final cause is ‘first’, it is motivating
purpose, an insight which elicits seeking, movement. It is ‘first in the order of intention’, opening the
subject to action. She may not know all of the directions and implications of the action.... So to say
the Women’s Movement is the final cause is to mean it sets manydimensional movements in motion,
e.g. liberation of children, of the aged, of the racially oppressed. To say this is to see a priority for the
women’s movement as catalyst, as the necessary catalyst—hardly to see it as a selfenclosed system”
(Personal communication, Spring 1974).
1986: In historical fact, the women’s movement in the United States, in both the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, has, like other liberation movements, been “opened to action” or unlatched by
the three hundred years of the Black liberation struggle, in which Black women have always been
leaders and builders of resistance. Many of the emerging white feminists of the late 1960s first
encountered female political leadership while participating in the Black Civil Rights movement,
where sexism was also debated. See Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black
Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow, 1984),pp.299–324.

OceanofPDF.com
IV THE PRIMACY OF THE
MOTHER

Woman to primitive man is ... at once weak and magical,

oppressed, yet feared. She is charged with powers of
childbearing denied to man, powers only half-understood . . .
forces that all over the world seem to fill him with terror.
The attitude of man to woman, and, though perhaps in a
lesser degree, of woman to man, is still today essentially
magical.
—Jane Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of
Greek Religion

As women our relationship to the past has been problematical. We have

been every culture’s core obsession (and repression); we have always
constituted at least one-half, and are now a majority, of the species; yet in
the written records we can barely find ourselves. Confronted with this
“Great Silence,” we have apparently had two paths to follow: the path of
anatomizing our oppression, detailing the laws and sanctions ranged against
us; and the path of searching out those women who broke through the
silence, who, though often penalized, misconstrued, their work neglected or
banned, or though tokenized in lonely and precarious acceptance, still
embodied strength, daring, self-determination; who were, in short,
exemplary.
When we survey the lost, undocumented lives of the majority of
women, the waste of women’s brains and talents throughout history, the
idea of a prehistoric period, when not a handful, but most women were
using their capacities to the utmost, becomes extremely seductive. And
anthropology, more than history, has given license to that desire. Once it
began to be recognized that human society embodies diversity as much as
conformity, once non-Western societies began to be examined, not as
heathen, retarded, or infantile versions of Western culture, but for their own
values, it began to be possible to imagine that the patriarchal, patrilineal
family of Western culture was neither as essential nor as inevitable as it had
seemed. It began to be possible to imagine some universal earlier
civilization in which mother-right, not father-right, prevailed; in which
matrilineality and matrifocality played a part; in which women were active
and admired participants in all of culture; and so to imagine a wholly
different way for women to exist in the world. If we were not simply bound
“by nature” to the “passive,” “docile,” “irrational” aspects of human
personality, if it was in fact institutions and culture that determined our
“nature,” the victimization and abnegation demanded of “motherhood”
could be seen as the inversion of a period of mother-power—of
matriarchy.*
The desire for a clearly confirmed past, the search for a tradition of
female power, also springs from an intense need for validation. If women
were powerful once, a precedent exists; if female biology was ever once a
source of power, it need not remain what it has since become: a root of
powerlessness. For many women, the inconclusiveness of any historical
argument, the fact that history has been written by and for men, and the
belief that we need not turn to the past in order to justify the future, are
reasons enough to discount past theories of matriarchy and to concentrate
on the present and the future. For others, a belief in the necessity to create
ourselves anew still allows for curiosity about the artifacts of written history
—not as verifiable evidence of things done, but as something like the
notebooks of a dreamer, which incompletely yet often compellingly depict
the obsessions, the denials, the imaginative processes, out of which s/he is
still working. Believing in continuity, I myself am hard put to know where
the “past” ends and the “present” begins; and far from assuming that what
we call the past must teach us to be conservative, I think that for women a
critical exploration backward in time can be profoundly radicalizing. But
we need to be critically aware of the limitations of our sources.
Certain writers, like Elizabeth Gould Davis, have taken the existence of
an ancient, Arcadian matriarchal world as a given. The source of such
theory, apart from Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, is largely the work
of two men, J. J. Bachofen and Robert Briffault.† Bachofen’s work had
earlier been used by Helen Diner in her Mothers and Amazons, published in
Germany in 1929, and first translated into English in 1965.‡ Perhaps Diner
had read Bachofen in its entirety, but since she provides no notes, we must
bear in mind that she may simply have used the 1926 German abridged
edition. She does pay tribute, in her preface, both to Bachofen and to
Briffault.
The reader of Diner or Davis is likely to receive the impression that
Bachofen was a celebrant of female power, and that he perceived the
“matriarchal” age not simply as a universal stage through which all cultures
once passed, but as a golden age, a lost utopia, to which if the species were
fortunate we might yet return. To look closely at the fragments of Bachofen
translated by Manheim, however, is to receive a different impression. Like
many other Victorians, Bachofen is given to sentimental generalizations
about women. The feminine principle, for him, is “distinguished less by
sharpness and freedom of outline than by prophetic feeling; governed more
by sentiment than by thought; subject always to division of mind and the
strange, aimless striving peculiar to women . . . hovering between frenzy
and reflection, between voluptuousness and virtue"” (Emphasis mine.)1§ In
the conflict between the sexes, whose cycles he attempts to trace in myth,
“the realm of the idea belongs to the man, the realm of material life to the
woman.” “The transience of material life goes hand in hand with mother
right. Father right is bound up with the immortality of a supramaterial life
belonging to the regions of light.”2 The matriarchal phase is identified with
agriculture, with an advance out of the tellurian (earth-derived) swamp life
(which Bachofen identifies with sexual promiscuity). As such, it is a
superior phase; but it is essentially a stepping-stone toward the higher phase
of father-right:
In this respect the establishment of matriarchy represents a step forward toward civilization. .
. . Woman counters man’s abuse of his superior strength by the dignity of her enthroned
motherhood. . . . The more savage the men of this first period, the more necessary becomes
the restraining force of women. . . . Matriarchy is necessary to the education of mankind and
particularly of men. Just as the child is first disciplined by his mother, so the races of men are
first disciplined by woman. The male must serve before he can govern. It is the woman’s
vocation to tame man’s primordial strength, to guide it into benign channels. (Emphasis
mine.)3

The idealization of Amazonism also gets short shrift from Bachofen.

According to his view of the historical process, there were two phases of
Amazonism in ancient times, alternating with two phases of matriarchy.
The period of promiscuous sexuality and hetaerism is linked with an
Amazon phase in which women revolt against their sexual exploitation,
take arms, and resist the physical abuses of men. But these earlier Amazons,
according to the myth cited in Plutarch and interpreted by Bachofen, are in
turn defeated by the Mothers in a kind of spiritual victory. Matriarchy is
seen as the acceptance by woman of her “natural vocation,” and it is
indissoluble from monogamous marriage. It is “conjugal matriarchy,”
against which Bachofen sees Amazonism as a perversion of womanhood,
an “unnatural intensification of women’s power.”4
Demetrian matriarchy, says Bachofen, is “chaste . . . grounded in strict
order ... a source of lofty virtues and of an existence which, though limited
in its ideas, was nevertheless secure and well-ordered.” This phase gives
way to Dionysian, or Aphroditean matriarchy, a decadent phase in which
“one extreme followed the other, showing how hard it is, at all times, for
women to observe moderation.”5 However, for all its lofty virtues,
Demetrian matriarchy is still bound up with the tellurian swamp-grass, the
material and physical, as distinct from (and even opposed to) the
“liberation” and “sublimation” of father- right and the victory of patriarchy.
For Bachofen these opposites are always in dialectical struggle; and this
struggle is seen from a purely masculine point of view: “Maternity pertains
to the physical side of man, the only thing he shares with the animals; the
paternal-spiritual principle belongs to him alone. Here he breaks through
the bonds of tellurism and lifts his eyes to the higher regions of the
cosmos." (Emphasis mine.)6 In breaking the matriarchal bonds, however,
man degrades and debases woman, giving rise to a new wave of
Amazonism, the offspring of Dionysian excesses, which in turn is
vanquished, creating the patriarchy which, in this author’s view, has since
enlightened the world.
In Bachofen we are dealing with several layers of expression: the actual
myths reported or embodied in sources such as Plutarch, Strabo, Herodotus,
Ovid, the Greek dramatists; the ancient consciousness which produced such
myths; and the nineteenth-century German masculine consciousness of
Bachofen himself, which frequently contradicts itself¶. It is a little as if we
were looking at the reflection of a painting in a windowpane at night. At
times Bachofen’s lack of clarity and precision is so frustrating that one is
tempted to attribute the problem to the fragmentary nature of the excerpts in
Manheim’s translation.
It can at best be charitably assumed that sometimes Bachofen is
expressing, not his own opinions, but the climate of opinion crystallized in
the myth—for example, when he announces that woman is possessed of “an
insatiable blood-thirst,” as demonstrated in the story (related in Aeschylus
and Apollodorus) of how the women of Lemnos massacre all but one of
their men for cohabiting with Thracian women. As a support for this
characterization of women (whom he sees elsewhere as chaste, the bringers
of order and harmony, etc.) he cites Euripides’s Ion and Medea. It is
difficult to be sure when Bachofen is accepting the mythology and poetry of
males as an objective description of women, and when he may be
suggesting simply that this is how women have been perceived at certain
times by certain males. One thing is clear: in Bachofen’s own mind there is
no yearning for a matriarchy of the future, and there is great ambivalence
toward the idea of past matriarchy, and indeed toward the female presence.

2
Robert Briffault’s three-volume work, The Mothers, first published in 1927,
is the work of a lonely, furious, and obsessive mind. He set out to show in
this book that the socializing element in human history has been “traceable
to the operation of instincts that are related to the functions of the female
and not to those of the male.”7 He saw the patriarchal family as essentially
antisocial: “a euphemism for the individualistic male with his subordinate
dependents. As a social unit the family means the individual, actuated by
his most aggressively individualistic instincts; it is not the foundation, but
the negation of society.” The real social bonds grew out of “the natural and
biological dominance of the primitive mother over the group which she
created, the awe attaching to her magical nature and powers.” Such a social
bonding emerged from “the primitive mystery of generation and the
primitive sacrament of common blood and common food, bestowed upon
the ideal tribe of its followers.”8
In tracing the aspects of this natural dominance and bonding, Briffault
consumed a bibliography of nearly 200 close-printed pages; his three
volumes are copiously footnoted and his practice was, with scholarly
compendiousness, to make no statement that should rest on merely one or
two examples. The unabridged Briffault (there are two abridged editions,
one edited by him, the other by G. Rattray Taylor) is a mine of lore for
anyone interested in what history, legend, and anthropology were saying
about women up to the time of Briffault’s authorship. Whatever his
conclusions, however we may wish to quarrel with them, it is difficult not
to feel gratitude to a man so committed to unearthing the details and the
patterns of female influence in civilization. Admittedly, when he strays far
from the realm of his special genius—assimilating and condensing vast
amounts of material and seeing relationships between them—he veers
toward the moralistic, expounding freely at the end of his book on marriage,
female intellect as it differs from male, and the necessity for women to save
civilization (though without, as he puts it, “provoking” antagonism between
the sexes). Yet one senses in his final chapter a profound weariness with
patriarchy: “We live in a patriarchal society in which patriarchal principles
have ceased to be valid. . . . Power, energy, ambition, intellect, the interests
of the combative male, no more achieve the fulfillment of his being than
they can of themselves build up a human society.” What Briffault longs for
is a movement, not back to matriarchy (a term which he used rather loosely
in the end of his book, though he had defined it quite precisely in the
beginning), but to “new forms of marriage” and a condition where, “in the
love of the mother, in the mutual devotion of man and woman, the
achievements of the organizing and constructive intellect fade into the
mist.”
Into the mist, perhaps, of Briffault’s own vision; certainly not into the
clarity of a vision which can see both intellect and maternal altruism as
coexistent, because it affirms the natural capacity of women to think, to
analyze, to construct, and to create and nurture more than our individual
children.

3
If Bachofen was a mid-nineteenth-century German patriarchal
mythographer, drawing on earlier myths and fragments of historical record,
Elizabeth Gould Davis was the first contemporary feminist myth-maker.
The First Sex, published one hundred and ten years after Das Mütterrecht,
is at times inaccurate, biased, unprofessional—all these charges do not
really dismiss it. Furthermore, Davis fails to mention or examine Oriental or
precolonial African and American myths and traditions of female power,
thereby limiting the scope of her work to Western Civilization with a
seemingly unconscious parochialism. Her book has undoubtedly been an
embarrassment to academic feminists intent on working within strictly
traditional and orthodox definitions of what constitutes serious knowledge.
Yet its impact has been great, beginning with the arresting implications of
its title. Its scholarly deficiencies can be and have been easily enumerated;9
Davis had, for one thing, a frustrating tendency to quote without indicating
omissions, and to rearrange sentences in a quoted paragraph. “Professional”
history, on the other hand, has been blindingly unscholarly where women
are concerned. What Davis did was to exhume a wealth of materials—some
mythic, some historical, some archeological or literary—like someone
stirring a fire and rousing showers of sparks sleeping in the ashes. She
assumed the role of the tribal story-teller of a conquered people, reciting
legends of their past, reminding them that their mothers once were queens
and goddesses, strong and courageous leaders. Out of a blend of fact and
guesswork, fragments of rumor, memory, and desire, she tried to do in prose
what the poet of earlier times did in epic or ballad—to call up before
women a different condition than the one we have known, to prime the
imagination of women living today to conceive of other modes of existence.

Davis, unlike Simone de Beauvoir or Helen Diner, exhaustively footnoted

her book, creating the impression that it can be read—and criticized—like a
doctoral thesis. Thus, the academic scholar finds it wanting as a piece of
“professional” research, while the awakening feminist may be lured into
taking its claims as Scripture was once taken—for a literal rendition of the
past. (Her bibliography, however, is a document of immense value in itself.)
If we approach Davis as a catalyst of memory and imagination, rather than
as a documenter of unshakable fact, or a failed pedant, we can better
appreciate the achievement of her book.

The myth of matriarchy pieced together by Davis will perhaps never be

completely disproven or verified. But against all the works detailing
woman’s oppressed condition, Davis’s book stands out as the first to create
a counter-image—and, let it be added, one which can by no means be
lightly dismissed by academic historians and anthropologists#
It is notable that while some feminist anthropologists may deny that any
actual “matriarchal” period ever existed, as a universal phase of culture,
they do not necessarily dismiss the idea of matriarchy as “crazy” or absurd.
As the classical anthropologist Jane Harrison once expressed it, a myth is
not something that springs “clean and clear” out of the imagination (if
anything can be said to do that) but is rather a response to the environment,
an interaction between the mind and its external world.10 It expresses a
need, a longing. And myth has always accumulated, accreted; the profile of
the goddess or the hero is always changing, weathered by changes in
external conditions. If Davis’s book depicts women finally as the sole
possessors of practical and spiritual vision, if she previsions a world where
men are left to tinker with gadgetry of a toylike inconsequentiality while the
spiritual and political order is created by women, this is a powerful and an
imaginative response to the faces we see aggrandized on our TV screens,
the faces of male leaders, the pure products of patriarchy, who appear less
and less credible, less and less informed by any responsible vision, less and
less capable of governing any community, and more and more
technologically capable of degrading and destroying human life. For many
women, Davis provided a genesis, though not a resting place, for
speculations about the possibility and nature of female power: a
springboard into feminist desire.

4
The question, “Was there ever true universal matriarchy?” seems to me to
blot out, in its inconclusiveness, other and perhaps more catalytic questions
about the past. I therefore use the term gynocentric in speaking of periods
of human culture which have shared certain kinds of woman-centered
beliefs and woman-centered social organization. Throughout most of the
world, there is archeological evidence of a period when Woman was
venerated in several aspects, the primal one being maternal; when Goddess-
worship prevailed, and when myths depicted strong and revered female
figures. In the earliest artifacts we know, we encounter the female as primal
power.
 Leave aside for the moment whether those images were made by
women’s or men’s hands: they express an attitude toward the female
charged with awareness of her intrinsic importance, her depth of meaning,
her existence at the very center of what is necessary and sacred**. She is
beautiful in ways we have almost forgotten, or which have become defined
as ugliness. Her body possesses mass, interior depth, inner rest, and
balance. She is not smiling; her expression is inward-looking or ecstatic,
and sometimes her eyeballs seem to burn through the air. If, as very often,
there is a child at her breast, or on her lap, she is not absorbed in
contemplation of him (the “Adoration of the Virgin” with the Son as center
of the world, will come later). She is not particularly young, or rather, she is
absolutely without age. She is for-herself even when suckling an infant,
even when, like the image of the Ephesian Diana, she appears as a cone of
many breasts. Sometimes she is fanged, wielding a club, sometimes she is
girdled by serpents; but even in her most benign aspect the ancient Goddess
is not beckoning to her worshipers. She exists, not to cajole or reassure
man, but to assert herself.
Let us try to imagine for a moment what sense of herself it gave a
woman to be in the presence of such images. If they did nothing else for
her, they must have validated her spiritually (as our contemporary images
do not), giving her back aspects of herself neither insipid nor trivial,
investing her with a sense of participation in essential mysteries. No Pietà
could do this, nor even the elegant queen of the Amarnan divine family of
Egypt, in which the Sun-King stands with his hand patriarchally on his
son’s head, while his consort—regal as she is—remains clearly a consort.
The images of the prepatriarchal goddess-cults did one thing; they told
women that power, awesomeness, and centrality were theirs by nature, not
by privilege or miracle; the female was primary. The male appears in
earliest art, if at all, in the aspect of a child, often tiny and helpless, carried
horizontally in arms, or seated in the lap of the goddess, or suckling at her
breast.††
Now it can be argued that these figures—Neolithic, preColumbian,
Cypriot, Cycladic, Minoan, predynastic Egyptian—can tell us nothing of
woman’s early perception of herself; that they are the work of men, the
casting into symbolic form of man’s sense of his relation to earth and
nature. Erich Neumann, a Jungian analyst (1905-1960), inclines to this
view. First of all, he sets up a triad of relationships characterized by (1) “the
child’s relationship to its mother, who provides nourishment . . (2) “an
historical period in which man’s dependence on the earth and nature is at its
greatest”; and (3) “the dependence of the ego and consciousness on the
unconscious.”11‡‡ Then, according to Neumann, “the Feminine, the giver
of nourishment, becomes everywhere a revered principle of nature, on
which man is dependent in pleasure and pain. It is from this eternal
experience of man, who is as helpless in his dependence on nature as the
infant in his dependence on his mother, that the mother-child figure is
inspired forever anew (Emphasis mine.)12 In other words, we again have
woman reduced to bearer and nourisher, while man depicts his vision of her,
and himself in relation to her, in a different kind of creation—the images of
art.§§
Neumann, was, however, writing before an event which changed
accepted ideas about the age of the earliest cultures. Recent archeological
excavations in the Near East, at such sites as Jericho in Israel and Anatolia
in Turkey, revealed cultures existing in Asia Minor two thousand or more
years before the presumed Neolithic cultures of Iraq, Iran, Syria, and
Palestine, and producing evidence of a “proto-Neolithic” cult of worship,
including figurines and “symbolically ornamented chapels—revealing, in
superb display, practically all the basic motifs of the great mother-goddess
mythologies of later ages.”13 James Mellaart, an archeologist active in the
unearthing of the town of Çatal Hüyük in Anatolia, believes that the
goddess-figurines, as well as the other art discovered there, were the work
of women:
What is particularly noteworthy ... is the complete absence of sex [he means sexuality] in any
of the figurines, statuettes, plaster reliefs or wall-paintings. The reproductive organs are never
shown, representations of phallus and vulva are unknown, and this is the more remarkable as
they were frequently portrayed both in the Upper Paleolithic and in the Neolithic and post-
Neolithic cultures outside Anatolia. It seems that there is a very simple answer to this
seemingly puzzling question, for emphasis on sex in art is invariably connected with male
impulse and desire. If Neolithic woman was the creator of Neolithic religion, its absence is
easily explained and a different symbolism was created in which breast, navel and pregnancy
stand for the female principle, horns and homed animal heads for the male.14¶¶

We can find some support for this hypothesis indirectly in both Briffault
and Neumann, who cite numerous examples to show that the deeply
reverenced art of pottery-making was invented by women, was taboo to
men, was regarded as a sacred process and that “the making of the pot is
just as much a part of the creative activity of the Feminine as is the making
of the child. ... In pottery making the woman experiences . . . primordial
creative force ... we know how great a role the sacred vessel played in the
primordial era, particularly as a vehicle of magical action. In this magical
implication the essential features of the feminine transformation character
are bound up with the vessel as a symbol of transformation.”15 Briffault
describes the actual molding of pots by Zuni women in the shape of a
breast; he further states that “the manufacture of pots, like most operations
in primitive society . . . partakes of a ritual or religious character” and that
“the pot’s identity with the Great Mother is deeply rooted in ancient belief
through the greater part of the world.”16
It does not seem unlikely that the woman potter molded, not simply
vessels, but images of herself, the vessel of life, the transformer of blood
into life and milk—that in so doing she was expressing, celebrating, and
giving concrete form to her experience as a creative being possessed of
indispensable powers. Without her biological endowment the child—the
future and sustainer of the tribe—could not be born; without her invention
and skill the pot or vessel—the most sacred of handmade objects—would
not exist.
And the pot, vessel, urn, pitcher, was not an ornament or a casual
container; it made possible the long-term storage of oils and grains, the
transforming of raw food into cooked; it was also sometimes used to store
the bones or ashes of the dead. The potential improvement and stabilization
of life inherent in the development and elaboration of pottery-making could
be likened to the most complex innovations of a technological age—the
refining of crude petroleum, the adaptation of nuclear energy—which invest
their controllers with immense power. And yet this analogy, even, fails us,
because the relationship of the potter to the pot, invested with both an
intimate and a communal spirit, is unknown in present-day technology.
Because of speculations like Erik Erikson’s (wittily dissected by Kate
Millett) as to the meaning and value of woman’s “inner space,” it is difficult
to talk about women in connection with “containers” without evoking a
negative if not derisive response.17 The old associations start pouring in:
woman is “receptive,” a “receptacle”; little girls “instinctively” want to play
with dollhouses while boys do not; woman’s place is the “inner space” of
the home; woman’s anatomy lays on her an ethical imperative to be
maternal in the sense of masochistic, patient, pacific; women without
children are “unfulfilled,” “barren,” and “empty” women. My own negative
associations with male derivations from female anatomy were so strong that
for a long time I felt distaste, or profound ambivalence, when I looked at
some of the early mother-goddess figures emphasizing breasts and belly. It
took me a long time to get beyond patriarchally acquired responses and to
connect with the power and integrity, the absolute nonfemininity, of posture
and expression in those images. Bearing in mind, then, that we are talking
not about “inner space” as some determinant of woman’s proper social
function, but about primordial clusters of association, we can see the
extension of the woman/vessel association. (It must be also borne in mind
that in primordial terms the vessel is anything but a “passive” receptacle: it
is transformative—active, powerful.)
A diagram may be useful here:

The transformations necessary for the continuation of life are thus, in

terms of this early imagery, exercises of female power. According to
Neumann, “the magical caldron or pot is always in the hands of the female
mana figures, the priestess, or later, the witch.”18 The earliest religious
activity had as its impulse not the contemplation of eternity but the struggle
for survival; it was “practical, not speculative,” as Briffault says, having to
do with daily needs. And women were the people who filled those needs.
He suggests further that sex inequality in our terms was unknown in
prepatriarchal society; the kinds of administrative and bureaucratic power-
relationships which developed in patriarchy simply did not exist.19 Thus,
not power over others but transforming power, was the truly significant and
essential power, and this, in prepatriarchal society, women knew for their
own.

5
For a long time, the relationship between the sexual act and pregnancy went
unrecognized. Sigmund Freud, in Totem and Taboo, Otto Rank, in Beyond
Psychology, and Bronislaw Malinowski, in The Sexual Life of Savages, all
noted this fact and suggested that here was not mere ignorance but active
denial of the paternal role. This denial permitted men to believe that women
were impregnated by spirits of the dead, symbolized in the totem animal of
the clan. Rank suggested that two impulses could be at work here: the
desire for personal immortality (i.e., in the form of rebirth in a later
generation) and the desire for a system which would place responsibility for
the survival of the tribe on someone other than the individual male—that is,
on the totem animal.20 Malinowski found that the Trobriand Islanders were
aware that a virgin could not conceive and that a woman’s vagina must be
opened before she could become pregnant. They insisted, however, that
pregnancy occurred when the spirit of a fully formed child was introduced
into the woman’s body by being placed on her head by another spirit of the
clan.21 Finally, of course, the visible, physical relationship of mother to
child cannot help but seem more authentic than the indistinct paternal
relationship, which depends so tangibly on the mother for its realization.
In prepatriarchal life the phallus (herm) had a quite different
significance from the one it has acquired in androcentric (or phallocentric)
culture. It was not worshiped on its own account or regarded as
autonomously powerful; it existed as an adjunct to the Goddess, along with
other figures such as the bull, the cow, the pig, the crescent moon, the
serpent, the lunar axe or labrys, the small child in her lap. The tree in leaf is
not phallic; it is a female symbol; “it bears, transforms, nourishes; its
leaves, branches, twigs are ’contained’ in it and dependent on it”; it is
inhabited by its own spirit, which it also contains. The sacred grove is
sacred to the Goddess. Neumann sees the distortion of the tree into a
phallic-patriarchal symbol—as post or pillar, without leaves or natural roots
—or into the world-tree whose roots are in the sky, an “unnatural symbol”
(a patriarchal reversal of natural fact).22 Prepatriarchal phallus-cults were
the celebration by women of the fertilizing instrument, not the celebration
by men of their “manhood” or of individual paternity. The Great Mother
acknowledged no individual husband, only sons who become consorts.
Prepatriarchal, gynocentric motherhood preceded wifehood; the mother
relation and status were far more important than the wife-status. The act of
birth, as Barbara Seaman suggests, must have been perceived as profoundly
awesome by primitives—even more so than today, when it is still
accompanied, for many onlookers and participants, by intense feelings of
transcendence.23 Out of her body the woman created man, created woman,
created continuing existence. Spiritualized into a divine being, she was the
source of vegetation, fruition, fertility of every kind. Whether she bore
children or not, as potter and weaver she created the first objects which
were more than objects, were works of art, thus of magic, and which were
also the products of the earliest scientific activity, including the lore of
herbs and roots, the art of healing and that of nurturing the young.##
In biological motherhood, as in these other activities, woman was not
merely a producer and stabilizer of life: there, too, she was a transformer.
Menstrual blood was believed to be transformed into the infant (an idea
which still persists—I recall my own mother, an intellectually curious and
well-read woman, the wife of a physician, telling me that menstrual blood
was “wasted baby”) and into the milk which flowed from the mother’s
breasts. What to many women today may be experienced as a passive
function, occurring beyond volition, once was felt to be transformative
power and was associated, as we have seen, with other kinds of
transformation, including reincarnation. If the pot, or vessel, was associated
with the woman’s body, the conversion of raw fibers into thread was
connected with power over life and death; the spider who spins thread out
of her own body, Ariadne providing the clue to the labyrinth, the figures of
the Fates or Norns or old spinning-women who cut the thread of life or spin
it further, are all associated with this process.
Woman did not simply give birth; she made it possible for the child to
go on living. Her breasts furnished the first food, but her concern for the
child led her beyond that one-to-one relationship. Briffault sees the
primitive division of labor as created by the development of hunting. He
cites many examples of women in preliterate societies who show great
proficiency in hunting, and concludes that the more prevalent pattern of the
all-male hunt arose, not from “the respective powers or aptitudes of the
sexes or . . . any physical inferiority in woman, but by the functional
necessity which bound her to the care of the off-spring and prevented her
from undertaking pursuits entailing absence.”24 The human species is
dependent on maternal (or adult) care in infancy much longer than any
other animal species, and in creating a situation in which they could nurture
and rear infants safely and effectively, women became the civilizers, the
inventors of agriculture, of community, some maintain of language
itself.***

6
The woman’s body, with its potential for gestating, bringing forth and
nourishing new life, has been through the ages a field of contradictions: a
space invested with power, and an acute vulnerability; a numinous figure
and the incarnation of evil; a hoard of ambivalences, most of which have
worked to disqualify women from the collective act of defining culture.
This matrix of life has been fundamental to the earliest division of labor;
but also, as Bruno Bettelheim has shown, males have everywhere tried to
imitate, annex, and magically share in the physical powers of the female.25
The highly developed (and highly dubious) technology of modem obstetrics
is merely a late stage in what Suzanne Arms has called “the gradual attempt
by man to extricate the process of birth from women and call it his own.”
“Overpopulation” is today regarded as a global problem; yet there is far
more concern with sterilizing (chiefly Black and Third-World) women, and
limiting births, than with finding new ways to produce and distribute food
throughout the globe. Not simply Western capitalism, but a male need to
feel in control of female reproductive power, is at issue here.
 In his study of primitive mythology Joseph Campbell compares the
energy-releasing response to myth (and poetry) with the innate biological
response to certain signs that have been identified by students of animal
behavior. (The wooden model or the actual shadow of a hawk, drawn over a
cage of newly hatched chicks, will cause them to dart for shelter; the model
or shadow of a gull or other bird will not. The human infant will respond to
masks resembling a human face, but the mask must embody certain specific
features or it will evoke no response.) He identifies certain early
imprintings of the human mind—the paradisical bliss of the infant still
floating weightlessly in amniotic waters, the struggle and fear of suffocation
on drawing the first breath, the suckling at the mother’s breast and the sense
of abandonment at her absence—which are endlessly relived, sought, or
evaded, and which myth, poetry, and art cause us to experience again as
powerful reverberations. He goes on to acknowledge that “The fear of
menstrual blood and isolation of women during their periods, the rites of
birth, and all the lore of magic associated with human fecundity make it
evident that we are here in the field of one of the major centers of interest of
the human imagination. . . . The fear of woman and the mystery of her
motherhood have been for the male no less impressive imprinting forces
than the fears and mysteries of the world of nature itself.”26
Obviously there was a very ancient and powerful tangle of relationships
between a cycle in woman associated with fertility, the cycle of the moon to
which it so mysteriously corresponds, the need for women to protect
themselves at times from men’s unwanted sexual aggression, and the
reaction of men to that curb on their sexuality. Into these play still other
relationships—between the remission of menstruation during pregnancy,
the end of menstruation which marks the end of fertility, the kinds of
knowledge about herself that even primitive woman has through her menses
—whether she is pregnant, whether she can become so.
Generally it seems to be assumed that the menstrual taboo (withdrawal
of the woman from her usual activities, including sex) is the original taboo;
where authorities differ is on whether it was first imposed by women or
men. Briffault sees it as “the veto originally laid by women on the exercise
of the sexual instincts of the male. . . . These prohibitions represent the
repulse of the men by the women . . .” According to his studies, both of
menstrual taboos and those of childbirth, the woman is author of the
prohibition, and her self-segregation is felt by men to suggest that at such
times she is emitting “dangerous influences.”27 C. G. Hartley claims that
the egoistic, nonsocial tyranny of the early male group forced the female
group to establish laws of social conduct.28 Neumann says that woman
“domesticated the male through the taboos that she imposed on him, and so
created the first human culture.”29 According to his view, sexual initiation
originates, not with male puberty rites but with the ritual surrounding the
first menstrual period; taboo with the menstrual taboos imposed on men by
women; and exogamy (marriage outside the kinship group) as an incest
taboo aimed at preventing the sexual exploitation of women by the men
living closest to them. What a contemporary woman experiences as her
“uncleanness,” prepatriarchal women may well have understood as one of
their sacred mysteries.
According to the Jungian psychologist Esther Harding:
In primitive communities a woman’s whole life is focused around the regular changes of her
physiological cycle. Periods of work at home and in the community of social life with her
neighbors and of marital relationship with her husband, alternate with periods of seclusion. At
regular intervals she is obliged to go away alone; she may not cook, nor tend the cultivated
patch, nor walk abroad; she is precluded from performing any of her customary tasks; she is
compelled to be alone, to go down into herself, to introvert. Anthropologists, who, as a rule,
are more interested in the customs of a tribe than in the psychology of individuals, have not
asked what effects these customs have on the women themselves. Yet, this periodic seclusion
must inevitably have had a profound effect on the woman’s relation to life.30

Both Harding and Bettelheim suggest that the puberty initiation rites
practiced by men—which include seclusion, purification, fasting, and the
“seeking of a vision"—are attempts to achieve the power inherent in the
kind of inwardness which women have come by organically in their
periodic menstrual and puerperal withdrawals. Harding suggests that the
contemporary woman may still need to use her period as a time for reaching
into her subjectivity, living closer to the rhythms of her deepest being—not
because the menses are a time of neurotic illness or demonic possession, but
because they can be, if used, a source of insight.
Mary Douglas, in her study of pollution and taboo, Purity and Danger,
points out that where male dominance is unquestioned, and women are
totally and violently subjugated (as among the Walbiri, a desert people of
central Australia) no menstrual taboo exists; it is, in her opinion, a male-
imposed taboo calculated to protect men from the dangers felt to emanate
from women.31 Various other writers, including Margaret Mead, have
assumed that the menstrual taboo was created by men out of a primitive fear
of blood. But, as Paula Weideger notes in Menstruation and Menopause, “if
all blood is a source of mana, why is it that men and only men consider
menstrual blood identical in spiritual substance with other blood? What
makes women’s attitude toward blood so very different? . . . Primitive
peoples are not victims of arrested development who are incapable of
learning about the existence of natural events with repeated exposure. . . .
Every woman learns the lesson of menstrual blood quite early in life and so
might every man.”32
Whether or not woman was actually the originator of taboo, the mere
existence of a menstrual taboo signifies, for better or for worse, powers only
half understood; the fear of woman and the mystery of her motherhood. I
would suggest that if women first created a menstrual taboo, whether from a
sense of their own sacred mysteries or out of a need to control and socialize
the male, this taboo itself must have added to their apparent powers,
investing them with the charisma of ritual. The deliberate withdrawal of
women from men has almost always been seen as a potentially dangerous
or hostile act, a conspiracy, a subversion, a needless and grotesque thing,
while the exclusion of women from men’s groups is rationalized by
arguments familiar to us all, whether the group is a priesthood, a dining
club, a fishing expedition, an academic committee, or a Mafioso
rendezvous. The self-segregation of women (most of all in lesbian
relationships, but also as in the group which formed around Anne
Hutchinson, or as in the women’s political clubs in the French revolution of
1848, or in present-day women’s classes or consciousness-raising groups) is
to this day seen as threatening to men; presumably in a culture attuned to
magic it would have terrifying overtones.
Certainly, the menstrual cycle is yet another aspect of female experience
which patriarchal thinking has turned inside out, rendering it sinister or
disadvantageous. Internalizing this attitude, we actually perceive ourselves
as polluted. Our tendency to flesh-loathing (the aversion to the female body
passed on to us by men) is underscored; religious taboos are laid on us even
in “advanced” societies.††† A man whose unconscious is saturated with the
fear of menstrual blood will make a woman feel that her period is a time of
pollution, the visitation of an evil spirit, physically repulsive. Men often
exalt and romanticize the spermal fluid (one man I knew compared its smell
to the scent of chestnut-blossom) while degrading menstrual blood as
unnatural and distasteful (another man assured me that intercourse with a
menstruating woman did not appall him, but that it resulted in irritation of
“the” penis).
It is recognized today that the menstrual and premenstrual periods can
be characterized by depression, anxiety, flashes of anger. Water retention
and hormonal fluctuation may contribute their share, but there are also deep
psychic and cultural factors. An ambivalence of pride and shame (and fear)
have marked, under patriarchy, the onset of the menses; sometimes a young
woman will experience outright denial and revulsion. A similar
ambivalence of fear and relief often marks the beginning of menopause. For
woman-defined-as-mother, the event may mean, at last, an end to unwanted
pregnancies, but also her death as a woman (thus defined), as a sexual
being, and as someone with a function.
Male attitudes toward menstrual blood aside, the years of menstruation
are the years when a woman is potentially, if not actually, a mother. Under
patriarchy, until very recently (and still only with immense difficulty) a
childbearing woman could not be unto-herself, a virgin in the ancient,
authoritative, sense of the word. The unmarried mother has borne the most
savage excoriations of church and society, and still carries a heavy burden
of economic and social pressures which penalize her for her choice.
Somewhere in the feelings, latent and overt, that women carry through
menstruation, there is an association of the menstrual period with a
profound ambivalence toward our pregnability, and toward institutionalized
motherhood.

8
Prepatriarchal religion acknowledged the female presence in every part of
the cosmos. The moon is generally held to have been the first object of
nature-worship, and the moon, to whose phases the menstrual cycle
corresponds, is anciently associated with women. The Moon Mothers,
according to Harding, were virgins, in the great primal sense of the word—
not the unde-florated girl, but the woman who belongs to herself, or, in the
Eskimo phrase, “She-who-will-not-have-a-husband.” She has many lovers,
and many sons, and the son often grows up to be a lover. Sometimes the
moon is herself female, represented by a goddess like Selene, Artemis,
Luna; sometimes the moon is the impregnator, the male source of the Great
Mother’s fertility (and that of all women); but even so, still associated
primarily with what Harding terms “Woman’s Mysteries.” In other words,
whether female or male, the lunar deity has been first and foremost related
to the Virgin-Mother-Goddess, who is “for-herself” and whose power
radiates out from her maternal aspect to the fertilization of the whole earth,
the planting and harvesting of crops, the cycle of seasons, the dialogue of
humankind and nature.33
But the moon is merely one aspect of the female presence once felt to
dominate the universe. Prepatriarchal thought gynomorphized everything.
Out of the earth-womb vegetation and nourishment emerged, as the human
child out of the woman’s body. The words for mother and mud (earth,
slime, the matter of which the planet is composed, the dust or clay of which
“man” is built) are extremely close in many languages: mutter, madre,
mater, materia, moeder, modder. The name “Mother Earth” still has
currency, although, significantly, in our time, it has acquired a quaint,
archaic, sentimental ring.
In winter, vegetation retreats back into the earth-womb; and in death the
human body, too, returns into that womb, to await rebirth. Ancient Mid-
Eastern tombs were deliberately designed to resemble the body of the
mother—with labyrinths and spirals intended to represent her internal
anatomy—so that the spirit could be reborn there. G. Rachel Levy suggests
that this design originated in the caves of Neolithic culture, which were
natural symbols of the Mother. Here we see one of many connections
between the idea of the Mother and the idea of death—an association which
remains powerful in patriarchal thought.34
The ocean whose tides respond, like woman’s menses, to the pull of the
moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human
life begins, the ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can
ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal
themselves—this ocean lies somewhere between the earth and moon in the
gynomorphizing of nature. From human eye-level the ocean is
approachable as the moon is not; it is unstable and threatening as the earth
is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like
the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal. The ocean cannot be
planted or plowed; it is a sterile, salty field, yet it produces, spontaneously,
its own life, rich, nourishing, yet very different from the life of vegetation
and animals onshore. The Great Goddess is found in all water: “the sea of
heaven on which sail the barks of the gods of light, the circular, life-
generating ocean above and below the earth. To her belong all waters,
streams, fountains, ponds and springs, as well as the rain.”35
The moon was sometimes perceived as a male deity which impregnated
both women and the earth. But gynocentric pantheism imagined the sky
itself to be female, with the sun and moon as her sons. “The female sky is
the fixed and enduring element,” in a number of cultures and myths cited by
Neumann: Egyptian, Aztec, Vedic, Babylonian. The Great Mother, the
female principle, was originally personified both in darkness and in light, in
the depths of the water and the heights of the sky. Only with the
development of a patriarchal cosmogony do we find her restricted to a
purely “chthonic” or tellurian presence, represented by darkness,
unconsciousness, and sleep.

* Along with the idea of matriarchy goes an ideal of “Amazonism”-as early as the 1920S Helen
Diner called her “first feminine history of culture” Mothers and Anlazons. Feminists have sometimes
become polarized between the “matriarchal” and an “Amazonian” ideal, neither of which has, so far,
much historical verification, but both of which have been potent as myths. “Matriarchal” and
“Amazonian” culture are seen as opposed- not merely in Diner, or in the earlier German writer, J. J.
Bachofen, on whom she bases much of her theory, but in the minds of some contemporary writers
like Jill Johnston, who wants no part of “matriarchy” (seeing it as patriarchy with a different set of
genitals) but who believes all women should be daughters.
† Bachofen’s Das Mütterrecht, first published in Germany in 1861, exists in a partial and
unsatisfactory edition in English—Ralph Manheim’s 1967 translation of a German edition of
selections from Bachofen’s work published in 1926. The chapter on Crete, which might be expected
to contain especially interesting materials, is omitted, and a fragment of Bachofen’s essay,
“Gräbersymbolik,” is grafted onto the section on Egypt.
‡ This first American edition, with a somewhat patronizing foreword by Joseph Campbell, has now
been superseded by the 1973 Anchor edition, with a critical introduction by Brigitte Berger.
§ Cf. Briffault: “Women are constitutionally deficient in the qualities that mark the masculine
intellect. . . . Feminine differs from masculine intelligence in kind: it is concrete, not abstract;
particularizing, not generalizing.” (Note that this is phrased in terms of female, not male,
“deficiency.”) “Women are more precocious than men, their maturity is reached earlier. There is in
their growth the arrest of development, physical and mental, which goes with relative precocity. It
has been said that a man learns nothing after forty; it can be said in the same broad sense that a
woman learns nothing after twenty-five” (The Mothers [New York: Johnson Reprint, 1969], III: 507-
8).
¶ Bachofen, trans. Ralph Manheim, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right (Princeton, N.].: Princeton
University Press, 1967); compare, for example, the texts on facing pages 100 and 101.
# 1986: Today, I note a certain defensiveness about these paragraphs. Davis’s appeal was that she
presented a “power” rather than a “victim” perspective on female origins. But her book was not
simply Eurocentric or “unconsciously parochial” it was antipolitical and biological-determinist.
(“The ages of masculism are now draWing to a close.... Men of goodwill turn in every direction
seeking cures for their perishing society, but to no avail. Any and all social reforms [are useless].....
Only the overthrow of the three-thousand-year old beast of masculist materialism will save the race.
In the new science of the twenty-first century, not physical force but spiritual force will lead the way.
. . . And in this sphere woman will again predominate” (The First Sex [Baltimore: Penguin, 1972 ], p.
339). Since refonns are pointless, this is an invitation to drift into the future on the current of
woman’s presumed spiritual superiority.
** Some illustrative photographs of such images may be found in the early sections of the Larousse
World Mythology, edited by Paul Grinlal; in Paul Radin’s African Folktales and Sculpture; in
Reynold Higgins, Minoan and Mycenean Art. See also (for descriptive text) E. O. James, The Cult of
the Mother-Goddess (New York: Praeger, 1959).
†† In her suggestive and closely documented book Religions Conceptions of the Stone Age, G.
Rachel Levy discusses the types of tracings found in Neolithic caves from Siberia to southern France.
She sees the female symbolism and images in many of these paintings—some linear, some fully
painted and gloriously immanent with power—along with the female statuettes found in the caves, as
suggesting not just a “cult of the Mother Goddess” but a later identification of the caverns with the
body of a Mother of Rebirth. She points out that the cave was not simply a shelter in the secular
sense, but a religious sanctuary; that its most exquisite and mysterious images are found, not in the
general domestic dwelling area, but in labyrinthine corridors, difficult to reach, and clearly sacred
zones. The cave itself as a whole was perceived as the body of the Mother, but within it there is also
an abundance of vaginal imagery, a triangular symbol in particular, which is found at the entrance to
enclosed spaces, and which seems to demarcate profane from sacred areas. Although figures of male
hunters occasionally appear, they are not cult-objects; “the underlying principle [of the Aurignacian
culture] was feminine.”
‡‡ Unfortunately, this triad depends on a too-familiar dualism, between man/culture/consciousness,
and woman/nature/unconsciousness. As a woman thinking, I experience no such division in my own
being between nature and culture, between my female body and my conscious thought. In bringing
the light of critical thinking to bear on her subject, in the very act of becoming more conscious of her
situation in the world, a woman may feel herself coming deeper than ever into touch with her
unconscious and with her body. Woman-reading-Neumann, woman-reading-Freud, womanreading-
Engels or Lévi-Strauss, has to draw on her own deep experience for strength and clarity in
discrimination, analysis, criticism. She has to ask herself, not merely, “What does my own prior
intellectual training tell me?” but “What do my own brain, my own body, tell me—my memories, my
sexuality, my dreams, my powers and energies?”
§§ Neumann, though a Jungian, has gone much further than Jung in trying to understand and bring
into focus the role of the feminine in culture and to acknowledge the force of misogyny. However,
like Jung, he is primarily concerned with integrating the feminine into the masculine psyche (again,
as in Marcuse’s coinage, “the femalization of the male“) and his bias is clearly masculine.
Nevertheless, I find Neumann’s interleaving of several aspects of experience useful as a way of
keeping in mind that we are talking at one and the same time about the physical realm of human
biological reproduction and nurture, the cultural/historical realm of what human beings have
invented, prescribed, designed in their efforts to live together, and the realm that exists within the
individual psyche. Like Briffault, Neumann has brought together an enormous mass of material
relating to woman, specifically as mother, and many of their materials reinforce each other in
suggesting certain aspects of prepatriarchal life.
¶¶ It is tempting to ask why sexuality in art—Neolithic or otherwise—should “invariably (be)
connected with male impulse and desire.” But this is not the place in which to follow up that query. I
quote from Mellaart to suggest that there is some documentation for the idea that the early images of
women were created by women.
## “It was in neolithic times that nlan’s [sic] mastery of the great arts of civilization—of pottery,
weaving, agriculture, and the donlestication of animals—became firmly established. No one today
would any longer think of attributing these enornlOUS advances to the fortuitous accumulation of a
series of chance discoveries or believe them to have been revealed by the passive perception of
certain natural phenomena. Each of these techniques assumes centuries of active and methodical
observation, of bold hypotheses tested by means of endlessly repeated experiments” (Claude Lévi-
Strauss, “The Science of the Concrete,“ in Vernon Gras, ed., European Literary Theory and Practice:
From Existential Phenomenology to Structuralism [New York: Delta Books, 1973], pp. 138-39).
*** A recent study uses “inlplicational analysis” to show that the sexual division of labor in a
standard cross-cultural sample derives from the basic fact that “because Inen cannot nurse infants, the
wonlen of any preindustrial society, taken as a group, have prinlary responsibility for the care of
small children" and that “women win not undertake activities which would require large numbers of
women to work simultaneously in situations which are dangerous to children,” whether this means
activities such as hunting or plowing, or activities near the home involving heavy materials or
implements. The authors suggest that these constraints on women’s roles proliferate .throughout role
behavior through the sequences of production (clearing land, tilling, sowing, harvesting) and that
they derive from a need for “efficient utilization of human resources” (D. White, M. Burton, L.
Brudner, J. Gunn, “Implicational Structures in the Sexual Division of Labor,” unpublished, 1974).
The avoidance of dangerous or physically taxing work by women for the protection of unuweaned
children has, of course, no implications whatsoever for the innate capacity of women to engage in
such activities. It tens us nothing whatsoever about necessary constraints in the role of a nonnursing,
or childless female; the only “innate constraint” would seem to be upon men who are incapable of
breast-feeding.
††† In order to be legally married in contemporary Israel, a woman must present herself at the Chief
Rabbinate and declare the date of her last period; her wedding-date will be set thereby so that she
does not go “unclean” to her husband. It is still believed that a Jewish woman having intercourse with
her husband during her period may cause him to be killed in war. There is, of course, an ancient
background. The Mishnah compares a menstruating woman’s “uncleanliness” to that of males with
gonorrhea, of lepers, of human corpses, animal carrion, dead reptiles, and incestuous sexual relations
(Personal communication, Dr. Myra Schotz, Ben-Gurion University, Israel; Emily Culpeper,
“Niddah: Unclean or Sacred Sign?” unpublished paper, Harvard Divinity School, 1973).

OceanofPDF.com
V THE DOMESTICATION OF
MOTHERHOOD

. . . there is a Persian myth of the creation of the World

which precedes the biblical one. In that myth a woman
creates the world, and she creates it by the act of natural
creativity which is hers and which cannot be duplicated by
men. She gives birth to a great number of sons. The sons,
greatly puzzled by this act which they cannot duplicate,
become frightened. They think, “Who can tell us, that if she
can give life, she cannot also take life.” And so, because of
their fear of this mysterious ability of woman, and of its
reversible possibility, they kill her.
—Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, “On the Denial of Woman’s
Sexual Pleasure."

Frederick Engels identified father-right and the end of the matrilineal clan
with the beginnings of private ownership and slavery. He saw women as
forced into marriage and prostitution through economic dependency, and
predicted that sexual emancipation would come with the abolition of private
property and the end of male economic supremacy. For Engels (as for
succeeding generations of Marxists) the oppression of women has, simply,
an economic cause, and an economic solution. He actually discourages our
trying to speculate on how the transition to sexual equality would come
about:
What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the
impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the
most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a
new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what
it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or any other social instrument of power, a
 generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any
other considerations than real love, or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of
the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little
what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their
corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual—and there will be the end
of it.1

This is an excellent illustration of what Karen Horney means when she

says that “it is in the interest of men to obscure [the fact that there is a
struggle between the sexes]; and the emphasis they place on their ideologies
has caused women, also, to adopt these theories.” In her delicately worded
essay, “The Distrust Between the Sexes.” Homey speaks of the resentment
and anxiety harbored by all men toward women—even, she says, by “men
who consciously have a very positive relationship with women and hold
them in high esteem as human beings.”2* Materialist analysis and
masculine bias allow Engels to assume that an economic solution will
cleanse false consciousness, create a new concept of gender, purge the
future of the pathologies of the past. But he fails to understand that it is the
mother-son and mother-daughter relationship, as much as, perhaps more
than, that between man the buyer and woman the bought, which creates the
sexual politics of male supremacism. Even under the pressures of a
growing, worldwide, women’s consciousness, the overwhelming bias of
socialist and revolutionary movements is male, and reflects a wish to have a
social revolution which would leave male leadership and control essentially
untouched†. Eli Zaretsky has at least attempted to respond to the challenge
directed by radical feminism at socialism, acknowledging that in the
Bolshevik Revolution,
Revolution through economic development left intact a major part of women’s oppression.
The psychosocial heritage of male supremacy was scarcely challenged by the entry of women
into industry; while the strengthening of the family encouraged a resurgence of traditional
patriarchal ideals, such as the exaltation of motherhood . . .

and that Marxism has assumed the traditional division of labor within the
family along with heterosexuality as a “natural” condition.3 But the effort
to marry psychoanalysis and Marxism—two creations of the nineteenth-
century masculine intellect—seems unavailing, since we find that it is “the
family” which is seen as the problem, rather than the attitudes—
acknowledged and hidden—held toward women by men. A woman is for a
man both more and less than a person: she is something terribly necessary
and necessarily terrible. She is not simply “more than an exploited
worker”;4 she is not simply the “other"; she is first of all the Mother who
has to be possessed, reduced, controlled, lest she swallow him back into her
dark caves, or stare him into stone.
Rationalizations of patriarchy which deny this fact exist, of course,
outside the Left. In a little book on kinship systems, the anthropologist
Robin Fox describes, in several bland sentences, the “basic female function
.” After acknowledging that the essential human bond, the foundation of all
social bonds, is that between mother and child, he goes on to explain how
the longer extrauterine gestation required by the upright, bipedal human has
resulted in woman’s necessary preoccupation with bearing and nurturing for
long periods, “probably getting pregnant again while doing so.” This
necessitated, according to Fox, a system whereby the mothers, thus
incapacitated, had to be “protected.” Where Engels sees male dominance as
evolving from the possession of private property, Fox sees it as naturally
evolving from this “protective” role: “it was the men who hunted the game,
fought the enemies, and made the decisions” (Emphasis mine.)5 Apart from
the question of how far decisions must be made by a protective group, we
have already seen that, in fact, decision-making—in whatever sense that
concept would have had meaning in elementary society—was probably
originally inseparable from the maternal role. Fox creates a somewhat
Victorian image of the early male (and, incidentally of himself), implying
that “protection” rather than power and force, is at issue—a familiar
rhetoric. If, however, we are to assume that from woman’s original child-
nurturing function flowed a “natural” division of all labor, generally
accepted as natural by women and men, how do we account for the fact that
laws, legends, and prohibitions relating to women have, from the early
patriarchal myths (e.g., Eve) through the medieval witch-massacres and the
gynocide of female infants down to the modem rape laws, mother-in-law
jokes, and sadistic pornography of our time, been hostile and defensive,
rather than “protective"?
One of the themes of post-Freudian psychology is that man’s
contributions to culture are his way of compensating for the lack of the one,
elemental, creative power of motherhood. Bruno Bettelheim has analyzed
male initiation rituals as outgrowths of deep male envy of this female
power.6 Horney suggests that, despite male dominance in every other
sphere, a residua! envy and resentment has remained which has expressed
itself in phallocentric thinking (including such concepts as “penis envy”), in
the devaluation (I would call it reduction) of motherhood, and in a generally
misogynist civilization.‡
She finds that besides the very ancient resentment of woman’s power to
create new life, there is fear of her apparent power to affect the male
genitals. Woman as elemental force, and as sexual temptress and consumer
of his sexual energies, thus becomes, for man, a figure generating anxiety:
“Woman is a mysterious being who communicates with spirits and thus has
magic powers that she can use to hurt the male. He must therefore protect
himself against her powers by keeping her subjugated.” (It is possible that
the more “rational” and antisubjective the male, the greater his unconscious
servitude to these magical ideas.) “Motherliness” is split off from both
sexual attractiveness (the temptress) and “motherhood” (the powerful
Goddess) and is acceptable in its “nurturing, selfless, self- sacrificing^
form: thus, in the fourteenth century, the Virgin Mary could be worshiped
while living women were brutalized and burnt as witches.

2
Joseph Campbell, tracing the universality of the Great Goddess or Great
Mother image from prehistory onward, asserts that “there can be no doubt
that in the very earliest ages of human history the magical force and wonder
of the female was no less a marvel than the universe itself; and this gave to
woman a prodigious power, which it has been one of the chief concerns of
the masculine part of the population to break, control and employ to its own
ends.”7 He associates the glorification of hunting over agriculture, and the
disappearance of female figurines at the end of the Aurignacian period (c.
30,000 B.C.), with the rise of this male self-assertion against the elemental
power of woman. Female figurines were, he finds, “the first objects of
worship by the species Homo sapiens. But there is a shift in the magic,
ritual and imagery of Homo sapiens from the vagina to the phallus, and
from an essentially plant-oriented to a purely animal-oriented mythology"
G. Rachel Levy offers a convincing and beautifully concrete recreation
of Neolithic consciousness. She bases her conclusions, which are never
dogmatic, on her actual explorations of Aurignacian caves, on a great
variety of artifacts and wall-tracings, on the architecture of post-Neolithic
cultures, and on studies of the prehistoric movements of wild herds and the
distribution of wild grasses throughout Eastern and Western Europe. She
suggests that a unified life-giving principle—the female principle embodied
in the caves themselves and the goddess-cult figurines found within them—
informed the existence of the hunting peoples. The beginnings of animal
domestication and grazing, the development of agriculture, led, she feels, to
the first consciousness of “movement in time"—i.e., the seasons’ cycles, the
rotation of the stars, the gestation, birth, and death of animals and crops.
This earliest sense of “movement in time” generated a sense of numerical
relation, balance, cyclic symmetry which in turn made possible such
advances as the development of pottery.8 But one essential by-product of
this “mental revolution” was a growing consciousness of duality—a way of
perceiving which, carried to its extreme and bifurcated, was later to become
fundamental to patriarchal consciousness.
To acknowledge a cyclic change of aspects (that birth is followed by
death, death by reincarnation; that tides ebb and flow, winter alternates with
summer, the full moon with the dark of the moon) is to acknowledge that
process and continuity embrace both positive and negative events—
although, as parts of a process, events are less likely to become stamped as
purely “positive” or “negative.” Prepatriarchal consciousness, according to
Levy, begins with an elemental unity which is sensed as female; and
proceeds to an awareness of dynamics still presided over by a female
presence: “In the growing consciousness of duality, the Mother retained her
former abiding and fundamental status as the earth into which men return
and out of which all birth emanates ... no cult of a male divinity is
discoverable in Neolithic archaeology. . . . Female potency [was] the great
subject of Aurignacian sculpture.”9
Even death was part of a movement in time, part of the cycle leading to
reincarnation and rebirth. A “dark” or “negative” aspect of the Great
Mother was thus already present from the beginning, inseparable from her
benign, life-giving aspect. And, like death, violence, bloodshed, destructive
power, were always there, the potentially “evil” half of the Mother’s profile,
which, once completely split off, would become separately personified as
the fanged blood-goddess Kali, the killer-mother Medea, the lewd and
malign witch, the “castrating” wife or mother. (As I was writing this, one of
my sons showed me the cover of the current National Geographic—the
photograph of a Peruvian Indian rowing a pure white llama to the annual
ceremony on Titicaca Island where it would be sacrificed to the Earth
Mother in exchange for a good harvest. This ceremony is performed by
sorceresses and the llama’s blood sprinkled onto “Pacha Mama” [Mother
Earth].10 Thus the bringing of life—i.e., food—is associated, as in ancient
times, with bloodshed and killing, and both are associated with the Great
Mother. Such customs, if rare today, were once legion.)
Women’s blood is different from the blood of men or animals. It is
associated not only with the “curse” and mysteries of the menstrual taboo,
but with the mana of defloration, the transformation mystery of birth, and
with fertility itself. There is thus a complex fusion of associations derived
from the several aspects of the female, which might be visualized as a
cluster like the one below:

As Joseph Campbell acknowledges: “the natural mysteries of childbirth and

menstruation are as directly convincing as death itself, and remain to this
day what they must also have been in the beginning, primary sources of a
religious awe.”11
In the recurrent hero myth, the male infant grows up into the son/lover,
who later undergoes violence (murder or castration) at his mother’s hands.
The myth of killing the dragon (another violence/blood myth) recounts the
test by which the young man tries to surmount his dread of the Terrible
Mother—his elemental fear of women. According to Mycenean myth,
Apollo had to battle a female dragon before he could enter Delphi, which
became his shrine.12
The Neolithic triangle or the yoni—female genital symbols anciently
inscribed at the entrance to a sacred area—become, in this struggle against
female power, fanged Kali, or Medusa’s face with its snarl of snaky hair.
The beneficient “Cow Goddess beyond the grave” who “suckled the souls
of the newly dead” is transformed into the pregnant monster,
“hippopotamus and crocodile, lioness and woman in one.”13
Neumann sees an adult male ego as one which is able to enter into a
creative connection with the Great Mother—presumably both in her dark
and her benign aspects, since full adulthood requires eventually entering
into some creative relationship with death itself. It is the adolescent ego that
is still so uncertain of itself that it perceives the female as threatening; as
“the unconscious and the non-ego . . . darkness, nothingness, the void, the
bottomless pit.” Of course the issue here is not one of a chronological phase
ending at, say, twenty, or even of a more primitive stage of human
consciousness, but of an aspect of male sexuality, which in a great many,
probably a majority of men, continues into middle life and beyond. In fact,
patriarchy is by nature always trying to “kill the dragon,” in its negation of
women; and the fully adult woman in patriarchal society may still often find
only an adolescent son/lover, who wants her for his emotional sustenance
even while somewhere within him he fears castration and death at her
hands. This fear is the real dragon that has to be destroyed.

3
Woman has always known herself both as daughter and as potential mother,
while in his dissociation from the process of conception man first
experiences himself as son, and only much later as father. When he began to
assert his paternity and to make certain claims to power over women and
children on that basis, we begin to see emerging the process through which
he compensated for—one could say, took revenge for—his previous
condition as son-of-the-mother.
Patriarchal monotheism did not simply change the sex of the divine
presence; it stripped the universe of female divinity, and permitted woman
to be sanctified, as if by an unholy irony, only and exclusively as mother
(without the extended mana that she possessed prepatriarchally)—or as the
daughter of a divine father. She becomes the property of the husband-father,
and must come to him virgo intacta, not as “second-hand goods”; or she
must be ritually deflorated. If he is to know “his” children, he must have
control over their reproduction, which means he must possess their mother
exclusively. The question of “legitimacy” probably goes deeper than even
the desire to hand on one’s possessions to one’s own blood line; it cuts back
to the male need to say: “I, too, have the power of procreation—these are
my seed, my own begotten children, my proof of elemental power.” In
addition, of course, the children are the future receivers of the patrimony;
by their prayers and sacrifices, they will ensure the father’s spirit a safe
passage after death; but they are also present assets, able bodies to work
fields, fish, hunt, fight against hostile tribes. A wife’s “barrenness” (until
very recently it was the woman who was declared “barren” rather than the
husband infertile) was a curse because she was, finally, the means of
reproduction. A man needed children to enhance his position in the world,
and especially, a man needed sons. The command of Yahweh: “Be fruitful
and multiply,Ӥ is an entirely patriarchal one; he is not invoking the Great
Mother but bidding his sons beget still more sons. Thus, Engels is correct in
his famous statement that in the patriarchal family the husband is the
bourgeois and the wife and children the proletariat. But each is something
more to each, something which both cements and can outlast economic
bondage.
In the Middle East to this day, God is believed to strike a woman barren
as punishment for some impiety (the woman is assumed to be the sinner,
not her husband) and the production of daughters is a disaster, not simply
for the mother, but for the daughters. The Hebrew scholar Raphael Patai
says that “we know from historical documents relating to the Arab world
from pre-historic times down to the 19th century that often a father decided
to put to death a daughter either immediately upon her birth or at a later
date. The usual method of putting a newborn daughter to death was to bury
her in the sands of the desert.” He quotes from the Koran the words of a
father who asks himself, of his newborn daughter: “Shall he keep it in
contempt, or bury it in the dust?”14 The earlier background of female
primacy I have described needs to be held in mind against the violence of
this question—along with the fact that the Yahwists savagely repressed the
cults of Astarte (originally Tanit, Asherah, or Ishtar) and denounced all
worship of the Goddess as “an abomination.”15
The Mother Goddess is gradually devalued and rejected; the human
woman finds her scope and dignity increasingly reduced. Patriarchal man
impregnates “his” wife and expects her to deliver “his” child; her elemental
power is perceived more and more as a service she renders, a function she
performs. In the Eumenides of Aeschylus, the Erinyes, representing mother-
right, claim vengeance on Orestes for the crime of matricide. But Apollo
declares that Orestes’s murder of his mother was a just act because it
avenged the death of his father Agamemnon; and he continues:
The mother is no parent of that which is called her child, but only nurse of the newplanted
seed that grows. The parent is he who mounts.

Athena, also a representative of father-right, denies having had any mother;

she sprang from her father Zeus’s brain and she acts like a true token
woman, loyal only to “the man” as she does not hesitate to announce.16
And the medieval church held that a minuscule, fully formed homunculus,
complete with soul, was deposited by the male in the female body, which
simply acted as incubator.17¶
The image of the divine family also changes. The Goddess, whether in
Sumer, Minos, Mycenae, Phrygia, Knossos, or Syria, had often been
represented with a young god, her son, servant, or consort, but always
subsidiary to her. E. O. James perceives these young male images as the
first sign of recognition of the male’s part in fertilization. But for a long
time the young god remained more son than husband, more consort than
equal. Mellaart finds the role of the son of the goddess “strictly subordinate
to hers”; of a male figure found in one of the Çatal Hüyük shrines, he says:
“Presumably he represents an aspect of hunting, which alone was
responsible for the presence of an independent male deity in the neolithic of
Çatal Hüyük.”18 But in his earliest appearance he is a vegetation god, who
must die and be reborn for the vegetative cycle to continue. In a sense, he is
thus still annexed to the Mother of grains, fruits, and growing things. Later,
the virgin-mother with her youthful child- mate is replaced by a father, his
wife, and his children. In contrast to the “Divine Triad” of Mycenae cited
by Leonard Palmer, which consists of two queens and a king, we find such
images as the Egyptian Amarnan family, consisting of a father, his son, and
his small grandson.19 The mother is no longer virgin, “she-unto-herself”;
she is “unto-the-husband,” his unequal consort or his possession and
subordinate, to be reckoned up with his cattle.#
Devaluations of the Goddess are legion. Patai describes the struggle of
Jewish patriarchal monotheism with the goddess- cults, of which the golden
calf was one remnant (the horned bull or cow having been sacred to the
Goddess throughout the world.)** He tells of women weaving “houses"—
possibly garments—for Asherah in the temple at Jerusalem, and the baking
of cakes for Astarte or Anath. Some remnant of female presence—heavily
laden with what Jung would call anima-projection—survived in the concept
of the Shekhina, “the loving, rejoicing, motherly, suffering, mourning and
in general emotion-charged aspect of deity” (with what implications for
centuries of Jewish mothers?). A female deity also reemerged in the
Kabbalistic renascence of the thirteenth century, under the name Matronit,
who, acording to Patai is a distinct and often independent presence, but who
seems to have left few ripples in the mainstream of Judaism.20 The pig,
declared an unclean animal in the Koran and the Old Testament, was a
reiterative figure in goddess- religion; the sow was sacred in Crete,
sometimes appeared as an embodiment of Isis, was sacrificed at the feast of
Aphrodite, and was a symbol of the Eleusinian cult of Demeter. “Wherever
the eating of pork is forbidden and the pig is held to be unclean, we can be
sure of its originally sacred character.”21
Jane Harrison describes the descent (in every sense) of the Hellenic
figure of Pandora from the Cretan Earth-Mother, her conversion from the
All-Giver to merely a beautiful girl dowered with gifts by all the Olympians
and then sent as a temptress to man. Pandora’s famous “box” which when
opened released every kind of grief and trouble among men, was originally
a pithos or jar in which the Earth-Mother stored all the goods of wine,
grain, and fruits. Jane Harrison was struck by the “ugly and malicious
theological animus” in Hesiod’s telling of this tale: “he is all for the Father
and the Father will have no great Earth-Goddess in his man-made
Olympus.”22
Slater sees the entire Olympian mythology as saturated with fear of the
mature, maternal woman; the much-admired goddess, Athena, is born from
her father Zeus’s brain, is virginal, childless, and, as has been seen, affirms
her loyalty to the male. Hera is a jealous, competitive consort, and
destructive mothers like Gaea, Rhea, Medea, and Clytemnestra abound. He
theorizes that this fear of the maternal woman derived from the sexual
politics of fifth-century Greece, where women were ill-educated, were sold
into marriage, and had no role except as producers of children, the sexual
interest of men was homoerotic, and for intellectual friendships a man
sought out hetaeras (usually foreign-born women) or other men. He
assumes the mother to have been filled with resentment and envy of her
sons, and, in her own frustration, excessively controlling of her male
children in their earliest years. Her feelings would have been experienced
by her sons as a potentially destructive hostility which is later embodied in
mythology and classical drama.23††

4
Sun-worship, which always postdates worship of a lunar deity (whether
feminine or masculine) is another feature of patriarchal thought. The
ancients saw the moon not as a reflector of solar light, but as independently
glowing in the darkness of night; the sun was the inhabitant, rather than the
source of daylight.
It is extraordinary to see concretely, as in Egyptian art of the Amarna
period, the coming-into-dominance of the sun. Although a solar deity had
long been central in Egyptian religion, there was still a strong goddess-cult
embodied in the figures of Isis, Hathor, Nut, Nepthys. The fourteenth-
century B.C. pharaoh Akhenaton revolutionized Egyptian cosmology in
setting up the Aten, or sun-disk, as the sole embodiment of a new religion.
In his capital, the seat of the Aten at Tell-el-Amarna, he encouraged an art
which over and over, in the sun-disk with its spreading rays, asserts the
message of a monotheistic, heliocentric, and patriarchal universe.
 When we think of Amarnan art we tend to think of the famous portrait
bust of Nefertite. But her popularity in our times should not make us
exaggerate her importance in her own. Amarnan art, in fact, reiterates
images of woman and of the family which do not seem very different from
contemporary stereotypes. In these incised or carven images, Akhenaton is
already both patriarch and deity (Incarnation of the Aten). With him is his
queen, Nefertite, of extraordinary bearing and elegance, who comes far
closer to contemporary ideals of feminine, aristocratic beauty than do most
prepatriarchal female images. But she is unmistakenly second; a consort,
even a royal deity, depicted with dignity and pride, but essentially a token
woman. In one stele, the royal family (Akhenaton, Nefertite, and three of
their daughters) are represented in an informal, even intimate family scene
showing a good deal of physical affection. But above them the Aten holds
forth its rays, and it is the real center and keystone of the composition.
In establishing the worship of the Aten, Akhenaton not only ordered the
destruction of many images of the earlier gods, and removed their names
from monuments, but prohibited the plural form of the word “god.” A
reference in Cyril Aldred to the fact that “the words for ‘mother’ and ‘truth’
were cleansed of their old associations” is tantalizing, since the hieroglyph
for “house” or “town” also symbolizes “mother,” emphasizing the principle
of collective as well as individual nurture.24
In the Eumenides of Aeschylus, Apollo, the Hellenic sun-god, becomes
the spokesman for father-right, upheld by Athena, the goddess who denies
her mother. Apollo is god of poetry and the lyre, twin brother of an
independent sister, associated with light, with trees, with the art of healing.
Jane Harrison notes that Apollo is derived from the god Paean, of the land
where the styptic peony grows, and that this herb, which could stanch
blood, was held in reverence throughout the East. But Artemis, his sister, is
likewise associated with healing herbs, in her diminished state as goddess.
Apollo’s relationship to trees is interesting: The nymph Daphne, to escape
rape by him, had herself turned into a laurel tree. This tree Apollo made his
personal symbol; and it was with a laurel branch in his hand that he came to
take over the oracular shrine of the earth-goddess, Themis, at Delphi25—
killing, as we have seen, a female dragon on the way.
Thus Apollo assimilated a number of attractive aspects of the Great
Mother—even to being paired with the moon. The Mother of Trees, of
healing herbs and the preservation of life, becomes a male god; the lunar
goddess becomes his sister. Slater calls him “the personification of anti-
matriarchy, the epitome of the sky-god, a crusader against Earth-deities. He
is all sunlight, Olympian, manifest, rational.”26 Now this of course is an
extreme case of patriarchal “splitting”—in Jane Harrison’s words, Greek
orthodoxy would allow “no deed or dream of darkness” about Apollo. All
was to be lucidity, radiant masculinity. Harding suggests that the worship of
the moon embodies respect for the wisdom of instinct and natural law, and
that sun-worship has to do with the idea of control of natural forces.27
Indeed, Apollo is personified as driving the steeds of the sun. The
“Apollonian” rational control of nature, as opposed to the instinctual
excesses of the cult of Dionysus, the power of consciousness as opposed to
the unconscious, the celebration of father-right over mother-right, come
together in this mythology.
Why the sun should have come to embody a split consciousness, while
the worship of the moon allowed for coexistent opposites, a holistic
process, is an interesting question. The fact that the moon is itself
continually changing, and is visible in so many forms, while the sun
presents itself in one, single, unvarying form, may account for the kinds of
human perceptions which would be powerfully drawn to one or the other.
At all events, with the advent of solar religion, the Great Mother, in her
manifold persons and expressions, begins to suffer reduction; parts of her
are split off, some undergo a gender change, and henceforth woman herself
will be living on patriarchal terms, under the laws of male divinities and in
the light of male judgments.

5
There are really two modes in which man has related to woman- as-mother:
the practical and the magical. He has, at one time, been utterly dependent
on her. Predominantly, in all cultures, it is from women that both women
and men have learned about caresses, about affectionate play, about the
comfort of a need satisfied—and also about the anxiety and wretchedness of
a need deferred.
Briffault was convinced that maternal sentiment far predated the mating
instinct; the first love being the love of mother and child. He perceived
tender feelings as a secondary female sexual characteristic, derived in the
course of female evolution from the biological nature of the female
organism. It was the desire for that tenderness, which the male experienced
from his mother, that originally induced him to modify his own sexual
instinct in accordance with the mating, or stabilizing, impulse of woman.28
According to Margaret Mead,
The relationship in the male between his innate sexual impulses and reproduction seems to be
a learned response. . . . Male sexuality seems originally focussed to no goal beyond
immediate discharge; it is society that provides the male with a desire for children, for
patterned interpersonal relationships that order, control, and elaborate his original impulses.29

Thus in prepatriarchal life the male child early perceived that the female
power of procreation was charged with mam. The sacred, the potent, the
creative were symbolized as female. When not absorbed in fending for
existence, or ritually acknowledging the (female) powers ruling life and
death, prepatriarchal man must have felt something of an outsider. As Mead
remarks: “His equipment for love [sex] is manifest to the very small boy—
but what is it to be a father? This is something that goes on outside one’s
own body, in the body of another.”30 The anthropologist Leo Frobenius
gives us the words of an Abyssinian woman commenting on the richness
and complexity of a woman’s biological endowment as contrasted with a
man’s: “His life and body are always the same. . . . He knows nothing.”31
Patriarchal man created—out of a mixture of sexual and affective
frustration, blind need, physical force, ignorance, and intelligence split from
its emotional grounding, a system which turned against woman her own
organic nature, the source of her awe and her original powers. In a sense,
female evolution was mutilated, and we have no way now of imagining
what its development hitherto might have been; we can only try, at last, to
take it into female hands.
The mother-child relationship is the essential human relationship. In the
creation of the patriarchal family, violence is done to this fundamental
human unit. It is not simply that woman in her full meaning and capacity is
domesticated and confined within strictly defined limits. Even safely caged
in a single aspect of her being—the maternal—she remains an object of
mistrust, suspicion, misogyny in both overt and insidious forms. And the
female generative organs, the matrix of human life, have become a prime
target of patriarchal technology.
* Erich Neumann goes much further. In an essay called “Psychological Stages of Feminine
Development” (translated by Rebecca Jacobson and revised for Spring by Hildegarde Nagel and Jane
Pratt), he discusses the myth of feminine evil and the use of woman as scapegoat “which . . . means
that the feminine is ‘recognized’ as evil by the patriarchally stamped cultures, the Judeo-Christian,
Mohammedan and Hindu. Therefore, it is suppressed, enslaved, and outwardly eliminated from life,
or else—which is what happens in witch trials—persecuted and done to death as the carrier of evil.
Only the fact that man cannot exist without woman has prevented the extirpation ... of this group of ‘
evil’ humans upon whom the dangerousness of the unconscious has been projected.” (Emphasis
mine.) This raises the question of how extrauterine reproduction and cloning techniques could be
applied toward a gynocidal future, if they remain under male control.
† Horney notes that to confess dread of women is far more threatening to masculine self-regard than
to acknowledge dread of a man. Since the notion of class assumes that women are merely subsumed
under either the dominant males of the ruling class, or the oppressed males of the working class, it
has perhaps been only natural that class analysis, male-created, has taken precedence over a sexual
analysis.
1986: There has been a feminist temptation to replace a “primary contradiction” of class with a
“primary contradiction” of sex. A majority of women in the world, however, experience their lives as
the intersection of class, sex, and race, and must contend with all three both in theory and action.
‡ Misogyny is not a projection of women who resent men. That it exists, and has been validated by
patriarchal culture at all times, is clearly documented. There are a number of recent works—all by
men—on this subject, most of them quite interestingly misogynist in their leanings and conclusions.
R. E. L. Masters and Eduard Lea, in an anthology called The AntiSex (1964), assert at regular
intervals that “true misogyny is an unwarranted generalization” and suggest that despite the evidence
to the contrary they have accumulated, misogyny is really an aberrant strain in human culture. At the
same time they admit that misogyny is “cultural and ideological” rather than individual. Both
Masters and Lea, and Wolfgang Lederer (The Fear of Women [1968]) deny in the dedications of their
books that they are misogynists. Lederer accumulates vast research on male fear of the female, but
his conclusion is that it is justified because women’s drive to reproduce (“Some women are
excessively—one is tempted to say, pathologically—fertile”) is a genuine threat to civilization. What
man really fears is not woman, but an overcrowded planet on which she is determined to go on
breeding. A similar case of denial is found in the classical scholar H. F. Kitto, who, after amassing
evidence of the repression of Athenian women, writes: “What is wrong is the picture it gives of the
Athenian man. The Athenian had his faults, but pre-eminent among his qualities were lively
intelligence, humanity and curiosity. To say that he habitually treated one-half of his own race with
indifference, even contempt, does not, to my mind, make sense” (The Greeks [Baltimore: Penguin,
1960], p. 222).
H. R. Hays, who nowhere in his book presents credentials of gynophilia, has written the least
misogynist treatment of the subject. His The Dangerous Sex (New York: Putnam, 1964) is an attempt
“to make men aware of the shameful burden of fantasy and rationalization which they have been
trailing down the ages ... By using this symbolic magic he has either imprisoned [woman], made her
an outcast or treated her as a scapegoat” (p. 295). Hays’s book is unhysterical and straightforward
and should be basic reading for men who want to think seriously about sexual politics.
§ That imperative in Genesis is of course preceded by the myth of Adam, in which woman’s
procreative power is denied and she is taken out of the man’s body. When Adam and Eve are cursed,
Eve is told that Uin sorrow [she] will bring forth children."
¶ Margaret Mead notes that it has always been more difficult to obscure the woman’s role in
procreation than the man’s—yet she gives contemporary examples—the Rossel Islanders, the
Montenegrins—of cultures in which the mother’s role is held to be purely passive or is denied
outright (Male and Female [New York: Morrow, 1975], pp. 59-60).
# In Judaism there is no divine family. Christianity’s Holy Family—really the human family of Jesus
—is distinct from the Trinity, or three-part Godhead of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Daly notes the
ambiguity surrounding the Holy Spirit, which is invested with stereotypically “feminine” qualities
but referred to by a masculine pronoun and supposed to have impregnated the Virgin Mary. As for
the human family of Jesus, his words spoken to the Virgin Mary in the Gospels are suggestive:
“Woman, what have I to do with thee?” The Virgin is, of course, virgo intacta, not virgo in the sense
associated with the cult of Artemis.
** In his Ancient Judaism, Max Weber hints at the rejection of “chthonic and vegetative” cults by the
Hebrews; he is, of course, talking about cults of the Mother-Goddess. Another example of the
method Daly has named “The Great Silence.”
†† Slater is another writer who comes close to a denunciation of patriarchy yet gets deflected. His
thesis is that maternal overinvolvement with the son, deriving from the inferior and reduced status of
women, results—in America as in fifth-century Greece—in a narcissistic male consciousness, given
to “proving” itself through war, often through meaningless achievement and acquisitiveness, and
through competition. He does not, like some writers, leave the problem at the mother’s door; he is
refreshingly aware that her relationship to her son occurs in a social context, the reductio-ad- matrem
which gives no other opportunity for action, makes motherhood the definition of womanhood, and
child-care (in the middle classes) a fulltime, exclusively female occupation. Though many of Slater’s
observations are useful, his failure to connect the psychic pattern with the patriarchal context leaves
his insights regrettably incomplete.

OceanofPDF.com
VI HANDS OF FLESH, OF IRON

How have women given birth, who has helped them, and how, and
why? These are not simply questions of the history of midwifery
and obstetrics: they are political questions. The woman awaiting her
period, or the onset of labor, the woman lying on a table undergoing
abortion or pushing her baby out, the woman inserting a diaphragm
or swallowing her daily pill, is doing these things under the
influence of centuries of imprinting. Her choices—when she has any
—are made, or outlawed, within the context of laws and
professional codes, religious sanctions and ethnic traditions, from
whose creation women have been historically excluded.
In Judeo-Christian theology, woman’s pain in childbirth is punishment
from God. (The notion of birth-pain as punitive is found, as well, in other
cultures.) Since the curse laid on Eve in Genesis was taken literally well
into the nineteenth century, the mother in labor had to expect to suffer; but
what was even more significant, it was assumed until the last three decades
that she must suffer passively. In 1591 a midwife, Agnes Simpson, was
burned at the stake for having attempted to relieve birth pangs with opium
or laudanum.1 In the nineteenth century, chloroform was finally allowed to
blot the laboring woman from consciousness, rendering her so totally
passive that she awoke unaware that she had delivered. Others would do to
her what had to be done. “Nature” is often referred to in manuals of early
midwifery as wiser than the “art” of the surgeon with his hooks and forceps;
but that a woman might learn to understand the process herself, and bring to
it her own character and intelligence, her own instinctive and physical
equipment, is never hinted. The “courage” of passive suffering is the
highest praise accorded the lying-in mother.
I began thinking about childbirth with the hypothesis that men had
gradually annexed the role of birth-attendant and thus assumed authority
over the very sphere which had originally been one source of female power
and charisma. But for many reasons—the advent of the male midwife and
obstetrician being one—passive suffering and the archetypal female
experience of childbirth have been seen as identical. Passive suffering has
thus been seen as a universal, “natural,” female destiny, carried into every
sphere of our experience; and until we understand this fully, we will not
have the self-knowledge to move from a centuries-old “endurance” of
suffering to a new active being.
A surprising number of women—not simply poor and illiterate but
educated and middle-class—approach labor insisting that they want to
know as little about it as possible: “Just put me out and let the doctor handle
it.” I was one of these women myself, in the fifties: literate, intellectual, an
artist curious about the psyche, yet convinced that the knowledge of my
body was a matter for “experts” and that birth was the specialty of the
obstetrician. A part of me, even then, could not tolerate passivity, but I
identified that part with the “unwomanly” and in becoming a mother I was
trying to affirm myself as a “womanly woman.” If passivity was required, I
would conform myself to the expectation. I was also, of course, mistrustful
of and alienated from my body. Later, in the mid-sixties, I underwent a
series of operations for arthritis which demanded my active engagement in
painful physiotherapy if I was to walk freely again. “Womanliness” was not
in question then; but also, I brought with me into that experience certain
political ideas about resistance, about the conversion of suffering into
activism, and about the need to analyze what was happening to me. I kept a
notebook in which I tried to explore the efforts of the hospital system to
reduce the patient to a child or an object and to induce passive reactions,
even though immense will and determination were needed to go through the
postoperative exercises. I understood then, as I had not in bearing my three
children, that I could not afford to become an object; and I knew, later, that I
could probably have given birth with the same active engagement in
whatever pain there was.
In reading the history of childbirth, we have to “read between the lines”
of histories of obstetrics by contemporary medical men; we can also
examine the passionate debate-by-pamphlet that went on between those
who opposed and those who argued for the female midwife. But it is
important to remember that the writers were by no means disinterested, that
they were engaged in both a rhetorical and a political battle—and that the
one group whose opinions and documentation we long to have—the
mothers—are, as usual, almost entirely unheard-from.

2
Benjamin Rush, the eighteenth-century physician, reported of Native-
American mothers that
Nature is their only midwife. Their labors are short, accompanied with little pain. Each
woman is delivered in a private cabin, without so much as one of her own sex to attend her.
After washing herself in cold water, she returns in a few days to her usual employment.2

Of course, a great deal of glib romanticizing surrounds the notion of the

“primitive” woman giving birth without pain or fuss and then getting on
with the day’s work. However, certain physical facts do suggest that women
in a homogeneous elementary culture might have shorter and easier normal
labors than women of a heterogeneous and urbanized culture.
First, in the earliest human groups, all human beings were smaller; and
a small fetus is easier to deliver. Moreover, the fetus and the mother were of
the same body-type. A small-boned woman from the Mediterranean did not
meet or mate with a tall, heavy-boned man from the north; consequently she
did not have to deliver a large-boned, large-skulled child through a narrow
pelvis. She began bearing her children in the second decade of life, soon
after first menstruation; she did not wait till some age of consent to mate,
and youth gave her a muscular tone and flexibility already diminished in a
woman of thirty.3 She was not likely to have a pelvis misshapen by rickets
—this, too, came later, along with urbanization and a more indoor life. She
was not likely to contract infection, since she gave birth alone and no one
touched her internally. Moreover, she gave birth in an instinctively natural,
squatting position, which allowed the force of gravity to aid her in expelling
the child. All this was true for normal labors; however, complications—a
breech presentation, twins, prematurity—would be almost necessarily fatal
to mother or child, since a woman laboring alone cannot manipulate her
own body and the body of the child to facilitate a difficult birth.
Throughout the literature of childbirth runs the theme that the majority
of births, even today, are “normal,” and that the chief work of the birth-
attendant is to be with the mother prenatally and during labor, to help expel
the placenta, cut the umbilical cord, and attend to the newborn. So we can
assume that the majority of births before recorded history were also normal
ones.
When the father recognized his fatherhood, some men probably
attended at births. There are accounts of women in elementary societies
giving birth on the father’s knees, as on an obstetrical stool, assisted by a
woman relative. Before paternity was acknowledged or understood, it
seems improbable that the father assisted at births, as one contemporary
obstetrician asserts.4 In fact, in many cultures a pregnant or laboring
woman is still today taboo to all but her female relatives, and men are
excluded from the birth-chamber.5 Most commonly, a woman would give
birth with the help and moral support of the grandmother, a woman friend
or relative, or a group of women who had been through the experience.
Finally certain of these would become known as “experienced” or “wise”
women.6
No one disputes that within recorded history, until the eighteenth
century, childbirth was overwhelmingly the province of women. This seems
utterly natural, if only because women were experienced firsthand in the
process; but even in early times there were male rationalizations as to why
it should be so. For instance: we are told on the one hand that the Athenian
midwife knew far more about the female reproductive organs than the
Hippocratic physician (which seems highly likely); on the other, that the
practice of midwifery was “beneath the dignity” of the male physician. The
latter view of course corresponds with the low opinion held of women—in
particular mothers, as Slater has shown—by the Athenian male.
Athenian midwives were more than birth-assistants; they prescribed
aphrodisiacs and contraceptives, gave advice on sexual problems, and
induced abortions. They were often accompanied by priestesses who
chanted and recited spells to ease labor. The physician was forbidden to
perform abortions; but only he was permitted to perform podalic version;7
and this type of specialization was to give the male practitioner a kind of
power which, though it hovers for many centuries in the background, can be
traced throughout the history of midwifery.
The technique of podalic version, or the turning of the child in its
descent through the birth-canal from an upside-down head position to a
breech presentation, for better traction, was practiced as early as 1500 B.C.
in Egypt—not by midwives or physicians, but by priests*. Greek physicians
were called in only when labor became acutely difficult; we are told that
podalic version was practiced by them with skill.8 Throughout the historical
literature on midwifery runs the assertion that midwives took care of normal
births but that in emergency a male physician (or priest) had to be
summoned†. (Women, of course, could not be physicians in fifth-century
Greece.) But podalic version is not a surgical operation, nor part of the
treatment of disease. It is a technique relevant only to obstetrics, and it
necessitates a good deal of knowledge about the normal birth-process and
the inner organs of women. It is hard to see how podalic version could have
been mysteriously at the command of Hippocrates, unless he had learnt it
originally from the mid wives.
Caesarean section—removal of the child from the mother’s abdomen
through an incision—was apparently performed by the Hindus and by
Hippocrates, but usually at the expense of the mother’s life. (It was
reinvented in Western Europe in 1500, having been a lost art for centuries,
not by a physician but by a sow-gelder.) But before version and Caesarean
section, the efforts to deliver a child in a difficult labor were probably more
excruciating than the labor itself. There are accounts, from many cultures,
of birth-attendants “stripping” the abdomen (squeezing it downward like a
cow’s udder to force the child’s descent), trampling on the abdomen directly
above the fetus, or tying tight clothes around the mother’s body to force
expulsion. If her contractions were weak she might be “shaken” in a sheet
or hung from a tree‡. Repeatedly and for centuries, hooks were used to
extract the fetus in pieces—a practice appropriately known as “destructive
obstetrics,” with subdivisions including craniotomy, embryotomy, hook
extraction, and amputation of limbs. This was the specialty of the male
physician as taught by Hippocrates and Galen; Galen specifically declared
it a male domain.9
Whatever the frequency of such labors, they can only have left their
mark on the consciousness of any woman who witnessed them, underwent
them, or heard them described. Very early, the process of labor—the most
natural process in the world—becomes tinged with cultural reverberations
of terror, and a peculiar resonance of punishment. In some cultures an infant
who did not get born easily was assumed to be evil, or possessed of
demons; it was condemned to death, and the mother sometimes shared in
the penalty, since to be pregnant with such a child was surely a judgment on
her.
Three types of mid wives practiced in Rome: the obstetrical midwife,
her assistant, and the female priest who chanted prayers for a successful
delivery. Soranus of Ephesus, a physician of the second century A.D.,
produced an obstetrical treatise giving instructions for midwives;10 again, it
is difficult to know where he could have obtained his knowledge unless
from the midwives themselves, since the male birth-attendant did not attend
at normal births. But women did not write books; and the real history of the
development of birthing as an art, the expertise accumulated and passed on
by the actual practitioners, is blotted out in the history of male obstetrics.
Only after the Middle Ages, when male influence and the struggle for male
control of midwifery were well underway, do we begin to hear of the
“heroes” of this branch of medicine. And indeed, there were some heroes,
men who fought to save the lives of women in labor; but the names of the
great midwives are mostly lost.

3
The establishment of Christianity in the West had its own effect on
childbirth. Of the two great classical sources of medical learning,
Hippocrates and Galen, the Church preferred Galen, not on the basis of his
science but for his monotheism. Galen taught that surgery was unrelated to
medicine, so that surgery remained for centuries a technique rather than a
science, requiring at best a strong stomach and a certain brutal self-
confidence. Where obstetrical surgery was called for, it was performed “by
barbers and sow-gelders.”11 During the Middle Ages and beyond,
midwifery was in any case seen as an unclean profession. The misogyny of
the Church Fathers, which saw woman—especially her reproductive organs
—as evil incarnate, attached itself to the birth-process, so that males were
forbidden to attend at births, and the midwife was exhorted to make her
primary concern not the comfort and welfare of the mother, but the baptism
of the infant—in utero, with a syringe of holy water if necessary.12 With
convenient double think, the midwife was classified with the sow-gelder as
performing a necessary but degraded function; however, she, and she alone,
except for the priest, could baptize—because an infant might die in
damnation if it failed to survive until a priest could be called.
The male physician, in any case, would have a fairly limited notion of
the female organs, since the Church also forbade the dissection of corpses,
thus arresting and retarding the study of anatomy in general. So for several
centuries, the knowledge of pregnancy, of the birth-process, of female
anatomy, and of methods for facilitating labor, was being accumulated
entirely by women. As late as the fifteenth century, only women birth-
attendants are depicted in paintings and engravings.13 Only by the
seventeenth century do we find the man-midwife appearing on the scene,
and he appears at the moment when the male medical profession is
beginning to control the practice of healing, refusing “professional” status
to women and to those who had for centuries worked among the poor. He
appears first in the Court, attending upper-class women; rapidly he begins
to assert the inferiority of the midwife and to make her name synonymous
with dirt, ignorance, and superstition.
In their classic pamphlet, Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of
Women Healers, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English trace the rise of
this élitist male medical profession, which emerged out of the suppression
of women healers during the centuries of witch-hunting, persecution, and
murder. Eighty- five percent of the many millions executed as witches were
women. They were charged with an imaginative variety of crimes, from
causing a man’s genitals to disappear to bringing about the death of a
neighbor’s cow; but wisewomen, healers, and midwives were especially
singled out by the witch-hunters. I have already cited one English midwife
who was executed for prescribing a pain-reliever during labor; and many
more were charged with using “heathen” charms and spells, under the
direction of the devil. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony in America,
midwives were often viewed with suspicion and charged with witchcraft.
The case of Anne Hutchinson is instructive because it illuminates the
many levels on which the American Puritan midwife was seen as
threatening and subversive. The doctrine of “the priesthood of all believers”
and the Puritan emphasis on the individual conscience as the primary
mediator with God, had seemed to encourage freedom of thought for
women and men alike. But in practice, a male theology and a male
magistracy stood between the individual woman’s conscience and intellect,
and God. To men was assigned the task of interpreting God’s “unknowable
omnipotence”—specifically, his power of damnation or salvation; and in
order for men to be free to wrestle with the problems of covenant theology,
women must devote themselves to the management of “Secular Cares”; in
short, stay in the home and keep off the masculine turf of theology. God
was to be revealed to women by men. Ben Barker-Benfield suggests that
the anxiety, frustration, and impotence experienced by the seventeenth-
century New England woman, living under the double pressure of God’s
unknowable will and man’s exclusion of her from active participation in
interpreting that will, drove some women to infanticide, attempted murder,
suicide, and “utter desperation.” Others, more vocally aggressive, were
whipped for challenging the male hierarchy.
Anne Hutchinson was a midwife and a thinking woman, “of haughty
and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and very active spirit, and a very
voluble tongue, more bold than a man,” as Governor Winthrop, no admirer,
described her. She held classes in Boston of sixty to eighty women, meeting
weekly, to discuss issues of doctrine and interpret scripture. As Barker-
Benfield sees,
It was through this virtually exclusive female province—obstetrical care—that Hutchinson
reached out to address the need which the size and composition of her classes demonstrated
was there, and intensely enough to drive some women to murder their children. Women’s
turning to a midwife, an assistant at the springing forth of life, starkly contrasts with their
dumb stifling of self and child where the spiritual assistants were exclusively male . . .
[Governor] Winthrop saw an intimate connection between Hutchinson’s claim to invade male
mysteries and her role in childbearing.

Childbearing was, of course, intimately associated with sexuality; and

the Puritan midwife was believed to administer aphrodisiacs, to empower
women to get control of their men’s sexuality (another variant of the witch’s
supposed power to take away the penis). John Cotton saw that “filthie Sinne
of the Communitie of Women"—i.e., the coming-together of Hutchinson
with other women to discuss doctrine—as leading to total sexual
promiscuity. If the male-dominated hierarchy of Puritan society were to
change, that is, if women were to become thinkers and formulators of the
relationship between human beings and God, pure anarchy and bestiality
would result. Thus, the midwife, with her already formidable expertise and
power in the matter of life itself, became completely threatening when she
challenged religious doctrine. She became a witch. Anne Hutchinson was
not alone. The first person executed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony was
Margaret Jones, a midwife convicted of witchcraft. And a Mistress
Hawkins, a colleague of Hutchinson’s in midwifery, was charged with
“familiarity with the devill.”14
It seems obvious that throughout history, as one of the few professions
open to women, midwifery must have attracted women of unusual
intelligence, competence, and self-respect§. While acknowledging that
many remedies used by the witches were “purely magical” and worked, if at
all, by suggestion, Ehrenreich and English point out an important
distinction between the witch-healer and the medical man of the late Middle
Ages:
. . . the witch was an empiricist; She relied on her senses rather than on faith or doctrine, she
believed in trial and error, cause and effect. Her attitude was not religiously passive, but
actively inquiring. She trusted her ability to find ways to deal with disease, pregnancy and
childbirth—whether through medication or charms. In short, her magic was the science of her
time.

By contrast:

There was nothing in late mediaeval medical training that conflicted with
church doctrine, and little that we would recognize as “science”. Medical
students . . . spent years studying Plato, Aristotle and Christian theology. . .
. While a student, a doctor rarely saw any patients at all, and no
experimentation of any kind was taught. . . . Confronted with a sick person,
the university-trained physician had little to go on but superstition. . . . Such
was the state of medical “science” at the time when witch-healers were
persecuted for being practitioners of “magic”.15
Since asepsis and the transmission of disease through bacteria and
unwashed hands was utterly unknown until the latter part of the nineteenth
century, dirt was a presence in any medical situation—real dirt, not the
misogynistic dirt associated by males with the female body. The midwife,
who attended only women in labor, carried fewer disease bacteria with her
than the physician.
But the climate of misogyny surrounding the woman in childbirth took
many forms. There was much opposition to The Byrthe of Mankynde, a
translation into English in 1540 of a Latin text on midwifery, De Partu
Hominis—possibly because it would then be available to the common
people who knew no Latin. But this was the argument against it:
 it is not meete ne fitting that such matters to be intreated of so plainly in our mother and
vulgar language to the dishonour ... of womanhood . . . whereof men it reading or hearing
shall be moved thereby the more to abhor and loathe the company of women, every boy and
knave reading them as openly as the tales of Robin Hood. (Emphasis mine.)16

In short, the facts of woman’s physicality could only be repulsive; and

flesh-loathing toward woman—especially in her role as mother—was taken
for granted as a fact of the male character.
The ancient physician held midwifery beneath his dignity; the male
practitioner of the Christian Era was forbidden to degrade his manhood in
the birth-chamber. Over and over, the historians of medicine declare that
obstetrics could only move forward once the male midwife or physician
took the place of the female midwife. Rongy states that “the backward state
of obstetrical knowledge was the direct result of this complete monopoly by
women.”17 Another obstetric historian makes the unconsciously revealing
observation that “perhaps even today the medical practice of midwifery
seems less distinguished than some of the other specialities because it was
originally wrested from the hands of women, and for centuries was
considered an inappropriate occupation for men.” (Emphasis mine.)18 Yet,
as Ehrenreich and English point out, the women were in many ways,
relative to their time, more scientific than the men; they knew female
anatomy as men did not, and they were more often than not dealing with a
physical process which they themselves had experienced. The
unacknowledged assumption in the quotations above is, of course, that only
men could be physicians.

4
The beginning of the transformation of obstetrics into a male province is
usually dated from the attendance of a court physician named Boucher on
Louise de la Vallière, the favorite mistress of Louis XIV, in 1663. The fad
of employing a man- midwife, or accoucheur, soon spread within the
French upper classes. As one historian bluntly expresses it: “The few
physicians who were known to be qualified in this art soon found
themselves besieged by royalty and the well-to-do, and amazed at this
sudden turn in their fortunes, they promptly limited their practice to
obstetrics.”19 They also, of course, limited it to those who could pay well.
The male physicians had for at least fifty years been using their
privileged situation to discover skills unknown to their profession since
classical times or known only to witches and wisewomen. In 1551 the
physician Ambroise Paré wrote an obstetrical treatise in which he revived
the technique of podalic version. We will probably never know whether
podalic version had actually been practiced all along by midwives while it
remained a lost art to physicians; at all events, Paré made it again available
to anyone who could read vernacular French.20 In the last decade of the
sixteenth century the medical faculty at Marburg stumbled on the effects of
ergot, a fungus found in blighted grain, which had been used for centuries
by witches and midwives to induce labor and strengthen weak
contractions.¶ The female healers had long observed the effects of mild
ergot poisoning in pregnant women in their care, and deduced that, in
minute quantities, the substance could be effective in childbirth. Now the
physicians of Marburg recognized the value of this “witches’ ” remedy.
The books written by male accoucheurs generally seem to conform to
what Rongy says of Eucharius Rösslin: “His book consists in the main of a
collection of standard authorities and scraps of information conveyed to the
author by midwives with whom he was in contact. So limited was his own
knowledge that the woodcuts he used as illustration of the foetus within the
uterus convey a fantastic, altogether false picture”21# It was not until the
seventeenth century that William Harvey, celebrated for his discovery of the
circulation of the blood, was able to describe the female reproductive
organs from his own dissections and observations.
The first great woman practitioner of obstetrics—“great” in the sense
that she both practiced and trained other women (and men) and wrote three
books on midwifery—was Louise Bourgeois, herself a mother and married
to a barber-surgeon. Her husband had been trained by Ambroise Paré, and
when, after her first child was born, Bourgeois became interested in
midwifery, she took instruction both from her husband and from his famous
teacher. She was licensed as a midwife and practiced both at Court and at
the Hôtel Dieu, the public hospital of Paris, where she directed the training
of midwives and taught obstetrics to surgeons. Her midwifery text,
Observations Diverses, first published in 1609, was widely translated.22
She also published an account of the lyings-in of Marie de Médicis, whom
she had attended. In the latter book, written as a series of letters to “ma
fille"—a daughter or younger midwife—she urges that the midwife
attending in poor households accept as little as possible in the way of fee
(“for little may seem much to them") and give her services to those who can
afford nothing. Her sense of the ethics and dignity of her profession is high:
Undertake, till the last day of your life, to learn; which to do readily requires a great
humbleness, for the proud do not win the hearts of those who know secrets. Never in your life
venture to employ any medicine in which you have been instructed, neither on the poor nor
on the rich, unless you are certain of its virtue and that it can do no harm, whether taken
within the body or applied upon it. Nor hide the medicines you know of from physicians or
midwives, lest these be as little regarded as the charlatans who employ their medicines alike
on every occasion, and yet claim to know wonders and, in all they do, hide their practice.23

The waste of female lives through these centuries was partly

unavoidable; mortality of both sexes, and from all causes, was high before
the discovery of asepsis and the refinement of anatomical knowledge with
dissection. But much of it was avoidable, if we remember that a pregnant
woman, a woman in labor, is not usually suffering from disease. The
midwives’ ignorance of progress in medicine and surgery, on the one hand,
and the physician’s ignorance of female anatomy and techniques relating to
childbirth, on the other, were not inevitable; they were the consequences of
institutionalized misogyny. The midwives’ work was either stolen and
reproduced in the form of treatises by “learned” scientists, or treated as
“heathen charms,” “old wives’ tales,” and derogated as the pretensions of
“high and lofty conceited midwives, that will leave nothing unattempted to
save their credits and cloak their ignorances,” as Percival Willughby (1596-
1685), a friend of Harvey, wrote in his Observations on Midwifery,24
The effectiveness of the midwife who for centuries practiced her
“degraded” craft among her sisters, was reduced and diminished with the
growth of an élite medical profession from which women were barred. 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 in difficult
labor. The masculine “hands of iron”—the forceps—were, and still are,
often used with mechanistic brutality and unconcern to hasten a normal
labor, causing brain damage to the infant and perforation of delicate tissues
in the mother, both totally unnecessary. The wasteful and disastrous split in
the profession must be laid at the door of male prejudice and the power of a
male-dominated establishment to discredit and drive out even the most
talented women practitioners.**

5
“The obstetric forceps, more than any other instrument, symbolizes the art
of the obstetrician.”25 The history of the forceps is a peculiar one,
involving three male generations of a family, the commercial exploitation of
a scientific invention, and the effective displacement of the midwife
through a male monopoly of that invention.
It begins in the late sixteenth century with William Chamberlen, a
Huguenot who emigrated to England to avoid religious persecution under
the Catholic Church in France. This Chamberlen had numerous children
and two of them, both male midwives, bore the same name, Peter. (Like
royalty, they have become known as Peter I and Peter II.) These two Peters
became known for their pushiness, “impudence,” and antiestablishment
ideas; they were known to all the midwives, and Peter II was formally
rebuked by the College of Physicians for trying to organize the midwives
into a society with credentials and corporate status. It is difficult to know
whether the midwives thus organized could have become an independent
body or whether, as is more likely, they were intended to become part of
Peter IPs entourage. But clearly the two Peters and the son of Peter II (also,
to further confuse matters, a Peter) were in running conflict with the
College of Physicians, and were much sought after, practicing at Court.
Peter III actually acquired his M.D. after studying at Heidelberg, Padua, and
Oxford, thus bringing unimpeachable status to the family name.
The Chamberlens were not simply flashy and fashionable; they had
their Secret. A mystique grew up around them: two of them attended at
each difficult birth, arriving in a carriage and carrying between them a
massive carved chest whose contents were revealed to no one. Even the
women they delivered were blindfolded. And they were dramatically
successful at delivering in difficult labors.
This family Secret, kept for nearly a century, consisted of a kit of three
instruments: a pair of obstetric forceps, a vectis or lever to be used in
grasping the back of the head of the fetus, and a fillet or cord used to help in
drawing the fetus, once disengaged from an abnormal position, out through
the birth- canal. Ironically, although these instruments ensured the success
of the Chamberlens for many years, they failed in the test when Hugh
Chamberlen, son of Peter III, and also a man- midwife in the family
tradition, tried to sell the Secret to the celebrated French obstetrician,
Francois Mariceau. Mariceau challenged him to deliver successfully a case
which appeared to be beyond hope. The patient was a dwarfed woman with
inflammation of the spine and a deformed pelvis, in labor with her first
child††. Chamberlen failed, and Mariceau declined to purchase the Secret
at the exotic price demanded.
Arrogant to the core, Chamberlen did not fail, in writing his
introduction to the English translation of Mariceau’s midwifery text, to
remind readers that the famous Frenchman did not possess “the Secret":
My Father, Brothers, and myself (tho none other else in Europe as I know) have, by God’s
Blessing and our Industry, attained to, and long practised a way to deliver women in this case,
without any prejudice to them or their infants; tho all others ... do and must endanger, if not
destroy, one or both with hooks.26

In Chamberlen’s words we hear the readiness to sacrifice thousands of

women’s and children’s lives, smugly and complacently, knowing how
easily they could be saved, and to justify the withholding of that
information in terms of “God’s Blessing and our Industry.” The men who
developed the forceps, symbol of the art of the obstetrician, were profiteers.
True to their principled tradition, the Chamberlens finally sold their
Secret to a Dutch practitioner. When they had received their money and the
Secret was handed over, they proved to have tricked him and to have
supplied him with—one-half of a forceps. A Belgian barber-surgeon, Jean
Palfyne, guessed at the whole instrument, either from seeing the part sold to
the Dutchman, or from putting together rumors of the Chamberlen
apparatus, and presented his recreation entire to the Paris Academy of
Science in 1721. In the words of Harvey Graham, it consisted of:
. . . two large spoons set in round wooden handles. These were known as the mains de fer
[hands of iron], and were of course crude artificial hands designed to grasp the infant’s head.
They derived from the large spoon-shaped cuillers which had been used for many years to
remove parts of the foetus piecemeal after operations intended to destroy the child. The most
important difference was in the curve of the blades and their shanks. The long axis of all
earlier instruments was straight. Since the birth passage from the womb to the vulva is deeply
curved, a correspondingly curved instrument will obviously penetrate much farther and more
effectively than any straight instrument.27
The actual design of the Chamberlen forceps—perfected over three
generations of secretive monopolization—was finally revealed by the
surgeon and man-midwife Edward Chapman, in his Essay for the
Improvement of Midwifery in 1773. From then on, the forceps was available
to all male—and to almost no female—practitioners of the obstetric art.28

6
With the public knowledge of the Chamberlen device, a public struggle
broke out between the mid wives and the surgeons. In scanning the
rhetorical and theoretical arguments on both sides, it is important to bear
several facts in mind. The practice of surgery was considered a lower craft
than that of medicine and the barber-surgeon was not a fully trained
physician. Moreover, we have to rid ourselves of the opposite stereotypes of
the highly trained, spotlessly aseptic male obstetrician, clad in sterile gown,
masked and gloved, and the filthy peasant crone muttering over her bag of
charms. Contagion and asepsis were unknown to physician, surgeon, and
midwife alike. John Leake, M.D., in his late-eighteenth-century treatise on
midwifery, argues for the examination and certification of obstetrical
attendants “as is usual in other branches of physic and surgery. We should
not then find the town and country overrun with ignorant and half-
instructed practitioners of both sexes.” (Emphasis mine.)29 The male
physician’s standards of cleanliness were not, by contemporary standards,
high; there is no evidence that the average doctor was more scrupulous than
the average midwife. The midwife was far more experienced in the
pragmatic conduct of normal births than the surgeon or physician; and,
perhaps as important, she felt by tradition and gender- sympathy at home in
the birth-chamber, while the male practitioner was still emotionally, if not
practically, under the cloud of a tradition of misogyny which made it a sin
and a crime for him to be there except in extreme emergencies. Finally, it
was the male practitioners, such as Julien Clement in France and John
Leake in England, who established the lithotomy (lying down, therefore
passive) position as the preferred one for women in labor. The midwife used
the obstetrical chair or the upright position, which is still universal outside
Western culture and cultures in which Western medical influence
prevails,30 and which is now just beginning to be revived, against the
resistance of the profession, in North and South America‡‡.
The forceps was the masculine weapon in this struggle; but it was not
maneuvered with equal enthusiasm by all men. Leake warned that “the
safety of the patient more immediately depends on the operator’s skill in
this, than in any other brand of physic or surgery.” In his instructions on the
use of forceps he points out that a too forceful application of this lever can
cause dangerous bruising to vagina and bladder, and even tear apart the two
bones forming the pubis.31 The midwives were even more outspokenly
opposed to the forceps, and soon many were writing pamphlets and
handbooks in defense of their own methods. Justine Siegmundin in
Germany, Sarah Stone in England, among others, warned against the
overuse and abuse of instruments. Stone also demanded regulation of the
profession of midwifery, with requirements of several years apprenticeship
and training.32 Meanwhile, the Chamberlen forceps were being modified
and developed by others, in particular André Levret in France and William
Smellie in England, both surgeons. Smellie became the target for one of the
most detailed and passionate attacks on male midwifery, published in 1760
by Elizabeth Nihell, a graduate of the Hôtel Dieu midwife school.
Nihell’s Treatise on the Art of Midwifery deserves a place in the history
of feminist polemics. It is an exhaustive argument against the use of
instruments, and on behalf of the patience, expertise, and natural capability
of women for assisting at births. She accuses the surgeons of using forceps
to force labor prematurely and to shorten the time of normal deliveries, for
their own convenience or for experimental purposes. She acknowledges her
own lack of experience with instruments, but has read Levret and others
who describe their use. She maintains that during her apprenticeship at the
Hotel Dieu she never saw a birth where instruments were necessary,
although five to six hundred women were delivered there monthly. She sees
the hand as the proper “instrument” for facilitating labor, guided by a
knowledge of female anatomy, and the forceps, reserved to male surgeons,
as a means of preempting the practice of women.
I own however there are but too few midwives who are sufficiently mistresses in their
professions. In this they are . . . but too near a level with the men-midwives, with this
difference . . . that they are incapable of doing so much actual mischief as the male ones, . . .
who with less tenderness and more rashness go to work with their instruments, where the skill
 and management of a good midwife would . . . prove more efficacious toward saving both
mother and child; always with due preference however to the mother. (Emphasis mine.)33

Her three major arguments run as follows:

1. There is no “plea of superior safety” in the entrance of men into
midwifery; consequently it is not worth the “sacrifice ... of decency and
modesty.” Here she is probably playing on the puritan sentiments of her
public.
2. Men have justified their intrusion into the profession by “forging the
phantom of incapacity in women” and by “the necessity of murderous
instruments.” (It is likely that all instruments bore a certain taint by
association with the hooks and blades used for destructive obstetrics in the
past. But we also know that the forceps itself was often used unnecessarily
and could become destructive in awkward or unpracticed hands.§§)
3. The surgeons themselves disagree as to which instruments are
preferable, in spite of having used “the lives and limbs of so many women
and children” as subjects for experimentation.
Nihell is not above shifting her ground in order to create an argument
which bristles in all directions. She asserts that some occupations are
“naturally” more proper for women than for men: spinning, bed-making,
pickling, and preserving—at the end of which list she casually slips in
midwifery. Women, she maintains, would of course not be encouraged to
set up fencing academies. On the other hand, she takes considerable pride in
the professionalism of the Hotel Dieu school for midwives, which had a
woman at its head, and where women taught surgeons—not the other way
around. She is thoroughly cynical about the sudden enthusiasm of men for
midwifery:
. . . the nobility of this art is only begun to be sounded so high by the men, till they discovered
the possibility of making it a lucrative one to themselves. . . . The art with all its nobility was
for so many ages thought beneath the exercise of the noble sex; it was held unmanly,
indecent, and they might safely have added impracticable for them.

She is most eloquent and convincing when she describes the surgeon’s
style of birthing, as contrasted with the midwife’s:
In the men, with all their boasted erudition, you may observe a certain clumsy untoward
stiffness, an unaffectionate perfunctory air, an ungainly management, that plainly prove it to
be an acquisition of art, or rather the rickety production of interest begot upon art . . .
(Emphasis mine; the portrait certainly rings true.)
 In women, with all their supposed ignorance, you may observe a certain shrewd vivacity, a
grace of ease, a hardiness of performance, and especially a kind of unction of the heart . . .
there is something that would be prodigious, if anything natural could properly be termed
prodigious, in that supremely tender sensibility with which women in general are so strongly
impressed toward one another in the case of lying-in.34

She also reiterates the midwife’s constant and intimate experience with
the female body and with normal birth, which left male students of
midwifery at a severe disadvantage. According to her, Smellie instructed his
students of midwifery on a machine, invented by himself, which consisted
of
... a wooden statue, representing a woman with child, whose belly was of leather, in which a
bladder full, perhaps, of small beer, represented the uterus. This bladder was stopped with a
cork ... in the middle of the bladder was a wax doll, to which were given various positions.

On the other hand, she says that a physician should absolutely be called
in the event of complications. She sees women as less prideful than men,
readier to admit their ignorance and ask for help. But “lying-in women
principally require an early assistance” and patience. She makes a
convincing argument that the forceps became a quick-delivery trick, rather
than a device to be used with great care and caution in manifestly difficult
cases. She constantly reiterates that labor must not be rushed, that nature
must be allowed to take its course, though the midwife can alleviate pain
manually and through “a thousand little tender attentions suggested by
nature and improved by experience.” Her trust in process, and her sense that
women are more capable of understanding and moving with process, makes
us trust her, finally; her sarcasm and anger at the sudden descent of men
upon a field formerly left to women as degraded, we can well understand.
Why did not more of the midwives make an effort to learn the use of the
forceps and retain control of the profession? After all, the leading
professional midwives must have been exceptionally strong, self-confident
women. But strong, self-confident women of the twentieth century are still
battling uphill against prejudice and institutional obstacles, particularly in
the field of health and science. And the centuries of witchcraft trials, during
which midwives were a particular target, were not far behind in the
eighteenth-century memory. Presumably a midwife still would have been
cautious about “going too far” and arousing the hostility of an entire
society. Moreover, the midwives had seen the horrors of “destructive
surgery” in obstetrics—the child dragged from the mother’s body
piecemeal, the mother’s pubic bone and vagina used as a fulcrum and often
permanently mutilated. Many of them must sincerely have felt that the
forceps could only be a refinement of these tools of force. Nihell herself
notes:
A few, and very few indeed of the midwives, dazzled with that vogue into which the
instruments brought the men ... attempted to employ them, and though certainly they could
handle them at least as dexterously as the men, they soon discovered that they were at once
insignificant and dangerous substitutes to their own hands, with which they were sure of
conducting their operations both more safely, more effectually, and with less pain to the
patient.35

Had the forceps been freely permitted to women, would Nihell have
condemned their use so sweepingly? Perhaps not; like Sarah Stone, she
would probably have taught that they should be used as a last resort, and
with great judiciousness and care.¶¶ Her pride in the midwife’s multiplicity
of skills, “small hands” with their feminine dexterity, and “tenderness” of
heart toward the women in her care, suggests that for Nihell and others like
her, the forceps would never have become the major symbol of the
obstetrical profession.##
Finally, one major difference distinguished the midwife and the male
obstetrician. The midwife not only gave prenatal care and advice, but came
to the woman at the beginning of her labor and stayed with her till after
delivery. She gave not only physical assistance but psychological support.
The male birth- attendant was historically called in only to perform the
functions (podalic version, Caesarean, forceps delivery) which were
forbidden to the midwife. He was a technician rather than a counselor,
guide, and source of morale; he worked “on” rather than “with” the mother.
And this difference has persisted into the present, where the obstetrician,
though he may see the mother during her pregnancy, often does not appear
until the late stage of labor and sometimes arrives too late for the delivery;
while the midwife (literally, “with-woman”) stays with the mother
throughout her labor, as a friend and teacher in the birth-chamber.36

7
In the seventeenth century began a two centuries’ plague of puerperal fever
which was directly related to the increase in obstetric practice by men.
(Again, we must remember that antisepsis, asepsis, contagion, and bacterial
infection were still unheard-of; the hands of the physician or surgeon and
those of the midwife were both potential carriers of bacteria. But the hands
of the physician or of the surgeon, unlike those of the midwife, often came
directly from cases of disease to cases of childbirth, and the chance for
communication of infection was much higher. Moreover, the man-midwife
attended many cases of labor, arriving in time to perform a forceps delivery
and then going his way; the midwife stayed with one woman in labor from
the beginning of her pains till after delivery, often for several days in
difficult birth.) With the growth of lying-in hospitals in the cities of Europe,
the disease—rarely known in earlier times—reached epidemic proportions.
In the French province of Lombardy in one year no single woman survived
childbirth; in the month of February 1866 a quarter of the women who gave
birth in the Matemité Hospital in Paris died.37
Puerperal fever was thought to be an epidemic, and “epidemic
influences” were “hitherto inexplicable, atmospheric, cosmic, telluric
changes, which sometimes disseminate themselves over whole
countrysides.”38 The conditions of all hospitals were unsanitary enough—
hospitals were for the poor, who could not pay a doctor to attend them at
home. Even the dubious standards of sanitation in an average middle-class
home were superior to those of the hospitals, with their overcrowding,
unwashed linens, open barrels of organic waste and used bandages, lack of
ventilation, and the visible presence of death. Between the seventeenth and
nineteenth centuries the lying-in clinics were as bad or worse than other
wards, and often adjoined them. One observer of a new hospital in
Budapest in 1860 reported that
. . . there poor lying-in women are to be found, some of them partly on straw, spread on the
floor, some of them on wooden benches, others crouching in any comer of the room, weary
and worn-out . . . everywhere you find dirty bed linen, with bedclothes old and worn and
almost in rags.39

Oliver Wendell Holmes says that in the 1840s, in the Vienna Lying-In
Hospital, the mortality from “childbed fever” was so high that women were
buried two in a coffin to disguise the actual rate of death.40
Childbed or puerperal fever was a misnomer for a deadly kind of blood-
poisoning. In the seventeenth century, William Harvey, the first physician to
dissect a female body and observe the reproductive organs at firsthand, had
described the postpartum uterus as resembling “an open wound”—highly
absorptive and extremely vulnerable to contamination. Any decomposing
organic substances carried on the hands of a birth- attendant became fatal
when introduced into the vagina of a woman in labor or one who had just
given birth. But for centuries the disease was regarded as a mysterious
epidemic, part of the curse of Eve. Women knew that delivery in the
hospitals meant a far greater likelihood of death than deliveries at home.
However, the majority of poor women seeking obstetric help were required
to have their babies in public hospitals, probably in part because they were
material for teaching and experimentation, just as today. Many ran from the
hospitals, others committed suicide rather than enter.
Meanwhile, the potential sources of the disease went unexplored, and
women continued to die—not from giving birth but from acute
streptococcal infection of the uterus, in no way inevitably linked with the
birth-process. It killed one Mary Wollstonecraft, of whom we know, and
thousands of women of whom we know nothing, whose potential genius
and influence we can only try to imagine. And the specter of death, larger
than ever before in the history of maternity, darkened the spirit in which any
woman came to term. Anxiety, depression, the sense of being a sacrificial
victim, all familiar components of female experience, became more than
ever the invisible attendants at pregnancy and labor.
A certain indifference and fatalism toward the diseases of women,
which persists to this day in the male gynecological and surgical
professions, was reflected in the indifference and outright hostility
encountered by the three men who, over two hundred years, did choose to
look further. As early as 1795, Alexander Gordon, a Scottish physician,
published his observations that childbed fever “seized such women only as
were visited or delivered by a practitioner, or taken care of by a nurse, who
had previously attended patients affected with the disease.” In other words,
the disease was not a mysterious epidemic, but was contagious—that is,
communicated on contact from one body to another. Others corroborated
Gordon’s experience, yet the possible contagiousness of puerperal fever
continued to go unmentioned in the texts and handbooks of gynecology and
midwifery.
Nearly fifty years later, the young American doctor Oliver Wendell
Holmes followed up Gordon’s observations with his own detailed studies of
contagion in cases he had seen or which were reported to him. He
demonstrated even more solidly that the disease was carried by the
physician from patient to patient.41 The response of his profession was
outrage at the implication that the hands of the physician could be unclean;
uncleanliness was the very charge the doctors had long been leveling at the
midwives. Holmes was abused and attacked as an irresponsible and
sensation-seeking young upstart. His essay on “The Contagiousness of
Puerperal Fever” was to become a medical classic, but not until many years
later.
In 1861 Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, a Viennese physician, published a
passionate and obsessive book: The Etiology, the Concept and the
Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever. Semmelweis had observed births and deaths
over five years in two sections of the Vienna Lying-In Hospital. (The First
Clinic was staffed entirely by physicians and medical students, the Second
Clinic entirely by midwives.) He found that poor women who literally gave
birth in the streets of Vienna had a lower mortality rate than those giving
birth in the First Clinic. He became convinced that puerperal fever was not
an epidemic raging in the community at large; it was somehow connected
with the hospital, and in particular with the clinic staffed by physicians.
Even the poor women of Vienna knew that they were likelier to survive in
the midwives’ than in the physicians’ section. “That they really dread the
First Division can readily be demonstrated, because one must endure heart-
rending scenes, when women, wringing their hands, beg on bended knee for
their release, in order to seek admission to the Second Division after having
hit upon the First Division because of the unfamiliarity of the place, which
the presence of many men made clear to them.”42
Semmelweis was possessed by the spectacle of this suffering and these
deaths. Yet he was unable to grasp the source of them, until a crevice broke
open in his personal life. He had gone on holiday to Venice to look at the
paintings there, and while he was away a close friend and colleague died of
a wound in his finger acquired during a post-mortem dissection.
Semmelweis returned to the news of this fresh death. By his own account,
Professor Kolletschka . . . became ill with lymphangitis and phlebitis . . . and died, during my
absence in Venice, of a bilateral pleuritis, pericarditis, peritonitis, and meningitis, and some
days before his death a metastasis formed in one eye. Still animated by my visit to the
Venetian treasure houses, still much agitated by the report of Kolletschka’s death, there was
forced on my mind with irresistible clarity in this excited state the identity of this disease, of
which Kolletschka died, with that from which I had seen so many hundred puerpera die.43
What Semmelweis recognized was that cadaveric particles, which could not
be removed by ordinary washing, were being carried from the dissecting
rooms to the women in childbirth. Just as the cut in Kolletschka’s hand had
absorbed these particles from the cadaver into his bloodstream as deadly
poisons, so a hand retaining these particles could introduce them into the
uterus, with fatal results. Semmelweis mounted a campaign to compel all
physicians and medical students to wash their hands in chlorinated lime on
entering a labor room. The death rate in the First Clinic soon fell to that of
the Second Clinic.44
Semmelweis’s findings, and his polemics against other doctors and
clinics, met with such antagonism that he was professionally discredited by
politically powerful physicians, who saw to it that he was not promoted at
Vienna. Yet he arraigned no one more harshly than himself.
Because of my convictions, I must here confess that God only knows the number of patients
that have gone prematurely to their graves by my fault. I have handled cadavers extensively,
more than most accoucheurs. If I say the same of another physician, it is only to bring to light
a truth, which was unknown for many centuries, with direful results for the human race45

He was forced to leave Vienna for Budapest, taking a post in a lying-in

clinic where “directly under the windows of the obstetrical department is
found the open sewer, into which all the liquid refuse of the . . . pathological
anatomy is thrown.”46 To work under these destructive conditions, and to
see his laboriously amassed findings rejected in one country after another,
affected the mind of this emotionally vulnerable man, and in 1865 he was
committed to the Vienna Insane Asylum. A few days before his
commitment he had wounded his hand while operating, and he died soon
after—the same death as Kolletschka, and the thousands of women whose
fate had obsessed him. Twenty years later, following Lister’s presentation of
the principle of asepsis in surgery, and Pasteur’s demonstration of the
reality of bacterial infection, Semmelweis’s plea for doctors to wash their
hands finally became accepted practice, and a statue was erected to him in
Budapest.47 The two hundred years of puerperal fever were coming to an
end. The age of anesthetized, technologized childbirth was simultaneously
beginning.
* The oldest existing medical treatise, the Ebers Papyrus of Egypt, mentionschildbirth only once,
according to R. P. Finney (The Story of Motherhood [New York: Liveright, 1937], p. 23).
† One exception is that of high-caste Hindu women of the early centuries A.D., who were apparently
delivered by a priest-physician even in normallabors, while lower-caste women had midwives. (See
Harvey Graham, Eternal Eve [London: Hutchinson, 1960], p. 23; Finney, Ope cil., pp. 2638.)
‡ “Sometimes it worked. . . . And each time it did seem to work, those who had conceived the idea
became convinced of their power to influence and control nature. That the midwife would have
waited for the natural process to move at its own pace, and that her quiet assistance would have been
enough to see the process through to a safe conclusion, were often forgotten in the face of such
dramatic evidence that man’s power to reason could shape and control nature” (Suzanne Arms,
Immaculate Deception [Boston, Houghton Miffiin, 1975], p. 10).
§ The term “midwife” has been so downgraded and so associated with ignorance and dirt, that we can
easily lose sight of that fact. Kathleen Barry suggests a connection between the idea of the “filthy”
midwife and the male physician’s view of women’s bodies, and the doctoring of women, as “dirty.” If
woman’s flesh is intrinsically foul and evil, these qualities become attributed to those who have to do
with her, particularly at a time as charged with fear and mystery for men as the moment of giving
birth. (See “The Cutting Edge: A Look at Male Motivation in Obstetrics and Gynecology,”
unpublished, copyright, 1972, by Kathleen Barry.) This is not simply a Western male cultural bias.
“Since God, who made disease, had conveniently decreed that women were inferior, unclean and
blood-producing creatures, and Chinese physicians had diagnosed pregnancy as a disease of the
blood, religious tenets held that the gravid female was unclean. If menstruating or pregnant, a woman
could not walk through the torii, or arches, of shrines” (M. W. Standlee, The Great Pulse: Japanese
Midwifery and Obstetrics Through the Ages [Rutland, Vt.: Chas. E. Tuttle, 1959], p. 26).
¶ The mild form of ergot poisoning caused abortion in pregnant women; the severe form was a
disease called “St. Anthony’s Fire” which caused the limbs of the afflicted to become blackened and
gangrenous and to fall off—one of those peculiarly horrible and mysterious diseases of the Middle
Ages which must have lent credence to the idea of Hell.
# In 1522, a Dr. Wortt of Hamburg had the temerity to dress in women’s clothes in order to be present
at a delivery. For this indecency and degradation of his profession he was burned at the stake. Yet the
majority of books on midwifery were written by men—Rösslin, Damian Carbon in Spain, Paré in
France, among many others.
** One of the less covert misogynists, AugustuS K. Gardner, M.D., used to deliver an introductory
lecture to his course in midwifery at the Philadelphia College of Physicians and Surgeons “showing
the Past Inefficiency and Present Natural Incapacity of Females in the Practise of Obstetrics.” He
inveighs against “a proposition mooted—springing from the same high source which advocates
women’s rights, the Bloomer costume, and other similar nonsensical theories—to give again the
portion of the healing art of which I am treating, if not the whole domain of medicine, to the
females.” Gardner was also opposed to birth control and to higher education for women (A History of
the Art of Midwifery [New York: 1852], pp. 26-27, 30-31 ).
† In all accounts of this case I have read, the woman is referred to as a “rachitic dwarf primapara.” It
took me some time to understand that the creature thus described was a woman, presumably terrified,
probably a victim of rape, whose entire existence must have been psychically and physically painful,
and who died in torture. (Hugh Chamberlen “worked over” her for three hours with his forceps in the
unsuccessful attempt to prove his method; she had been similarly “worked over” earlier by other
methods.) Possibly before the advent of asepsis, analgesia, and safe Caesarean section, she could not
have been saved. But beneath the medical jargon we can easily forget that here, too, lived a victim of
obstetrical indifference, nameless and deprived even of her humanity.
‡‡ “the lithotomy (supine) position has two purposes: It makes maintenance of asepsis easier and it
contributes greatly to the convenience of the obstetrician. These advantages more than compensate
for the somewhat unphysiologic posture and the discomfort of the position itself” (emphasis mine)
(Bryand, Danforth, Davis, “The Conduct of Normal Labor” in D. N. Danforth, ed., Textbook of
Obstetrics and Gynecology [New York: Harper and Row, 1966] pp. 532-33. This text was written by
fortytwo men and one woman.)
§§ “The forceps was to afford men-midwives with the means by which they could expedite a
laborious labor, without any serious consequences either to mother or child. At first far too many of
them used this new weapon blindly and roughly ... SmeIlie only used his forceps on rare occasions. . .
. Some of Smellie’s pupils were even more cautious in their use for the forceps, and in particular
William Hunter ... who is reputed to have told his class that it was ‘a thousand pities that it was ever
invented’. There is no doubt that instruments were resorted to far too readily by brash and
enthusiastic man-midwives, and it was necessary for the leading men in the profession to teach sonle
measure of restraint, especially with the forceps” (Walter Radcliffe, Milestones in Midwifery [Bristol:
Wright, 1967], pp. 48-49).
¶¶ Stone, in her Complete Practice of Midwifery (1737) asserts that out of three hundred cases she
delivered in one year, she used instruments in only four.
## The pride of contemporary midwives, from California to Denmark, in the use of their hands, bears
this out, as documented by Suzanne Arms, op. cit.

OceanofPDF.com
VII ALIENATED LABOR

Metaphors of midwifery and childbirth recur in the literature of the

contemporary women’s movement: a feminist poster bears the
inscription, I am a woman giving birth to myself*. Such an image
implies a process which is painful, chosen, purposive: the creation
of the new. But for most women actual childbirth has involved no
choice whatever, and very little consciousness. Since prehistoric
times, the anticipation of labor has been associated with fear,
physical anguish or death, a stream of superstitions, misinformation,
theological and medical theories—in short, all we have been taught
we should feel, from willing victimization to ecstatic fulfillment.
The Hebrews saw in women’s travail the working of Eve’s curse for
tempting Adam to the Fall. The Romans called it poena magna—the “great
pain.” But poena also means punishment, penalty. We are told over and
over by ancient writers that childbirth is the most terrible pain endured in
human life. In a 1950 study of the myth of “painless childbirth” in primitive
societies, Lawrence Freedman and Vera Ferguson conclude that the
expectation of agony in childbirth is as common in elementary as in
postindustrial societies. Margaret Mead suggests that “whether they are
allowed to see births or not, men contribute their share to the way in which
child-birth is viewed, and I have seen male informants writhe on the floor,
in magnificent pantomine of a painful delivery, who have never themselves
seen or heard a woman in labour.”1 Nancy Fuller and Brigitte Jordan report
that in their field work with Mayan Indian women, they have observed both
difficult and easy births, but that pain is expected and is taken for granted
by the midwife and birth-attendants, and the husband is expected to be
present, not only to help but “to see how women suffer.”2
A woman preparing to swim the English Channel, or to climb in high
altitudes, is aware that her system will undergo stress, her courage will be
tested, and her life may even be in danger; but despite the demands to be
expected on her heart, her lungs, her muscular coordination, her nerves,
during such an effort, she thinks of it primarily in terms not of pain but of
challenge. The majority of women, literate or illiterate, come to childbirth
as a charged, discrete happening: mysterious, sometimes polluted, often
magical, as torture rack or as “peak experience.” Rarely has it been viewed
as one way of knowing and coming to terms with our bodies, of discovering
our physical and psychic resources.
It is as difficult to think about pain as about love; both are charged with
associations going back to early life, and with cultural attitudes wrought
into language itself. Yet pain, like love, is embedded in the ideology of
motherhood, and it has so much depth of allusion for all women, mothers or
not, that we need to examine its meaning more closely. The attempt is
sometimes made to divide pain into the categories of sensory perception—a
response to a measurable stimulus—and psychological experience.3 To
separate sense from emotion, body from mind, is hardly useful when we are
trying to understand the whole of female experience, and in particular a
function—childbirth—so charged with unconscious and subjective power,
and so dramatic in its physical sensations.
The experience of pain is historical—framed by memory and
anticipation—and it is relative. Thresholds of what we call pain vary greatly
among individuals, and the conditions under which pain is experienced can
alter the sufferer’s definition of pain. Pain is also expressed differently in
different cultures. Briffault cites examples of Maori and African women in
labor for whom it was traditional not to utter a groan.4 Emotional display is
more acceptable in some cultures than in others, and behavior during
childbirth may reflect an overall style of expressiveness.
But the pains of labor have a peculiar centrality for women, and for
women’s relationship—both as mothers and simply as female beings—to
other kinds of painful experience. What, anyway, is this primal idea which
seems to take women—not only in childbirth—in its grasp and press the
self out of us, or, even worse, to become our selfhood? Can we distinguish
physical pain from alienation and fear? Is there creative pain and
destructive pain? And who or what determines the causes and nature and
duration of our suffering? In different cultures there are different answers;
but women live, bear children, and suffer in all cultures.
 The remarkable philosopher-mystic Simone Weil makes the distinction
between suffering—characterized by pain yet leading to growth and
enlightenment—and affliction—the condition of the oppressed, the slave,
the concentration-camp victim forced to haul heavy stones back and forth
across a yard, endlessly and to no purpose. She reiterates that pain is not to
be sought, and she objects to putting oneself in the way of unnecessary
affliction. But where it is unavoidable, pain can be transformed into
something usable, something which takes us beyond the limits of the
experience itself into a further grasp of the essentials of life and the
possibilities within us. However, over and over she equates pure affliction
with powerlessness, with waiting, disconnectedness, inertia, the
“fragmented time” of one who is at others’ disposal.5 This insight
illuminates much of the female condition, but in particular the experience of
giving birth.
Weil’s image of the prison camp is also an image of forced labor—labor
as contrasted with work, which has a real goal and a meaning. The labor of
childbirth has been a form of forced labor. For centuries, most women had
no means of preventing conception, and they carried the scriptural penalty
of Eve’s curse with them into the birth-chamber. Then, in the nineteenth
century, the possibility of eliminating “pain and travail” created a new kind
of prison for women—the prison of unconsciousness, of numbed
sensations, of amnesia, and complete passivity. Women could choose
anesthesia, and for many of the women who first did so it was a conscious,
even a daring choice. But the avoidance of pain—psychic or physical—is a
dangerous mechanism, which can cause us to lose touch not just with our
painful sensations but with ourselves. And, in the case of childbirth, pain
has been a label indiscriminately applied to the range of sensations during
labor, a label which appropriates and denies the complexity of the
individual woman’s physical experience.

2
Patriarchy has told the woman in labor that her suffering was purposive—
was the purpose of her existence; that the new life she was bringing forth
(especially if male) was of value and that her own value depended on
bringing it forth. As the means of reproduction without which cities and
colonies could not expand, without which a family would die out and its
prosperity pass into the hands of strangers, she has found herself at the
center of purposes, not hers, which she has often incorporated and made
into her own. The woman in labor might perceive herself as bringing forth a
new soldier to fight for the tribe or nation-state, a new head of the rising
yeoman or bourgeois family, a new priest or rabbi for her fathers’ faith, or a
new mother to take up the renewal of life. Given this patriarchal purpose
she could obliterate herself in fertility as her body swelled year after year,
and pain and suffering might well become associated, for her, with her
ultimate value in the world. She might equally know that her pregnancy and
labor would result in a life without a future, a child who could not be fed, or
who would be strangled at birth; a wasted human life.
In the twelfth century, with the beginnings of the romantic love-cult in
the West, still another element enters the tangle of feelings and attitudes
surrounding childbirth. The courtly love tradtion perceived marriage quite
correctly for what is was—a property settlement—and located the real
springs of feeling, intensity, vital energy as dwelling in passion-love, a
secret and usually doomed relationship. To bear the child of a man with
whom one was entangled in passion-love became an assertion of the
seeming uniqueness of that love; to bear this man’s child was to bring this
love to a tangible consummation. Bastards were believed to be
exceptionally vital and dynamic beings, begotten in the intensity of passion
rather than between the dull, obligatory sheets of marriage. The child thus
becomes not only the expression of a forbidden love, but an incorporation
of the lover into the woman’s body. He may desert her, they may be parted
by fate, but she continues to possess him in “his” child—especially if a son.
To bear an “illegitimate” child proudly and by choice in the face of societal
judgment has, paradoxically, been one way in which women have defied
patriarchy. Hester Prynne’s needlework in which she splendidly dresses her
daughter Pearl and decorates her own label of “adulteress” in The Scarlet
Letter is a gesture of such defiance. Childbirth, then, may be painful,
dangerous, and unchosen; but it has also been converted into a purpose, an
act of self-assertion by a woman forced to assert herself primarily through
her biology.
From the sense of producing a necessary person, or persons, and of
carrying out one’s destiny as a woman, to the ambivalence toward, or
rejection of motherhood by many twentieth- century women, there is a
continuing thread of unexamined emotions. The twentieth-century, educated
young woman, looking perhaps at her mother’s life, or trying to create an
autonomous self in a society which insists that she is destined primarily for
reproduction, has with good reason felt that the choice was an inescapable
either/or: motherhood or individuation, motherhood or creativity,
motherhood or freedom. Doris Lessing’s heroine, Martha Quest,
. . . saw it all so very clearly. That phrase, “having a baby,” which was every girl’s way of
thinking of a first child, was nothing but a mask to conceal the truth. One saw a fluttering
image of a madonna-like woman with a helpless infant in her arms; nothing could be more
attractive. What one did not see, what everyone conspired to prevent one seeing, was the
middle- aged woman who had done nothing but produce two or three commonplace and
tedious citizens in a world that was already too full of them.6

Not only is the world already “too full,” but Martha resists the notion of the
child as an end-in-itself; she sees, with bitter clarity, beyond the sentimental
image of “motherhood” to the life-span of the woman defined as mother;
instead of a “peak experience” she perceives a continuing condition. For a
creative woman, as for a woman living in poverty, the child can be
perceived as a disaster, as an “enemy within.” In Cora Sandel’s Alberta and
Freedom, Alberta, an impoverished young woman writer, has become
pregnant by her lover; she confesses to her friend Liesel, also an artist:

“Only today I thought I could see some way in my work,” she

said half to herself. “I had such a desire to write, but in quite a
different form from before.”
“Oh—.” Liesel gestured away from herself with her hand. “That’s
precisely when it happens, when we think we’re beginning to
achieve something. Then it comes and interrupts it all . . .”

But there is a need—whether instinctual or psychogenic or acculturated, to

come to terms with the disaster. Alberta begins to notice the mothers with
their children in the streets.
They had nobody to look after them, they were tied by them from morning to night, forced to
forget everything else for sake of the white bundle, sacrifice everything for it. And Alberta
felt mutinous. She thought: I’m not ready with myself yet, I haven’t achieved anything, must I
start thinking only about someone else, unable even to look in any other direction? At the
same time she surprised herself noticing how such bundles were carried and dressed, and
attempted instinctively to catch glimpses of the tiny, well-wrapped faces . . .
Finally, she sees an African woman with her child in the tent of a traveling
exhibition; the mother, noticing that Alberta is pregnant, smiles and nods
wordlessly to her.
For the first time she felt without defiance and coldness that she was to become a mother. The
approaching enemy was a little naked child, with only herself to turn to and trust. Boundless
sympathy for it streamed towards her heart and eyes . . .7

The depths of this conflict, between self-preservation and maternal feelings,

can be experienced—I have experienced it—as a primal agony. And this is
not the least of the pains of childbirth.
Finally, a woman who has experienced her own mother as a destructive
force—however justified or unjustified the charge—may dread the
possibility that in becoming a mother she too will become somehow
destructive. The mother of the laboring woman is, in any case, for better or
worse, living or dead, a powerful ghost in the birth-chamber.

3
Throughout the world, certain powerful attitudes surround pregnancy and
childbirth.8 Nowhere is the pregnant woman taken for granted; she may be
viewed as proof of her husband’s sexual adequacy; as dangerous to crops or
to men; as especially vulnerable to the evil eye or other maleficient
influences; as an embarrassment; as possessed of curative powers.† These
attitudes culminate in the birth itself. The lack of material on the conduct of
normal births and on the actual behavior of mothers in normal labors in
different cultures is due to the scarcity, until recently, of women observing
women’s behavior, and the fact that male anthropologists have usually been
excluded from births unless the delivery was abnormal, when males (as
medicine man, witch doctor, or priest) would be admitted.9 However, there
are emotional responses shared by laboring women of all cultures.
Grantly Dick-Read, the early crusader for “natural” childbirth,
identified a dynamic, in labor, between fear, tension, and pain. Fear stands
high on the list. In the woman bearing her first child there is first of all fear
of the unknown. She has heard all her life tales of “how women suffer”; she
may have attended births and witnessed for herself; above all, there is the
sense of her body going into powerful, involuntary contractions, almost a
sense of becoming possessed. In most of our history, women have not been
told to identify these as “contractions” they have been described by
midwives, surgeons, priests, mothers alike as “pains,” and even as
punishment. Instead of visualizing a functional physical process the woman
may perceive herself simply as invaded by pain.‡ Not only has she been
socialized to expect suffering, but the mysteriousness of the process
generates fear. Freedman and Ferguson’s study of childbirth, cited above,
concludes that the fear of suffering derives from “empirically derived
knowledge of mutilations and deaths” or of the births of monstrosities. The
fear of death is inextricable from fear of the unknown.
In many cultures the woman in labor is believed to be particularly
vulnerable to malign occult influences, just as during pregnancy. Closely
related to this is the notion of childbirth as illness. Niles Newton cites the
Cuna Indians of Panama, who “regard childbirth as so abnormal that the
mother goes to the medicine man daily throughout pregnancy for medicine
to help her and is under constant medication during labor.” In the American
hospital delivery, similarly, birth is frequently treated as an operation, and
always as a medical event.
The idea of birth as defilement is widespread. Indian village midwives
are usually of the “untouchable” caste, and in some parts of India the
mother is supposedly “untouchable” during birth and for ten days after.
Similarly, Vietnamese women were reported (in 1951) to be secluded for a
lengthy time after giving birth in order not to bring bad luck upon others.
Arapesh women give birth in an area “reserved for excretion, menstrual
huts, and foraging pigs.” The ritual purification of women after childbirth is
found among Jews, Christians, and Arabs, and from the Caucasus to
southern Africa. Newton observes that (as with menstrual taboos) post-
partum “defilement” may at least procure for the mother some relief from
her daily tasks and an opportunity for uninterrupted and peaceful
concentration on the new relationship with her baby. But even where this is
so, the cost exacted is still female flesh-loathing; and physical self-hatred
and suspicion of one’s own body is scarcely a favorable emotion with
which to enter an intense physical experience.10
Finally, there is the pain of sexual guilt. In some cultures, confessions of
adultery are extorted from women in labor.11 The sexual connotations of
pregnancy and birth can give rise, not only to shame and embarrassment
during pregnancy, but feelings of guilt in the intimate exposure of the birth-
chamber. The dread of giving birth to monsters, as Sheila Kitzinger
observes, 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.”12 Again, sexual guilt and physical
defilement in women are inextricably associated, and throughout the world
are sources of enormous tension.
Such negative attitudes, found in nonliterate as well as literate cultures,
make childbirth an ordeal both psychically and physically. There is a deep
and prevalent sense of the woman’s body as magical, as either vulnerable to
or emanating evil—as unclean, and as the embodiment of guilt. These
beliefs, internalized in her, affect her relationship to the birth-process as
much as do ignorance, or the actual, verifiable reality of risk and danger.
But contemporary Western culture shares many of these attitudes, and has
made its own special contributions to the alienation of women from the
birth-process.

4
The fear of pain of childbirth in literate as in nonliterate societies may come
(and often does) from verbal tales, phrases, anecdotes; it is further
reinforced by literature. As a girl of twelve or thirteen, I read and reread
passages in novels which recounted births, trying to imagine what actually
happened. I had no films, no photographs of childbirth to enlighten me; but
in my favorite novel, Anna Karenina, I found the account of Kitty Levin’s
labor, as perceived by her husband.

Kitty’s flushed, agonized face, a lock of hair clinging to her

clammy forehead, was turned to him, seeking his eyes. . . .
She spoke fast, and tried to smile, but suddenly her face distorted
with pain and she pushed him away.
“Oh, this is terrible! I am dying ... I shall die! Go away, go away!”
she cried, and the same unearthly shriek echoed through the house. .
..
 Leaning his head against the doorpost, he stood in the next room
and heard someone shrieking and moaning in a way he had never
heard before, and knew that these sounds came from what had once
been Kitty. . . .
Beside himself, he rushed into the bedroom again. The first thing
he saw was the midwife’s face looking more frowning and stem than
ever. Kitty’s face was not there. In its place was something fearful—
fearful in its strained distortion and the sounds that issued from it. . .
. The terrible screams followed each other quickly until they seemed
to reach the utmost limit of horror, when they suddenly ceased . . .
and he heard a soft stir, a bustle, and the sound of hurried breathing,
and her voice, faltering, vibrant, tender and blissful as she
whispered, “It’s over!”13

The outcome for Princess Lise, in War and Peace, was less blissful:

The screaming ceased, and a few more seconds went by. Then
suddenly a terrible shriek—it could not be hers, she could not
scream like that—came from the bedroom. Prince Andrew ran to the
door; the scream ceased and he heard the wail of an infant.
... A woman rushed out and seeing Prince Andrew stopped, hesitating on the threshold. He
went into his wife’s room. She was lying dead, in the same position he had seen her in five
minutes before . . .14

Both these passages, of course, were composed by a man, and written

through the consciousness of the father.
I considered myself a young woman enlightened in “the facts of life”;
my mother, unlike the mothers of many of my friends, had described sexual
intercourse and conception in general terms, quite unhysterically. But the
process of labor was mysterious to me. I imagined that the pains could only
be caused by the squeezing of an infant’s head through the tiny opening of
the vagina—how could that be anything but painful? I had heard of
“forceps” deliveries and imagined a huge instrument which would lacerate
the mother while grasping the child’s body. But how was it possible that the
pain could end immediately after the child was born? And how could Lise
simply have died there, “in the same position he had seen her in five
minutes before?” What killed her? How could it all happen so suddenly?
And there was something terrifying in the metamorphosis which Tolstoy
implied women underwent in the sufferings of labor: “these sounds came
from what had once been Kitty” ... “a terrible shriek—it could not be hers,
she could not scream like that—.” One became, then, possessed or
dehumanized, with pain.
Beyond the accounts of childbirth—few and far between—in novels
(Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth was another source), I knew that my own
birth had been long and slow, that my mother had been accounted “a
heroine” for enduring my coming. In my father’s library I stole glances at a
thick, dark red volume, Williams’s Obstetrics, a textbook written by the
obstetrician who had delivered me. Nowhere was the face of a laboring
mother visible in its photographs; all was perineum, episiotomy, the nether
parts I recognized as like and unlike my own, stretched beyond belief by the
crowning infant head. Like many a young girl, I simply could not imagine
that my body was built to withstand the cataclysm.
Dick-Read says that he was told by many women that they cried out,
not from pain but the fear of pain, and demanded to be put to sleep in order
to escape from the terrors of the unknown. For centuries, notably the
centuries of puerperal fever, death-fantasies had a literal, unassailable basis
in statistical fact. Yet, even in a place and time where maternal mortality is
low, a woman’s fantasies of her own death in childbirth have the accuracy
of metaphor. Typically, under patriarchy, the mother’s life is exchanged for
the child; her autonomy as a separate being seems fated to conflict with the
infant she will bear. The self- denying, self-annihilative role of the Good
Mother (linked implicitly with suffering and with the repression of anger)
will spell the “death” of the woman or girl who once had hopes,
expectations, fantasies for herself—especially when those hopes and
fantasies have never been acted-on. For a poor woman, or one who has only
herself to depend on economically, the birth of an infant can imply another
kind of death—a new liability in the struggle merely to survive.
There is another kind of fear which does seem elemental; the fear of
change, of transformation, of the unfamiliar. Pregnancy may be experienced
as the extinguishing of an earlier self, as the diary notes of a European
woman suggest:
My face in the mirror looked alien to me. My character blurred. Childish violent desires,
unknown to me, came over me, and childish violent dislikes. I am a coldly logical thinker, but
at that time, my reasoning blurred and dissolved, impotent, into tears, another helpless,
childish creature’s tears, not mine. I was one and the other at once. It stirred inside of me.
 Could I control its movements with my will? Sometimes I thought I could, at other times I
realized it was beyond my control. I couldn’t control anything. I was not myself. And not for
a brief, passing moment of rapture, which men, too, experience, but for nine watchful quiet
months. . . . Then it was born.

I heard it scream with a voice that was no longer mine.15

Not every woman, of course, feels pregnancy as “imposing” “alien traits”

on her, as did this woman with her “coldly logical” self-image. It could be
said of her that what appeared most alien and unfamiliar were really buried,
denied aspects of her own nature. But pregnancy and birth do herald
enormous changes in the life of any mother. Even a woman who gives up
her child for adoption at birth has undergone irreversible physiological and
psychic changes in the process of carrying it to term and bearing it. And the
woman who continues to mother will find the rhythms and priorities of her
life changed in the most profound and also the most trivial ways. The
woman who has long wanted and awaited a child can anticipate becoming a
mother with imaginative eagerness; but she too must move from the
familiar to the strange, and this is never a simple process.

5
The forceps and its monopoly by male practitioners were decisive in
annexing childbirth to the new male medical establishment. In 1842 a
Georgia physician discovered that pain could be annulled by ether-
inhalation; both ether and nitrous oxide were rapidly introduced in
dentistry; and the term anesthesia, suggested by Oliver Wendell Holmes,
soon became current. In 1847, using ether in a case of childbirth, James
Simpson in Scotland showed that contractions of the uterus would continue
even if the woman was unconscious, and proceeded to experiment with and
to use chloroform to relieve the pains of labor. A fierce theological
opposition arose; the clergy attacked anesthesia as “a decay of Satan,
apparently offering itself to bless women; but in the end it will harden
society and rob God of the deep earnest cries which arise in time of trouble
for help”16 The lifting of Eve’s curse seemed to threaten the foundations of
patriarchal religion; the cries of women in childbirth were for the glory of
God the Father. An alleviation of female suffering was seen as “hardening”
society, as if the sole alternative to the mater dolorosa—the eternally
suffering and suppliant mother as epitomized by the Virgin—must be the
Medusa whose look turns men to stone.
This view still finds expression in antiabortion rhetoric, and extends
beyond any single issue to feminism in general. After the horrible and
lingering death of Mary Wollstonecraft from septicemia, the Rev. Richard
Polwhele complacently observed that “she had died a death that strongly
marked the distinction of the sexes, by pointing out the destiny of women,
and the diseases to which they were peculiarly liable."17
The identification of womanhood with suffering—by women§ as well
as men—has been tied to the concept of woman-as- mother. The idea that
woman’s passive suffering is inevitable has worn many guises in history;
not only those of Eve or the Virgin Mary but also later ones such as Helene
Deutsch’s association of passivity and masochism with “normal”
femininity. If the medieval woman saw herself as paying by each childbirth
for Eve’s transgression, the nineteenth-century middle-class woman could
play the Angel in the House, the martyr, her womanhood affirmed by her
agonies suffered in travail. Oliver Wendell Holmes supplies us with one
version of the rhetoric:
The woman about to become a mother, or with her newborn infant upon her bosom, should be
the object of trembling care and sympathy wherever she bears her tender burden or stretches
her aching limbs. The very outcast of the streets has pity upon her sister in degradation when
the seal of promised maternity is impressed upon her. The remorseless vengeance of the law
... is arrested in its fall at a word which reveals her transient claim for mercy. The solemn
prayer of the liturgy singles out her sorrows from the multiplied trials of life, to plead for her
in her hour of peril.18¶

The value of a woman’s life would appear to be contingent on her being

pregnant or newly delivered. Women who refuse to become mothers are not
merely emotionally suspect, but are dangerous. Not only do they refuse to
continue the species; they also deprive society of its emotional leaven—the
suffering of the mother. As late as the 1920s, it was assumed that “the
suffering which a woman undergoes in labor is one of the strongest
elements in the love she bears her offspring.”19
It was therefore a radical act—the truly radical act of her entire reign—
when Queen Victoria accepted anesthesia by chloroform for the birth of her
seventh child in 1853. In so doing she opposed clerical and patriarchal
tradition and its entire view of women; but her influence and prestige were
strong enough that her decision opened the way for anesthesia as an
accepted obstetrical practice.
It was also in the Victorian period that the female body became more
taboo, more mysterious, more suspected of “complaints and disorders,” and
the focus of more ignorant speculation, than ever before. The male
gynecological establishment viewed female sexual responsiveness of any
kind as pathological, and the “myth of female frailty” haunted the existence
of middle- and upper-class women. If education was supposed to atrophy
the female reproductive organs, women’s suffrage was seen as creating
“insane asylums in every county, and ... a divorce court in every town.”
Clitoridectomies and ovariotomies were performed on women as a form of
behavior modification for “troublesomeness,” “attempted suicide,” and
“erotic tendencies.” The much professed “reverence” for women (of the
upper classes) in Victorian England and America consisted largely in an
exaggerated prudery.20 At the onset of labor, the woman was placed in the
lithotomy (supine) position, chloroformed, and turned into the completely
passive body on which the obstetrician could perform as on a mannequin.
The labor room became an operating theatre, and childbirth a medical
drama with the physician as its hero.
In the early twentieth century various forms of anesthesia were
developed specifically for labor: “Twilight Sleep,” a compound of morphine
and scopolamine, was widely used until it was discovered to have a highly
toxic effect on the infant. Sodium amytal and nembutal were found to
produce after-amnesia (while only partly blunting pain); of nembutal Sylvia
Plath’s heroine in The Bell Jar bitterly remarks, “I thought it sounded just
like the sort of drug a man would invent."21 The development of caudal or
saddle-block anesthesia meant that a woman could remain conscious and
see her baby born, though she was paralyzed from the waist down. Speert
and Guttmacher, in their textbook Obstetric Practice, admit that the use of
caudal or saddle-block anesthesia can prolong the second stage of labor, by
producing “uterine inertia . . . [and] the absence of voluntary expulsive
efforts by the mother,” thus rendering a forceps delivery “necessary” where
the child might otherwise have been born more swiftly and without
instruments. (Not to mention the fact that in inexperienced hands the
possibility of permanent damage has to be considered.)
 There are certain valid indications for the prevention of exertion by the
mother—such as heart disease, tuberculosis, or a previous Caesarean,22 but
women are now asking what psychic effect a state of semihelplessness has
on a healthy mother, awake during the birth, yet prevented from
participating actively in delivery. No more devastating image could be
invented for the bondage of woman: sheeted, supine, drugged, her wrists
strapped down and her legs in stirrups, at the very moment when she is
bringing new life into the world. This “freedom from pain,” like “sexual
liberation,” places a woman physically at men’s disposal, though still
estranged from the potentialities of her own body. While in no way altering
her subjection, it can be advertised as a progressive development.#

6
In the 1940s, Dick-Read observed that pain sensations arose out of fear and
tension and began to train prospective mothers to relax, to breathe correctly,
to understand the stages of the labor process, and to develop muscular
control through exercises. Dick-Read also placed great emphasis on the
presence of calm, supportive birth-attendants throughout labor, especially
the obstetrician, who was to act as a source of confidence and security
rather than as a surgeon needlessly interfering with or accelerating the birth
process. He held that anesthesia should always be available but never
involuntarily imposed on the woman or administered routinely. Dick-Read’s
work was path-breaking, and many of his observations are still valuable.
However, his attitude to women is essentially patriarchal: While in genuine
awe of the female capacity to produce new life, he writes of “the inborn
dependence of woman” which finds its natural outlet in her dependence on
the doctor. He perceives the birth process as naturally “ecstatic”:
“Biologically, motherhood is her desire,” he remarks; and at one point:
“Varium et mutabile semper femina, but never more so than in childbirth.”
For him, childbirth is a woman’s glory, her purpose in life, her peak
experience. Remove fear, reinforce ecstasy, and childbirth can be
“natural”—that is, virtually without pain. But the male obstetrician is still in
control of the situation.23
During the thirties and forties, several Soviet obstetricians began
applying Pavlov’s theories of the conditioned reflex to childbirth.
Successful deliveries in Russia under hypnosis and in posthypnotic states
led to increased emphasis on “suggestion,” which was the basis for the first
prenatal training: the creation, during pregnancy, of “complex chains of
conditioned reflexes which will be applicable at the confinement. The
pregnant woman learns to give birth as the child learns to read or swim.”
The conditioning towards pain was to be altered and new reflexes set up;
the method is described as “verbal analgesia.”24 Pavlov had observed that
... for man speech provides conditioned stimuli which are just as real as any other stimuli. . . .
Speech, an account of the whole preceding life of the adult, is connected up with the internal
and external stimuli which can reach the cortex, signalling all of them, and replacing all of
them, and therefore it can call forth all those reactions of the organism which are normally
determined by the actual stimuli themselves 25

In 1951, Fernand Lamaze, a French physician, visited maternity clinics in

the U.S.S.R. which used the “psychoprophylactic method,” and introduced
the method in the West, at the maternity hospital under his direction,
serving the members of the Metallurgists’ Union. Lamaze, far more than
Dick-Read, emphasized the active participation of the mother in every stage
of labor, and developed a precise and controlled breathing drill to be used
during each stage. Where Dick-Read encourages a level of “dulled
consciousness” in the second stage, Lamaze would have the mother aware
and conscious, responding to a series of verbal cues from the birth-attendant
by panting, pushing, and blowing. Suzanne Arms suggests, however, that
the Lamaze method “has the unfortunate side-effect of greatly altering a
woman’s natural experience of birth from one of deep involvement inside
her body to a controlled distraction.” In her “militant control over her
body,” she is “separate and detached from the sensations, smells and sights
of her body giving birth. She is too involved in . . . control . . .”26
The “psychosexual” method of Sheila Kitzinger, in England, involves a
much broader concept of childbearing as part of the context of a woman’s
entire existence. She stresses that a woman must learn to “trust her body
and her instincts” and to understand the complex emotional network in
which she comes to parturition. Kitzinger insists on both physical and
psychic education for childbirth if the mother is to retain “the power of self-
direction, of self-control, of choice, of voluntary decision and active
cooperation with doctor and nurse” and she strongly favors giving birth at
home, usually with a midwife.
 The mother of five children herself, she unequivocally states that “pain
in labour is real enough.” But she also describes the sensuous experience of
the opening of the vagina during expulsion—not as painless, but as
powerful and often exhilarating. Her grasp of female reality is much
broader than that of Dick- Read or Lamaze, but she, like other writers on
prepared childbirth, assumes that babies are born only to married couples,
and that the husband—present and emotionally dependable—will be a
primary figure in the birth-chamber; and she unhesitatingly states that “the
experience of bearing a child is central to a woman’s life.”27
More recently, in the United States, there has been widespread interest
in various combinations of the Dick-Read, Lamaze, and Kitzinger
approaches. The move toward midwife deliveries and away from the male
obstetrician and the depersonalization of the hospital has been a crucial
aspect of “taking our bodies back” and of the women’s health-care
movement. In the late sixties there began to appear a sprinkling of volumes
celebrating home births, glamorized with photographs of very young and
lovely pregnant women, naked or in flowered dresses, in rural communes,
romanticized as hippie earth-mothers. The conditions which affect the
majority of women in labor—poverty, malnutrition, desertion by the father
of the child, inadequate prenatal care—are ignored in these books (where,
again, an eager young father is usually present at the birth). “Prepared” or
“natural” childbirth in the United States has been a middle- class
phenomenon; but even its crusaders acknowledge that the context of a
woman’s life may have something to do with her experience of labor. A
French obstetrician Pierre Vellay says that in “normal” cases (normal pelvis,
good presentation, good physical and psychological conditions) “the
woman can expect childbirth without any pain, provided that no family,
money or social worries upset her just before the birth. ... A light, pleasant
house with plenty of room, enough money and no fear for the future are the
best conditions in which a woman can bear a baby.”28 Lamaze admits that
“the addition of a child to a family may be a real source of anxiety when the
house is too small or the father’s income inadequate ... it is natural for a
mother to feel depressed about her child’s future when her own is overcast.”
Shulamith Firestone, as an early theorist of the contemporary women’s
movement, was understandably skeptical of “natural” childbirth as part of a
reactionary counterculture having little to do with the liberation of women
as a whole.
Firestone sees childbearing, however, as purely and simply the
victimizing experience it has often been under patriarchy. “Pregnancy is
barbaric,” she declares; “Childbirth hurts.” She discards biological
motherhood from this shallow and unexamined point of view, without
taking full account of what the experience of biological pregnancy and birth
might be in a wholly different political and emotional context. Her attitudes
toward pregnancy (“the husband’s guilty waning of sexual desire; the
woman’s tears in front of the mirror at eight months”) are male-derived.29
Finally, Firestone is so eager to move on to technology that she fails to
explore the relationship between maternity and sensuality, pain and female
alienation.
Ideally, of course, women would choose not only whether, when, and
where to bear children, and the circumstances of labor, but also between
biological and artificial reproduction. Ideally, the process of creating
another life would be freely and intelligently undertaken, much as a woman
might prepare herself physically and mentally for a trip across country by
jeep, or an archeological “dig”; or might choose to do something else
altogether. But I do not think we can project any such idea onto the future—
and hope to realize it—without examining the shadow-images we carry out
of the magical thinking of Eve’s curse and the social victimization of
women-as-mothers. To do so is to deny aspects of ourselves which will rise
up sooner or later to claim recognition.

7
In 1955, 1957, and 1959, I gave birth to my three children—all essentially
normal births—under general anesthesia. In my first labor, an allergic
reaction to pregnancy, which was assumed to be measles, may have
justified medical intervention. But in each subsequent pregnancy I used the
same obstetrician, and was “put out” as completely as I had been for the
first. During my first pregnancy I and many of the women I knew were
reading Grantly Dick-Read’s Natural Childbirth. I found myself suspicious
of his claims that giving birth was the ecstatic and exhilarating experience
for women. I was only beginning a long process of reunion with the body I
had been split from at puberty; my mind lived on one plane, my body on
another, and physical pleasure, even in sex, was problematic to me. I had
known exhilaration in language, in music, in ideas, in landscape, in talk, in
painting; even in Dick-Read’s book I could identify more with the
obstetrician’s exhilaration at a “natural” labor than with what he believed
his patients experienced. I was vaguely interested in his theories, but did not
consider trying them for myself. Labor seemed to me something to be
gotten through, the child—and the state of motherhood—being the
mysterious and desired goal.
During and after those years, I often felt apologetic in talking with
women who had delivered by some variant of the Dick- Read method, or
had attempted it. I was told: “It hurt like hell, but it was worth it"; or, “It
was the most painful, ecstatic experience of my entire life.” Some women
asserted that the promised ecstasy had been, in fact, agony, and that they
had ended crying for anesthesia. Others had been, on the delivery table,
anesthetized against their will. At that time, even more than now, the
“choice” a woman made as to the mode of delivery was likely to be her
obstetrician’s choice. However, among those who were awake at delivery, a
premium seemed to be placed on the pain endured rather than on an active
physical experience. Sometimes I felt that my three unconscious deliveries
were yet another sign of my half-suspected inadequacy as a woman; the
“real” mothers were those who had been “awake through it all.” I think now
that my refusal of consciousness (approved and implemented by my
physician) and my friends’ exhilaration at having experienced and
surmounted pain (approved and implemented by their physicians) had a
common source: we were trying in our several ways to contain the expected
female fate of passive suffering. None of us, I think, had much sense of
being in any real command of the experience. Ignorant of our bodies, we
were essentially nineteenth-century women as far as childbirth (and much
else) was concerned. (But, unlike our European sisters, none of us dreamed
of having our babies at home, with a midwife. In the United States, that was
a fate reserved for the rural poor.)
We were, above all, in the hands of male medical technology. The
hierarchal atmosphere of the hospital, the definition of childbirth as a
medical emergency, the fragmentation of body from mind, were the
environment in which we gave birth, with or without analgesia. The only
female presences were nurses, whose training and schedules precluded
much female tenderness. (I remember the gratitude and amazement I felt
waking in the “recovery room” after my third delivery to find a young
student nurse holding my hand.) The experience of lying halfawake in a
barred crib, in a labor room with other women moaning in a drugged
condition, where “no one comes” except to do a pelvic examination or give
an injection, is a classic experience of alienated childbirth. The loneliness,
the sense of abandonment, of being imprisoned, powerless, and
depersonalized is the chief collective memory of women who have given
birth in American hospitals.
But not just American hospitals. Cora Sandel describes the sensations of
her heroine Alberta, giving birth to her illegitimate child in a Paris hospital
at the turn of the century:

She was sitting up to her neck in water in a bath tub, forsaken by

God and man. They had closed the door and gone away, as if she
were quite capable of looking after herself. Suppose they forgot her?
Suppose the pain came back before she was safe in bed? With
sinking heart she stared at the door.
There they were! She breathed again.
But it was only a hand which snatched her clothes from the chair
on which they were lying, placed some kind of white linen robe
there instead, and closed the door again. She called. Nobody
answered. She was a prisoner, with no chance of flight.
What was happening was inevitable. Outside night lay over the
city. . . . Far, far away, in another world, lived people she knew who
were close to her . . . shades, left behind in an earlier life, incapable
of helping her. Nor had they any suspicion of how bitterly forsaken
she was in this machine composed of curt, white-clad persons and
shining tiled walls, which had her in its clutches and would not
release her again until she was transformed, one became two, or
until—30

Brigitte Jordan, an anthropologist studying childbirth cross-culturally,

describes routine hospital delivery in the United States as
... a complex of practices which are justified, on medical grounds, as being in the best interest
of mother and child . . . induction and stimulation of labor with drugs, the routine
administration of sedatives and of medication for pain relief, the separation of the laboring
woman from any sources of psychological support, surgical rupturing of the membranes,
 routine episiotomy, routine forceps delivery, and the lithotomy position for delivery, to name
just a few.

Jordan is saying that childbirth is a “culturally produced event,” and that in

the United States the same relentless consistency of method is pursued
without regard to individual aspects of a particular labor. Yes, episiotomies
are done to avoid tearing of the perineum, but tearing is much more likely
when the lithotomy position is used than when a woman gives birth
squatting, on a birth-stool, or (as in the Yucatan) supported in a hammock.
Forceps deliveries are also more often necessary in the lithotomy position,
where the pull of gravity cannot aid in the expulsion of the child.31
Tucho Perussi, an Argentine doctor, urges a return to the obstetrical
stool, pointing out that in the lithotomy position a contraction which has
pushed the fetus downward can be compensated against by the sliding-back
of the fetus, lengthening the labor unnecessarily. In the vertical position
gravity naturally works with the contractions. Roberto Caldeyro-Barcia of
Argentina puts it succinctly: “Except for being hanged by the feet . . . the
supine position is the worst conceivable position for labor and delivery.”
Moreover, vertical delivery seems to minimize the loss of oxygen to the
fetus which results when the uterus is lying on the largest vein in the body
(the vena cava). The chief objection to the use of the obstetrical stool or
chair seems to be the obstetricians’ belief that it would inconvenience
them.32**
The artificial induction and stimulation of labor, widely resorted to in
the United States, produces longer, stronger contractions with less
relaxation-span between them than the contractions of normal labor. This in
turn leads to the use of pain-relieving drugs; as so often, medical
technology creates its own artificial problem for which an artificial remedy
must be found. These unnaturally strong and lengthy contractions can
deprive the fetus of oxygen, while the analgesic drugs interfere with its
respiration.## If labor in the United States were induced only in cases of
medical necessity, only about 3 percent of births would be induced. In fact,
at least one in five births are drug-induced or drug-stimulated, for the
physician’s convenience and with no physiologic justification whatever.33
In cultures as different as Sweden and the Yucatan, women have a part
in the decision-making process during their deliveries. The Yucatan
midwife emphasizes that “every woman has to ‘buscar la forma,’ find her
own way, and that it is the midwife’s task to assist with whatever decision is
made.”34 This does not mean that births are painless, but that needless pain
is prevented, birth is not treated as a “medical event,” and the woman’s
individual temperament and physique are trusted and respected.
Thirty years ago, in Male and Female, Margaret Mead wrote of the
violence done by American hospital obstetrics to both infant and mother in
the first hours of life.35 In 1972 Doris Haire, of the International Childbirth
Education Association, published a report on “The Cultural Warping of
Childbirth.” In it she pointed out that of sixteen developed countries in 1971
and 1972, the United States had the highest infant mortality rate (number of
infant deaths per 1000 live births, in the first year of life). She surveyed the
routine methods used in American hospital obstetrics, researched the
literature on each, and compared them with practices found in countries
where infant mortality is especially low. Among practices routinely
followed in this country, which she found to be damaging both to mother
and child, she lists the following:

Withholding information on the disadvantages of obstetrical

medication
Requiring all normal women to give birth in the hospital
Elective induction of labor (without clear medical indication)
Separating the mother from familial support during labor and birth
Confining the normal laboring woman to bed Shaving the birth area
Professional dependence on technology and pharmacological
methods of pain relief Chemical stimulation of labor Delaying
birth until the physician arrives Requiring the mother to assume
the lithotomy position for birth
Routine use of regional or general anesthesia for delivery Routine
episiotomy
Separating the mother from her newborn infant Delaying the first
breast-feeding36

Writers like Haire, Sheila Kitzinger, and Suzanne Arms have stressed the
process of childbirth as a continuum, interwoven inextricably with the
entire spectrum of a woman’s life. It is not a drama tom from its context, a
sudden crisis to be handled by others because the mother is out of control of
her body. Of course actual medical crises occur during childbirth; but birth
itself is neither a disease nor a surgical operation. Nor should infant and
mother, immediately after parturition, be treated as two separate creatures,
to be cared for in separate parts of a building by separate nursing staffs.
They are still a continuum, and sensitive treatment of the one is incomplete
without closeness to the other. The very nature of the mother-child bond
may depend on the degree of contact in the first hours and days of the
child’s life.
Placed directly upon the mother’s belly, while still connected to her placenta (by the
unsevered umbilical cord) the baby finds the nipple and begins its first suckling activity. The
mere licking of the mother’s nipple triggers the nerves in her breast to alert the uterus that the
baby is out and safe. In immediate response, the uterus clamps down to begin to expel the
placenta. Meanwhile, the suckling action of the baby stimulates its breathing and heat
productivity. Most important, the newborn finds peace and calm in direct contact with its
mother’s warm body. This moment of security is the first it has known since the onset of
labor.37§§

Suzanne Arms both demystifies and pleads for a rehumanization, a

rewomanization, of the entire pregnancy, birth, and post-partum process.
She does not, of course, claim that the hospital alone is the creator of pain
in childbirth, although she does point out that hospitals are associated with
“disease and disorder.” an atmosphere of medical emergency which can
only increase the tension of the laboring woman. All labor, however, has to
pass through the “transition” between the first stage in which the cervix
becomes fully dilated, and the expulsion of the child. Arms’s description of
the psychic and physical stress of this part of labor is astute and revealing:
At this point the woman, nearly sapped of energy, must rally her reserves to begin pushing the
baby out, yet she is now confronted with contractions even more violent than before, coming
so hard and fast that they seem to meld together in successive waves, culminating in a
shattering explosion that overwhelms her entire body. . . . Suddenly nauseous and chilled to
the bone, the woman turns to the nearest figure of authority with beseeching eyes and a look
on her face that no one who has ever attended a delivery will forget. It is a look of shock and
disbelief, a statement all its own that woman is never so completely and totally alone than at
this moment. A beseechingly, pleading, imploring cry for help, which looks like terror to the
uninitiated, it is often articulated as “Do something!” “I can’t go on!” “Help me!” or words of
similar dramatic power. The response of early Christian man might have been to read his wife
the passages from the Scriptures telling her it was her lot to suffer so; the response of modem
doctors’s to inject drugs to end the suffering. Yet neither reaction is responsible. When
primitive woman turned to the midwife with that same look of desperation, the midwife
rightfully interpreted the plea to mean “Assist me” “Support me,” “Tell me this is supposed to
happen.” The obstetrician reads it as a cry to “Stop it,” “Intervene,” “Do it for me.”38
 She rightly observes that “after centuries of ingrained fear, expectations
of pain, and obeisance to male domination, the mother cannot easily come
to childbirth a ‘changed woman’ after a few classes in natural childbirth or
a heavy dose of Women’s Liberation.”39 What we bring to childbirth is
nothing less than our entire socialization as women.
The question is one of power and powerlessness, of the exercise of
choice, whether a woman can choose to give birth at home, attended by a
woman, or at least in a maternity clinic which is not a hospital. It is a
question of the mother’s right to decide what she wants, to “buscar la
forma.” At this time in America it is extremely difficult and usually illegal
for a woman to give birth to her child at home with the aid of a professional
midwife. The medical establishment continues to claim pregnancy and
parturition to be a form of disease. The real issue, underlying the economic
profit of the medical profession, is the mother’s relation to childbirth, an
experience in which women have historically felt out of control, at the
mercy of biology, fate, or chance. To change the experience of childbirth
means to change women’s relationship to fear and powerlessness, to our
bodies, to our children; it has far-reaching psychic and political
implications.

8
Childbirth is (or may be) one aspect of the entire process of a woman’s life,
beginning with her own expulsion from her mother’s body, her own sensual
suckling or being held by a woman, through her earliest sensations of
clitoral eroticism and of the vulva as a source of pleasure, her growing
sense of her own body and its strengths, her masturbation, her menses, her
physical relationship to nature and to other human beings, her first and
subsequent orgasmic experiences with another’s body, her conception,
pregnancy, to the moment of first holding her child. But that moment is still
only a point in the process if we conceive it not according to patriarchal
ideas of childbirth as a kind of production, but as part of female experience.
Beyond birth comes nursing and physical relationship with an infant,
and these are enmeshed with sexuality, with the ebb and flow of ovulation
and menses, of sexual desire. During pregnancy the entire pelvic area
increases in its vascularity (the production of arteries and veins) thus
increasing the capacity for sexual tension and greatly increasing the
frequency and intensity of the orgasm.40 During pregnancy, the system is
flooded with hormones which not only induce the growth of new blood
vessels but increase clitoral responsiveness and strengthen the muscles
effective in orgasm. A woman who has given birth has a biologically
increased capacity for genital pleasure, unless her pelvic organs have been
damaged obstetrically, as frequently happens. Many women experience
orgasm for the first time after childbirth, or become erotically aroused while
nursing. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Niles Newton, Masters and Johnson,
and others have documented the erotic sensations experienced by women in
actually giving birth. Since there are strong cultural forces which
desexualize women as mothers, the orgasmic sensations felt in childbirth or
while suckling infants have probably until recently been denied even by the
women feeling them, or have evoked feelings of guilt. Yet, as Newton
reminds us, “Women . . . have a more varied heritage of sexual enjoyment
than men”;41 and the sociologist Alice Rossi observes,
I suspect that the more male dominance characterizes a Western society, the greater is the
dissociation between sexuality and maternalism. It is to men’s sexual advantage to restrict
women’s sexual gratification to heterosexual coitus, though the price for the woman and a
child may be a less psychologically and physically rewarding relationship.42

The divisions of labor and allocations of power in patriarchy demand

not merely a suffering Mother, but one divested of sexuality: the Virgin
Mary, virgo intacta, perfectly chaste. Women are permitted to be sexual
only at a certain time of life, and the sensuality of mature—and certainly of
aging—women has been perceived as grotesque, threatening, and
inappropriate.
If motherhood and sexuality were not wedged resolutely apart by male
culture, if we could choose both the forms of our sexuality and the terms of
our motherhood or nonmotherhood freely, women might achieve genuine
sexual autonomy (as opposed to “sexual liberation"). The mother should be
able to choose the means of conception (biological, artificial, or
parthenogenetic), the place of birth, her own style of giving birth, and her
birth-attendants: midwife or doctor as she wishes, a man she loves and
trusts, women and men friends or kin, her other children. There is no reason
why it should not be an “Amazon expedition” if she so desires, in which she
is supported by women only, the midwife with whom she has worked
throughout pregnancy, and women who simply love her. (At present, the
father is the only nonmedical person legally admitted to the labor and
delivery room in American hospitals, and even the biological father can be
legally excluded over the mother’s decision to have him there.)43
But taking birth out of the hospital does not mean simply shifting it into
the home or into maternity clinics. Birth is not an isolated event. If there
were local centers to which all women could go for contraceptive and
abortion counseling, pregnancy testing, prenatal care, labor classes, films
about pregnancy and birth, routine gynecological examinations, therapeutic
and counseling groups through and after pregnancy, including a well-baby
clinic, women could begin to think, read about, and discuss the entire
process of conceiving, gestating, bearing, nursing their children, about the
alternatives to motherhood, and about the wholeness of their lives. Birth
might then become one event in the unfolding of our diverse and
polymorphous sexuality: not a necessary consequence of sex, but one
experience of liberating ourselves from fear, passivity, and alienation from
our bodies.

9
I am a woman giving birth to myself. In that psychic process, too, there is a
“transition period” when energy flags, the effort seems endless, and we feel
spiritually and even physically “nauseous and chilled to the bone.” In such
periods, turning to doctors for help and support, thousands of women have
been made into consumers of pain-numbing medication, which may quell
anxiety or desperation at the price of cutting the woman off from her own
necessary process. Unfortunately, there are too few trained, experienced
psychic midwives for this kind of parturition; and the psycho-obstetricians,
the pill-pushers, those who would keep us in a psychological lithotomy
position, still dominate the psychotherapeutic profession.
There is a difference between crying out for help and asking to be “put
under”; and women—both in psychic and physical labor—need to
understand the extremity and the meaning of the “transition stage,” to learn
to demand active care and support, not “Twilight Sleep” or numbing. As
long as birth—metaphorically or literally—remains an experience of
passively handing over our minds and our bodies to male authority and
technology, other kinds of social change can only minimally change our
relationship to ourselves, to power, and to the world outside our bodies.

* Published by Times Change Press, 62 West Fourteenth St., New York.

† During my own first pregnancy, I was invited to give a poetry reading at an old and famous boys’
preparatory school in New England. When the master responsible for inviting me realized that I was
seven months pregnant he canceled the invitation, saying that the fact of my pregnancy would make
it impossible for the boys to listen to my poetry. This was in 1955.
‡ K. D. Keele points out that ‘‘in primitive thought, pain is closely associated with the intrusion of an
object or of a spirit into the body; painful disease is often thought to be caused by the spirit of another
person, dead or living, which seeks a new body. Pregnancy has widely been thought to result from
the entrance of a spirit seeking rebirth into the woman’s body” (Anatomies of Pain [Oxford:
Blackwell, 1957], p. 2).
§ Olive Schreiner wrote in 1888 to Havelock Ellis: “Once God Almighty said: ‘I will produce a self-
working, automatic machine for enduring suffering, which shall be capable of the largest amount of
suffering in a given space,’ and he made woman. But he wasn’t satisfied that he had reached the
highest point of perfection; so he made a man of genius. He was not satisfied yet. So he combined the
two and made a woman of genius—and he was satisfied. That’s the real theory—but in the end he
defeated himself because the machine he’d constructed to endure suffering could enjoy bliss too . . .”
(Letters of Olive Schreiner, 1826-1920, S. C. Cronwright-Schreiner, ed. [London: T. Fisher Unwin,
1924]).
¶ This of course was purely sentimental. In the nineteenth century, as before and since, women gave
birth in prisons and workhouses. See, for example, Emmeline Pankhurst’s account of listening to the
cries of a woman in childbirth in the prison cell next to hers (Midge MacKenzie, ed., Shoulder to
Shoulder [New York: Knopf, 1975], pp. 72 , 91).
# A physician of the 1930s offers us this description of the perfections of American obstetrical
technology:
Arriving (at the hospital) . . . she is immediately given the benefit of one of the modern analgesics
or pain-killers. Soon she is in a dreamy, half-conscious state at the height of a pain, sound asleep
between spasms. Though hours must elapse before the infant appears, her conscious self is through;
the rest is up to the doctor and her own reflexes.
She knows nothing about being taken to a spotlessly clean delivery room, placed on a sterile table,
draped with sterile sheets; neither does she see . . . the doctor and nurses, garbed for her protection in
sterile white gowns and gloves; nor the shiny boiled instruments and antiseptic solutions. She does
not hear the cry of her baby when first he feels the chill of this cold world, nor see the care with
which the doctor repairs such lacerations as may have occurred. She is, as most of us want to be
when severe pain has us in its grasp—asleep—Finally she awakes in smiles, a mother with no
recollection of having become one.
(R. P. Finney, The Story of Motherhood [New York: Liveright, 1937], PP. 6–7.)
** Brigitte Jordan reports, however, that contemporary European delivery tables allow for greater
diversity of position, having “a moveable backrest (which can be cranked up to support the woman in
a semi-sitting position, where that isn’t possible either the husband or midwife will hold the pushing
woman up); secondly, the middle part; thirdly, the footend which can be inclined, left flat, or wheeled
away or pushed under the middle part in case it becomes desirable to put the woman in the lithotomy
position (for repair of episiotomies, for example). Routinely, then, pushing is done with the woman in
a semi-upright position, hooking her hands under her thighs. Some delivery tables have hand holds
(nowhere are a woman’s hands tied down), some have foot supports, but nowhere is the lithotomy
position used for routine delivery” (Personal communication, October 1974).
## A study of over 50,000 infants from birth to one year of age, prepared by the National Institute of
Neurological Diseases and Stroke, revealed the ironic fact that there was a greater incidence of
neurologic damage among white than among Black children of one year old, and that “in one New
York hospital during 1970 there was twice the incidence of depressed babies among private patients
as among clinic patients.” “Although the incidence of low birth weight, prematurity and
undernutrition is decidedly greater among our black population, black patients, who are more often
clinic patients, traditionally receive less medication during labor and birth” (Doris Haire, “The
Cultural Warping of Childbirth,” International Childbirth Education Association, 1972, 1974).
§§ Suzanne Arms reports that even as women in the United States are beginning to demand home
births, American obstetrical superhardware is selling itself in countries like England, Holland, and
Denmark which have a long tradition of midwifery, maternity clinics, and home births, with a
complete back-up system of emergency medical care. Despite the much lower infant mortality rate in
Western Europe, the promise of “quick and easy” technologized obstetrics is making inroads.
Meanwhile, in the United States, “doctors resist any move to take birth out of the hospital or make it
a woman’s event” (Suzanne Arms, Immaculate Deception [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975], p. 160).

OceanofPDF.com
VIII MOTHER AND SON,
WOMAN AND MAN

As her sons have seen her: the Mother in patriarchy: controlling,

erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking;
a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes,
swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred
son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son. “I could
never really take it in that there had been a time, even in der heym,
when she had been simply a woman alone, with a life in which I had
no part.”1 She finds in him her reason for existence: “A mother is
only brought unlimited satisfaction by ... a son; this is altogether the
most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human
relationships.” “The relationship between . . . mother and son . . .
furnishes the purest examples of unchanging tenderness,
undisturbed by any egoistic consideration.”2 The mother as seducer,
with whom the son longs to sleep, against whom the incest taboo is
strongest: Jocasta, Gertrude.* Despite the very high incidence of
actual father-daughter and brother-sister rape, it is mother- son
incest which has been most consistently taboo in every culture3 and
which has received the most obsessive attention in the literature men
have written.
The mother-in-law, also cross-culturally tabooed; the potentially deadly
surrogate for both wife and mother. The Banks Islander son-in-law waits till
the tide has erased her footprints before he can follow her down the beach;
the Navaho calls her “doyshini,” meaning “She whom I may not see”; in the
Yucatan an encounter with her is enough to sterilize a man.4 The mother
unmanning the son, holding him back from life: “It always starts with
Mama, mine loved me. As testimony of her love, and her fear of the fate of
the man-child all slave mothers hold, she attempted to press, hide, push,
capture me in the womb. The conflicts and contradictions that will follow
me to the tomb started right there in the womb ... I pushed out against my
mother s strength September 23, 1941—I felt free.”5 She who ought to
have helped the son defy the father’s tyranny, handing him over instead to
the male realm of judgment and force. “Mother unconsciously played the
part of a beater during a hunt. Even if your [his father’s] method of
upbringing might in some unlikely case have set me on my own feet by
means of promoting defiance, dislike, or even hate in me, Mother canceled
that out again by kindness, by talking sensibly ... by pleading for me, and I
was again driven back into your orbit, which I might otherwise have broken
out of, to your advantage and to my own.”6 She tries to prevent the child
from being born; she is the birth trauma. “It is she who is the enemy. She
who stands between the child and life. Only one of them can prevail; it is
mortal combat. . . . The monster bears down one more time . . .”7 She lurks
in the past of the criminal:

“Oh mother, mother,” he did cry!

“You’re to blame because I die;
I was trained when I was young,
For which this day I’m to be hung.”†8

She remains powerful and vampiristic after death: “What is the use of a
mother’s sacrificing herself for her children if after death her unappeased
soul shall perforce return upon the child and exact from it all the fulfillment
that should have been attained in the living flesh, and was not?”9 And, at
the two ends of a spectrum which is really a continuum, she is Kali, the
“black mother” of Hindu religion, fangs ecstatically bared, a necklace of
skulls round her neck, dancing on her dead husband’s body; while in
Michelangelo’s white-satin-marble Pietà she bends her virginal
mannequin’s face above the icy, dandiacal corpse of the son on her lap.
Somehow her relationship to him is connected with death. Is it simply
that in looking at his mother (or any mature woman) he is reminded,
somewhere beyond repression, of his existence as a mere speck, a weak,
blind, clot of flesh growing inside her body? Remembering a time when he
was nothing, is he forced to acknowledge a time when he will no longer
exist?‡ Certainly we know that he has chosen, for burial, caves, and tombs
and labyrinths imitating caves which represent the female body; or the
hollowed-out ship of death, which in the hero myths is also a cradle.10 He
may fear—and long for—being lost again in a female body, reincorporated,
pulled back into a preconscious state; to penetrate a woman can be an act
filled with anxiety, in which he must ignore or deny the human breathing
person, must conquer or possess her body like a territory, and even so that
body remains threatening to him.11 (Before leaving the Earth, astronauts,
like warriors of the past, abstain from intercourse with women.) He must
make a separation between the sexual woman and the “motherly”
woman;12 and even so, romantic sexual love is prevailingly associated with
death.13
Denial of this anxiety toward the mother can take many forms: the need
to view her as Angel of the Home, unambivalently loving, is merely one. A
recently divorced mother of a young child told me that a man she was
seeing had assured her: “Mothers turn me on—they are more real than other
women. They have a foothold in the future. Childless women are already
dead.” Here the objectification of the woman to whom he was speaking is
mingled with some, no doubt buried, need to outface, to exploit, even, her
maternality. (This man’s first act in entering her apartment was always to
open the refrigerator.) I think it would be simplistic to say that he was
“looking for a mother”; rather, he was attempting to assert his sexuality in
the face of the mother who was already there.
But the mother is there, it seems, for better or worse, in childless
women as well; the mother looms in each woman for the grown-up boy.
Perhaps nowhere in literature has this been so clarifyingly revealed as in the
“Third Duino Elegy” of Rilke. Here he addresses the “Mädchen” or young
woman, the “beloved,” trying to describe to her all that preceded her in his
consciousness, all that she represents for him. In so doing he creates a
landscape of the male psyche in its “prehistoric” apprehension of the
mother (with whom the young girl becomes almost immediately confused):

But did he ever begin himself?

Mother, you created him small, it was you who started him;
he was new for you, you bent over his new eyes the friendly world, and
warded off the unfriendly.
O where are those years when with your delicate figure
you simply stood between him and surging chaos?
You hid much from him thus; you rendered harmless
the eerie room at night; from your full heart’s sanctuary
you mixed a more humane space into his space of night.
You placed the night-light, not in the darkness, no.
but in your closer being, and it shone with friendship.
There was nowhere a creak you couldn’t explain away, smiling,
as though you’d long known when the floor would act that way.
And he listened, and calmed down . . .

He, the new, retreating one, how he was entangled

in the ever-growing vines of inner events
already twisted in patterns, into choking growth,
into beastlike stalking forms. How he gave himself—loved.
Loved his inner self, the wilderness inside him,
that jungle on whose quiet deadfall
his heart stood up, lightgreen. Loved. Left it, went
with his own roots, into a vast new beginning
where his insignificant birth was already forgotten. Loving
he went down into the older blood, the canyons
where lay the monstrous, still gorged with the fathers ...
. . . this, woman, came before you . . .

So the young woman is to mediate for him in his “monstrous” inner life,
just as the mother mediated in his childhood with the strange world and his
own night-fears:

. . . Oh, slowly, slowly

do something kind for him each day, a task he can rely on
—bring him
close to the garden, give him the extra weight of nights
Keep him with you

The woman, yet again, as healer, helper, bringer of tenderness and security.
The roles (or rules) are clear: nowhere in the Elegies is it suggested that a
man might do this for a woman, or that the woman has her own inner
complexity. Rilke grappled at least once with the possibility of a change in
roles. In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, he asks whether, since
women have done the work of “loving” for centuries, it might not be time
for men to take on their share of this work. “We have been spoiled by easy
enjoyment like all dilettanti and stand in the odor of mastery. But what if we
were to despise our successes, what if we were to start from the very outset
to learn the work of love, which has always been done for us? What if we
were to go ahead and become beginners, now that much is changing?”14
But nowhere in his musings does Rilke acknowledge even faintly what
the cost of doing this “work of love” for men—in a word, mothering—has
been for women. Depending for encouragement and protectiveness on a
series of women, soulmates and patronesses, he remained essentially a son.
In 1902 he writes of his recent marriage to the sculptor Clara Westhoff:
Since December we have a dear little daughter, Ruth, and life has become much richer with
her.—For the woman—according to my conviction—a child is a completion and a liberation
from all strangeness and insecurity: it is, spiritually too, the mark of maturity; and I am filled
with the conviction that the woman artist, who has had and has and loves a child, is, no less
than the mature man, capable of reaching all the artistic heights the man can reach under the
same conditions, that is, if he is an artist . . .
In the past year I have had a little household with my wife (in a little village near
Worpswede); but the household consumed too much, and so we have promised each other to
live for our work, each as a bachelor of limited means, as before.15

But of course for Clara Westhoff, as the mother of a child, it could never
again be “as before.” Eventually she was to entrust Ruth to her own mother
in order to go on with her work. But the meaning of what it is to have a
child, for the woman artist or for any woman—the unending details of care,
of forethought, of having to learn all that women are assumed simply to
know “by nature,” the actual physical, emotional work in one day of
mothering, the night-risings which he remembers from a child’s point of
view, oblivious of the inroads of broken sleep on a woman’s life and work
—all this Rilke, childlike, takes for granted, as men have usually taken it.
We read Rilke in part because he often seems on the verge of saying—
or seeing—further than other male writers, in the sense of knowing, at least,
that the relationship of man to woman is more dubious, more obscure, than
literature has assumed. By far the majority of men have written of women
out of the unexplored depths of their fears, guilt, centered on our
relationship to them, that is*, to women perceived as either mothers or
antimothers.
It is these grown-up male children who have told us and each other: in
Mesopotamia that we were “a pitfall, a hole, a ditch” (a grave?);16 under
Hindu law, that we were by nature seductive and impure and required to
live under male control, whatever our caste;17 in the Christian Era, that we
were “the head of sin, a weapon of the devil, expulsion from Paradise,
mother of guilt”;18 that as Eternal Woman we wore the word “mystery”
inscribed on our brows and that self-sacrifice was our privilege;19 that our
wombs were “unbridled” breeding-places of “brackish, nitrous, voracious
humours”;20 by the Victorian medical experts, both that we had no
sensuality and that “voluptuous spasms” would make us barren, also that
“the real woman regards all men ... as a sort of stepson, towards whom her
heart goes out in motherly tenderness”;21 in the aftermath of the Bolshevik
Revolution, that we were victims of our own “biological tragedy” which no
legal and social changes could undo;22 by the neo-Freudians, that “the
syndrome of decay, the evil tendency in man, is basically rooted in the
mother-child relationship”;23 in the People’s Republic of China that the
love of women for women is a bourgeois aberration, a function of
capitalism.
But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with
actual bodies and actual minds.

2
The first thing I remember hearing about mothers and sons, at the age of
about six, was the story of the “brave Spartan mothers” who sent their sons
forth to battle with the adjuration : With your shield or on it, meaning that
the young man was to return victorious, or dead. Over and over a picture
played itself out in my mind: the young man, wounded, without his shield,
finds his way back to his mother’s door. Would she really refuse to open it?
Vous travaillez pour l’armée, madame?
 I still have a children’s book, much-read in my early years, which
quotes the following letter:

Dear Madam:
I have been shown in the files of the War Department that you are the mother of five
sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any
words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming.
But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of
the Republic they died to save. I pray that our heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of
your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the
solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.
Yours very sincerely and respectfully, Abraham Lincoln24

Despite these early impressions, when I first became pregnant I set my

heart on a son. (In our childish “acting-out” games I had always preferred
the masculine roles and persuaded or forced my younger sister to act the
feminine ones.) I still identified more with men than with women; the men I
knew seemed less held back by self-doubt and ambivalence, more choices
seemed open to them. I wanted to give birth, at twenty- five, to my unborn
self, the self that our father-centered family had suppressed in me, someone
independent, actively willing, original—those possibilities I had felt in
myself in flashes as a young student and writer, and from which, during
pregnancy, I was to close myself off. If I wanted to give birth to myself as a
male, it was because males seemed to inherit those qualities by right of
gender. And I wanted a son because my husband spoke hopefully of “a little
boy.” Probably he, too, wanted to give birth to himself, to start afresh. A
man, he wanted a male child. A Jew, and a first-born, he wanted a first-born
son. An adult male, he wanted “a little boy.”
I wanted a son, also, in order to do what my mother had not done: bring
forth a man-child. I wanted him as a defiance to my father, who had
begotten “only” daughters. My eldest son was born, as it happened, on my
father’s birthday.
Vous travaillez pour l’armée, madame? For generations, we have
entered our sons in some kind of combat: not always so direct and bloody
as those of Sparta or the Civil War. Giving birth to sons has been one means
through which a woman could leave “her” mark on the world. After my
youngest son was born, six years later, a woman friend, intelligent and
talented herself, wrote to me: “This one . . . will be the genius. That’s so
obviously why it had to be born with a penis instead of a vagina.”
 But, having borne three sons, I found myself living, at the deepest levels
of passion and confusion, with three small bodies, soon three persons,
whose care I often felt was eating away at my life, but whose beauty,
humor, and physical affection were amazing to me. I saw them, not as
“sons” and potential inheritors of patriarchy, but as the sweet flesh of
infants, the delicate insistency of exploring bodies, the purity of
concentration, grief, or joy which exists undiluted in young children,
dipping into which connected me with long-forgotten zones in myself. I was
a restless, impatient, tired, inconsistent mother, the shock of motherhood
had left me reeling; but I knew I passionately loved those three young
beings.
I remember one summer, living in a friend’s house in Vermont. My
husband was working abroad for several weeks, and my three sons—nine,
seven, and five years old—and I dwelt for most of that time by ourselves.
Without a male adult in the house, without any reason for schedules, naps,
regular mealtimes, or early bedtimes so the two parents could talk, we fell
into what I felt to be a delicious and sinful rhythm. It was a spell of
unusually hot, clear weather, and we ate nearly all our meals outdoors,
hand-to-mouth; we lived half-naked, stayed up to watch bats and stars and
fireflies, read and told stories, slept late. I watched their slender little-boys’
bodies grow brown, we washed in water warm from the garden hose lying
in the sun, we lived like castaways on some island of mothers and children.
At night they fell asleep without murmur and I stayed up reading and
writing as I had when a student, till the early morning hours. I remember
thinking: This is what living with children could be—without school hours,
fixed routines, naps, the conflict of being both mother and wife with no
room for being, simply, myself. Driving home once after midnight from a
late drive-in movie, through the foxfire and stillness of a winding Vermont
road, with three sleeping children in the back of the car, I felt wide awake,
elated; we had broken together all the rules of bedtime, the night rules, rules
I myself thought I had to observe in the city or become a “bad mother.” We
were conspirators, outlaws from the institution of motherhood; I felt
enormously in charge of my life. Of course the institution closed down on
us again, and my own mistrust of myself as a “good mother” returned,
along with my resentment of the archetype. But I knew even then that I did
not want my sons to act for me in the world, any more than I wished for
them to kill or die for their country. I wanted to act, to live, in myself and to
love them for their separate selves.

3
Does this sense of personal worth, this enthusiasm for one’s own personality [as in Whitman
and Richard Jefferies] belong only to great self-expressive souls? or to a mature period of life
I have not yet attained? or may I perhaps be shut off from it by eternal law because I am a
woman, and lonely? It seems to me the one priceless gift of this life:—of all blessings on
earth I would choose to have a man-child who possessed it.25

The fathers have of course demanded sons; as heirs, field-hands, cannon-

fodder, feeders of machinery, images and extensions of themselves; their
immortality. In societies systematically practicing female infanticide,
women might understandably wish for boys rather than face the prospect of
nine months of pregnancy whose outcome would be treated as a waste
product. Yet, under the realities of organized male territoriality and
aggression, when women produce sons, they are literally working for the
army. It may be easier to repress this knowledge, or to believe that one’s
own child will escape death at war, than to face the routine murder of a
female infant. In a society riddled with sanctions against women, a mother
may instinctively place more value—let us say more hope—on a son, just
as some Afro- Americans, before the growth of “Black pride,” felt
constrained to value the child with the lightest skin and most Caucasoid
features. The sense of the unlived, the unachieved in a woman’s own life,
may unconsciously express itself, as in the passage quoted above from the
youthful notebooks of Ruth Benedict (who was later to marry, hope for
children she never had, finally leave her marriage and become a
distinguished anthropologist and a feminist of a kind).
“To have a man-child who possessed it.” And so we come upon ground
still lying in the shadow of Freud. Within the last forty years, Freud’s work
has been both revised and vulgarized, so that acceptance or rejection of
“Freudianism” is frequently based on selected aspects of his work, filtered
through other minds. (We should not underestimate the power of films,
plays, jokes.) No one aspect of his theory has been more influential than the
so-called Oedipus complex. Women who have never read Freud are raising
their sons in the belief that to show them physical affection is to be
“seductive,” that to influence their sons against forms of masculine
behavior they as women abhor, is to “castrate” them or to become “the
’devouring,’ ‘domineering’ creature that their sons will have to reject in
order to grow up mentally healthy,” or that they, and they alone, are
responsible if their sons become “unnecessarily [sic] homosexual.”26
Freud was unquestionably a pioneer along certain lines: for example, in
positing the idea that the emotionally afflicted are not simply moral
criminals, and that unconscious impulses contribute to ordinary human
actions. Primitive as his dream- analysis may seem to us today, he did
reestablish recognition of the dream as a significant event, to which
attention must be paid, after several centuries of a “science” of medicine
which had denied its validity. But Freud was also a man, terribly limited
both by his culture and his gender. Karen Horney, one of his most searching
early critics, pointed out the narrowly biological and mechanistic
foundations of his thought, his reduction of psychological qualities to
anatomical causes, and his inherently dualistic thinking, in which instinct
and “ego,” feminine and masculine, passivity and activity, are seen as polar
opposites. In particular she assailed his view that we go on throughout life
repeating or regressing backward into events of childhood; a view which
she rightly felt to deny the organic development of a person, the qualitative
changes we go through in the process of a life.
Horney accepted the Oedipus complex, though with serious
qualifications: unlike Freud she did not believe that a child’s intense sexual
feelings toward parents are biologically determined, therefore universal; she
saw them as the result of concrete situations experienced by some, but not
all, children.27 Her critique was extremely daring and courageous at a time
when the ubiquitous Oedipus complex, repressed or active, was believed to
be at the center of psychic life. Her divergences from Freud caused her to
be excommunicated two years later from the powerful New York
Psychoanalytic Institute. But for us, her views do not press far enough.
For the male child, Freud believed the Oedipus complex to consist of
the process whereby a little boy first experiences strong sexual feelings for
his mother, then learns to detach and differentiate himself from her, to
identify as a male with his father instead of perceiving him as a rival, and
finally to go on to a point where his erotic instincts can be turned toward a
woman other than his mother. Freud thought that the boy’s infantile sexual
feelings for his mother create anxiety in him that his jealous father will
punish him by castration. The ideal resolution of the Oedipus complex is for
the boy to give up his attachment to his mother, and to internalize and
identify with his father, whom he recognizes as superior in power. The price
of keeping his penis, then, is to adopt his father, in Freudian terminology, as
“super-ego"—in short, to acknowledge the supremacy of patriarchal law,
the discipline of the instincts, exogamy, and the incest taboo.
Freud suggested a range of possibilities in this early crisis: the boy
might actually be threatened with castration as punishment for
masturbation; jealous fathers might actually use circumcision (symbolic
castration) against pubescent sons; but also, these events might simply take
place in fantasy.28
The fundamental assumption here is that the two-person mother-child
relationship is by nature regressive, circular, unproductive, and that culture
depends on the son-father relationship. All that the mother can do for the
child is perpetuate a dependency which prevents further development.
Through the resolution of the Oedipus complex, the boy makes his way into
the male world, the world of patriarchal law and order. Civilization—
meaning, of course, patriarchal civilization—requires the introduction of
the father (whose presence has so far not been essential since nine months
before birth) as a third figure in the interrelationship of mother and child.
The Oedipus complex thus becomes, in Juliet Mitchell’s phrase, “the entry
into human culture.” But it is distinctively the father who represents not just
authority but culture itself, the super-ego which controls the blind
thrashings of the “id.” Civilization means identification, not with the
mother but with the father.
Freud also held that the little girl experiences her lack of a penis as
“castration”; that, to become a woman, she must substitute pregnancy and a
baby for the missing male organ. Given this assumption, it is not surprising
that he should have invested the mother-son relationship with this
“libidinal,” unconscious quality: the son is not only a baby, he possesses the
penis the mother has craved. (It is, however, difficult to understand how
Freud also imagined the relationship of mother and son to be free from
ambivalence and “egoistic considerations.")
Over and over, this view of the impulse to motherhood has been
challenged by women analysts. Not only Homey, but Clara Thompson and
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann urged that if the small girl wishes for a penis at
all, it is only because she sees privilege and favor bestowed on people who
have this single distinguishing feature. They perceived the penis as a
metaphor, the wish for a child as a wholly different kind of impulse.
But even as we challenge or refute Freud’s structure, the questions arise:
How does the male child differentiate himself from his mother, and does
this mean inevitably that he must “join the army,” that is, internalize
patriarchal values? Can the mother, in patriarchy, represent culture, and if
so, what does this require of her? Above all, what does separation from the
mother mean for the son?
It means, of course, in the first place, physical birth, leaving the warm,
weightless dream of the amniotic sac. It means the gradual process through
which the baby discovers that the mother’s breast, her face, her body’s
warmth, belong to another person, do not exist purely for him, can
disappear and return, will respond to his crying, his smiles, his physical
needs, but increasingly, not always in perfect rhythm with his desires and
pangs. It means a dual process, in which the mother first absents herself—
momentarily or longer—from the child, then later he experiments with
games of hide-and-seek, and finally, on his own legs, is able to wander
away from her for short distances. It means weaning, learning that others
beside his mother can take care of him, that he is safe in his mother’s
absence. Undoubtedly the child feels anxiety and desolation at each of these
stages, the fear that security, tenderness, reliability may have departed
forever. A third person, other persons, are obviously necessary to relieve
this anxiety, to dry his tears of abandonment, to reassure him that all care
and love are not embodied solely in one person, his mother, and to make it
possible for him to accept her separateness and his own. But more often
than not that third person has also been a woman: a grandmother, aunt,
older sister, nurse. She may, in fact, give more care and cherishing than the
mother has been able to give; she may become, emotionally, the mother. As
for male figures, the child’s experience is that they are less physical, less
cherishing, more intermittent in their presence, more remote, more
judgmental, more for-themselves, than the women who are around him.
Male or female, the child learns early that gender has something to do with
emotional attunement to others.
Yet finally he must be taken over by these male figures. Tribal societies
have always required a “second birth” of the young boy at puberty into the
male group. “In the initiation rites . . . the young men are as it were
swallowed up by the tutelary spirit of this masculine world and are reborn
as children of the spirit rather than of the mother; they are sons of heaven,
not just sons of earth. This spiritual rebirth signifies the birth of the ‘higher
man’ who, even on the primitive level, is associated with consciousness, the
ego, and will power. . . . The man’s world, representing ‘heaven,’ stands for
law and tradition, for the gods of aforetime, so far as they were masculine
gods.”29 The event is often attended by animal castration and sacrifice,
symbolic wounds, ordeal. It may also be attended by an overt ritualized
rejection of the mother: striking her, as with the Fiji, wounding her with
arrows, as with the Apache and Iroquois. But whatever the ritual to be
enacted, the child-with-a-penis is expected to bond himself with others who
have penises. It hardly matters, then, if the son grows up in a so-called
matriarchal family of strong women, or one in which the mother is head of
the household. He must still—according to this view—come to terms with
the Fathers, the representatives of law and tradition, the wagers of
aggression, the creators and purveyors of the dominant culture.
And his mother, whatever her deepest instincts tell her, is expected to
facilitate this. My grandmother often described, and still with pain, how my
father—an undersized, slender Jewish boy—was sent off to military school
at the age of about ten. ‘The uniform was too big for him ... I can see him to
this day, the smallest of all the boys, looking so scared on that platform
waiting for that train.” But she sent him off, for a “better education” and to
become a man; what choice did she have, in Birmingham, Alabama, in the
early twentieth century?
The third term in the so-called Oedipal triangle is, in fact, patriarchal
power. Any attempt to salvage the Oedipus complex as a theory of human
development must begin here. The anthropologist Sherry Ortner offers the
possibility that, even though Freud assumed that the “Oedipal process”
takes place in a biological family, there is a more basic underlying theory of
socialization which is independent of any specific society or gender-roles.
“It is a powerful and . . . ultimately dialectical theory; the person evolves
through a process of struggle with and . . . integration ... of symbolic figures
of love, desire and authority.” Ortner suggests that this structure would exist
even if a child were reared equally by two or more parents, male and female
or of the same sex, who shared in nurturance and authority; although, as she
points out, “even where the nuclear family has been experimentally broken
up, as in the Kibbutz for example, the nursery attendants have always been
wholly or predominantly female.”30§
Rereading Freud, and some Freudians (notably Juliet Mitchell, who is
more a Freudian than either a Marxist or a feminist), wending through such
concepts as penis envy, castration, the child (especially the son) as penis-
substitute, what finally leaves the strongest impression is a tone-deafness in
the language. This may well result from the psychoanalysts’ desire to feel
that they are dealing with memory, dream, fantasy, on a “scientific” level;
that is, in the false sense of science as the opposite of poetry.¶ A penis, a
breast, obviously have imaginative implications beyond their biological
existence (just as an eye, an ear, the lungs, the vulva, or any other part of
the body which we inhabit intellectually and sensually). Yet these
implications go unexplored; the density and resonance of the physical
image gets lost in the abstract reductiveness of the jargon. Even the much-
evoked penis, in Freudian theory, seems a poor thing, divested of the
dimensionality it possessed as a symbol of generative power, the herm, the
Great Mother’s appurtenance in prepatriarchal cults. This limitation—which
comes, as Karen Horney suggests, from Freud’s rigidly biological and
dualistic approach—is particularly notable where the figure of the mother
land hence of woman) is involved, in the dreams and fantasies of men.
Juliet Mitchell reiterates that we should not fault Freud for what he did
not attempt: an analysis of the social conditions which, as he himself
acknowledged, contribute to feminine psychology*31 Robert Jay Lifton, a
psychiatrist, has been quoted as saying that “every great thinker has at least
one blind spot: Freud’s was women.”32 But in fact there is no such thing as
an intellectual “blind spot” surrounded by an outlook of piercing lucidity—
least of all when that spot happens to cover the immense and complex
dimensions in which women exist, both for ourselves and in the minds of
men. Freud need not have been a feminist in order to have had a deeper
sense of the resonance and chargedness of the figure of the woman—
especially as mother—in patriarchal thinking. But, even in terms of his own
proclaimed methods and goals, he, as it were, lost his nerve and drew back
where women were concerned. And this affected not simply his attitudes
toward women but, of necessity, his speculations and observations about
men, and about the significance of the penis for both sexes. The Freudian
view of the son is saturated with the Freudian hostility—and sentimentality
—toward the mother.
It was Freud himself, of course, who emphasized the extent to which, in
“everyday life,” the double meaning, the loss of memory, the slip of the
tongue, express what we do not consciously take responsibility for
meaning. Elizabeth Janeway calls attention to his repeated use of the
phrase, “the fact of castration,” referring to the little girl. “We must assume
that this slip is meaningful, and indeed I believe that it leads us to the heart
of Freud’s dilemma about the female sex.”33 Janeway suggests that
although “little girls have not ‘in fact’ been castrated,” Freud was well
aware—though he never chose to investigate it—that women have suffered
intense thwarting and deprivation as social beings. In short, Freud meant
female castration as a metaphor. But precisely because he did not pursue the
psychic meaning of this social mutilation of women (which would have
forced him to go deeper into male psychology, also) his work, both on
women and on men, lacks a kind of truth which has been called political
and which I would call poetic and scientific as well.

4
Every culture invents its special version of the mother-son relationship. The
mockery (and sentimentalization, its obverse) leveled at the Jewish-
American mother by her sons, in fiction, theatre, film, and anecdote, has its
roots both in Yahwist misogynist tradition and in the situation of the Jewish
woman and man in assimilationist America. The immigrant Jewish woman
suffered extreme reduction in the process of becoming “American"; she
rapidly lost her role as mediator with the outside world, woman of business,
entrepreneur, manager of the family and its fortunes, strategist of survival,
to become an “American” wife to her “American” husband. Since his
prestige now depended on being the aggressive breadwinner and achiever
instead of the other-worldly Talmudic student, his assertion of masculinity
in transatlantic terms demanded (or seemed to demand) her dwindling into
home-enclosed motherhood.34
It is interesting to compare Freud’s idyll of the “perfect” and
“unambivalent” mother-son relationship with the resentment and contempt
for the mother reflected in such novels as Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s
Complaint, or in popular nonbooks such as Dan Greenburg’s How To Be a
Jewish Mother. Yet, the idyll and the actuality have been held in a strange
kind of double vision in Jewish-American culture; the mother is either
sentimentalized, or ruthlessly caricatured; she is too loud, too pushy, too
full of vitality (sexuality?), or asexual to the point of repressiveness; she
suffers, in Freud’s phrase, from “housewife psychosis”; she bullies her
children with guilt and unwanted food; at intervals she is dignified by
mourning or the lighting of Sabbath candles.
Pauline Bart has depicted some of the human damages inflicted on these
women in her study of depression in middle-aged women.35 And
depression there is in plenty, revealed in forms ranging from the high-
pitched voice and nervous laugh of self-derogation to the year-after-year
reliance on sleeping-pills and tranquilizers. But there is also a smoldering
energy and resilience in the domesticated Jewish woman which—from a
woman’s point of view—commands respect, however it has been abused or
derogated by this particular subculture#. She is a survivor-woman, a fighter
with tooth and claw and her own nervous system, who, like her Black
sisters, has borne the weight of a people on her back. Yet she has lived
between her sons’ dependency and denigration on the one hand, and her
own guilt-feelings and repressed rage, on the other.
The Black mother has been charged by both white and Black males with
the “castration” of her sons through her so-called matriarchal domination of
the family, as breadwinner, decision-maker, and rearer of children in one.
Needless to say, her “power” as “matriarch” is drastically limited by the
bonds of racism, sexism, and poverty. What is misread as power here is
really survival-strength, guts, the determination that her children’s lives
shall come to something even if it means driving them, or sacrificing her
own pride in order to feed and clothe them. In attributing to the Black
mother a figurative castration of her sons, white male racism, which has
literally castrated thousands of Black men, reveals yet again its inextricable
linkage with sexism.

5
“If you want to know more about femininity, enquire from your own
experience of life, or turn to the poets, or wait until science can give you
deeper and more coherent information.” Thus, in an edgy yet candid
acknowledgment of his own limitations, Freud ended his essay, “On
Femininity.”
In the forty-odd years since he wrote those words, a great deal has
happened. We have begun to accumulate, through the work of scientists like
Mary Jane Sherfey, Masters and Johnson, Niles Newton, Alice Rossi, new
information about female biology and sexuality and their relation to
psychology;36 the women’s movement has unearthed and stimulated new
descriptions of female experience by women; and women poets, certainly,
have spoken.
One aspect of female experience which is changing—albeit gradually—
is the expressed desire for sons. Undoubtedly there are and will long
continue to be women who, for all the reasons given earlier, will still prefer
sons, and still have higher expectations for their male children. But as some
women come closer to shaping their own lives, there are signs that the
overvaluation of the son as a male is undergoing changes as well.
Many women are expressing the sense that at this moment in human
history it is simply better to be a woman; that the broadening and deepening
of the demand for women’s self-determination has created a largeness of
possibility, a scope for original thought and activism, above all a new sense
of mutual aims and sharing among women; that we are living on the edge of
immense changes which we ourselves are creating. In addition, many
women have felt that the first outrush of anger they experienced in coming
to feminism, the bursting of the floodgates of years, involved them in
painful contradictions with their male children as part of the male caste.
“You cannot alienate the child from his culture. My sons are developing
many features that are most distasteful to me. They have contempt for
women ... I love them [her sons]. I cannot get myself to look at them as my
enemy.”37 Whatever this woman’s confusions, she is expressing a conflict
which is not unique.
The fear of alienating a male child from “his” culture seems to go deep,
even among women who reject that culture for themselves every day of
their lives. In the early sixties I recall a similar uneasiness, among some
mothers who called themselves pacifists, that to forbid toy machine guns
and hand grenades was to “alienate” their sons from playmates, even
perhaps to “emasculate” them. (Perhaps those mothers, too, instinctively
knew the gun was phallic, that it stood for more than simple killing; perhaps
they simply feared being accused, as mothers so often are accused, of
castrating their children.) But the feminist mothers’ fear of alienating a son
from “his” culture goes even deeper.
What do we fear? That our sons will accuse us of making them into
misfits and outsiders? That they will suffer as we have suffered from
patriarchal reprisals? Do we fear they will somehow lose their male status
and privilege, even as we are seeking to abolish that inequality? Must a
woman see her child as “the enemy” in order to teach him that he need not
imitate a “macho” style of maleness? How does even a mother genuinely
love a son who has contempt for women—or is this that bondage,
misnamed love, that so often exists between women and men? It is indeed a
painful contradiction when a mother who has herself begun to break female
stereotypes sees her young sons apparently caught in patterns of TV
violence, football, what Robert Reid has described as “the world of male-
animal posturing, from which one male can emerge as dominant”38 It is all
too easy to accept unconsciously the guilt so readily thrust upon any woman
who is seeking to broaden and deepen her own existence, on the grounds
that this must somehow damage her children. That guilt is one of the most
powerful forms of social control of women; none of us can be entirely
immune to it.
A woman whose rage is under wraps may well foster a masculine
aggressiveness in her son; she has experienced no other form of
assertiveness. She may allow him literally to strike her, to domineer over
her, in his small maleness, out of a kind of double identification: this young,
posturing male animal is one with the entire male realm that has victimized
her; but also, he is a piece of her, a piece that can express itself unchecked;
and for this he is forgiven his khamstvo (a Russian word which combines
“coarseness, truculence, bestiality and brutality” and which Soviet women
have used about their men).39
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a leader of the nineteenth-century American
women’s suffrage movement and the mother of five sons,** acknowledged
the burdens of mothering her sons, and the essential ironies:
I have so much care with all these boys on my hands. . . . How much I do long to be free from
housekeeping and children . . . but it may be well for me to understand all the trials of
woman’s lot, that I may more eloquently proclaim them when the time comes . . .
 . . . tomorrow the sun will shine and my blessed baby will open his sweet blue eyes, crow and
look so lovingly on me that I shall live again joyfully . . .
When I think of all the wrongs that have been heaped upon womankind, I am ashamed that I
am not forever in a condition of chronic wrath, stark mad, skin and bone, my eyes a fountain
of tears, my lips overflowing with curses, and my hand against every man and brother! Ah,
how I do repent me of the male faces I have washed, the mittens I have knit, the trousers
mended, the cut fingers and broken toes I have bound up!40

But it is absurd to think that women on the path of feminism wish to

abandon their sons, emotionally or otherwise. Rather, the mother-son
relationship—like all relationships—is undergoing revaluation, both in the
light of the mother’s changing relationship to male ideology, and in terms of
her hopes and fears for her sons. If we wish for our sons—as for our
daughters—that they may grow up unmutilated by gender-roles, sensitized
to misogyny in all its forms, we also have to face the fact that in the present
stage of history our sons may feel profoundly alone in the masculine world,
with few if any close relationships with other men (as distinct from male
“bonding” in defense of male privilege). When the son ceases to be the
mother’s outreach into the world, because she is reaching out into it herself,
he ceases to be instrumental for her and has the chance to become a person.
I have been asked, sometimes with genuine curiosity, sometimes with
veiled hostility, “What do your sons think about all this?” (“All this” being
feminism in general, my own commitment to women in particular.) When
asked with hostility the implication is that a feminist must be man-hating,
castrating; that “all this” must of course be damaging to my children; it is a
question meant to provoke guilt. (My only answer, obviously, is, “You’ll
have to ask them.”) But the less our energy and power, as women, is
expended on making our sons into our instruments, our agents in a system
which has tried to keep us powerless, the less our sons need live under the
burden of their mother’s unlived lives.
The poet Sue Silvermarie writes of her young son, not as a
compensation for male power and privilege, but as a source of unexpected
revelation of the depth of what she calls “the motherbond”:
My deep preference for women made mothering a male seem contradictory. But it is my very
preference which now generates insight into the motherbond. The bond so easily blurred by
everyday role-tasks. . . . What comes clear is the passion—the series of love-poems that
poured from me while I carried him . . . the strength that let me defy all those who called him
illegitimate ... the moment of holding him to my breast in the hospital room and looking up to
see my own mother at the foot of the bed with tears in her eyes ... the feeling that when I am
right with him, my life is lucid, but when our relationship is muddled, clouds cover my days.
 It is when I use this kind of perspective that his gender pales into insignificance. . . .
Resentment gone, I can love him freely. I am more important to myself than is anyone else, I
need not sacrifice iny integrity, but neither must I sacrifice my son’s. The passion of the
motherbond demands whole persons.

But this mother also acknowledges, in her poem, “To a Boy-Child,” the
possibility of a time of confusion and separation:

i tremble to see your temptations

how clear for me what losing you would mean
how confusing for you
little man. already
you’re lured by what passes for power,
and is, by half
what do I do with your guns?
outlaws, you’re playing, and I think
it is i who am out of the law,
it is you within it,
approved,
who grows blind to its bars . .41

Surely here the “penis” becomes the obverse of the mother’s fulfillment.
Passionately loving her child as a small human being, she has nothing to
gain from the mere fact of his maleness. She fears the price of the penis for
him—the boy’s acceptance of (and within) patriarchal law. But neither does
she wish her son were a girl; she affirms both the complexity and the pain
of the world of gender.
In a different vein, Robin Morgan addresses her son:

Little heart, little heart,

You have sung in me like the spiral alder-bud.
You, who gave birth to this mother
comprehend, for how much longer? my mysteries. . . .
You have clung to me like a spiderling
to the back of the Lycosa lenta; wolf-spider mother,
I have waited, wherever you fell off,
for you to scramble on before proceeding.
 But you have come five-fold years and what I know
now is nothing can abduct you fully from the land
where you were born . . .
I have set my seal upon you.

I say:
you shall be a child of the mother
as of old, and your face will not be turned from me . .
.42

It may be objected that these mothers, too, want to make their sons
instrumental, in the sense of rearing them in anti-masculinist values. But
there is a distinction between heaping our thwarted energies on our sons,
and hoping to unlock possibilities for them even as we are doing it for
ourselves. I sense in Morgan’s poem a hope and longing, expressed—
perhaps optimistically—as conviction; in Silvermarie’s a greater diffidence
as to the outcome, but in both a recognition that the son will have to make
choices between “the male group” and his own humanity.
We come back to the question of separation. For the son to remain a
“child of the mother” in Morgan’s sense is not for him to remain childish,
dependent, the receiver rather than the giver of nurture, an eternal boy. In a
seeming paradox, it is the “sons of the fathers” who persist in searching
everywhere for the woman with whom they can be infantile, the
embodiment of demand, the primitive child, Stanley Kowalski howling for
his wife. The world of the fathers, the male group, is too obsessed with
aggression and defense to sanction and give solace to fear, self-doubt,
ordinary mortal weakness, and tears. The son of the fathers learns contempt
for himself in states of suffering, and can reveal them only to women,
whom he must then also hold in contempt, or resent for their knowledge of
his weakness. The “son of the mother” (the mother who first loves herself)
has a greater chance of realizing that strength and vulnerability, toughness
and expressiveness, nurturance and authority, are not opposites, not the sole
inheritance of one sex or the other. But this implies a new understanding of
the love between mother and son.
Vulgar psychoanalytic opinion has it that the “son of the mother”
becomes homosexual, either in flight from the power of women, or in
protest against the traditional male role. In fact, we know next to nothing
about the influences and accidents which lead to erotic love for one’s own
sex. And of heterosexuality, we know only that it has had a biological
function, and that enormous social pressure has appeared to be necessary to
maintain it, an institutionalized compulsion far beyond the present
biological needs of the species. Why men choose men instead of women for
sexual gratification, or as life-partners, is a question which cannot be
answered simplistically in terms of fifth-century Athens; nor in terms of the
“effeminizing” of sons by mothers who want to “hold on” to them. (Goethe
and Freud, neither of them famous as homosexuals, were both sons of the
mother in the sense of being preferred and cherished.) A man may well seek
the love of other men in reaction to his father’s khamstvo, his gross abuse of
women as sexual objects; or he may try to replace a father who was chiefly
absent. The spectrum of male homosexuality—ranging from the
homosexual who genuinely likes and cares about women to the drag
queen’s contemptuous parody of female oppression, is known as yet only in
its superficial aspects††. I believe that all men to some degree dread strong
women, but I have had no experience which suggests that dread to be
greater in homosexuals than in men who call themselves “straight.” The
systems men have created are homogeneous systems, which exclude and
degrade women or deny our existence; and the most frequent rationalization
for our exclusion from those systems is that we are or ought to be mothers.
Both straight and homosexual men take refuge in those systems. Yet the
fear that our strength, or our influence, will “make our sons into
homosexuals” still haunts even women who do not condemn homosexuality
as such, perhaps because the power of patriarchal ideology still makes it
seem a better fate for the boy to grow into a “real man.”

6
What do we want for our sons? Women who have begun to challenge the
values of patriarchy are haunted by this question. We want them to remain,
in the deepest sense, sons of the mother, yet also to grow into themselves, to
discover new ways of being men even as we are discovering new ways of
being women. We could wish, that there were more fathers—not one, but
many—to whom they could also be sons, fathers with the sensitivity and
commitment to help them into a manhood in which they would not perceive
women as the sole sources of nourishment and solace. These fathers barely
exist as yet; one exceptional individual here and there is a sign of hope, but
still only a personal solution. Nor, as Jane Lazarre has pointed out, is the
tokenly “involved” father even an individual solution. Until men are ready
to share the responsibilities of full-time, universal child-care as a social
priority, their sons and ours will be without any coherent vision of what
nonpatriarchal manhood might be.43 The pain, floundering, and
ambivalence our male children experience is not to be laid at the doors of
mothers who are strong, nontraditional women; it is the traditional fathers
who—even when they live under the same roof—have deserted their
children hourly and daily. We have to recognize, at this moment of history,
as through centuries past, that most of our sons are—in the most profound
sense—virtually fatherless.
Even if contraception were perfected to infallibility, so that no woman
need ever again bear an unwanted child; even if laws and customs change—
as long as women and women only are the nurturers of children, our sons
will grow up looking only to women for compassion, resenting strength in
women as “control,” clinging to women when we try to move into a new
mode of relationship. As long as society itself is patriarchal—which means
antimaternal—there can never be enough mothering for sons who have to
grow up under the rule of the Fathers, in a public “male” world separate
from the private “female” world of the affections.
We need to understand that there is a difference between handing our
sons over to patriarchy, on its terms, “travaillant pour l’armée,” figuratively
or literally allowing them to victimize us as tokens of their manhood; and
helping them to separate from us, to become themselves. Esther Harding
cites the recurrent myth of “the sacrifice of the son”: Attis, Adonis, Horus,
Osiris. In these myths, the son on reaching manhood is sacrificed “by the
edict and consent of his mother.” She observes that this myth has always
been treated from the son’s point of view, as “the need ... to sacrifice his
own childishness and dependence.” She examines it from the point of view
of the mother: “She loves him, and, in the myths, must always sacrifice
him.” A decisive “no” must be said where all was “yes” before: indulgence,
protectiveness, compliance, pure motherliness.
For the mother as much as for the son, lifelong mothering is a denial of
her own wholeness. Harding suggests that a continuing maternal
protectiveness is an unwillingness to face the harshness of life, for herself
as much as for her child. She further sees the “sacrifice of the son” as
needing to take place, by extension, between women and men in general:
It is no accident that the sacrifice ... is represented by castration, for the most fundamental
demand for satisfaction that man makes upon woman is the demand for satisfaction of his
sexuality. It is in this realm that he feels . . . most helpless to cope with his own need, except
by demanding that the woman serve him. This childish demand on his part and the equally
undeveloped maternal wish to give on hers, may serve on a low level ... to produce an alliance
between a man and a woman which passes for relationship. But when a necessity arises for
something more mature in the situation between them . . . the man may be compelled to
recognize that the woman is something more than the reciprocal of his need. . . . When she
refuses any longer to mother him, no longer repressing her own needs in her determination to
fulfill his, he will find himself faced with the necessity of meeting the reality of the situation. .
. . The loss of the phallus refers to the necessity for the man to give up his demand that the
woman satisfy his sexual and emotional needs as if she were his mother.44

Harding is saying that the maternal emotions can hold the mother in arrest
as much as the son. But maternal altruism is the one quality universally
approved and supported in women. The son may be ritually passed over
into manhood, or his later difficulties may be blamed on his mother’s
excessive love and protectiveness, but she gets little support in her efforts to
achieve a separation.
Harding, like other Jungians, fails to give full weight to the pressure on
all women—not only mothers—to remain in a “giving,” assenting,
maternalistic relationship to men. The cost of refusing to do so, even in
casual relationships or conversations, is often to be labeled “hostile,” a
“ball-breaker,” a “castrating bitch.” A plain fact cleanly spoken by a
woman’s tongue is not infrequently perceived as a cutting blade directed at
a man’s genitals.
And women too reinforce in each other a “mothering” attitude toward
men. Often one woman’s advice to another on relationships with men will
be worded in terms of the treatment of children. “[Our] attitude can
influence men’s perception of themselves, so that they conform to it. In
other words—as in dealing with children—if you say to a child ‘You’re
mean!’ he or she will agree, internalize your judgment, and get mean!” a
sensitive and learned woman writes to me. In fact, one of the most insidious
patterns between the sexes is the common equation, by women, of man with
child. It is infantilizing to men, and it has meant a trapping of female energy
which can hardly be calculated.
 Mary Daly has noted that men perceive the new presence of women to
each other as an absence 45 This is the real separation they dread—that
women should not be waiting there for them when they return from the
male group, the hierarchies, the phallic world. This fear of women
communing with each other, when not expressed as ridicule or contempt,
often takes the overt forms of “Don’t leave me!”—the man beseeching the
woman who is finding her spiritual and political community with other
women. “Any really creative vision of new ways, of a new society, ought to
and will have to include men,” a troubled friend writes to me, on the
letterhead of one of the most sexist institutions in the United States. He
fears a loss of “humanity” when women speak and listen to women. I
suspect that what he really fears is the absence of humanity among men, the
cerebral divisions of the male group, the undeveloped affections between
man and man, the ruthless pursuit of goals, the defensive male bonding
which goes only skin-deep. Underneath it all I hear the cry of the man-
child: “Mother! Don’t leave me!”
And, men fear the loss of privilege. It is all too evident that he majority
of “concerned” or “profeminist” men secretly hope that “liberation” will
give them the right to shed tears while still exercising their old prerogatives.
Frantz Fanon describes the case of a European police inspector engaged in
torturing Algerian revolutionaries, who suffered from mental disorder and
pain so serious that his family life became gravely disturbed, and who came
for psychiatric treatment.
This man knew perfectly well that his disorders were directly caused by the kind of activity
that went on inside the rooms where interrogations were carried out. ... As he could not see
his way to stopping torturing people (that made nonsense to him for in that case he would
have to resign) he asked me without beating about the bush to help him go on torturing
Algerian patriots without any prickings of conscience, without any behavior problems, and
with complete equanimity.46

Men are increasingly aware that their disorders may have something to do
with patriarchy. But few of them wish to resign from it. The women’s
movement is still seen in terms of the mother-child relationship: either as a
punishment and abandonment of men for past bad behavior, or as a
potential healing of men’s pain by women, a new form of maternalism, in
which little by little, through gentle suasion, women with a new vision will
ease men into a more humane and sensitive life. In short, that women will
go on doing for men what men cannot or will not do for each other or
themselves.
The question, “What do we want for our sons?” ultimately does
become, what do we want for men and what will we demand of them? (As I
write these words, most women in the world are far too preoccupied with
the immediate effects of patriarchy on their lives—too-large families,
inadequate or nonexistent child-care, malnutrition, enforced seclusion, lack
of education, inadequate wages due to sex discrimination—to demand
anything, or to ask this question; but that fact does not render the question
either reactionary or trivial.) The question of first priority is, of course, what
do we want for ourselves? But, whether we are childed or childless,
married, divorced, lesbian, celibate, token women, feminists, or separatists,
the other question is still with us.
If I could have one wish for my own sons, it is that they should have the
courage of women. I mean by this something very concrete and precise: the
courage I have seen in women who, in their private and public lives, both in
the interior world of their dreaming, thinking, and creating, and the outer
world of patriarchy, are taking greater and greater risks, both psychic and
physical, in the evolution of a new vision. Sometimes this involves tiny acts
of immense courage; sometimes public acts which can cost a woman her
job or her life; often it involves moments, or long periods, of thinking the
unthinkable, being labeled, or feeling, crazy; always a loss of traditional
securities. Every woman who takes her life into her own hands does so
knowing that she must expect enormous pain, inflicted both from within
and without. I would like my sons not to shrink from this kind of pain, not
to settle for the old male defenses, including that of a fatalistic self-hatred.
And I would wish them to do this not for me, or for other women, but for
themselves, and for the sake of life on the planet Earth.
In 1890 Olive Schreiner related a parable in which a woman is trying to
cross a deep, fordless river into the land of freedom. She wants to carry
with her the male infant suckling at her breast, but she is told, No, you will
lose your life trying to save him; he must grow into a man and save himself,
and then you will meet him on the other side.47 We infantilize men and
deceive ourselves when we try to make these changes easy and
unthreatening for them. We are going to have to put down the grown-up
male children we have carried in our arms, against our breasts, and move
on, trusting ourselves and them enough to do so. And, yes, we will have to
expect their anger, their cries of “Don’t leave me!”, their reprisals.
This is not the place, nor am I the person, to draw blueprints for the
assimilation of men in large numbers into a comprehensive system of child-
care, although I believe that would be the most revolutionary priority that
any male group could set itself. It would not only change the expectations
children—and therefore men—have of women and men; nor would it
simply break down gender-roles and diversify the work-patterns of both
sexes; it would change the entire community’s relationship to childhood. In
learning to give care to children, men would have to cease being children;
the privileges of fatherhood could not be toyed with, as they now are,
without an equal share in the full experience of nurture. I can see many
difficulties and dangers in integrating men into the full child-rearing
process; looming first is the old notion that child-care, because it has been
women’s work, is passive, low-level, nonwork; or that it is simply “fun.”
Close behind this comes the undeveloped capacity for sympathetic
identification in men. I also believe that many women would prefer that
even in a comprehensive day-care system, women remain the prime carers
for children—for a variety of reasons, not all of them short-sighted or
traditional. Women, at all events, must and will take the leadership in
demanding, drafting, and implementing such a profound structural and
human change. In order to do so we will have to possess more consciously
our own realms of unconscious, preverbal knowledge as mothers, biological
or not. Perhaps for a long time men will need a kind of compensatory
education in the things about which their education as males has left them
illiterate.
Meanwhile, in the realm of personal relationships, if men are to begin to
share in the “work of love” we will have to change our ways of loving
them. This means, among other things, that we cease praising and being
grateful to the fathers of our children when they take some partial share in
their care and nurture. (No woman is considered “special” because she
carries out her responsibilities as a parent; not to do so is considered a
social crime.) It also means that we cease treating men as if their egos were
of eggshell, or as if the preservation of a masculine ego at the expense of an
equal relationship were even desirable. It means that we begin to expect of
men, as we do of women, that they can behave like our equals without
being applauded for it or singled out as “exceptional”; and that we refuse
them the traditional separation between “love” and “work.”
They will not, for a long time, see this as a new form of love. We will be
told we are acting and speaking out of hatred; that we are becoming “like
them”; that they will perish emotionally without our constant care and
attention. But through centuries of suckling men emotionally at our breasts
we have also been told that we were polluted, devouring, domineering,
masochistic, harpies, bitches, dykes, and whores.
We are slowly learning to discredit these recitals, including the one that
begins, “Mothers are more real than other women.”

* Louis Malle’s film, Murmur of the Heart, suggests another attitude toward the story; far from being
a “dark legend,” the mutual seduction of son and mother is merely a lighthearted family incident.
† More recently, when the “Boston Strangler” was terrorizing that city with the sexual mutilation and
strangling of a series of women,
[a] Medical-Psychiatric Committee, upon invitation of the stymied police, had put together an
imaginative, detailed profile of the phantom Strangler. Or, to be more precise, they put
together an imaginative profile of the Strangler’s mother. Struck by the advanced age of the
first victims, one of whom was 75, the committee postulated . . . that the elusive killer was a
neat, punctual, conservatively dressed, possibly middle-aged, probably impotent, probably
homosexual fellow who was consumed by raging hatred for his “sweet, orderly, neat,
compulsive, seductive, punitive, overwhelming” mother. . . . Consumed by mother hatred, the
psychiatrists divined, the Strangler had chosen to murder and mutilate old women in a manner
“both sadistic and loving. . . .”
Albert DeSalvo, as he revealed himself and as his juvenile records bore out, was genuinely
attached to his mother. Moreover, she was still alive and not particularly sweet, neat or
overwhelming. The consuming rage DeSalvo bore was uncompromisingly directed against
his drunken, brutalizing father, who had regularly beaten him, his mother and the other
children during a wretched youth . . . engaged in sex acts with prostitutes in front of his
children, had taught his sons to shoplift, had broken every finger on his wife’s hand and
knocked out her teeth, and had . . . abandoned the family when Albert was eight.
(Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape [New York: Simon and Schuster,
1975], pp. 203-4.)
‡ Daughters may also dread being “redevoured” by their mothers; but the daughter also knows
herself potentially her mother’s inheritor: she, also, may bring life out of her body.
§ And state authority has been wholly or predominantly male: for example, Israel, the Soviet Union,
Cuba, the Republic of China. That Golda Meir or Indira Gandhi are women does not alter the
maleness of that authority, which emanates, finally, from and through male institutions.
¶ I do not mean that science and poetry are the same thing; only that they need be in no way opposed.
# “Traits that enabled Jewish women to keep their families together in the shtetl and to ease their
transition to the New World are the very same ones the processes of assimilation . . . were bent on
exorcising. . . . Their bowls of chicken soup have become philters of hemlock” (Charlotte Baum,
Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michel, The Jewish Woman in America [New York: Dial Press, 1975], pp.
244-51).
** One son, Theodore, collaborated with a sister in editing the two volumes of Stanton’s writings. He
also wrote his own book on The Woman Question in Europe.
††1986: For a much more considered view of the drag queen, see Judy Grahn, Another Mother
Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (Boston: Beacon, 1984), pp. 95-96: “One dilemma of the modem
Gay drag queen is that he is impersonating a female God and female characteristics that people
around him may despise, and he may be seen only as a mocker of women, sometimes most of all by
his Lesbian sisters.”

OceanofPDF.com
IX MOTHERHOOD AND
DAUGHTERHOOD

Mother
I write home
I am alone and
give me my body back.
—Susan Griffin

A folder lies open beside me as I start to write, spilling out references and
quotations, all relevant probably, but none of which can help me to begin.
This is the core of my book, and I enter it as a woman who, born between
her mother’s legs, has time after time and in different ways tried to return to
her mother, to repossess her and be repossessed by her, to find the mutual
confirmation from and with another woman that daughters and mothers
alike hunger for, pull away from, make possible or impossible for each
other.
The first knowledge any woman has of warmth, nourishment,
tenderness, security, sensuality, mutuality, comes from her mother. That
earliest enwrapment of one female body with another can sooner or later be
denied or rejected, felt as choking possessiveness, as rejection, trap, or
taboo; but it is, at the beginning, the whole world. Of course, the male
infant also first knows tenderness, nourishment, mutuality from a female
body. But institutionalized heterosexuality and institutionalized motherhood
demand that the girl-child transfer those first feelings of dependency,
eroticism, mutuality, from her first woman to a man, if she is to become
what is defined as a “normal” woman—that is, a woman whose most
intense psychic and physical energies are directed towards men.*
I saw my own mother’s menstrual blood before I saw my own. Hers was
the first female body I ever looked at, to know what women were, what I
was to be. I remember taking baths with her in the hot summers of early
childhood, playing with her in the cool water. As a young child I thought
how beautiful she was; a print of Botticelli’s Venus on the wall, half-
smiling, hair flowing, associated itself in my mind with her. In early
adolescence I still glanced slyly at my mother’s body, vaguely imagining: I
too shall have breasts, full hips, hair between my thighs—whatever that
meant to me then, and with all the ambivalence of such a thought. And
there were other thoughts: I too shall marry, have children—but not like her.
I shall find a way of doing it all differently.
My father’s tense, narrow body did not seize my imagination, though
authority and control ran through it like electric filaments. I used to glimpse
his penis dangling behind a loosely tied bathrobe. But I had understood very
early that he and my mother were different. It was his voice, presence, style,
that seemed to pervade the household. I don’t remember when it was that
my mother’s feminine sensuousness, the reality of her body, began to give
way for me to the charisma of my father’s assertive mind and temperament;
perhaps when my sister was just born, and he began teaching me to read.
My mother’s very name had a kind of magic for me as a child: Helen. I
still think it one of the most beautiful of names. Reading Greek mythology,
while very young, I somehow identified Helen my mother with Helen of
Troy; or perhaps even more with Poe’s “Helen,” which my father liked to
quote:
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore . . .

She was, Helen my mother, my native shore of course; I think that in that
poem I first heard my own longings, the longings of the female child,
expressed by a male poet, in the voice of a man—my father.
My father talked a great deal of beauty and the need for perfection. He
felt the female body to be impure; he did not like its natural smells. His
incorporeality was a way of disengaging himself from that lower realm
where women sweated, excreted, grew bloody every month, became
pregnant. (My mother became aware, in the last months of pregnancy, that
he always looked away from her body.) He was perhaps very Jewish in this,
but also very southern: the “pure” and therefore bloodless white woman
was supposed to be a kind of gardenia, blanched by the moonlight, staining
around the edges when touched.
But the early pleasure and reassurance I found in my mother’s body
was, I believe, an imprinting never to be wholly erased, even in those years
when, as my father’s daughter, I suffered the obscure bodily self-hatred
peculiar to women who view themselves through the eyes of men. I trusted
the pleasures I could get from my own body even at a time when
masturbation was an unspeakable word. Doubtless my mother would have
actively discouraged such pleasures had she known about them. Yet I
cannot help but feel that I finally came to love my own body through first
having loved hers, that this was a profound matrilineal bequest. I knew I
was not an incorporeal intellect. My mind and body might be divided, as if
between father and mother; but I had both.
Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other—
beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival—a knowledge that
is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two
alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other. The
experience of giving birth stirs deep reverberations of her mother in a
daughter; women often dream of their mothers during pregnancy and labor.
Alice Rossi suggests that in first breast-feeding her own child a woman may
be stirred by the remembered smell of her own mother’s milk. About
menstruation, some daughters feel a womanly closeness with their mothers
even where the relationship is generally painful and conflicted.1

2
It is hard to write about my own mother. Whatever I do write, it is my story
I am telling, my version of the past. If she were to tell her own story other
landscapes would be revealed. But in my landscape or hers, there would be
old, smoldering patches of deep-burning anger. Before her marriage, she
had trained seriously for years both as a concert pianist and a composer.
Born in a southern town, mothered by a strong, frustrated woman, she had
won a scholarship to study with the director at the Peabody Conservatory in
Baltimore, and by teaching at girls’ schools had earned her way to further
study in New York, Paris, and Vienna. From the age of sixteen, she had
been a young belle, who could have married at any time, but she also
possessed unusual talent, determination, and independence for her time and
place. She read—and reads—widely and wrote—as her journals from my
childhood and her letters of today reveal—with grace and pungency.
She married my father after a ten years’ engagement during which he
finished his medical training and began to establish himself in academic
medicine. Once married, she gave up the possibility of a concert career,
though for some years she went on composing, and she is still a skilled and
dedicated pianist. My father, brilliant, ambitious, possessed by his own
drive, assumed that she would give her life over to the enhancement of his.
She would manage his household with the formality and grace becoming to
a medical professor’s wife, though on a limited budget; she would “keep
up” her music, though there was no question of letting her composing and
practice conflict with her duties as a wife and mother. She was supposed to
bear him two children, a boy and a girl. She had to keep her household
books to the last penny—I still can see the big blue gray ledgers, inscribed
in her clear, strong hand; she marketed by streetcar, and later, when they
could afford a car, she drove my father to and from his laboratory or
lectures, often awaiting him for hours. She raised two children, and taught
us all our lessons, including music. (Neither of us was sent to school until
the fourth grade.) I am sure that she was made to feel responsible for all our
imperfections.
My father, like the transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, believed that he (or
rather, his wife) could raise children according to his unique moral and
intellectual plan, thus proving to the world the values of enlightened,
unorthodox child-rearing. I believe that my mother, like Abigail Alcott, at
first genuinely and enthusiastically embraced the experiment, and only later
found that in carrying out my father’s intense, perfectionist program, she
was in conflict with her deep instincts as a mother. Like Abigail Alcott, too,
she must have found that while ideas might be unfolded by her husband,
their daily, hourly practice was going to be up to her. (“ ‘Mr. A. aids me in
general principles, but nobody can aid me in the detail,’ she mourned. . . .
Moreover her husband’s views kept her constantly wondering if she were
doing a good job. ‘Am I doing what is right? Am I doing enough? Am I
doing too much?’ ” The appearance of “temper” and “will” in Louisa, the
second Alcott daughter, was blamed by her father on her inheritance from
her mother.2) Under the institution of motherhood, the mother is the first to
blame if theory proves unworkable in practice, or if anything whatsoever
goes wrong. But even earlier, my mother had failed at one part of the plan:
she had not produced a son.
For years, I felt my mother had chosen my father over me, had
sacrificed me to his needs and theories. When my first child was born, I was
barely in communication with my parents. I had been fighting my father for
my right to an emotional life and a selfhood beyond his needs and theories.
We were all at a draw. Emerging from the fear, exhaustion, and alienation of
my first childbirth, I could not admit even to myself that I wanted my
mother, let alone tell her how much I wanted her. When she visited me in
the hospital neither of us could uncoil the obscure lashings of feeling that
darkened the room, the tangled thread running backward to where she had
labored for three days to give birth to me, and I was not a son. Now, twenty-
six years later, I lay in a contagious hospital with my allergy, my skin
covered with a mysterious rash, my lips and eyelids swollen, my body
bruised and sutured, and, in a cot beside my bed, slept the perfect, golden,
male child I had brought forth. How could I have interpreted her feelings
when I could not begin to decipher my own? My body had spoken all too
eloquently, but it was, medically, just my body. I wanted her to mother me
again, to hold my baby in her arms as she had once held me; but that baby
was also a gauntlet flung down: my son. Part of me longed to offer him for
her blessing; part of me wanted to hold him up as a badge of victory in our
tragic, unnecessary rivalry as women.
But I was only at the beginning. I know now as I could not possibly
know then, that among the tangle of feelings between us, in that crucial yet
unreal meeting, was her guilt. Soon I would begin to understand the full
weight and burden of maternal guilt, that daily, nightly, hourly, Am I doing
what is right? Am I doing enough? Am I doing too much? The institution of
motherhood finds all mothers more or less guilty of having failed their
children; and my mother, in particular, had been expected to help create,
according to my father’s plan, a perfect daughter. This “perfect” daughter,
though gratifyingly precocious, had early been given to tics and tantrums,
had become permanently lame from arthritis at twenty-two; she had finally
resisted her father’s Victorian paternalism, his seductive charm and
controlling cruelty, had married a divorced graduate student, had begun to
write “modern,” “obscure,” “pessimistic” poetry, lacking the fluent
sweetness of Tennyson, had had the final temerity to get pregnant and bring
a living baby into the world. She had ceased to be the demure and
precocious child or the poetic, seducible adolescent. Something, in my
father’s view, had gone terribly wrong. I can imagine that whatever else my
mother felt (and I know that part of her was mutely on my side) she also
was made to feel blame. Beneath the “numbness” that she has since told me
she experienced at that time, I can imagine the guilt of Everymother,
because T have known it myself.
But I did not know it yet. And it is difficult for me to write of my
mother now, because I have known it too well. I struggle to describe what it
felt like to be her daughter, but I find myself divided, slipping under her
skin; a part of me identifies too much with her. I know deep reservoirs of
anger toward her still exist: the anger of a four-year-old locked in the closet
(my father’s orders, but my mother carried them out) for childish
misbehavior; the anger of a six-year-old kept too long at piano practice
(again, at his insistence, but it was she who gave the lessons) till I
developed a series of facial tics. (As a mother I know what a child’s facial
tic is—a lancet of guilt and pain running through one’s own body.) And I
still feel the anger of a daughter, pregnant, wanting my mother desperately
and feeling she had gone over to the enemy.
And I know there must be deep reservoirs of anger in her; every mother
has known overwhelming, unacceptable anger at her children. When I think
of the conditions under which my mother became a mother, the impossible
expectations, my father’s distaste for pregnant women, his hatred of all that
he could not control, my anger at her dissolves into grief and anger for her,
and then dissolves back again into anger at her: the ancient, unpurged anger
of the child.
My mother lives today as an independent woman, which she was
always meant to be. She is a much-loved, much-admired grandmother, an
explorer in new realms; she lives in the present and future, not the past. I no
longer have fantasies—they are the unhealed child’s fantasies, I think—of
some infinitely healing conversation with her, in which we could show all
our wounds, transcend the pain we have shared as mother and daughter, say
everything at last. But in writing these pages, I am admitting, at least, how
important her existence is and has been for me.
For it was too simple, early in the new twentieth-century wave of
feminism, for us to analyze our mothers’ oppression, to understand
“rationally"—and correctly—why our mothers did not teach us to be
Amazons, why they bound our feet or simply left us. It was accurate and
even radical, that analysis; and yet, like all politics narrowly interpreted, it
assumed that consciousness knows everything. There was, is, in most of us,
a girl-child still longing for a woman’s nurture, tenderness, and approval, a
woman’s power exerted in our defense, a woman’s smell and touch and
voice, a woman’s strong arms around us in moments of fear and pain. Any
of us would have longed for a mother who had chosen, in Christabel
Pankhurst’s words, that “reckoning the cost [of her suffragist activism] in
advance, Mother prepared to pay it, for women’s sake.”3 It was not enough
to understand our mothers; more than ever, in the effort to touch our own
strength as women, we needed them. The cry of that female child in us need
not be shameful or regressive; it is the germ of our desire to create a world
in which strong mothers and strong daughters will be a matter of course.
We need to understand this double vision or we shall never understand
ourselves. Many of us were mothered in ways we cannot yet even perceive;
we only know that our mothers were in some incalculable way on our side.
But if a mother had deserted us, by dying, or putting us up for adoption, or
because life had driven her into alcohol or drugs, chronic depression or
madness, if she had been forced to leave us with indifferent, uncaring
strangers in order to earn our food money, because institutional motherhood
makes no provision for the wageearning mother; if she had tried to be a
“good mother” according to the demands of the institution and had thereby
turned into an anxious, worrying, puritanical keeper of our virginity; or if
she had simply left us because she needed to live without a child—whatever
our rational forgiveness, whatever the individual mother’s love and
strength, the child in us, the small female who grew up in a male-controlled
world, still feels, at moments, wildly unmothered. When we can confront
and unravel this paradox, this contradiction, face to the utmost in ourselves
the groping passion of that little girl lost, we can begin to transmute it, and
the blind anger and bitterness that have repetitiously erupted among women
trying to build a movement together can be alchemized. Before sisterhood,
there was the knowledge—transitory, fragmented, perhaps, but original and
crucial—of mother-and-daughterhood.

3
This cathexis between mother and daughter—essential, distorted, misused
—is the great unwritten story. Probably there is nothing in human nature
more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two
biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the
other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are
here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement. Margaret
Mead offers the possibility of “deep biochemical affinities between the
mother and the female child, and contrasts between the mother and the male
child, of which we now know nothing.”4 Yet this relationship has been
minimized and trivialized in the annals of patriarchy. Whether in
theological doctrine or art or sociology or psychoanalytic theory, it is the
mother and son who appear as the eternal, determinative dyad. Small
wonder, since theology, art, and social theory have been produced by sons.
Like intense relationships between women in general, the relationship
between mother and daughter has been profoundly threatening to men.
A glance at ancient texts would suggest that daughters barely existed.
What the son means to the father is abundantly expressed, in the
Upanishads:
[The woman] nourishes her husband’s self, the son, within her. . . . The father elevates the
child even before the birth, and immediately after, by nourishing the mother and by
performing ceremonies. When he thus elevates the child ... he really elevates his second self,
for the continuation of these worlds. . . . This is his second birth.

Aten, or Atum, is hailed in the Egyptian hymn:

Creator of seed in women,

Thou who makes fluid into man,
Who maintainest the son in the womb of the mother. . . .

And Jewish traditional lore has it that a female soul is united with a male
sperm, resulting in, of course, a “man-child.”5
Daughters have been nullified by silence, but also by infanticide, of
which they have everywhere been the primary victims. “Even a rich man
always exposes a daughter.” Lloyd deMause suggests that the statistical
imbalance of males over females from antiquity into the Middle Ages
resulted from the routine practice of killing off female infants. Daughters
were destroyed not only by their fathers, but by their mothers. A husband of
the first century B.C. writes to his wife as a matter of course: “If, as well
may happen, you give birth to a child, if it is a boy let it live; if it is a girl,
expose it.”6† Given the long prevalence of this practice, it is no wonder if a
mother dreaded giving birth to a female like herself. While the father might
see himself as “twice-born” in his son, such a “second birth” was denied the
mothers of daughters.
In To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf created what is still the most
complex and passionate vision of mother-daughter schism in modern
literature. It is significantly, one of the very few literary documents in
which a woman has portrayed her mother as a central figure. Mrs. Ramsay
is a kaleidoscopic character, and in successive readings of the novel, she
changes, almost as our own mothers alter in perspective as we ourselves are
changing. The feminist scholar Jane Lilienfeld has pointed out that during
Virginia’s early years her mother, Julia Stephen, expended almost all her
maternal energies in caring for her husband and his lifework, the Dictionary
of National Biography. Both Virginia and her sister Vanessa were later to
seek each other for mothering, and Lilienfeld suggests that Leonard Woolf
was to provide Virginia with the kind of care and vigilance that her mother
had given her father.7 In any case, Mrs. Ramsay, with her “strange severity,
her extreme courtesy” her attentiveness to others’ needs (chiefly those of
men), her charismatic attractiveness, even as a woman of fifty who had
borne eight children—Mrs. Ramsay is no simple idealization. She is the
“delicious fecundity . . . [the] fountain and spray of life [into which] the
fatal sterility of the male plunged itself”; at the same time that “she felt this
thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you
gave it a chance.”
She perceives “without hostility, the sterility of men,” yet as Lilienfeld
notes, she doesn’t like women very much, and her life is spent in
attunement to male needs. The young painter Lily Briscoe, sitting with her
arms clasped around Mrs. Ramsay’s knees, her head on her lap, longs to
become one with her, in “the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman
who was, physically, touching her. . . . Could loving, as people called it,
make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she
desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any
language known to men, but intimacy itself . . .”
Yet nothing happens. Mrs. Ramsay is not available to her. And since
Woolf has clearly transcribed herself into Lily Briscoe, the scene has a
double charge: the daughter seeking intimacy with her own mother, the
woman seeking intimacy with another woman, not her mother but toward
whom she turns those passionate longings. Much later she understands that
it is only in her work that she can “stand up to Mrs. Ramsay” and her
“extraordinary power.” In her work, she can reject the grouping of Mrs.
Ramsay and James, “mother and son,” as a pictorial subject. Through her
work, Lily is independent of men, as Mrs. Ramsay is not. In the most acute,
unembittered ways, Woolf pierces the shimmer of Mrs. Ramsay’s
personality; she needs men as much as they need her, her power and
strength are founded on the dependency, the “sterility” of others.
It is clear that Virginia the daughter had pondered Julia her mother for
years before depicting her in To the Lighthouse. Again, that fascinated
attention is ascribed to Lily Briscoe:
Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get around that one woman with, she thought. Among
them, must be one that was stone blind to her beauty. One wanted some most secret sense,
fine as air, with which to steal through keyholes and surround her where she sat knitting,
talking, sitting silent in the window alone; which took to itself and treasured up like the air
which held the smoke of the steamer, her thoughts, her imaginations, her desires. What did
the hedge mean to her, what did the garden mean to her, what did it mean to her when a wave
broke?8

And this, precisely, is what Virginia the artist achieved; but the achievement
is testimony not merely to the power of her art but to the passion of the
daughter for the mother, her need above all to understand this woman, so
adored and so unavailable to her; to understand, in all complexity, the
differences that separated her mother from herself.
The woman activist or artist born of a family-centered mother may in
any case feel that her mother cannot understand or sympathize with the
imperatives of her life; or that her mother has preferred and valued a more
conventional daughter, or a son. In order to study nursing, Florence
Nightingale was forced to battle, in the person of her mother, the restrictive
conventions of upper-class Victorian womanhood, the destiny of a life in
drawing rooms and country houses in which she saw women going mad
“for want of something to do.”9 The painter Paula Modersohn-Becker was,
throughout her life, concerned—and fearful—that her mother might not
accept the terms of her life. Writing in 1899 of her struggles with her work,
she says: “I write this especially for mother. I think she feels that my life is
one long continuous egoistic drunken joyousness.” On leaving her husband
she writes: “I was so fearful that you might have been angry. . . . And now
you are so good to me. . . . You, my dearest mother, stay by me and bless
my life.” And, the year before her own death in childbirth:
. . . I am in continuous tumult, always . . . only sometimes resting, then moving again towards
a goal ... I beg of you to keep this in mind when at times I seem unloving. It means that all my
strength is concentrated towards one thing only. I do not know whether this should be called
egotism. If so, it is the most noble.

I put my head in the lap from which I came forth, and thank you for my life.10

Emily Dickinson’s famous statement that “I never had a mother” has

been variously interpreted; but surely she meant in part that she felt herself
deviant, set apart, from the kind of life her mother lived; that what most
concerned her, her mother could not understand. Yet when her mother
suffered a paralytic stroke in 1875, both Dickinson sisters nursed her
tenderly until her death in 1882, and in a letter of that year Emily Dickinson
writes:
. . . the departure of our Mother is so bleak a surprise, we are both benumbed . . . only the
night before she died, she was happy and hungry and ate a little Supper I made her with so
much enthusiasm, I laughed with delight . . .
Wondering with sorrow, how we could spare our lost Neighbors [her correspondents] our first
Neighbor, our Mother, quietly stole away.
Plundered of her dear face, we scarcely know each other, and feel as if wrestling with a
Dream, waking would dispel . . .

And the daughter’s letter ends with the poet’s cry: “Oh, Vision of
Language!”11
“Between Sylvia and me existed—as between my own mother and me
—a sort of psychic osmosis which, at times, was very wonderful and
comforting; at other times an unwelcome invasion of privacy.” This is
Aurelia Plath’s description of the relationship between herself and her
daughter Sylvia, from the other side. The intensity of the relationship seems
to have disturbed some readers of Plath’s Letters Home, an outpouring
chiefly to her mother, written weekly or oftener, first from college and later
from England. There is even a tendency to see this mother-daughter
relationship as the source of Sylvia Plath’s early suicide attempt, her
relentless perfectionism and obsession with “greatness.” Yet the preface to
Letters Home reveals a remarkable woman, a true survivor; it was Plath’s
father who set the example of self-destructiveness. The letters are far from
complete‡ and until many more materials are released, efforts to write Plath
biography and criticism are questionable at best. But throughout runs her
need to lay in her mother’s lap, as it were, poems and prizes, books and
babies, the longing for her mother when she is about to give birth, the effort
to let Aurelia Plath know that her struggles and sacrifices to rear her
daughter had been vindicated. In the last letters Sylvia seems to be trying to
shield herself and Aurelia, an ocean away, from the pain of that “psychic
osmosis.” “I haven’t the strength to see you for some time,” she writes,
explaining why she will not come to America after her divorce. “The horror
of what you saw and what I saw you see last summer is between us and I
cannot face you again until I have a new life . . .” (October 9, 1962). Three
days later: “Do tear up my last one ... I have [had] an incredible change of
spirit. . . . Every morning, when my sleeping pill wears off, I am up about
five, in my study with coffee, writing like mad—have managed a poem a
day before breakfast. . . . Terrific stuff, as if domesticity had choked me. . . .
Nick [her son] has two teeth, stands, and is an angel . . .” (October 12,
1962).12§
Psychic osmosis. Desperate defenses. The power of the bond often
denied because it cracks consciousness, threatens at times to lead the
daughter back into “those secret chambers ... becoming, like waters poured
into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored . . ”13
Or, because there is no indifference or cruelty we can tolerate less, than the
indifference or cruelty of our mothers.
In The Well of Loneliness, a novel by now notorious for its pathological-
tragic view of lesbianism, Radclyffe Hall suggests an almost preternatural
antipathy between Anna Gordon and her lesbian daughter Stephen. It is
Stephen’s father who—through having read Krafft-Ebbing—“understands”
her, and treats her as he might a tragically maimed son. Her mother views
her from the first as a stranger, an interloper, an alien creature. Radclyffe
Hall’s novel is painful as a revelation of the author’s self-rejection, her
internalizing of received opinions against her own instincts. The crux of her
self-hatred lies in her imagining no possible relationship between Anna the
mother and Stephen the daughter. Yet there is one passage in which she
suggests the longing for and possibility of connection between mother and
daughter—a connection founded on physical sensation:
 The scents of the meadows would move those two strangely. . . . Sometimes Stephen must tug
at her mother’s sleeve sharply—intolerable to bear that thick fragrance alone!
One day she had said: “Stand still or you’ll hurt it—it’s all round us—it’s a white smell, it
reminds me of you!” And then she had flushed, and had glanced up quickly, rather frightened
in case she should find Anna laughing.
But her mother had looked at her curiously, gravely, puzzled by this creature who seemed all
contradictions. . . . Anna had been stirred, as her child had been stirred, by the breath of the
meadowsweet under the hedges; for in this way they were one, the mother and daughter . . .
could they only have divined it, such simple things might have formed a link between them . .
.
They had gazed at each other as though asking for something . . . the one from the other; then
the moment had passed—they had walked on in silence, no nearer in spirit than before.14

A woman who feels an unbridgeable gulf between her mother and

herself may be forced to assume that her mother—like Stephen’s—could
never accept her sexuality. But, despite the realities of popular ignorance
and bigotry about lesbians, and the fear that she has somehow “damaged”
her daughter in the eyes of society, the mother may at some level—mute,
indirect, oblique—want to confirm that daughter in her love for women.
Mothers who have led perfectly traditional, heterosexual lives have
welcomed their daughters’ women lovers and supported their domestic
arrangements, though often denying, if asked, the nature of the relationship.
A woman who fully and gladly accepts her love for another woman is likely
to create an atmosphere in which her mother will not reject her.¶ But that
acceptance has first to be found in ourselves; it does not come as an act of
will.
For those of us who had children, and later came to recognize and act
upon the breadth and depth of our feelings for women, a complex new bond
with our mothers is possible. The poet Sue Silvermarie writes:
I find now, instead of a contradiction between lesbian and mother, there is an overlapping.
What is the same between my lover and me, my mother and me, and my son and me is the
motherbond—primitive, all-encompassing, and paramount.
In loving another woman I discovered the deep urge to both be a mother to and find a mother
in my lover. At first I feared the discovery. Everything around me told me it was evil. Popular
Freudianism cursed it as a fixation, a sign of immaturity. But gradually I came to have faith in
my own needs and desires. . . . Now I treasure and trust the drama between two loving
women, in which each can become mother and each become child.
It is most clear during lovemaking, when the separation of everyday life lifts for awhile.
When I kiss and stroke and enter my lover, I am also a child re-entering my mother. I want to
return to the womb-state of harmony, and also to the ancient world. I enter my lover but it is
 she in her orgasm who returns. I see on her face for a long moment, the unconscious bliss that
an infant carries the memory of behind its shut eyes. Then when it is she who makes love to
me . . . the intensity is also a pushing out, a borning! She comes in and is then identified with
the ecstasy that is born. ... So I too return to the mystery of my mother, and of the world as it
must have been when the motherbond was exalted.
Now I am ready to go back and understand the one whose body actually carried me. Now I
can begin to learn about her, forgive her for the rejection I felt, yearn for her, ache for her. I
could never want her until I myself had been wanted. By a woman. Now I know what it is to
feel exposed as a newborn, to be pared down to my innocence. To lie with a woman and give
her the power of my utter fragility. To have that power be cherished. Now that I know, I can
return to her who could not cherish me as I needed. I can return without blame, and I can
hope that she is ready for me.15

In studying the diaries and letters of American women of thirty-five

families, from the 1760s to the 1880s, the historian Carroll Smith-
Rosenberg has traced a pattern—indeed, a network—of close, sometimes
explicitly sensual, long-lasting female friendships characteristic of the
period. Tender, devoted, these relationships persisted through separations
caused by the marriage of one or both women, in the context of a “female
world” distinctly separate from the larger world of male concerns, but in
which women held a paramount importance in each others’ lives.
Smith-Rosenberg finds
... an intimate mother-daughter relationship ... at the heart of this female world. . . . Central to
these relationships is what might be described as an apprenticeship system . . . mothers and
other older women carefully trained daughters in the arts of housewifery and motherhood . . .
adolescent girls temporarily took over the household . . . and helped in childbirth, nursing and
weaning . . .
Daughters were born into a female world. ... As long as the mother’s domestic role remained
relatively stable and few viable alternatives competed with it, daughters tended to accept their
mother’s world and to turn automatically to other women for support and intimacy . . .
One could speculate at length concerning the absence of that mother-daughter hostility today
considered almost inevitable to an adolescent’s struggle for autonomy. ... It is possible that
taboos against female aggression . . . were sufficiently strong to repress even that between
mothers and their adolescent daughters. Yet these letters seem so alive and the interest of
daughters in their mothers’ affairs so vital and genuine that it is difficult to interpret their
closeness exclusively in terms of repression and denial.16

What the absence of such a female world meant on the newly opening
frontier can be grasped from the expressions of loneliness and nostalgia of
immigrant women from Europe, who had left such networks of friends,
mothers, and sisters far behind. Many of these women remained year-in,
year-out on the homesteads, waiting eagerly for letters from home, fighting
a peculiarly female battle with loneliness. “If I only had a few good women
friends, I would be entirely satisfied. Those I miss,” writes a Wisconsin
woman in 1846. Instead of giving birth and raising children near her mother
or other female relatives, the frontier mother had no one close to her with
whom to share her womanly experiences; if cholera or diphtheria carried off
a child or children, she would have to face the rituals of death and mourning
on her own. Loneliness, unshared grief, and guilt often led to prolonged
melancholy or mental breakdown.17 If the frontier offered some women a
greater equality and independence, and the chance to break out of more
traditional roles, it also, ironically, deprived many of the emotional support
and intimacy of a female community; it tore them from their mothers.
It may also seem ironic that the growth of nineteenth-century feminism,
the false “liberation” (to smoke cigarettes and sleep around) of the
twentieth-century flapper, the beginnings of new options for women as birth
control gained in acceptance and use, may have had the initial effect of
weakening the mother-daughter tie (and with it, the network of intense
female friendships based on a common life-pattern and common
expectancies). By the 1920s, and with the increasing pervasiveness of
Freudian thought, intense female friendships could be tolerated between
schoolgirls as “crushes,” but were regarded as regressive and neurotic if
they persisted into later life.#

4
“Matrophobia” as the poet Lynn Sukenick has termed it18 is the fear not of
one’s mother or of motherhood but of becoming one’s mother. Thousands of
daughters see their mothers as having taught a compromise and self-hatred
they are struggling to win free of, the one through whom the restrictions
and degradations of a female existence were perforce transmitted. Easier by
far to hate and reject a mother outright than to see beyond her to the forces
acting upon her. But where a mother is hated to the point of matrophobia
there may also be a deep underlying pull toward her, a dread that if one
relaxes one’s guard one will identify with her completely. An adolescent
daughter may live at war with her mother yet borrow her clothes, her
perfume. Her style of housekeeping when she leaves home may be a
negative image of her mother’s: beds never made, dishes unwashed, in
unconscious reversal of the immaculately tended house of a woman from
whose orbit she has to extricate herself.
While, in Grace Paley’s words, “her son the doctor and her son the
novelist” blame and ridicule the “Jewish mother,” Jewish daughters are left
with all the panic, guilt, ambivalence, and self-hatred of the woman from
whom they came and the woman they may become. “Matrophobia” is a
late-arrived strain in the life of the Jewish daughter. Jewish women of the
shtetl and ghetto and of the early immigrant period supported their Talmud-
Studying men, raised children, ran the family business, trafficked with the
hostile gentile world, and in every practical and active way made possible
the economic and cultural survival of the Jews. Only in the later immigrant
generations, with a greater assimilationism and pressure for men to take
over the economic sphere, were women expected to reduce themselves to
perfecting the full-time mother-housewife role already invented by the
gentile middle class.
“My mother would kill me if I didn’t marry.” “It would kill my mother
if I didn’t marry.” In the absence of other absorbing and valued uses for her
energy, the full-time “homemaker” has often sunk, yes, into the
overinvolvement, the martyrdom, the possessive control, the chronic worry
over her children, caricatured in fiction through the “Jewish mother.” But
the “Jewish mother” is only one creation of the enforced withdrawal of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century women from all roles save one.**
Matrophobia can be seen as a womanly splitting of the self, in the desire
to become purged once and for all of our mothers’ bondage, to become
individuated and free. The mother stands for the victim in ourselves, the
unfree woman, the martyr. Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and
overlap with our mothers’; and, in a desperate attempt to know where
mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.
When her mother had gone, Martha cupped her hands protestingly over her stomach, and
murmured to the creature within it that nothing would deform it, freedom would be its gift.
She, Martha, the free spirit, would protect the creature from her, Martha, the maternal force;
the maternal Martha, that enemy, would not be allowed to enter the picture.19

Thus Doris Lessing’s heroine, who has felt devoured by her own mother,
splits herself—or tries to—when she realizes she, too, is to become a
mother.
 But even women with children, can exist in an uneasy wariness such as
Kate Chopin depicts in The Awakening (1899):
. . . Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman. The mother women seemed to prevail that
summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting
wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women
who idolized their children, worshipped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to
efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.20

Edna Pontellier, seeking her own pleasure and self-realization (though still
entirely through men) is seen as “inadequate” as a mother, although her
children are simply more independent than most. Cora Sandel sets her
heroine, Alberta, against an archetypal mother-woman, Jeanne. Alberta is a
writer, “haunted in recent years [by the fear] of not appearing sufficiently
motherly and domesticated.” She feels both reproached and wearied by the
efficient, energetic Jeanne, who maintains an eye on everyone:
“Don’t forget your strengthening medicine, Pierre. Then you must lie down for awhile. You’ll
work all the better for it. Marthe, you’ve scratched yourself; don’t touch anything before I’ve
put iodine on it. You ought to look in at Mme. Poulain, Alberta, before she sells the rest of
those sandshoes. ... I don’t think Tot should be in the sun for such a long time, Alberta . . .21

Thus, women who identify themselves primarily as mothers may seem both
threatening and repellent to those who do not, or who feel unequal to the
mother-role as defined by Chopin. Lily Briscoe, too, rejects this role: She
does not want to he Mrs. Ramsay, and her discovery of this is crucial for
her.

5
The loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the
essential female tragedy. We acknowledge Lear (father-daughter split),
Hamlet (son and mother), and Oedipus (son and mother) as great
embodiments of the human tragedy; but there is no presently enduring
recognition of mother-daughter passion and rapture.
There was such a recognition, but we have lost it. It was expressed in
the religious mystery of Eleusis, which constituted the spiritual foundation
of Greek life for two thousand years. Based on the mother-daughter myth of
Demeter and Korê, this rite was the most forbidden and secret of classical
civilization, never acted on the stage, open only to initiates who underwent
long purification beforehand. According to the Homeric hymn to Demeter
of the seventh century B.C., the mysteries were established by the goddess
herself, on her reunion with her daughter Korê, or Persephone, who had
been raped and abducted, in one version of the myth by Poseidon as lord of
the underworld, or, in a later version, by Hades or Pluto, king of death.
Demeter revenges herself for the loss of her daughter by forbidding the
grain—of which she is queen—to grow.
When her daughter is restored to her—for nine months of the year only
—she restores fruitfulness and life to the land for those months. But the
Homeric hymn tells us that Demeter’s supreme gift to humanity, in her
rejoicing at Korê’s return, was not the return of vegetation, but the founding
of the sacred ceremonies at Eleusis.
The Eleusinian mysteries, inaugurated somewhere between 1400 and
1100 B.C., were considered a keystone to human spiritual survival. The
Homeric hymn says:
Blessed is he among men on earth who has beheld this. Never will he who has had no part in
[the Mysteries] share in such things. He will be a dead man, in sultry darkness.‡‡

Pindar and Sophocles also distinguish between the initiate and “all the rest,”
the nonbeatified. And the Roman Cicero is quoted as saying of the
Mysteries: “We have been given a reason not only to live in joy but also to
die with better hope.” The role played by the Mysteries of Eleusis in ancient
spirituality has been compared to that of the passion and resurrection of
Christ. But in the resurrection celebrated by the Mysteries, it is a mother
whose wrath catalyzes the miracle, a daughter who rises from the
underworld.
The rites of Eleusis were imitated and plagiarized in many parts of the
ancient world. But the unique and sacred place, the only place where the
true vision might be experienced, was the shrine at Eleusis itself. This was
the site of the “Virgin’s Well” or fountain where Demeter is supposed to
have sat, grieving for the loss of Kor£, and where she returned to establish
the ceremonies. This sanctuary was destroyed, after two thousand years,
when the Goths under Alaric invaded Greece in 396 A.D.
But for two thousand years, once a year in September, the mystai or
initiands underwent purification by sea bathing, then walked in procession,
carrying torches and bundles of myrtle, to Eleusis, where they finally had
access to the “vision”—“the state of having seen.” Pigs (animals sacred to
the Great Mother) were slaughtered in sacrifice to Demeter, and eaten in her
honor as a first stage in initiation. Only initiands and hierophants were
allowed into the innermost shrine, where Kor£ appeared, called up by the
voice of a thundering gong. There, in a great blaze of light, the queen of the
dead, Persephone, appeared with her infant son, a sign to human beings that
“birth in death is possible . . . if they had faith in the Goddess.” The real
meaning of the Mysteries was this reintegration of death and birth, at a time
when patriarchal splitting may have seemed about to sever them entirely.
At the end of the ceremonies, according to C. Kerenyi, whose study of
Eleusis I have drawn on for most of the above, the hierophant turned to the
initiates and showed them a cut-off ear of grain:
All who had “seen” turned, at the sight of this “concrete thing”, as though turning back from
the hereafter into this world, back to the world of tangible things, including grain. The grain
was grain and not more, but it may well have summed up for the [initiates] everything that
Demeter and Persephone had given to mankind: Demeter food and wealth, Persephone birth
under the earth. To those who had seen Kor£ at Eleusis this was no mere metaphor.22

A marble relief of the fifth century B.C., found at Eleusis, portrays the
goddesses Demeter and Kor£, and between them the figure of a boy,
Triptolemus. Triptolemus is the “primordial man,” who must come to
Demeter for her gift of the grain. According to one myth, he is converted
from a violent, warlike way of life to a peaceful, agrarian one, through his
initiation at Eleusis. He is supposed to have disseminated three
commandments: “Honor your parents.” “Honor the gods with fruits,” and
“Spare the animals.” But Kerenyi makes clear that Triptolemus is not an
essential figure at Eleusis.23 Demeter as “tranquilly-enthroned” grain-
goddess had existed in the archaic past, giver of fruits to man. But in her
aspect as Goddess of the Mysteries she became much more: “she herself in
grief and mourning entered upon the path of initiation and turned toward
the core of the Mysteries, namely, her quality as her daughter’s mother.”
(Emphasis mine.)24
The separation of Demeter and Korê is an unwilling one; it is neither a
question of the daughter’s rebellion against the mother, nor the mother’s
rejection of the daughter. Eleusis seems to have been a final resurgence of
the multiple aspects of the Great Goddess in the classical-patriarchal world.
Rhea, the mother of Demeter, also appears in some of the myths; but also,
Kor£ herself becomes a mother in the underworld.25 Jane Harrison
considered the Mysteries to be founded on a much more ancient women’s
rite, from which men were excluded, a possibility which tells us how
endangered and complex the mother- daughter cathexis was, even before
recorded history. Each daughter, even in the millennia before Christ, must
have longed for a mother whose love for her and whose power were so
great as to undo rape and bring her back from death. And every mother
must have longed for the power of Demeter, the efficacy of her anger, the
reconciliation with her lost self.

6
A strange and complex modern version of the Demeter-Kor6 myth resides
in Margaret Atwood’s novel, Surfacing. Her narrator—a woman without a
name, who says of herself that she “can’t love,” “can’t feel"—returns to the
island in Canada where she and her family lived during World War II. She
is searching for her father, who had been living there alone and has
mysteriously disappeared. Her mother is dead. With her lover, and another
couple, David and Anna—all more or less hippies in the American style,
though professing hatred for all things Yankee—she returns to the place
where her childhood was spent. She searches for clues to her father’s
whereabouts, in the surrounding woods and the neglected cabin. She finds
old albums and scrapbooks of her childhood, saved by her mother; her
mother’s old leather jacket still swings from a hanger. She also finds
sketches of Indian pictographs, made by her father. Her hippie friends are
restless and bored in the primitive setting of the island, although they
constantly express disgust with American technological imperialism. But
it’s the men in the novel—Canadian as well as Yankee—who are destroying
the natural world, who kill for the sake of killing, cut down the trees; David
brutally dominates Anna, sex is exploitative. Finally the narrator learns that
her father’s body has been found in the lake, drowned, evidently, while
attempting to photograph some Indian wall-paintings. The others in her
party are picked up by boat to return to civilization; she remains,
determined to get back into connection with the place and its powers. She
crawls naked through the woods, eating berries and roots, seeking her
vision. Finally she returns to the cabin and its overgrown, half-wild garden,
and there
 ... I see her. She is standing in front of the cabin, her hand stretched out, she is wearing her
grey leather jacket; her hair is long, down to her shoulders, in the style of thirty years ago,
before I was born; she is turned half away from me. I can see only the side of her face. She
doesn’t move, she is feeding them: one perches on her wrist, another on her shoulder.
I’ve stopped walking. At first I feel nothing except a lack of surprise: that is where she would
be, she has been standing there all along. Then as I watch and it doesn’t change I’m afraid,
I’m cold with fear, I’m afraid it isn’t real, paper doll cut by my eyes, burnt picture, if I blink
she will vanish.
She must have sensed it, my fear. She turns her head quietly and looks at me, past me, as
though she knows something is there but she can’t quite see it . . .
I go up to where she was. The jays are there in the trees, cawing at me; there are a few scraps
on the feeding-tray still, they’ve knocked some to the ground. I squint up at them, trying to
see her, trying to see which one she is.

Later, she has a vision of her father in the same place:

He has realized he was an intruder; the cabin, the fences, the fires and paths were violations;
now his own fence excludes him, as logic excludes love. He wants it ended, the borders
abolished, he wants the forest to flow back into the places his mind cleared: reparation . . .
He turns toward me and it’s not my father. It is what my father saw, the thing you meet when
you’ve stayed here too long alone . . .
I see now that although it isn’t my father, it is what my father has become. I knew he wasn’t
dead . . .

Atwood’s last chapter begins:

This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can do nothing. I have to recant,
give up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt
anyone. . . . The word games, the winning and losing games are finished, at the moment there
are no others but they will have to be invented. . . 26

She is no “free woman,” no feminist; her way of dealing with male-

identification, the struggle with a male culture, has been to numb herself, to
believe she “can’t love.” But Surfacing is not a programmatic novel. It is
the work of a poet, filled with animistic and supernatural materials. The
search for the father leads to reunion with the mother, who is at home in the
wilderness, Mistress of the Animals. In some obscure, subconscious way,
Atwood’s narrator begins to recognize and accept her own power through
her moment of vision, her brief, startling visitation from her mother. She
has worked her way back—through fasting and sacrifice—beyond
patriarchy. She cannot stay there: the primitive (her father’s solution, the
male—ultimately the fascist—solution) is not the answer; she has to go and
live out her existence in this time. But she has had her illumination: she has
seen her mother.

7
The woman who has felt “unmothered” may seek mothers all her life—may
even seek them in men. In a women’s group recently, someone said: “I
married looking for a mother”; and a number of others in the group began
agreeing with her. I myself remember lying in bed next to my husband,
half- dreaming, half-believing, that the body close against mine was my
mother’s.†† Perhaps all sexual or intimate physical contact brings us back
to that first body. But the “motherless” woman may also react by denying
her own vulnerability, denying she has felt any loss or absence of
mothering. She may spend her life proving her strength in the “mothering”
of others—as with Mrs. Ramsay, mothering men, whose weakness makes
her feel strong, or mothering in the role of teacher, doctor, political activist,
psychotherapist. In a sense she is giving to others what she herself has
lacked; but this will always mean that she needs the neediness of others in
order to go on feeling her own strength. She may feel uneasy with equals—
particularly women.
Few women growing up in patriarchal society can feel mothered
enough; the power of our mothers, whatever their love for us and their
struggles on our behalf, is too restricted. And it is the mother through whom
patriarchy early teaches the small female her proper expectations. The
anxious pressure of one female on another to conform to a degrading and
dispiriting role can hardly be termed “mothering,” even if she does this
believing it will help her daughter to survive.
Many daughters live in rage at their mothers for having accepted, too
readily and passively, “whatever comes.” A mother’s victimization does not
merely humiliate her, it mutilates the daughter who watches her for clues as
to what it means to be a woman. Like the traditional foot-bound Chinese
woman, she passes on her own affliction. The mother’s self-hatred and low
expectations are the binding-rags for the psyche of the daughter. As one
psychologist has observed:
When a female child is passed from lap to lap so that all the males in the room (father,
brother, acquaintances) can get a hard-on, it is the helpless mother standing there and looking
 on that creates the sense of shame and guilt in the child. One woman at the recent rape
conference in New York City testified that her father put a series of watermelon rinds in her
vagina when she was a child to open it up to his liking, and beat her if she tried to remove
them. Yet what that woman focuses her rage on today is that her mother told her, “Never say a
word about it to anyone."
Another young girl was gang-raped in her freshman year of high school and her mother said
to her, “You have brought disgrace on the family. You are no good anymore.” . . . When she
talks about these things now, the pain is as great as if it all happened yesterday.27

It is not simply that such mothers feel both responsible and powerless. It
is that they carry their own guilt and self-hatred over into their daughters’
experiences. The mother knows that if raped she would feel guilty; hence
she tells her daughter she is guilty. She identifies intensely with her
daughter, but through weakness, not through strength. Freudian
psychoanalysis has viewed the rage of daughters toward their mothers as
resentment for not having been given a penis. Clara Thompson, however,
remarked, in a suprisingly early political view of “penis envy” that “the
penis is the sign of the person in power in one particular competitive set-up
in this culture, that between man and woman. ... So, the attitude called penis
envy is similar to the attitude of any underprivileged group toward those in
power.”28 A contemporary psychoanalyst points out that the daughter’s
rage at her mother is more likely to arise from her mother having relegated
her to second-class status, while looking to the son (or father) for the
fulfillment of her own thwarted needs.29 But even where there is no
preferred brother or father, a daughter can feel rage at her mother’s
powerlessness or lack of struggle—because of her intense identification and
because in order to fight for herself she needs first to have been both loved
and fought for.§§
The nurture of daughters in patriarchy calls for a strong sense of self-
nurture in the mother. The psychic interplay between mother and daughter
can be destructive, but there is no reason why it is doomed to be. A woman
who has respect and affection for her own body, who does not view it as
unclean or as a sex-object, will wordlessly transmit to her daughter that a
woman’s body is a good and healthy place to live. A woman who feels
pride in being female will not visit her self-depreciation upon her female
child. A woman who has used her anger creatively will not seek to suppress
anger in her daughter in fear that it could become, merely, suicidal.
 All this is extremely difficult in a system which has persistently stolen
women’s bodies and egos from us. And what can we say of mothers who
have not simply been robbed of their egos but who—alcoholic, drugged, or
suicidal—are unavailable to their daughters? What of a woman who has to
toil so hard for survival that no maternal energy remains at the end of the
day, as she numbly, wearily picks up her child after work? The child does
not discern the social system or the institution of motherhood, only a harsh
voice, a dulled pair of eyes, a mother who does not hold her, does not tell
her how wonderful she is. And what can we say of families in which the
daughter feels that it was her father, not her mother, who gave her affection
and support in becoming herself? It is a painful fact that a nurturing father,
who replaces rather than complements a mother, must be loved at the
mother s expense, whatever the reasons for the mother’s absence. He may
be doing his best, giving everything that a man can give, but the mother is
twice-lost, if love for him takes the place of love for her.
“I have always gotten more support from men than from women”: a
cliché of token women, and an understandable one, since we do identify
gratefully with anyone who seems to have strengthened us. But who has
been in a position to strengthen us? A man often lends his daughter the ego-
support he denies his wife; he may use his daughter as stalking-horse
against his wife; he may simply feel less threatened by a daughter’s power,
especially if she adores him. A male teacher may confirm a woman student
while throttling his wife and daughters. Men have been able to give us
power, support, and certain forms of nurture, as individuals, when they
chose; but the power is always stolen power, withheld from the mass of
women in patriarchy. And, finally, I am talking here about a kind of strength
which can only be one woman’s gift to another, the bloodstream of our
inheritance. Until a strong line of love, confirmation, and example stretches
from mother to daughter, from woman to woman across the generations,
women will still be wandering in the wilderness.

8
What do we mean by the nurture of daughters? What is it we wish we had,
or could have, as daughters; could give, as mothers? Deeply and primally
we need trust and tenderness; surely this will always be true of every human
being, but women growing into a world so hostile to us need a very
profound kind of loving in order to learn to love ourselves. But this loving
is not simply the old, institutionalized, sacrificial, “mother- love” which
men have demanded: we want courageous mothering. The most notable fact
that culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most
important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand
her sense of actual possibilities. For a mother, this means more than
contending with the reductive images of females in children’s books,
movies, television, the schoolroom. It means that the mother herself is
trying to expand the limits of her life. To refuse to be a victim: and then to
go on from there.
Only when we can wish imaginatively and courageously for ourselves
can we wish unfetteredly for our daughters. But finally, a child is not a
wish, nor a product of wishing. Women’s lives—in all levels of society—
have been lived too long in both depression and fantasy, while our active
energies have been trained and absorbed into caring for others. It is
essential, now, to begin breaking that cycle. Anyone who has read the
literature in the obstetrician’s waiting-room knows the child-care booklets
which, at some point, confess that “you may get a fit of the blues” and
suggest “having your husband take you to dinner in a French restaurant, or
going shopping for a new dress.” (The fiction that most women have both
husbands and money is forever with us.) But the depressive mother who
now and then allows herself a “vacation” or a “reward” is merely showing
her daughters both that the female condition is depressing, and that there is
no real way out.
As daughters we need mothers who want their own freedom and ours.
We need not to be the vessels of another woman’s self-denial and
frustration. The quality of the mother’s life—however embattled and
unprotected—is her primary bequest to her daughter, because a woman who
can believe in herself, who is a fighter, and who continues to struggle to
create livable space around her, is demonstrating to her daughter that these
possibilities exist. Because the conditions of life for many poor women
demand a fighting spirit for sheer physical survival, such mothers have
sometimes been able to give their daughters something to be valued far
more highly than full-time mothering. But the toll is taken by the sheer
weight of adversity, the irony that to fight for her child’s physical survival
the mother may have to be almost always absent from the child, as in Tillie
Olsen’s story, “I Stand Here Ironing.”30 For a child needs, as that mother
despairingly knew, the care of someone for whom she is “a miracle."
Many women have been caught—have split themselves—between two
mothers: one, usually the biological one, who represents the culture of
domesticity, of male-centeredness, of conventional expectations, and
another, perhaps a woman artist or teacher, who becomes the countervailing
figure. Often this “counter-mother” is an athletics teacher who exemplifies
strength and pride in her body, a freer way of being in the world; or an
unmarried woman professor, alive with ideas, who represents the choice of
a vigorous work life, of “living alone and liking it.” This splitting may
allow the young woman to fantasize alternately living as one or the other
“mother,” to test out two different identifications. But it can also lead to a
life in which she never consciously resolves the choices, in which she
alternately tries to play the hostess and please her husband as her mother
did, and to write her novel or doctoral thesis. She has tried to break through
the existing models, but she has not gone far enough, usually because
nobody has told her how far there is to go.
The double messages need to be disentangled. “You can be anything
you really want to be” is a half-truth, whatever a woman’s class or
economic advantages. We need to be very clear about the missing portion,
rather than whisper the fearful subliminal message: “Don’t go too far.” A
female child needs to be told, very early, the practical difficulties females
have to face in even trying to imagine “what they want to be.” Mothers who
can talk freely with their daughters about sex, even teaching them to use
contraception in adolescence, still leave them in the dark as to the
expectations and stereotypes, false promises and ill-faith, awaiting them in
the world. “You can be anything you really want to be”—if you are
prepared to fight, to create priorities for yourself against the grain of
cultural expectations, to persist in the face of misogynist hostility.
Interpreting to a little girl, or to an adolescent woman, the kinds of
treatment she encounters because she is female, is as necessary as
explaining to a nonwhite child reactions based on the color of her skin.¶¶
It is one thing to adjure a daughter, along Victorian lines, that her lot is
to “suffer and be still,” that woman’s fate is determined. It is wholly
something else to acquaint her honestly with the jeopardy all women live
under in patriarchy, to let her know by word and deed that she has her
mother’s support, and moreover, that while it can be dangerous to move, to
speak, to act, each time she suffers rape—physical or psychic—in silence,
she is putting another stitch in her own shroud.

9
I talk with a brilliant and radical thinker, a woman scholar of my generation.
She describes her early feelings when she used to find herself at
conferences or parties among faculty wives, most of whom had or would
have children, she the only unmarried woman in the room. She felt, then,
that her passionate investigations, the recognition accorded her work, still
left her the “barren” woman, the human failure, among so many women
who were mothers. I ask her, “But can you imagine how some of them were
envying you your freedom, to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as
yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?” Yet even as I
speak, I know: the gulf between “mothers” and “nonmothers” (even the
term is pure negation, like “widow,” meaning without) will be closed only
as we come to understand how both childbearing and childlessness have
been manipulated to make women into negative quantities, or bearers of
evil.
In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.
Throughout this book I have been thrown back on terms like “unchilded,”
“childless,” or “child-free”; we have no familiar, ready-made name for a
woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to
men, who is self- identified, who has chosen herself. “Unchilded,”
“childless,” simply define her in terms of a lack; even “child-free” suggests
only that she has refused motherhood, not what she is about in and of
herself. The notion of the “free woman” is strongly tinged with the
suggestion of sexual promiscuity, of “free love,” of being “free” of man’s
ownership; it still defines the woman by her relationships with men. The
ancient meaning of the word “virgin” (she-who-is-unto-herself) is obscured
by connotations of the “undeflorated” or intact hymen, or of the Roman
Catholic Virgin Mother, defined entirely by her relationship to God the Son.
“Amazon” suggests too narrowly the warrior-maiden who has renounced all
ties with men except for procreation: again, definition through relatedness.
Neither is “lesbian” a satisfactory term here; not all self-identified women
would call themselves lesbians; moreover, numberless lesbians are mothers
of children.
There can be no more simplistic formula for women than to escape into
some polarization such as “Mothers or Amazons,” “matriarchal clan or
guerilleres.” For one thing, in the original matriarchal clan all females, of
whatever age, were called “mothers"—even little girls. Motherhood was a
social rather than a physical function. “Women . . . were sisters to one
another and mothers to all the children of the community without regard to
which individual mother bore any child. . . . Aborigines describe themselves
as . . . ‘brotherhoods’ from the standpoint of the male and ‘motherhoods’
from the standpoint of the female.”31 And everywhere, girl-children as
young as six have cared for younger siblings.
The “childless woman” and the “mother” are a false polarity, which has
served the institutions both of motherhood and heterosexuality. There are no
such simple categories. There are women (like Ruth Benedict) who have
tried to have children and could not. The causes may range from a
husband’s unacknowledged infertility to signals of refusal sent out from her
cerebral cortex. A woman may have looked at the lives of women with
children and have felt that, given the circumstances of motherhood, she
must remain childless if she is to pursue any other hopes or aims.## As the
nineteenth-century feminist Margaret Fuller wrote in an undated fragment:
I have no child and the woman in me has so craved this experience, that it seems the want of
it must paralyze me. But now as I look on these lovely children of a human birth, what slow
and neutralizing cares they bring with them to the mother! The children of the muse come
quicker, with less pain and disgust, rest more lightly on the bosom.***

A young girl may have lived in horror of her mother’s child- worn existence
and told herself, once and for all, No, not for me. A lesbian may have gone
through abortions in early relationships with men, love children, yet still
feel her life too insecure to take on the grilling of an adoption or the
responsibility of an artificial pregnancy. A woman who has chosen celibacy
may feel her decision entails a life without children. Ironically, it is
precisely the institution of motherhood, which, in an era of birth control,
has influenced women against becoming mothers. It is simply too
hypocritical, too exploitative of mothers and children, too oppressive.
But is a woman who bore a baby she could not keep a “childless”
woman? Am I, whose children are grown-up, who come and go as I will,
unchilded as compared to younger women still pushing prams, hurrying
home to feedings, waking at night to a child’s cry? What makes us mothers?
The care of small children? The physical changes of pregnancy and birth?
The years of nurture? What of the woman who, never having been
pregnant, begins lactating when she adopts an infant? What of the woman
who stuffs her newborn into a bus-station locker and goes numbly back to
her “child-free” life? What of the woman who, as the eldest girl in a large
family, has practically raised her younger sisters and brothers, and then has
entered a convent?
The woman struggling to cope with several young children, a job, and
the unavailability of decent child-care and schooling, may feel pure envy
(and rage) at the apparent freedom and mobility of the “child-free” woman
(I have). The woman without children of her own may see, like Margaret
Fuller, the “dull and neutralizing cares” of motherhood as it is lived in the
bondage of a patriarchal system and congratulate herself on having stayed
“free,” not having been “brainwashed into motherhood.” But these
polarizations imply a failure of imagination.
Throughout recorded history the “childless” woman has been regarded
(with certain specific exceptions, such as the cloistered nun or the temple
virgin) as a failed woman, unable to speak for the rest of her sex,††† and
omitted from the hypocritical and palliative reverence accorded the mother.
“Childless” women have been burned as witches, persecuted as lesbians,
have been refused the right to adopt children because they were unmarried.
They have been seen as embodiments of the great threat to male hegemony:
the woman who is not tied to the family, who is disloyal to the law of
heterosexual pairing and bearing. These women have nonetheless been
expected to serve their term for society as missionaries, nuns, teachers,
nurses, maiden aunts; to give, rather than sell their labor if they were
middle-class; to speak softly, if at all, of women’s condition. Yet ironically,
precisely because they were not bound to the cycle of hourly existence with
children, because they could reflect, observe, write, such women in the past
have given us some of the few available strong insights into the experience
of women in general. Without the unacclaimed research and scholarship of
“childless” women, without Charlotte Bronte (who died in her first
pregnancy), Margaret Fuller (whose major work was done before her child
was born), without George Eliot, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Christina
Rossetti, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir—we would all today be
suffering from spiritual malnutrition as women.
The “unchilded” woman, if such a term makes any sense, is still
affected by centuries-long attitudes—on the part of both women and men—
towards the birthing, child-rearing function of women. Any woman who
believes that the institution of motherhood has nothing to do with her is
closing her eyes to crucial aspects of her situation.
Many of the great mothers have not been biological. The novel Jane
Eyre, as I have tried to show elsewhere, can be read as a woman-pilgrim’s
progress along a path of classic female temptation, in which the motherless
Jane time after time finds women who protect, solace, teach, challenge, and
nourish her in self-respect.32 For centuries, daughters have been
strengthened and energized by nonbiological mothers, who have combined
a care for the practical values of survival with an incitement toward further
horizons, a compassion for vulnerability with an insistence on our buried
strengths‡‡‡. It is precisely this that has allowed us to survive; not our
occasional breakthroughs into tokendom, not our “special cases,” although
these have been beacons for us, illuminations of what ought to be.
We are, none of us, “either” mothers or daughters; to our amazement,
confusion, and greater complexity, we are both. Women, mothers or not,
who feel committed to other women, are increasingly giving each other a
quality of caring filled with the diffuse kinds of identification that exist
between actual mothers and daughters. Into the mere notion of “mothering”
we may carry, as daughters, negative echoes of our own mothers’
martyrdom, the burden of their valiant, necessarily limited efforts on our
behalf, the confusion of their double messages. But it is a timidity of the
imagination which urges that we can be “daughters"—therefore free spirits
—rather than “mothers”—defined as eternal givers. Mothering and
nonmothering have been such charged concepts for us, precisely because
whichever we did has been turned against us.
To accept and integrate and strengthen both the mother and the daughter
in ourselves is no easy matter, because patriarchal attitudes have
encouraged us to split, to polarize, these images, and to project all unwanted
guilt, anger, shame, power, freedom, onto the “other” woman. But any
radical vision of sisterhood demands that we reintegrate them.
 10
As a child raised in what was essentially the South, Baltimore in the
segregated 1930s, I had from birth not only a white, but a Black mother.
This relationship, so little explored, so unexpressed, still charges the
relationships of Black and white women. We have not only been under
slavery, lily white wife and dark, sensual concubine; victims of marital
violation on the one hand and unpredictable, licensed rape on the other. We
have been mothers and daughters to each other; and although, in the last
few years, Black and white feminists have been moving toward a still-
difficult sisterhood, there is little yet known, unearthed, of the time when
we were mothers and daughters. Lillian Smith remembers:
I knew that my old nurse who had cared for me through long months of illness, who had
given me refuge when a little sister took my place as the baby of the family, who soothed me,
fed me, delighted me with her stories and games, let me fall asleep on her warm, deep breast,
was not worthy of the passionate love I felt for her but must be given instead a half-smiled-at
affection ... I knew but I never believed it that the deep respect I felt for her, the tenderness,
the love, was a childish thing which every normal child outgrows . . . and that somehow—
though it seemed impossible to my agonized heart—I too must outgrow these feelings. ... I
learned to cheapen with tears and sentimental talk of “my old mammy” one of the profound
relationships of my life.33

My Black mother was “mine” only for four years, during which she fed
me, dressed me, played with me, watched over me, sang to me, cared for
me tenderly and intimately. “Childless” herself, she was a mother. She was
slim, dignified, and very handsome, and from her I learned—nonverbally—
a great deal about the possibilities of dignity in a degrading situation. After
my sister’s birth, though she still worked from time to time in the house, she
was no longer my care-giver. Another nurse came, but she was not the same
to me; I felt she belonged to my sister. Twenty years later, when I left my
parents’ house, expecting never to return, my Black mother told me: “Yes, I
understand how you have to leave and do what you think is right. I once
had to break somebody’s heart to go and live my life.” She died a few years
later; I did not see her again.
And, yes: I know what Lillian Smith describes, the confusion of
discovering that a woman one has loved and been cherished by is somehow
“unworthy” of such love after a certain age. That sense of betrayal, of the
violation of a relationship, was for years a nameless thing, for no one yet
spoke of racism, and even the concept of “prejudice” had not yet filtered
into my childhood world. It was simply “the way things were,” and we tried
to repress the confusion and the shame.
When I began writing this chapter I began to remember my Black
mother again: her calm, realistic vision of things, her physical grace and
pride, her beautiful soft voice. For years, she had drifted out of reach, in my
searches backward through time, exactly as the double silence of sexism
and racism intended her to do. She was meant to be utterly annihilated.§§§
But, at the edge of adolescence, we find ourselves drawing back from
our natural mothers as if by a similar edict. It is toward men, henceforth,
that our sensual and emotional energies are intended to flow. The culture
makes it clear that neither the Black mother, nor the white mother, nor any
of the other mothers, are “worthy” of our profoundest love and loyalty.
Women are made taboo to women—not just sexually, but as comrades,
cocreators, coinspiritors. In breaking this taboo, we are reuniting with our
mothers; in reuniting with our mothers, we are breaking this taboo.

* At the risk of seeming repetitious, I will note here, again, that the institution of heterosexuality,
with its social rewards and punishments, its roleplaying, and its sanctions against “deviance,” is not
the same thing as a human experience freely chosen and lived.
1986: See my essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in Blood, Bread, and
Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (New York: Norton, 1986).
† It can be argued that, just as infanticide in general was a form of population control and even of
eugenics (twins, infants who were undersized, malformed, or otherwise abnormal were destroyed,
whatever their sex), female infanticide was a way of limiting births, since females were seen
primarily as breeders. Still, the implicit devaluation of the female was hardly a message to be lost on
women.
‡ There are many elisions and omissions, since publication had to be approved by Ted Hughes,
Sylvia’s husband.
§ 1986: See Alice Miller, “Sylvia Plath: An Example of Forbidden Suffering,” in For Your Own
Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-rearing and the Roots of Violence (New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1983).
¶ 1986: This sentence seems facile to me in placing too much weight on the "self-acceptance" of the
lesbian daughter and denying the mother’s responsibility for her homophobia.
# A woman of my mother’s generation told me that her husband had effectively dampened her
intimate friendship with another woman by telling her he was sure the woman was a lesbian. A
hundred years before, their friendship would have been taken for granted, even to the husband’s
leaving the conjugal bed when a wife’s woman friend came to visit, so that the two women could
share as many hours, day and night, as possible.
** 1986: Here is an obvious example of unstated class generalization. For large numbers of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century freedwomen and immigrant women, no such withdrawal was
mandated or possible.
‡‡ The above rendering is from C. Kerenyi’s book Eleusis. For a verse translation of the entire hymn
to Demeter, see Thelma Sargent, The Homeric Hymns (New York: Norton, 1973), pp. 2-14.
†† Simone de Beauvoir says of her mother that: “Generally speaking, I thought of her with no
particular feeling. Yet in my sleep (although my father only made very rare and then insignificant
appearances) she often played a most important part: she blended with Sartre, and we were happy
together. And then the dream would turn into a nightmare: why was I living with her once more?
How had I come to be in her power again? So our former relationship lived on in me in its double
aspect-a subjection that I loved and hated” (A Very Easy Death [New York: Warner Paperback,
1973], pp. 11-20).
§§ Nancy Chodorow cites examples of communities—among the Rajput and Brahmins in India—
where, although sons are considered more desirable, mothers show a special attachment to their
daughters, and she comments that “people in both groups say that this is out of sympathy for the
future plight of their daughters, who will have to leave their natal family for a strange and usually
oppressive postmarital household” (“Family Structure and Feminine Personality,” in M. Z. Rosaldo
and L. Lamphère, eds., Woman, Culture and Society [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1974], p. 47). But this kind of female bonding, though far preferable to rejection or indifference,
arises from identification with the daughter’s future victimization. There is no attempt on the
mothers’ part to change the cycle of repetitions into which the daughters’ lives are being woven.
¶¶ A woman recently described in my hearing how her friend’s daughter had been on the verge of
dropping out of architecture school because of the harassment she encountered there as a woman. It
was her mother who urged her to stay, to fight a political battle against sexism, and get the training
she wanted.
## There are enough single women now adopting children, enough unmarried mothers keeping their
children, to suggest that if mothering were not an enterprise which so increases a woman’s social
vulnerability, many more “childless” women would choose to have children of their own.
*** She was later to bear a child, in Italy, to a man ten years younger than herself, and to die in the
wreck of the ship on which she, the child, and the father were returning to America.
††† See for example Albert Memmi’s criticism of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex: she is
suspect because she did not exercise what Memmi glibly describes as her “woman’s right” to bear
children (Dominated Man [Boston: Beacon, 1968], pp. 150-51).
‡‡ Mary Daly has suggested to me that the ”nonbiological mother” is really a “spirit-sister” (a phrase
which affirms her in terms of what she is rather than what she isn’t).
§§§ 1986: The above passage overpersonalizes and does not, it seems to me now, give enough
concrete sense of the actual position of the Black domestic worker caring for white children.
Whatever the white child has received both in care and caring, the Black woman has given under
enormous constraints. As Trudier Harris sums it up, “Control of time, wages and work was solely in
the hands of the white woman.” Black women domestic workers were often statistically invisible in
the labor market and were expected to behave invisibly in the white home, existing as a role and not a
person: “She must maneuver . . . in order to salvage what portion of dignity she can, to resist
depersonalization and dehumanization. . . . The mistress expects the maid to be a good mammy
simply because, she believes, it’s in her blood.” (Trudier Harris, From Mammies to Militants:
Domestics in Black American Literature [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982], pp. 10, 13,
20. See also Alice Childress, Like One of the Family . .. Conversations from d Domestic’s Life [New
York: Independence, 1956].)

OceanofPDF.com
X VIOLENCE: THE HEART OF
MATERNAL DARKNESS

I know of streets of houses where there are large factories built,

taking the whole of the daylight away from the kitchen, where the
woman spends the best part of her life. On top of this you get the
continual grinding of machinery all day. Knowing that it is mostly
women and girls who are working in these factories gives you the
feeling that their bodies are going round with the machinery. The
nlother wonders what she has to live for; if there is another baby
coming she hopes it will be dead when it is born. The result is she
begins to take drugs. I need hardly tell you the pain and suffering
she goes through if the baby survives, or the shock it is to the
mother when she is told there is something wrong with the baby.
She feels she is to blame if she has done this without her husband
knowing, and she is living in dread of him. All this tells on the
woman physically and mentally; can you wonder at women turning
to drink? If the child lives to grow up you find it hysterical and with
very irritable, nasty ways. . . . When you see all this it is like a sting
at your heart when you know the cause of it all and no remedy . . .

Maternity: Letters from Working-Women, Collected by

the Women’s Cooperative Guild, 1915

On June 11, 1974, “the first hot day of summer,” Joanne Michulski, thirty-
eight, the mother of eight children ranging from eighteen years to two
months of age, took a butcher knife, decapitated and chopped up the bodies
of her two youngest on the neatly kept lawn of the suburban house where
the family lived outside Chicago. This “bizarre incident,” as her husband
called it, created an enormous stir in the surrounding community. Full pages
in the local press were devoted to “human interest” reporting of the
background of Ms. Michulski’s act. Columns headed “IT NEED NOT
HAVE HAPPENED,” “WHY DO MOTHERS KILL? THEY ARE
KILLING THEMSELVES,” “THE POLICE ROLE IN MENTAL CASES:
STRICTLY LIMITED,” “WALK-IN CLINIC CAN’T HELP
EMERGENCIES” attempted to explain, exonerate, psychologize; the local
newspapers ran an interview with Victor Michulski in which “HUSBAND
TELLS OF TORTURED LIFE.” MS.Michulski was charged with voluntary
manslaughter but found innocent by reason of insanity, and was committed
to a state hospital. Her husband sued for divorce.
The history of Joanne Michulski, as described by her husband, her
neighbors, by psychiatric caseworkers, by the clergy and police, had been as
follows: None of her eight children were “wanted” children. After the birth
of each child, she had gone into deep depression; after the third was born,
she discussed using contraceptives with her husband. He “talked about a
vasectomy, but just never had it done.” She planned to take oral
contraceptives, but according to him she never did so. In her depressions
she lay on the couch, “saying and doing nothing” for long periods.
Michulski, described as a “trim, dapper man,” said that his wife had never
been known to use violence toward her children, and that “she seemed to
show extreme love to the smallest of the children at all times.” He described
her as “a fairly good wife and mother; not the best.” The minister who lived
next door said that she seemed “quietly desperate from the moment the
family moved into the home” in 1959. Her women neighbors found her
“withdrawn"; she did not drive and her husband was absent from home for
long periods. The neighboring pastor also reported that while her husband
kept the outside of the house neat, the inside was “a mess.” She “rarely
cooked. Her refrigerator was never cleaned.” But the children always
seemed “well cared-for.” Her husband took the children out to eat several
times a week; she had developed a habit of standing up in the kitchen while
the family sat in the dining room. She began to talk out loud to herself and
had periods of screaming—not at the children, but at “imaginary people.”
According to the pastor, “I never saw her lay a hand on her children. . . .
She was like a mother bear where their safety or reputation was concerned.
She did react violently, however.”*
Between 1961 and 1966 the county probation department was in contact
with the family. Joanne Michulski was three times voluntarily admitted to
mental hospitals: once for her “real blue spells” as her husband termed
them; once because of her fear that “X-rays” or “laser beams” were being
projected into her home; once for “heart pains” which were treated as
psychosomatic. During one of these periods Michulski placed the children
in foster homes. On later discovering that one of his daughters had been
abused in a foster home, Michulski resolved never to break up the family
again.
At home again, Joanne Michulski’s spells of disturbance lengthened, but
in between she was “easy to get along with,” according to her husband. In
general, it seemed that she was better when her husband was around, and
that her bouts of rage, fear, and shouting took place when she was left alone
with the children. Aware that the situation was deteriorating, Michulski
stuck to his decision to “keep the family together”—that is, to leave his
wife all day long responsible for eight children. At no point do news
accounts or interviews suggest that there was any attempt to get household
help, or to offer her any respite from her existence as “wife and mother.”
And perhaps she would have refused.1
Throughout history numberless women have killed children they knew
they could not rear, whether economically or emotionally, children forced
upon them by rape, ignorance, poverty, marriage, or by the absence of, or
sanctions against, birth control and abortion. These terrible, prevalent acts
have to be distinguished from infanticide as a deliberate social policy,
practiced by peoples everywhere, against female or malformed children,
twins, or the first-born.
Legal, systematic infanticide was practiced in Sparta, in Rome, by the
Arabs, in feudal Japan, in traditional China, and it has always been a form
of population control in preliterate societies. “In the Old Testament are
preserved clear traces of the parental sacrifice of the first fruit of the womb
not only to Baal but to Yahweh.”2 Males have been spared as warriors:
“The old Vikings extended a spear to the newborn boy. If the child seized it,
it was allowed to live.”3 Although sickly and malformed infants of both
sexes were killed or exposed, and twins perceived as monsters or as the
product of a double impregnation by two different fathers, female children
(and their mothers) have borne the brunt of official infanticidal practice, for
various reasons; chiefly the expense of “marrying off” daughters, and
contempt for female life. Under Christianity, infanticide was forbidden as a
policy, but it continued nonetheless to be practiced as an individual act, in
which women, raped or seduced and then branded with their “sin,” and
under pain of torture or execution, have in guilt, self-loathing, and blind
desperation done away with the newborns they had carried in their bodies.
The Church had much to do with creating the crime of individual
maternal infanticide, by pronouncing all children born out of wedlock
“illegitimate.” Until the eighteenth century or later bastards were largely
excluded from participation in trades and guilds, could not inherit property,
and were essentially without the law. Since the “sin” of the child’s father
was more difficult to prove, it was on the unmarried mother that the full
penalty fell; as the eternally guilty party, she was considered by the Church
to be “the root of the whole sex problem.”4
Maternal infanticide was “the most common crime in Western Europe
from the Middle Ages down to the end of the eighteenth century.”5† In the
Middle Ages the punishments were drastic: The woman found guilty of
infanticide might be buried alive, impaled through the heart with a pointed
stick, or burnt at the stake. “In Zittau . . . the infanticide was stuffed into a
black sack together with a dog, a cat, a rooster or a viper. The sack had to
remain under water for six hours, and the choir boys sang, Aus tiefer Noth
schrei ich zu Dir.” (Out of great trouble I cry to Thee.) Since, in the minds
of the clergy, women who followed the old pagan religion were believed to
have intercourse with the devil, an unmarried mother was often assumed to
be a witch.6
Toward the end of the eighteenth century infanticide began to obsess the
minds of legislators, rulers, and writers. Oscar Werner says that the plight of
Goethe’s Gretchen in Faust was, far from being unusual, “the most popular
literary theme” in Germany between 1770 and 1800.7 It now began to be
recognized in Europe that the woman who murdered her infant was no
callous criminal, but a desperate person. Maria Theresa of Austria and
Catherine the Great of Russia both established foundling homes and
maternity clinics to receive the children of illegitimate pregnancies, and
Frederick the Great was concerned that the laws regulating infanticide
should be made more consistent and humane. But it has to be emphasized
that, historically, to bear a child out of wedlock has been to violate the
property laws that say a woman and her child must legally belong to some
man, and that, if they do not, they are at best marginal people, vulnerable to
every kind of sanction. The rape victim has paid the cost at every level. And
within wedlock, women have been legally powerless to prevent their
husbands’ use of their bodies, resulting in year-in, year-out pregnancies. In
a tenement, or hovel already crowded with undernourished and ailing
children, the new infant, whose fate was already almost certainly death,
might be “accidentally” or unconsciously suffocated, lain upon in bed,
allowed to drown, or simply left unfed.‡
In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, at least two women, unnerved by the
stress of living with a covenant theology which offered to men, but not to
women, a direct relationship with God and knowledge of his will, chose the
certainty of damnation over the anxiety and helplessness of their situation
by attempting, or actually committing, infanticide. Though translated into
theological terms (since theology was the language of Puritan life) their acts
were statements of revolt against both a patriarchal religion (which
promised the priesthood of all believers but extended it only to men) and a
patriarchal family system. One woman, Dorothy Talbye, tried to kill not just
her children but her husband, after announcing that “it was so revealed” to
her by God.8
The administrators of the British Empire in India, in the early nineteenth
century, were pained to discover that among several Hindu communities a
woman who had given birth to a daughter was routinely instructed to kill
her, because her dowry would prove too heavy a cost for the family to bear.
Cultural variations aside, in England as in Gujarat a self-respecting family
should be able to “marry off” its daughters, marriage being a woman’s sole
destiny. The unmarried woman, in Mayfair as in Kutch, was an object of
suspicion and contempt; the difference was only that in a more complex
society there would be subordinate niches for her in the extended family; in
a small Brahmin village, she would be simply, a disgrace, and had to be
killed at birth. The mother was instructed to starve her baby daughter, or to
drown her in milk. Sometimes opium was placed on the mother’s nipple
and the child was allowed to suckle herself to death. Such, evidently, was
the pressure of social custom that the Brahmin religious injunction against
killing so much as a fetus did not prevent the practice.9
The Victorian period abounds with cases of the seduction (read “rape")
of servant girls by their employers; if they refused sex, they would be fired,
and many were fired anyway for getting pregnant. Disraeli admitted in 1845
that “infanticide is practised as extensively and as legally in England as it is
on the banks of the Ganges.”10 Queen Victoria, however, supported the
abolition of capital punishment for this crime.11
In America, Elizabeth Cady Stanton rose to the defense of women
charged with infanticide, and associated it with “the triple cord of a
political, religious, and social serfdom—that have made [woman] a pliant,
pitiable victim to the utter perversion of the highest and holiest sentiments
of her nature.”12 She managed to obtain a governor’s pardon for one
woman, Hester Vaughan, who, at age twenty, deserted by her hushand, had
been “seduced” by her employer and fired when he found she was pregnant.
She gave birth in an unheated garret in midwinter; later she was found in a
critical condition and the baby was dead. She was imprisoned,, without
proof, for infanticide. Stanton, in addressing the New York legislature on
this case, demanded that women should have the right to a jury of their
peers—i.e., of women—and that equal moral standards should be enforced
for men and women.13
In 1973 the New York Times headlined an epidemic of infanticide in
Japan; according to reports, a newborn infant was found stuffed into a
railway-station coin locker on an average of every ten days, sometimes with
a note expressing contrition and guilt. In Tokyo alone during a single year
119 babies had been deserted. The Times failed to associate these deaths
with the repeal of the liberal abortion laws and the limiting of available
contraceptives to the diaphragm, measures which were reported in the same
month (December 1973) by the newsletter of Boston Female Liberation.14
But Stanton’s was the first feminist voice to be heard on behalf of
women who, battered by patriarchal laws and practices, had taken the most
desperate and emphatic way they knew to make a clear statement.

2
Joanne Michulski’s statement was also clear and desperate. She spoke, after
her arrest, of “a sacrifice.” If we assume that any word of hers is simply the
raving of a “paranoid-schizophrenic” we shall not hear what she was
saying. A sacrifice is “the act of offering something to a deity in
propitiation or homage; especially the ritual slaughter of an animal or
person for this purpose”; it is also “the forfeiture of something highly
valued.” Joanne Michulski had endured the violence of the institution of
motherhood for nineteen years, and it seems that the most precious thing in
her life was, in fact, her children. (“There never was a question of her
interest or love for her children,” a caseworker observed. “She just couldn’t
handle the situation.”) Particularly, her husband said, she always showed
“extreme love toward the smallest ones.” These were the two she killed and
mutilated.
Much of the speculation in the newspapers had to do with whether the
county mental health services and the laws surrounding commitment had
failed this family. But what could traditional psychiatry have done for
Joanne Michulski? It could have tried to “adjust” her to motherhood, or it
could have incarcerated her. But, as a group of twelve women pointed out in
a letter published in a local newspaper, the expectations laid on her and on
millions of women with children are “insane expectations.” Instead of
recognizing the institutional violence of patriarchal motherhood, society
labels those women who finally erupt in violence as psychopathological.
Here are a few statements by psychiatrists on the subject of women who
in one way or another attempt to resist the demands of the institution:
The very fact that a woman cannot tolerate pregnancy, or is in intense conflict about it, or
about giving birth to a child, is an indication that the pre-pregnant personality of this woman
was immature and in that sense can be labelled as psychopathological. . . . The problem
centers around unresolved oedipal situations. . . . Since pregnancy and birth are the overt
proofs of femininity, the exaggerated castrative factors become overwhelmingly threatening.
Identification with the mother is pre-dominant and hostile. Receptivity in the feminine sexual
role appears as debasing. Competition with the male is always at a high pitch. . . . Pregnancy
as a challenge of femininity is unacceptable to them.15
With sterilization the woman voluntarily surrenders a portion of her femininity. . . . Some
women with unresolved hostility for their mother thereby hope to appease that same hated
and hating mother and to obtain forgiveness for their wish for Father and Father’s child.16
[Vasectomy] frequently is requested as a contraceptive measure. It seldom, if ever, can be so
considered. Some emotionally sick women would like to castrate their husbands, and manage
for this reason to force their own equally emotionally sick mates to request vasectomies.17

I am not offering the naive proposition that existing methods of birth

control, or a twice-weekly baby-sitter, could have “solved” Joanne
Michulski’s “problems.” Why didn’t she use the pill? it can be asked. For
all we know, a few doses made her feel continually nauseated. And, as we
now know, it could have killed her. Perhaps she felt the hopelessness of any
control of her life which is indoctrinated into so many women. Motherhood
without autonomy, without choice, is one of the quickest roads to a sense of
having lost control§. Because only her husband, her neighbors, psychiatric
workers, the clergy, and the police have spoken for her, because her rage
and despair communicated itself in metaphors, in violence turned first
inward, then upon what she loved, we will never know the small details
which built over the years toward her honorable, unendurable suffering.
A woman in depression does not usually welcome sex. We can assume
that although Ms. Michulski accepted the violence of the institution of
marriage, which guarantees a man his “conjugal rights” so that he cannot be
considered the rapist of his wife, she did not wish to have sex at the cost of
bearing children. She knew she had had enough children by the time the
third was born. Once she had children at all, she was faced with the double
violence of marital rape (a woman regarded as her husband’s physical
property is a raped woman) and of institutionalized motherhood. Let us
look at the aspects of that institution which converged in this woman’s life.
There is no safe, infallible method of birth control. Had the Michulskis
been Catholic (they were Lutheran) there would have been grave sanctions
against using any method whatever. But non-Catholics are better off only to
a degree. Christopher Tietze, a biostatistician involved in the movement for
population control, has said that the hazards to a woman’s health are far less
with the diaphragm, condom, foam, or rhythm methods, but these methods
require medically safe, legal, abortion as a back-up if they are to be
regarded as genuinely effective. The pill and the IUD, though they have a
higher rate of prevention, are physically dangerous and potentially lethal.
The IUD causes exceptionally heavy menses, severe cramps (20 percent of
IUD users request removal of the device within a year), irritation of pelvic
infections, and perforation of the uterus. The pill is known to cause blood-
clotting, heart attack, stroke, gall bladder and kidney disease, and cancer of
the breast and possibly of other organs. Both it and the IUD have still-
unexplored long-term hazards. Even some of the jellies used with the
diaphragm contain a mercury compound known to cause birth defects if
pregnancy does occur.18¶ It is improbable that a problem which affected as
many men in the sensitive genital area, as contraception affects women,
would be considered solvable by methods so dangerous, even deadly, and
so undependable.
We know the judgments from within the psychiatric establishment
against women who do not wish to become mothers. We have to connect
these voices with others reaching far back in history. Soranus of Ephesus,
the Greek gynecologist, would have had abortion permitted for only three
reasons: (1) “to maintain feminine beauty"; (2) to avoid danger to the
mother’s life if her uterus should be “too small” for the fetus; (3) to control
population as urged by Plato in the Republic and Aristotle in the Politics.19
St. Augustine regarded abortion as “the work of minds characterized by
‘lustful cruelty’ or ‘cruel lust.’ ”20 Christian theologians through the ages
have engaged in hairsplitting debates. If a pregnant woman is attacked by a
bull, may she run for her life even though running may cause her to abort?
Yes, said the sixteenth-century Jesuit Tomas Sanchez. If a woman conceives
out of wedlock, and her male relatives would kill her if they found out, may
she destroy the fetus to save her life? Yes, again, said Sanchez.21 Within
the Catholic Church opinion has swayed back and forth as to when a fetus
is “ensouled,” a controversy which began with Tertullian, a self-confessed
loather of female sexuality and also the first to say in effect that “abortion is
murder.” The early Christian theologians, still cleaving to Aristotle,
believed that abortion was murder only if the fetus (if male) was within
forty days of conception and (if female) within eighty to ninety days, the
time when “ensoulment” was presumed to occur for each sex. (We can only
guess at how the gender of the fetus was supposed to be determined.) By
1588, Pope Sixtus V, a fanatic Counter-Reformation cleanser of the Church,
declared all abortion murder, with excommunication as its punishment. His
successor, finding the sanctions unworkable, revoked them in 1591, except
for abortions performed later than forty days from conception. By 1869,
Pius IX decided the time was ripe to swing back to the decision of Sixtus V:
All abortion was again declared murder.22 This is at present the official,
majority Catholic position. In spite of it, Catholic women comprise over 20
percent of all abortion patients 23
The arguments against and for abortion range from attempts to
determine biologically or legally when the fetus becomes a “person” to
exercises in the most abstract logic and ethics.24 I shall not attempt here to
enumerate the range of arguments; Mary Daly has already provided an
overview from a feminist perspective. She notes that
. . . abortion is hardly the “final triumph” envisaged by all or the final stage of the revolution.
There are deep questions beneath and beyond this, such as: Why should women be in
situations of unwanted pregnancy at all? Some women see abortion as a necessary measure
for themselves but no one sees it as the fulfillment of her highest dreams. Many would see
abortion as a humiliating procedure. Even the abortifacient pills, when perfected, can be seen
as a protective measure, a means to an end, but hardly as the total embodiment of liberation.
Few if any feminists are deceived in this matter, although male proponents of the repeal of
abortion laws tend often to be short-sighted in this respect, confusing the feminist revolution
with the sexual revolution.25#

The demand for legalized abortion, like the demand for contraception, has
been represented as a form of irresponsibility, a refusal by women to
confront their moral destiny, a trivialization or evasion of great issues of life
and death. The human facts, however, are hardly frivolous. Here are some
of the methods resorted to by women who have been denied legal, safe,
low-cost abortion: self-abortion by wire coat-hangers, knitting needles,
goose quills dipped in turpentine, celery stalks, drenching the cervix with
detergent, lye, soap, Ultra-Jel (a commercial preparation of castor oil, soap,
and iodine), drinking purgatives or mercury, applying hot coals to the body.
The underworld “cut-rate” abortionists, often alcoholic, disenfranchised
members of the medical profession, besides operating in septic
surroundings and performing unnecessary curettages on poor women who
cannot afford a pregnancy test, frequently rape or sexually molest their
patients; well-to-do women have been forced to travel thousands of miles to
receive a medically safe abortion.26
Clearly, the first violence done in abortion is on the body and mind of
the pregnant woman herself. Most people, women and men alike, find it
difficult to perform even a minor operation upon themselves, from giving
themselves an injection to lancing an infected finger or removing a splinter.
It is nothing less than grim, driven desperation which can impel a woman to
insert an unbent coat-hanger into her most sensitive parts, to place her body
in the hands of a strange man with unverified credentials, or to lie down
without anesthesia on a filthy kitchen table, knowing that in so doing she
risks illness, grilling by the police, and death. Some women are able to
speak later of such experiences in a measured, almost indifferent way; no
one should be deceived by this attempt to distance or minimize the trauma.
An illegal or self-induced abortion is no casual experience. It is painful,
dangerous, and cloaked in the guilt of criminality.**
Even when performed in a hospital, under the law, abortion is often
packaged with sterilization as a kind of punishment for the crime of wishing
not to be pregnant, just as women who request simple tubal ligation as
sterilization are frequently given only the option of hysterectomy.27†† The
sadism of the underworld abortionist and that of the hospital to which a
hemorrhaging woman turns herself in after an incomplete self-inflicted
abortion are not so different after all.
To become pregnant with an unwanted child is itself no light
experience. There have been efforts to show that abortion, legal or not, is
harder psychically on women who have borne children than on a woman
who has borne none. A recent Swedish study of nearly five hundred women
concluded, however, that no such generalization was possible.28 Each
woman reacts to pregnancy, wanted or not, and to abortion, even the easiest
and most legal, in her own way. Guilt about abortion can serve as the
channel for other, older feelings of guilt, of needing to atone; it can also be
the result of lifelong exposure to the idea that abortion is murder‡‡. If a
woman feels her guilt or depression as a kind of punishment, she may try to
disavow such feelings. It is crucial, however, in abortion as in every other
experience (especially in the realm of sexuality and reproduction) that
women take seriously the enterprise of finding out what we do feel, instead
of accepting what we have been told we must feel. One woman’s depression
may actually be anger at the man who got her pregnant; another woman
may be angry at her treatment by the abortionist or the hospital; another
may wish to have a child, know her situation renders it impossible, and
genuinely mourn the loss.
No free woman, with 100 percent effective, nonharmful birth control
readily available, would “choose” abortion. At present, it is certainly likely
that a woman can—through many causes—become so demoralized as to
use abortion as a form of violence against herself—a penance, an expiation.
But this needs to be viewed against the ecology of guilt and victimization in
which so many women grow up. In a society where women always entered
heterosexual intercourse willingly,§ where adequate contraception was a
genuine social priority, there would be no “abortion issue.” And in such a
society there would be a vast diminishment of female self-hatred—a
psychic source of many unwanted pregnancies.
Abortion is violence: a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman
upon, first of all, herself. It is the offspring, and will continue to be the
accuser, of a more pervasive and prevalent violence, the violence of rapism.

3
From a thoughtful woman’s point of view, no ethical ideal has deserved our
unconditional respect and adherence, because in every ethics crimes against
women are mysteriously unnamed or glossed over. We have always been
outside the (manmade) law, although we have been much more stringently
punished than men for breaking the law, as in the case of prostitution and
adultery.
The absence of respect for women’s lives is written into the heart of
male theological doctrine, into the structure of the patriarchal family, and
into the very language of patriarchal ethics. This is the underlying
hypocrisy of the orthodox Catholic or “Right-to-Life” argument against
abortion¶¶. It is a fiction—not just an “unexamined assumption”—that
respect for human life has been an ideal, or, as John Noonan phrases it, “an
almost absolute value in history.” Women, upon whom most of the burden
of respect for life has been placed, know that it is not. We know too much at
firsthand about the violence of the warrior, the rapist, the institutional
violence of political and social systems in which we have little part, but
which affect our bodies, our children, our aging parents: the violence which
over centuries we have been told is the way of the world, but which we
exist to mitigate and assuage.##
Neither the theologians, nor the Right-to-Lifers, nor the fertility experts,
nor the ecologists, have acknowledged that, where “humanity” and
“humanistic values” are concerned, women are not really part of the
population. It is not enough that the ecology-minded, or the Society of
Friends, or the planners of Planned Parenthood or Zero Population Growth,
concerned for “the quality of life on the planet,” happen at this time to
support the decontrol of abortion. Abortion legislation has always come and
gone with the rhythms of economic and military aggression, the desire for
cheap labor, or for greater consumerism. In pre-Christian Rome a husband
could order or permit his wife to have an abortion in one pregnancy, and
forbid her to in another. We have seen the vacillations of official Church
policy. In the Soviet Union, the first modern country to legalize abortion (in
1920), virtual abortion factories were provided at first by the state. These
were abolished and abortion declared illegal when it became clear that a
confrontation was building with Nazi Germany. After World War II, with a
new emphasis on consumerism, abortion was again legalized to encourage
wives to stay in the labor force and earn a second family income.
Throughout, by continuing a half-hearted and ineffective program of birth-
control information, the Soviet Union has in effect forced abortion on many
women who would have preferred not to conceive at all.29 In Japan, as we
have seen, a liberal abortion law was rescinded, and birth-control pills made
virtually unavailable, when the birth rate began to decline and the supply of
cheap labor was threatened.
The situation in China has been described by the fertility expert Carl
Djerassi as “approaching Nirvana”—not, it would seem, for women but for
epidemiologists. “China probably has already, or certainly will have within
another two years or so, more women on oral contraceptives than any other
country. In addition or in contrast to many women in North America and
Europe, Chinese women are much less mobile, their jobs and residences are
changed rarely, and the potential for local recordkeeping at the site of job
and/or residence is unsurpassed.” (Birth-control information is not available
to students, even at the university level, and is officially disseminated only
to married couples; early marriage and premarital intercourse are socially
unacceptable.)
“Chinese achievements in fertility control during the past decade are
extremely impressive and provide lessons from which most of the world
could learn,” Djerassi claims. Among these lessons is the fact that “the
Chinese modus operandi appears to be more flexible than that in the United
States . . . animal toxicity requirements do not exceed 6-12 months (as
compared to U.S. requirements of up to ten years) . . . the decision to
undertake clinical testing is carried out in ‘discussions’ between the
laboratory scientists, clinicians and representatives of the health authorities.
. . . The rationale for this ad hoc procedure is ‘to alleviate human suffering
as quickly as possible.’ ”
Moreover, “subjects for clinical experimentation are obtained by
‘making propaganda’ among women in nearby Street Committees. The
volunteers know that they are participating in an experiment in which they
might become pregnant (abortion is, of course, available as a back-up
procedure), but they are aware that this is ‘science for the revolutionary
cause’ and hence are willing to undertake the necessary risks.” Djerassi
himself is slightly skeptical about the conflict between “as quickly as
possible” and the safety of the women experimented on, and even about the
“extent of real informed consent of the patient (rather than revolutionary
zeal).”30*** But however much the Chinese woman benefits today by the
possibility of limiting her family to at most two children, the same modus
operandi may easily be applied, at some further time, to enlarging the size
of the population. “The revolutionary cause” can just as easily require that
contraceptives become limited, that abortion no longer be available, and
that, as presently in the Soviet Union, medals be awarded to women
producing more than ten children.
The New York Times noted on March 17, 1975, that the Argentine
government, hoping to double its population by the end of the twentieth
century, had recently prohibited the dissemination of birth-control
information and severely restricted the sale of contraceptives. As set forth
in the Peronist magazine Las Bases, the motives are unambiguous:
. . . when the year 2000 is at hand, we will have over-populated neighbors with great food
problems, and we, on the contrary, will have three million kilometers of land, practically
unpopulated. We will not have the arms to work this immense and rich territory, and if we do
not do it there will be others who will. . . . We must start from the basis that the principal
work of a woman is to have children.

These words have a familiar ring. In the early part of the twentieth century,
as contraception became more popular, both in England and America panic
arose lest the middle and upper classes, to whom methods were most
available, were “breeding themselves out,” while the “lower”—therefore
“unfit”—masses were still producing large families. (Poor women, as we
have seen, were vocal about the need to limit their families, but abstinence
or self-inflicted abortion were the chief methods they knew.) Apart from the
social-Darwinist fallacy inherent in these polemics (the idea that poor
people are poor because they are unfit, rather than because the rich take
care to protect their wealth), the arguments have a fascinating honesty about
the “true meaning and purpose” of motherhood. Rarely, whether from the
Christian or the Freudian, the fascist or the Maoist Fathers, do we get so
pure and clear a description of the institution of motherhood as from
obscure pamphlets like the Reverend George W. Clark’s Race Suicide—
England’s Peril, published in 1917 by the Duty and Discipline Movement.
Reverend Clark begins by declaring that the loss of human life through
birth control is more terrible than the lives lost in war. (It is worth
remembering that the 1914-1918 World War was considered to have
destroyed the “flower of manhood” in the British upper classes. Never mind
the ordinary soldier; it was only the “best and brightest” that had been
ravaged in the trench warfare of that “war to end all wars.”) Clark is
perfectly honest about his fear that middle- and upper-class restrictions on
the size of families, while the “physically and mentally inferior” continue to
breed, will prove a disaster for British society. He divides his sermon into
three heads: (1) Limitation [of family] Threatens Our Empire; (2)
Limitation Threatens Our Trade (“the merchant with one son has not the
same inducement to launch out in new enterprise as his German competitor
with two or more sons”); (3) National Defense is Imperilled by Limitation.
He concludes with this appeal to the mothers:
No other service woman can render the State can compensate for her failure in this, the one
function God and Nature have assigned to her, and to her alone. Everything else man can do.
This is woman’s function and her glory. For this she was sent into the world. Her best years
must be spent in the nursery, or the nation perishes. In the noblest periods of a nation’s history
the ablest women are ambitious of bearing distinguished sons. Only in periods of decadence
do women seek in barrenness to be distinguished themselves . . .31†††

Vous travaillez pour l’armée, madame. There is no guarantee, under

socialism or “liberal” capitalism, Protestantism, “humanism,” or any
existing ethics, that a liberal policy will not become an oppressive one, so
long as women do not have absolute decision-power over the use of our
bodies. We have seen federal conservation programs give way to the
lumbering, pipe lining, and stripping of wilderness lands. We have also seen
the laws and opinions regarding birth control and abortion fluctuate
throughout history, according to the requirements of military aggression, the
labor market, or cultural climates of puritanism or “sexual liberation,”
patriarchally controlled.

4
When we think of an institution, we can usually see it as embodied in a
building: the Vatican, the Pentagon, the Sorbonne, the Treasury, the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Kremlin, the Supreme Court.
What we cannot see, until we become close students of the institution, are
the ways in which power is maintained and transferred behind the walls and
beneath the domes, the invisible understandings which guarantee that it
shall reside in certain hands but not in others, that information shall be
transmitted to this one but not to that one, the hidden collusions and
connections with other institutions of which it is supposedly independent.
When we think of the institution of motherhood, no symbolic architecture
comes to mind, no visible embodiment of authority, power, or of potential
or actual violence. Motherhood calls to mind the home, and we like to
believe that the home is a private place. Perhaps we imagine row upon row
of backyards, behind suburban or tenement houses, in each of which a
woman hangs out the wash, or runs to pick up a tear-streaked two-year-old;
or thousands of kitchens, in each of which children are being fed and sent
off to school. Or we think of the house of our childhood, the woman who
mothered us, or of ourselves. We do not think of the laws which determine
how we got to these places, the penalties imposed on those of us who have
tried to live our lives according to a different plan, the art which depicts us
in an unnatural serenity or resignation, the medical establishment which has
robbed so many women of the act of giving birth, the experts—almost all
male—who have told us how, as mothers, we should behave and feel. We
do not think of the Marxist intellectuals arguing as to whether we produce
“surplus value” in a day of washing clothes, cooking food, and caring for
children, or the psychoanalysts who are certain that the work of motherhood
suits us by nature. We do not think of the power stolen from us and the
power withheld from us, in the name of the institution of motherhood.
When we think of motherhood, we are supposed to think of Renoir’s
blooming women with rosy children at their knees, Raphael’s ecstatic
madonnas, some Jewish mother lighting the candles in a scrubbed kitchen
on Shabbos, her braided loaf lying beneath a freshly ironed napkin. We are
not supposed to think of a woman lying in a Brooklyn hospital with ice
packs on her aching breasts because she has been convinced she could not
nurse her child; of a woman in Africa equally convinced by the producers
of U.S. commercial infant formula that her ample breast-milk is inadequate
nourishment; of a girl in her teens, pregnant by her father; of a Vietnamese
mother gang-raped while working in the fields with her baby at her side; of
two women who love each other struggling to keep custody of their
children against the hostility of exhusbands and courts. We are not supposed
to think of a woman trying to conceal her pregnancy so she can go on
working as long as possible, because when her condition is discovered she
will be fired without disability insurance; or of the women whose children
have gone unnourished because they had to hire themselves out as wet-
nurses; of the slave who, severed from her own child, has rocked and
tended the children of her masters; of the woman who passes for
“childless.” who remembers giving birth to a baby she was not allowed to
touch and see because she might love it and wish to keep it. We are not
supposed to think of what infanticide feels like, or fantasies of infanticide,
or day after wintry day spent alone in the house with ailing children, or of
months spent in sweatshop, prison, or someone else’s kitchen, in anxiety for
children left at home with an older child, or alone. Men have spoken, often,
in abstractions, of our “joys and pains.” We have, in our long history,
accepted the stresses of the institution as if they were a law of nature.
The institution of motherhood cannot be touched or seen: in art perhaps
only Käthe Kollwitz has come close to evoking it. It must go on being
evoked, so that women never again forget that our many fragments of lived
experience belong to a whole which is not of our creation. Rape and its
aftermath; marriage as economic dependence, as the guarantee to a man of
“his” children; the theft of childbirth from women; the concept of the
“illegitimacy” of a child born out of wedlock; the laws regulating
contraception and abortion; the cavalier marketing of dangerous birth-
control devices; the denial that work done by women at home is a part of
“production"; the chaining of women in links of love and guilt; the absence
of social benefits for mothers; the inadequacy of child-care facilities in most
parts of the world; the unequal pay women receive as wage- earners,
forcing them often into dependence on a man; the solitary confinement of
“full-time motherhood”; the token nature of fatherhood, which gives a man
rights and privileges over children toward whom he assumes minimal
responsibility; the psychoanalytic castigation of the mother; the pediatric
assumption that the mother is inadequate and ignorant; the burden of
emotional work borne by women in the family—all these are connecting
fibers of this invisible institution, and they determine our relationship to our
children whether we like to think so or not.
 Because we have all had mothers, the institution affects all women, and
—though differently—all men. Patriarchal violence and callousness are
often visited through women upon children—not only the “battered” child
but the children desperately pushed, cajoled, manipulated, the children
dependent on one uncertain, weary woman for their day-in, day-out care
and emotional sustenance, the male children who grow up believing that a
woman is nothing so much as an emotional climate made to soothe and
reassure, or an emotional whirlwind bent on their destruction.
I come back, as we must, to Joanne Michulski. Desperation surely grew
upon her, little by little. She loved, she tried to love, she screamed and was
not heard, because there was nothing and no one in her surroundings who
saw her plight as unnatural, as anything but the “homemaker’s” usual
service to the home. She became a scapegoat, the one around whom the
darkness of maternity is allowed to swirl—the invisible violence of the
institution of motherhood, the guilt, the powerless responsibility for human
lives, the judgments and condemnations, the fear of her own power, the
guilt, the guilt, the guilt. So much of this heart of darkness is an undramatic,
undramatized suffering: the woman who serves her family their food but
cannot sit down with them, the woman who cannot get out of bed in the
morning, the woman polishing the same place on the table over and over,
reading labels in the supermarket as if they were in a foreign language,
looking into a drawer where there is a butcher knife. The scapegoat is also
an escape-valve: through her the passions and the blind raging waters of a
suppressed knowledge are permitted to churn their way so that they need
not emerge in less extreme situations as lucid rebellion. Reading of the
“bad” mother’s desperate response to an invisible assault on her being,
“good” mothers resolve to become better, more patient and long-suffering,
to cling more tightly to what passes for sanity. The scapegoat is different
from the martyr; she cannot teach resistance or revolt. She represents a
terrible temptation: to suffer uniquely, to assume that I, the individual
woman, am the “problem.”
Does motherhood release rage and cruelty in anyone except me and “sick” child batterers? . . .
My children, when they were about a year old, released in me terrifying fantasies of torture
and cruelty. They did it by being children, with normal childish traits of persistence, nagging,
crying, curiosity.
Fantasy films unwind in my brain . . . I . . . seize a child by the heels, swing it round, and
smash its head into the wall, watching the blood and brains flow down. . . . Sometimes ... I
leave them in the house alone and just run away. . . . After the fantasy films run out I look at
 my babies and realize I could never do those things ... I love my children too much. Then I
am able to be tender and gentle with them once again.
But I really have, in anger (not rage: that makes me turn inward or destroy things, not
children) kicked at their legs, spanked, pulled hair, and pushed them to the floor. ... I
understand how the battered children become that way . . .

I am ashamed to admit I . . . really have hit and kicked my little

children. ... I spend so much time in self-hate . . .
(Autobiography of a student in a class in “Women’s Biography,”
California State College at Sonoma)32
Self-hatred of the mother in anger, the woman in anger. She does not look
beyond her individual anger hurled at the individual child, even when, like
Tillie Olsen’s Anna, she herself is the target of her husband’s violence:
For several weeks Jim Holbrook had been in an evil mood. ... He had nothing but blows for
the children, and he struck Anna too often to remember . . .
Anna too became bitter and brutal. If one of the children was in her way, if they did not obey
her instantly, she would hit at them in a blind rage, as if it were some devil she was
exorcising. Afterward, in the middle of her work, regret would cramp her heart at the memory
of the tear-stained little face. “ Twasn’t them I was beating up on. Somethin just seems to get
into me when I have somethin to hit:”33

In her prose-poem Momma, the poet Alta places her finger on the raw nerve
of motherhood: loving our children, defending them, as did Joanne
Michulski, “like a mother bear,” we still find in them the nearest targets for
our rage and frustration:

a child with untameable curly hair, i call her kia,

pine nut person, & her eyes so open as she watches me try
to capture her,
as I try to
name her . . .

what of yesterday when she chased the baby in my room

and i screamed
OUT OUT GET OUT & she ran
right out but the baby stayed
unafraid, what is it like to have
a child afraid of you. your own
child, your first child, the one . . .
 who must forgive you if either of you are to survive . . .
& how right is it to shut her out of the room so i can
write about her?
how human, how loving, how can
i even try to
: name her

maybe they could manage w/out me

maybe I could steal
away a little time
in a different room
would they all still love me
when i came back?34

What woman, in the solitary confinement of a life at home enclosed

with young children, or in the struggle to mother them while providing for
them single-handedly, or in the conflict of weighing her own personhood
against the dogma that says she is a mother, first, last, and always—what
woman has not dreamed of “going over the edge,” of simply letting go,
relinquishing what is termed her sanity, so that she can be taken care of for
once, or can simply find a way to take care of herself? The mothers:
collecting their children at school; sitting in rows at the parent-teacher
meeting; placating weary infants in supermarket carriages; straggling home
to make dinner, do laundry, and tend to children after a day at work;
fighting to get decent care and livable schoolrooms for their children;
waiting for child-support checks while the landlord threatens eviction;
getting pregnant yet again because their one escape into pleasure and
abandon is sex; forcing long needles into their delicate interior parts;
wakened by a child’s cry from their eternally unfinished dreams—the
mothers, if we could look into their fantasies—their daydreams and
imaginary experiences—we would see the embodiment of rage, of tragedy,
of the overcharged energy of love, of inventive desperation, we would see
the machinery of institutional violence wrenching at the experience of
motherhood.
What is astonishing, what can give us enormous hope and belief in a
future in which the lives of women and children shall be mended and
rewoven by women’s hands, is all that we have managed to salvage, of
ourselves, for our children, even within the destructiveness of the
institution: the tenderness, the passion, the trust in our instincts, the
evocation of a courage we did not know we owned, the detailed
apprehension of another human existence, the full realization of the cost
and precariousness of life. 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.
The changes required to make this possible reverberate into every part
of the patriarchal system. 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 pastor opened his interview with a reporter: “I am a Christian man.” The interview ends: “My
wife and I respected her the same way we would a vicious dog.”
† Rape, by the way, is almost unmentioned as a cause of illegitimate pregnancy; the term usually
employed is “seduction,” implying that the father had promised marriage and then deserted the
mother. Yet, as Susan Brownmiller has documented, rape has been taken for granted as a part of war.
Outside wars, rape has gone on throughout history; as Brownmiller points out, “Thou shalt not rape
was conspicuously missing from the Ten Commandments” (Against Our Will [New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1975], pp. 19, 30-113). Even Frederick the Great acknowledged an “unmarried soldiery”
was responsible for the high rate of infanticide in Prussia in the eighteenth century, although he
implied that rapes took place because of pent-up lust, a male theory that is slowly dying hard today.
(See Oscar Werner, The Unmarried Mother in German Literature [New York: Columbia University
Press, 1917], pp. 36-37.) Werner does note (p. 32) that, in the Middle Ages, “in looking through the
archives one seldom finds a case where the seducer is mentioned. When he was found out he was
punished severely. The reason he was so seldom punished is to be found in the fact that the courts
always accepted the man’s denial in preference to the woman’s accusation. It was a war against the
unmarried mother and not against the unmarried father.” This is of course a rationalization of the
much deeper assumption of women’s sexual guilt.
‡ “The sacrifice of the wage-earner’s children was caused by the mother’s starvation; vainly she gave
her own food to the children, for then she was unable to suckle the baby and grew too feeble for her
former work.” In such circumstances, the baby might well be consciously sacrificed. (Alice Clark,
The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century [London: Routledge & Sons, 1919], p. 87.)
§ Some women express this by furiously and incessantly cleaning house, which they know will be
immediately disorganized by small children; others, by letting the house go utterly to pieces since
any kind of order seems hopeless.
¶ 1986: Mercury compounds are no longer used in spermicides sold in the United States. (See The
Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, “The New” OUT Bodies, Ourselves [New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1984], P. 233.)
# 1986: Beverly Wildung Harrison, writing more recently from a Christian feminist perspective, has
this to say: “If we are ever to become genuinely serious about reducing the need for abortions in the
United States, we must cut through the miasma of fear and suspicion about women’s sexuality and
confront, by concrete analysis of women’s lives, the conditions that lead women to resort to frequent
abortion. It should be clear that I do not imagine that all abortions can or should be eliminated. The
availability of safe surgical, elective abortion in the early stages of pregnancy is considered an
abomination only by those who value potential human life more than they value existing women’s
lives. But if those intent on reducing the number of abortions are serious, they will have to take with
full and nonjudgmental seriousness the conditions of women’s lives and women’s social reality”
(Beverly Wildung Harrison, Our Right to Choose: Toward a New Ethic of Abortion [Boston: Beacon,
1983], pp. 245-46).
** 1986: For accounts of illegal abortion in recent literature by women, see Audre Lorde, Zami: A
New Spelling of My Name(Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1982); and Marge Piercy, Braided
Lives (New York: Summit, 1982).
†† 1986: Helen Rodriguez-Trias, M.D., Connie Uri, M.D., and other feminists and medical activists
have exposed and organized against sterilization abuse as it targets women of color and poor women-
—e.g., Indian women on reservations, women in Puerto Rico, Mexican-American women, poor
Black women in the South. In 1979 federal sterilization regulations went into law but are still widely
unenforced. See Rodriguez-Trias, “Sterilization Abuse,” in Rita Arditti, Pat Brennan, and Steve
Cavrak, eds., Science and Liberation (Boston: South End Press, 1980); see also The Boston Women’s
Health Book Collective, “The New” Our Bodies, Ourselves (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984),
pp. 256-57.
‡‡ A Boston women’s group, COPE, originally begun as a support group for women in pregnancy or
in postchildbirth depression, has started two postabortion discussion groups to enable women to sort
out their feelings rather than repress them. “The most important thing . . . is that the woman who’s
upset over her abortion shouldn’t feel like she’s crazy or ‘sick’. She’s been through an unpleasant
experience and she has a right to support” (Karen Lindsay, “COPE-ing with the Aftermath of
Abortion,” Boston Phoenix, January l4, 1975).
§The pressure on women to “fulfill their conjugal duties” deserves a chapter of its own in the history
of rape. As the wives of working-men quoted in Chapter II make clear, husbands have used many
kinds of pressure besides brute physical force to get the use of their wives’ bodies. One of these
women writes that “no amount of State help can help the sufferings of mothers until men are taught
many things in regard to the right use of the organs of reproduction, and until he realizes that the
wife’s body belongs to herself, and until the marriage relations takes a higher sense of morality and
bare justice. And what I imply not only exists in the lower strata of society, but is just as prevalent in
the higher.... Very much injury and suffering comes to the mother and child through the father’s
ignorance and interference” (Maternity: Letters from Working Women [London: 1915], pp. 27-28).
¶¶ 1986: On October 7, 1984, ninety-seven leading Catholic scholars, religious and social activists
published a “Catholic Statement on Pluralism and Abortion” in the New York Times. It pointed out
that the papal and hierarchical denunciation of abortion as “morally wrong in all in.. stances” is not
the sole legitimate Catholic position and that there is a diversity of belief among Catholics which
deserves “candid and respectful discussion.” It opposed “the kind of legislation that curtails the
legitimate exercise of the freedom of religion and conscience or disaiminates against poor women.”
Many of the signers have felt reprisals, including dismissal from jobs and harassment. In the New
York Times of March 2, 1986, a “Declaration of Solidarity,” signed by hundreds of Catholics,
protested these reprisals as violating the right to free speech.
## I have written elsewhere of the impression made on me by two films, released at about the same
time: Marcel Ophul’s The Sorrow and the Pity and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. In each of
these—one a documentary of French collaboration with and resistance to Nazism in World War II,
the other a dramatization of a best-selling novel about a Mafioso “family”—the men hold their
councils of war, while the women, as if symbolically, listen at doorways, silently serve drinks and
food, watching the faces of the men with acute anxiety and alertness. It is they who will later hold
those men and their children in their arms, whatever crimes they have committed against life.
*** 1986: In 1980, the State Family Policy of “one couple, one child” was implemented by
incentives such as “preferential housing, employment, childcare, free education and medical benefits
for the child.” In 1982, tax penalties were levied on the income of a family producing a second child.
Pre- and postnatal care and delivery at home or in a hospital are all free, in any case. (See Robin
Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Global [New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1984], pp. 144-45. See also
Gwen Iver, “China’s Population Policy,” of our backs, Vol. 15, No. 3 [March 1985], P.15.)
††† Recently two American feminists reported from the East Berlin World Congress of Women for
International Women’s Year that report after report, working paper after working paper presented at
this male-dominated gathering expressed the view that women’s major value is as “the bearers of
future generations” and in their “dual social function as mothers and bearers.” “Hardly ever during
the entire Congress was it pointed out that women are human beings first and foremost and deserve
their rights for that and no other reason” (Laura McKinley, Diana Russell et al., “The ‘Old Left’
Divided in Berlin over the ‘Woman Question,’ ” Majority Report, March 6-20, 1976, pp. 10-12).

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AFTERWORD

. . . there are ways of thinking that we don’t know

about. Nothing could be more important or precious
than that knowledge, however unborn. The sense of
urgency, the spiritual restlessness it engenders,
cannot be appeased . . .
—Susan Son tag, Styles of Radical Will

But what do we do with our lives? There are growing, collective efforts to
meet the institution of motherhood head-on, for example, the National
Welfare Rights Organization, the National Abortion Rights Action League,
and numerous special groups such as Catholics For A Free Choice, the
Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers in New York, and the Lesbian Mothers’
National Defense Fund, based in Seattle. A national organization,
MOMMA, with a newspaper and chapters throughout the country,
addresses itself to the problems of single mothers in general*. The women’s
health-care movement, challenging the ignorance and passivity fostered in
women by the male medical profession, is a spreading force, already having
an incalculable effect on a new generation of women.†
In the four years of writing this book I have seen the issue of
motherhood grow from a question almost incidental in feminist analysis to a
theme which now seems to possess the collective consciousness of
thoughtful women, whether as mothers, as daughters, or both. Various
writers have called for a new matriarchalism; for the taking over by women
of genetic technology; for the insistence on child-care as a political
commitment by all members of a community or by all “child-free” women;
communal child-raising; the return to a “village” concept of community in
which children could be integrated into the adult life of work; the rearing of
children in feminist enclaves to grow up free of gender-imprinting. There is
a ripple of interest in “new fatherhood,” in the establishing of a basis of
proof that men, as well as women, can and should “mother,” or for
redefinitions of fatherhood which would require a more active, continuous
presence with the child.
To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to
try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to
respect the effort even where it fails. At the same time, in the light of most
women’s lives as they are now having to be lived, it can seem naive and
self-indulgent to spin forth matriarchal utopias, to “demand” that the
technologies of contraception and genetics be “turned over” to women (by
whom, and under what kinds of effective pressure?); to talk of impressing
“unchilded” women into child-care as a political duty, of boycotting
patriarchal institutions, of the commune as a solution for child-rearing.
Child-care as enforced servitude, or performed out of guilt, has been all too
bitter a strain in our history. If women boycott the laboratories and libraries
of scientific institutions (to which we have barely begun to gain access) we
will not even know what research and technology is vital to the control of
our bodies.‡ Certainly the commune, in and of itself, has no special magic
for women, any more than has the extended family or the public day-care
center. Above all, such measures fail to recognize the full complexity and
political significance of the woman’s body, the full spectrum of power and
powerlessness it represents, of which motherhood is simply one—though a
crucial—part.
Furthermore, it can be dangerously simplistic to fix upon “nurturance”
as a special strength of women, which need only be released into the larger
society to create a new human order. Whatever our organic or developed
gift for nurture, it has often been turned into a boomerang. About women
political prisoners under torture, Rose Styron writes:
The imagination, the “emotionalism” a woman is classically assigned—the passion she has
developed defending her children, the compassion (or insight into human motive and
possibility) she has acquired being alert to the needs and demands of her family or
community—can make her into a fierce opponent for her tormentors. It can also make her
exceptionally vulnerable (Emphasis mine).§

This has been true for women in general under patriarchy, whether our
opponents are individual men, the welfare system, the medical and
psychoanalytic establishments, or the organized network of drug traffic,
pornography, and prostitution. When an individual woman first opposes the
institution of motherhood she often has to oppose it in the person of a man,
the father of her child, toward whom she may feel love, compassion,
friendship, as well as resentment, anger, fear, or guilt. The “maternal” or
“nurturant” spirit we want to oppose to rapism and the warrior mentality
can prove a liability so long as it remains a lever by which women can be
controlled through what is most generous and sensitive in us. Theories of
female power and female ascendancy must reckon fully with the
ambiguities of our being, and with the continuum of our consciousness, the
potentialities for both creative and destructive energy in each of us.
I am convinced that “there are ways of thinking that we don’t yet know
about.” I take those words to mean that many women are even now thinking
in ways which traditional intellection denies, decries, or is unable to grasp.
Thinking is an active, fluid, expanding process; intellection, “knowing” are
recapitulations of past processes. In arguing that we have by no means yet
explored or understood our biological grounding, the miracle and paradox
of the female body and its spiritual and political meanings, I am really
asking whether women cannot begin, at last, to think through the body, to
connect what has been so cruelly disorganized—our great mental capacities,
hardly used; our highly developed tactile sense; our genius for close
observation; our complicated, pain-enduring, multi- pleasured physicality.
I know no woman—virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate—whether
she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain
waves—for whom her body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded
meaning, its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its
silences, its changes and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings. There is for
the first time today a possibility of converting our physicality into both
knowledge and power. Physical motherhood is merely one dimension of our
being. We know that the sight of a certain face, the sound of a voice, can
stir waves of tenderness in the uterus. From brain to clitoris through vagina
to uterus, from tongue to nipples to clitoris, from fingertips to clitoris to
brain, from nipples to brain and into the uterus, we are strung with invisible
messages of an urgency and restlessness which indeed cannot be appeased,
and of a cognitive potentiality that we are only beginning to guess at. We
are neither “inner” nor “outer” constructed; our skin is alive with signals;
our lives and our deaths are inseparable from the release or blockage of our
thinking bodies.
 But the fear and hatred of our bodies has often crippled our brains.
Some of the most brilliant women of our time are still trying to think from
somewhere outside their female bodies—hence they are still merely
reproducing old forms of intellection.¶ There is an inexorable connection
between every aspect of a woman’s being and every other; the scholar
reading denies at her peril the blood on the tampon; the welfare mother
accepts at her peril the derogation of her intelligence. These are issues of
survival, because the woman scholar and the welfare mother are both
engaged in fighting for the mere right to exist. Both are “marginal” people
in a system founded on the traditional family and its perpetuation.
The physical organization which has meant, for generations of women,
unchosen, indentured motherhood, is still a female resource barely touched
upon or understood. We have tended either to become our bodies—blindly,
slavishly, in obedience to male theories about us—or to try to exist in spite
of them. “I don’t want to be the Venus of Willendorf—or the eternal
fucking machine.” Many women see any appeal to the physical as a denial
of mind. We have been perceived for too many centuries as pure Nature,
exploited and raped like the earth and the solar system; small wonder if we
now long to become Culture: pure spirit, mind. Yet it is precisely this
culture and its political institutions which have split us off from itself. In so
doing it has also split itself off from life, becoming the death- culture of
quantification, abstraction, and the will to power which has reached its most
refined destructiveness in this century. It is this culture and politics of
abstraction which women are talking of changing, of bringing to
accountability in human terms.
The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential
change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by
workers. The female body has been both territory and machine, virgin
wilderness to be exploited and assembly-line turning out life. We need to
imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own
body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not
only children (if and as we choose) but the visions, and the thinking,
necessary to sustain, console, and alter human existence—a new
relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power,
motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings;
thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.
* 1986: MOMMA no longer exists. There is, however, a Single Parents’ Clearing House, 116;
Broadway, New York, NY 10001.
† 1986: By far the most exhaustive and up-to-date resource presently available is The Boston
Women’s Health Book Collective’s “The New” Our Bodies, Ourselves (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1984). The bibliographies, listings of organizations, and wealth of information on
reproduction both as process and as politics are incomparable.
‡ It is, rather, essential that women become well informed about current developments in genetics,
cloning, and extrauterine reproduction. A two-pronged approach is needed: just as more women are
receiving medical training, while other women are educating themselves and each other as lay
persons in the fields of health-care and childbirth, so we need women scientists within the
institutions, and lay women who are knowledgeably monitoring the types of decisions and research
that go on there, and disseminating the information they gather.
1986: See Ruth Hubbard with Wendy Sanford, “New Reproductive Technologies,” in “The New”
Our Bodies, Ourselves, pp. 317-24.
§ “The Hidden Women.’ in Women Political Prisoners in the USSR, Ukrainian National Women’s
League of America, New York, 1975, PP-3-4
¶ Even Mary Wollstonecraft, viewing with pain the “passive obedience” and physical weakness she
saw in the majority of women around her, remarked that she had been “led to imagine that the few
extraordinary women who have rushed in eccentrical directions out of the orbit prescribed to their
sex, were male spirits, confined by mistake in female frames” (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
1792 [New York: Norton, 1967], p. 70). I am indebted to Barbara Gelpi for drawing this passage to
my attention.

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NOTES

I. ANGER AND TENDERNESS

1. Arthur W. Calhoun, A Social History of the American Family from

Colonial Times to the Present (Cleveland: 1917). See also Gerda Lemer,
Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York:
Vintage, 1973), pp.149–50ff.

II. THE “SACRED CALLING”

1. Margaret Sanger, Motherhood in Bondage (New York: Maxwell Reprint,

1956), p. 234.
2. John Spargo, Socialism and Motherhood (New York: 1914).
3. Benjamin F. Riley, White Man’s Burden (Birmingham, Ala.: 1910),p.
131.
4. Stuart Hampshire, review of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Seduction and
Betrayal, New York Review of Books, June 27, 1975, p. 21.
5. Arthur W. Calhoun, A Social History of the American Family from
Colonial Times to the Present (Cleveland: 1917), I: 67, 87. Julia C. Spruill,
Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies (New York: Norton,
1972), pp.137–39; first published 1938.
6. Margaret Llewelyn Davies, ed., Life as We Have Known It (New York:
Norton, 1975), p. 1; first published 1931 by the Hogarth Press, London.
7. Calhoun, op. cit., II: 244.
8. Rev. John S. Abbott, The Mother at Home, or The Pririciples of
Maternal Duty (New York: American Tract Society, 1833); book was a
best-seller in its time.
9. Maria J. McIntosh, Woman in America: Her Work and Her Reward (New
York: Appleton, 1850).
10. Abbott, op. cit., pp.62–64.
11. Lydia Maria Child, The Mother’s Book (Boston: 1831), p. 5.
12. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (New York: A. L. Burt, 1911), p. 68.
13. Lillian Krueger, “Motherhood on the Wisconsin Frontier,” Wisconsin, A
Magazine of History, Vol. 29, No. 2,157–83. Vol. 29, No. 3.333–46
14. Stella Davies, Living Through the Industrial Revolution (London:
Routledge and Kegan, 1966).
15. Margaret Hewitt, Wives and Mothers in Victorian Industry (London:
Rockliff, 1958), p. 22.
16. Ibid., pp.153–54.
17. Maternity: Letters from Working Women, collected by the Women’s
Cooperative Guild, with a preface by the Rt. Hon. Herbert Samuel, M.P.
(London: G. Bell, 1915), p. 5.
18. Ibid., pp.27–28.
19. Ibid., p. 49.
20. Ibid., pp.67–68.
21. Ibid., p. 153.
22. Ibid., p. 47.
23. Calhoun, op. cit., Ill: 86; Elinor C. Guggenheim, “The Battle for Day
Care,” Nation, May 7, 1973.
24. Hannah Gavron, The Captive Wife: Conflicts of Housebound Mothers
(London: Routledge and Kegan, 1966), pp.72–73. 80.
25. Lee Sanders Comer, “Functions of the Family under Capitalism,”
pamphlet reprinted by the New York Radical Feminists, 1974. Eli Zaretsky,
“Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life,” Socialist Revolution, January-
June 1973, p. 69.
26. Carl Djerassi, “Some Observations on Current Fertility Control in
China,” The China Quarterly, No. 57 (January-March 1974), pp.40–60.

III. THE KINGDOM OF THE FATHERS

1. Sherry Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” in Michelle

Rosaldo and Louise Lamphère, eds., Woman, Culture and Society (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1974); Hannah Pa- panek, “Purdah in Pakistan:
Seclusion and Modem Occupations for Women,” Journal of Marriage and
the Family, August 1971, p. 520.
2. Alexander Mitscherlich, Society Without the Father (New York:
Schocken, 1970), pp.145–47. 159.
3. Brigitte Berger, Introduction to Helen Diner, Mothers and Amazons (New
York: Anchor Books, 1973), p–xvi.
4. Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role,” The Black
Scholar, Vol. 3, No. 3. See also Pat Robinson et al., “A Historical and
Critical Essay for Black Women in the Cities,” in Toni Cade, ed., The Black
Woman (New York: Signet, 1970), pp.198–211.
5. David Schneider and Kathleen Gough, eds., Matrilineal Kinship
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), p. 5.
6. Ibid., pp.21–23.
7. Robert Briffault, The Mothers (New York: Johnson Reprint, !969), I:433–
35.
8. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York:
Knopf, 1953), p. 82.
9. See Ortner, op. tit. In Woman and Nature: The Roaring inside Her (New
York: Harper & Row, 1978), Susan Griffin explores in depth the evolution
and consequences of this splitting.
10. Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New
York: Basic Books, 1959), Vol. 5.
11. Niles Newton, Maternal Emotions: a study of women’s feelings toward
menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, breast feeding and other aspects of
their femininity (New York: P. B. Hoeber, 1955), p.24–26.
12. See Linda Thurston, “On Male and Female Principle,” The Second
Wave, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Summer 1971).
13. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967),
pp.72–73. The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1968), p. 294;
Toward the African Revolution (New York: Grove, 1967), pp. 3ff.; Paolo
Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury, 1971), pp.
31ff.; Albert Memmi, Dominated Man (Boston: Beacon, 1968), p. 202.
14. See Leslie H. Farber, “I’m Sorry, Dear,” in The Ways of the Will (New
York: Harper and Row, 1968); Albert Memmi, “A Tyrant’s Plea,” in
Dominated Man, op. cit.
15. E. M. Forster, Howards End (Baltimore: Penguin, 1953), p.175
16. Briffault, op. cit., II: 557.
17. De Beauvoir, op. cit., p. 171.
18. Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle (New York: Atheneum, 1971), P-
46
19. Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (New York: Fawcett,
1968), pp.168–69.
20. See Ben Barker-Benfield, “Anne Hutchinson and the Puritan Attitude
Toward Women,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall, 1972), pp.65–96.
21. Karen Homey, “The Dread of Woman,” in Feminine Psychology (New
York: Norton, 1967); Wolfgang Lederer, The Fear of Women (New York:
Grane and Stratton, 1968); Philip Slater, The Glory of Hera (Boston:
Beacon, 1968).
22. Homey, op. cit., p. 137.
23. Slater, op. cit., p. 72. See also Joan Bamberger, “The Myth of
Matriarchy: Why Men Rule in Primitive Society,” in Rosaldo and
Lamph£re, op. cit.
24. See my essay, “The Anti-Feminist Woman,” New York Review of Books,
November 30, 1972, reprinted in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected
Prose1966–1978(New York: Norton,1980). Nancy Milford, “Out from
Under: A Review of Woman’s Estate by Juliet Mitchell,” Partisan Review,
Vol. 40, No. 1 (Winter 1973).
25. See Karen Lindsay, “The Sexual Revolution Is No Joke for Women,”
Boston Phoenix, March 13, 1973; Barbara Seaman, Free and Female (New
York: Fawcett, 1973), pp.241–45. “New Evidence against the Pill,” MS.,
June 1975.
26. Barbara Segal, “Today Bucharest, Tomorrow the World,” off our backs,
Vol. 5, No.1 (January 1975), p.11.
27. Toni Cade, “The Pill: Genocide or Liberation?” The Black Woman, op.
cit., pp.162–69.
28. A1 Rutledge, “Is Abortion Black Genocide?” Essence, September 1973,
p. 86.
29. Jessie Bernard, The Future of Motherhood (New York: Dial, 1974), p.
268.
30. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New York: Bantam, 1972),
pp. i97ff.
31. Denis de Rougement, Love in the Western World (New York: Anchor
Books, 1957); first published 1939.
32. Karl Stem, The Flight from Woman (New York: Noonday Press, 1970),
p. 305.
33. Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon,
1972), pp.74–78. Robert Bly, Sleepers Joining Hands (New York: Harper
and Row, 1972), pp.29–50.
34. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, “The Politics of Androgyny,” Women*s
Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1974), pp.151–61.
35. Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness (Boston: Beacon, 197°), pp.46–
47. 89.
36. De Beauvoir, op. cit., p. 66.
37. Alice Schwartzer, interview with Simone de Beauvoir, MS., July 1972.
De Beauvoir opened the first International Tribunal on Grimes Against
Women in Brussels: “I greet the beginning of a radical decolonization of
women” (ITCAW newsletter, April 8, 1976, Berkeley Women’s Center,
2112 Channing Way, Berkeley, Calif. 94704).

IV. THE PRIMACY OF THE MOTHER

1. J. J. Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right>, trans. Ralph

Manheim (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 207.
2. Ibid., pp. 150, 129.
3. Ibid., pp.143–44.
4. Ibid., p. 150.
5. Ibid. p. 101.
6. Ibid., pp.109–10.
7. Robert Briffault, The Mothers (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1969), I:v.
8. Ibid., Ill:509–10.
9. See, for example, Amy Hackett and Sarah Pomeroy, “Making History:
The First Sex,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1972).
10. Jane Harrison, Mythology (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
1963), p. 43; first published 1924.
11. Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 43; first published 1949.
12. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1972), pp.129–31. first published 1955.
13. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (New York:
Viking, 1972), pp. vi-vii.
14. James Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1967), pp.201–2.
15. Neumann, The Great Mother, pp.135–37. Briffault, op. cit., I:466–67.
See also H. R. Hays, The Dangerous Sex (New York: Pocket Books, 1972).
16. Briffault, op. cit., I:473–74.
17. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970), pp.210–20.
18. Neumann, The Great Mother, p. 288.
19. Briffault, op. cit., II: 513, 490.
20. Otto Rank, “The Creation of the Sexual Self,” in Beyond Psychology,
(New York: Dover, 1958), pp.202–12.
21. Bronislaw Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, 1929), pp. 2,170–75.
22. Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, pp.49–51.
23. Barbara Seaman, Free and Female (New York: Fawcett, 1973), p. 22.
24. Briffault, op. cit. I: 441.
25. Bruno Bettelheim, Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious
Male (New York: Collier, 1968).
26. Campbell, op.cit. pp.30–31. 46,59–60.
27. Briffault, op. cit. II:403–6.
28. C. G. Hartley, The Age of Mother-Right (New York: Dodd, Mead,
1914), pp.65–68.
29. Neumann, The Great Mother, pp. 280, 290.
30. M. Esther Harding, Woman’s Mysteries (New York: C. G. Jung
Foundation, 1971), p. 70.
31. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of
Pollution and Taboo (Baltimore: Pelican, 1970), pp.166–69.
32. Paula Weideger, Menstruation and Menopause: The Physiology and
Psychology, The Myth and the Reality (New York: Knopf, 1976), Pp.93–94.
33. Briffault, op. cit. II:634–40. Harding, op. cit. chs. 8, 9.
34. G. Rachel Levy, Religious Conceptions of the Stone Age (New York:
Harper Torchbooks, 1963), pp. 52,157–59. Originally published in England
in 1948 as The Gate of Horn.>
35. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, op. cit. pp.217–25.
 V. THE DOMESTICATION OF MOTHERHOOD

1. Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the
State (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 73.
2. Karen Horney, Feminine Psychology (New York: Norton, 1967), pp.106–
18.
3. Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life. Originally
published in Socialist Revolution, January-June 1973, pp. 78,72–73.
(Available as a paperback from Harper and Row, N. Y., 1975.)
4. H. R. Hays, The Dangerous Sex (New York: Pocket Books, 1972), p.
270; first published 1964.
5. Robin Fox, Kinship and Marriage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1967), pp.27–33.
6. Bruno Bettelheim, Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious
Male (New York: Collier, 1968); first published 1954.
7. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (New York:
Viking, 1972), pp. 315fffirst published 1959.
8. G. Rachel Levy, Religious Conceptions of the Stone Age (New York:
Harper Torchbooks, 1963), pp.83–85.
9. Ibid., pp. 27,86–87. 100.
10. National Geographic, Vol. 144, No. 6 (December 1973).
11. Campbell, op. cit., p. 372.
12. Leonard Palmer, Mycenaeans and Minoans: Aegean Pre-History in the
Light of the Linear B Tablets (New York: Knopf, 1965), P- 347
13. Levy, op. cit., p. 120; Erich Neumann, The Great Mother (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 153.
14. Raphael Patai, Sex and Family in the Bible and the Middle East (New
York: Doubleday, 1959), p. 135.
15. Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (New York: Ktav, 1967), PP.
52,97–98.
16. Aeschylus, Oresteia, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 158, 161.
17. B. Ehrenreich and D. English, Witchesy Midwives and Nurses: A
History of Women Healers (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1973),
pp.8–9.
18. E. O. James, The Cult of the Mother-Goddess (New York: Praeger,
1959), pp. 47, 138; James Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük: A Neolithic Town in
Anatolia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), plate 84.
19. Palmer, op. cit. p. 192; Cyril Aldred, Akhenaton and Nefertite (New
York: Viking, 1973), p. 181.
20. Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, pp.26–27. 52,97–98.
21. Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 86.
22. Jane Harrison, Mythology (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963), pp. 44ff.
23. Philip Slater, The Glory of Hera (Boston: Beacon, 1968).
24. Aldred, op. cit. pp.11–12. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), p. 13.
25. Jane Harrison, op. cit. pp.94–95.
26. Slater, op. cit. pp.137–41.
27. M. Esther Harding, Woman’s Mysteries (New York: C. G. Jung
Foundation, 1971), p. 31.
28. Robert Briffault, The Mothers (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1969),
I:131–41.
29. Margaret Mead, Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in A Changing
World (New York: Morrow, 1975), p. 229; first published 1949.
30. Ibid., p. 82.
31. Campbell, op. cit. p. 451.

VI. HANDS OF FLESH, HANDS OF IRON

1. A. }. Rongy, Childbirth, Yesterday and Today (New York: Emerson,

1937), pp.62–64.
2. Quoted in R. P. Finney, The Story of Motherhood (New York: Liveright,
1937), P-21
3. Ibid., pp.18–20.
4. Irwin Chabon, M.D., Awake and Aware: Participating in Childbirth
through Prophylaxis (New York: Delacorte, 1966), pp.46–47.
5. W. F. Mengert, M.D., “The Origins of the Male Midwife.” Annals of
Medical History, Vol. 4, No. 5, pp.453–65.
6. Rongy, op cit., pp. 18, 33; Harvey Graham, Eternal Eve: The Mysteries
of Birth and the Customs That Surround It (London: Hutchinson, 1960)^.
12.
7. Rongy, op. cit., p. 33.
8. Finney, op. cit., p. 31; Rongy, op. cit., pp.76–77.
9. J. W. White, M.D., “4,000 Years of Obstetrics,” American Journal of
Surgery, Vol. 11, No. 3 (March 1931), pp.564–72.
10. Finney, op. cit., p. 44.
11. Graham, op. cit., pp.69–70.
12. Finney, op. cit., p. 56.
13. Graham, op. cit., p. 79.
14. Ben Barker-Benfield, “Anne Hutchinson and the Puritan Attitude
Towards Women,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall 1972), pp.65–96.
Finney, op. cit., p. 149.
15. B. Ehrenreich and D. English, Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History
of Women Healers (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1973), pp.12–15.
16. Rongy, op. cit., p. 84.
17. Ibid., p. 79.
18. Mengert, op. cit., pp.453–65.
19. Finney, op. cit., p. 101.
20. Graham, op. cit., p. 87.
21. Rongy, op. cit., p. 46.
22. J. L. Miller, “Renaissance Midwifery: The Evolution of Modem
Obstetrics1500–1700.” in Lectures on the History of Medicine:1862–
1932(Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1933).
23. Louise Bourgeois, Les Six Couches de Marie de Medicis (Paris: 1875),
PP.24–27I am indebted to Richard Howard for the English version of this
paragraph.
24. Peroral Willughby, Observations in Midwifery, as also the country
midwife’s opusculum or vade mecum (Warwick: H. T. Cooke, 1863), p. 151.
25. Harold Speert, M.D., and Alan Guttmacher, M.D., Obstetric Practice
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956), p. 304.
26. Graham, op. cit., p. 115.
27. Ibid., p. 120.
28. Ibid., pp.106–22.
29. John Leake, M.D., A Lecture Introductory to the Theory and Practice of
Midwifery (London: 1773), p. 48.
30. F. Naroll, R. Naroll, and F. M. Howard, “Position of Women in
Childbirth: A study in data quality control,” American Journal of Obstetrics
and Gynecology, Vol. 82, No. 4 (October 1961), P-953
31. Leake, op. cit., p. 49.
32. Graham, op. cit., p. 146.
33. Elizabeth Nihell, A Treatise on the Art of Midwifery: Setting Forth
Various Abuses Therein, Especially as to the Practice with Instruments
(London: 1760), pp. viii-ix.
34. Ibid., pp.91–99.
35. Ibid., p. 167m
36. See Sheila Kitzinger, The Experience of Childbirth (Baltimore: Pelican,
1973), p. 12; Janet Brown et al., Two Births (New York: Random House,
1972).
37. Finney, op. cit., p. 238.
38. I. P. Semmelweis, “The Etiology, the Concept and the Prophylaxis of
Childbed Fever” (1861), in Medical Classics, Vol. 5, No. 5 (January 1941),
p. 357.
39. Finney, op. cit., pp. 191ff.
40. Ibid., p. 218.
41. O. W. Holmes, “The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever” (1843), in
Epoch-Making Contributions to Medicine, Surgery and the Allied Sciences
(Philadelphia: 1909).
42. Semmelweis, op. cit., pp.369–75.
43. Ibid., p. 391.
44. ibid., P. 395.
45. Ibid., p. 400. See also A. Janik and S. Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), P-35
46. Semmelweis, op. cit., p. 417.
47. Finney, op. cit., p. 223.

VII. ALIENATED LABOR

1. Lawrence Freedman and Vera Ferguson, “The Question of ‘Painless

Childbirth’ in Primitive Cultures,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry,
Vol. 20 (1950), pp. 368, 370; Margaret Mead, Male and Female: A Study of
the Sexes in a Changing World (New York: Morrow, 1975), p. 277.
2. Nancy Fuller and Brigitte Jordan, “Birth in a Hammock,” Women: A
Journal of Liberation, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp.24–26.
3. Freedman and Ferguson, op. cit., p. 369.
4. Robert Briffault, The Mothers (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1969),
I:458–59.
5. Simone Weil, Waiting for God (New York: Putnam, 1951), pp. 117flF.;
Cahiers (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1953), p. 9.
6. Doris Lessing, A Proper Marriage (New York: New American Library,
1970), p. 274.
7. Cora Sandel, Alberta and Freedom, trans. Elizabeth Rokkan (London:
Peter Owen, 1963), pp. 231, 241; first published 1931.
8. Margaret Mead and Niles Newton, “Pregnancy, Childbirth and Outcome:
A Review of Patterns of Culture and Further Research Needs,” in S. A.
Richardson and A. F. Guttmacher, eds., Chi Id- bearing: Its Social and
Psychological Aspects (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1967). See also
Elsie Clews Parsons on pregnancy taboos in David Meltzer, ed., Birth (New
York: Ballantine, 1973), PP.34–38.
9. Mead and Newton, op. cit., p. 148.
10. Ibid., pp.170–75.
11. Freedman and Ferguson, op. cit., p. 367.
12. Sheila Kitzinger, The Experience of Childbirth (Baltimore: Penguin,
1973), pp.17–25.
13. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (Baltimore:
Penguin, 1954), pp.747–48.
14. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1942), p. 353.
15. Elizabeth Mann Borgese, The Ascent of Woman (New York: Braziller,
1963)^. 44.
16. Walter Radcliffe, Milestones in Midwifery (Bristol: Wright, 1967), p.
81; R. P. Finney, The Story of Motherhood (New York: Liveright, 1937),
pp.169–75.
17. Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York:
Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1974)^. 226.
18. O. W. Holmes, “The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever” (1843), in
Epoch-Making Contributions to Medicine, Surgery and the Allied Sciences
(Philadelphia: 1909).
19. H. W. Haggard, Devils, Drugs and Doctors (New York and London:
Harper and Bros., 1929), p. 116.
20. B. Ehrenreich and D. English, Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual
Politics of Sickness (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1973)>PP-26-36- .
21. Finney, op. cit., pp.186–90. Sylvia Plath, The Bell far (New York:
Bantam, 1972), p. 53.
22. H. Speert and A. Guttmacher, Obstetric Practice (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1956), p. 305.
23. Grantly Dick-Read, Childbirth Without Fear: The Principles and
Practice of Natural Childbirth (New York: Harper and Row, 1970); first
published 1944.
24. Pierre Vellay et. al., Childbirth Without Pain (New York: Dutton, 1968),
pp.18–21.
25. K. D. Keele, Anatomies of Pain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), p. 182.
26. Suzanne Arms, Immaculate Deception: A New Look at Women and
Childbirth in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), PP.145–46.
27. Kitzinger, op. cit., pp.17–25.
28. Vellay, op. cit., pp. 28, 151.
29. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New York: Bantam, 1972),
pp.198-99.
30. Cora Sandel, Alberta Alone, trans. Elizabeth Rokkan (London:
Women’s Press Ltd., 1980), p. 94; first published 1939.
31. Brigitte Jordan, Department of Anthropology, Michigan State
University, “The Cultural Production of Childbirth,” 1974 (unpublished ).
32. Arms, op. cit., p. 83; Judith Brister, “Vertical Delivery: Childbirth
Improved?” Detroit News, June 1971.
33. Roberto Caldeyro-Barcia, M.D., director of the Latin American Center
for Perinatology and Human Development, and president of the
International Federation of Gynecologists and Obstetricians, at a meeting of
the American Foundation for Maternal and Child Health, April 9, 1975.
(Jane Brody, “Some Obstetrical Methods Criticized,” New York Times,
April 10, 1975.)
34. Jordan, op. cit.; see also Fuller and Jordan, op. cit.
35. Margaret Mead, Male and Female, p. 268.
36. Doris Haire, “The Cultural Warping of Childbirth,” International
Childbirth Education Association, 1974. Copies of this pamphlet can be
obtained by writing to the International Childbirth Education Association
Supplies Center, 1414 N.W. 85th St., Seattle, Wash. 98117.
37. Arms, op. cit., p. 279.
38. Ibid., pp.125–26.
39. Ibid., p. 22.
40. Mary Jane Sherfey, The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality (New
York: Vintage, 1973), pp.100–101.
41. Niles Newton, ‘The Trebly Sensuous Woman.” Psychology Today, issue
on “The Female Experience,” 1973.
42. Alice Rossi, “Matemalism, Sexuality and the New Feminism,” in
Contemporary Sexual Behavior: Critical Issues in the 1970’s, ed. J. Zubin
and J. Money (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), Pp.145–
71.
43. Kathy Linck, “Legalizing a Woman’s Right to Choose,” in Proceedings
of the First International Childbirth Conference, 1973, New Moon
Communications, Box 3488, Ridgeway Station, Stamford, Conn. 06905.

VIII. MOTHER AND SON, WOMAN AND MAN

1. Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City, quoted in Franz Kobler, ed., Her
Children Call Her Blessed: A Portrait of the Jewish Mother (New York:
Stephen Daye, 1953), p. 234.
2. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. and
trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 133; A General
Introduction to Psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Garden City
Publishing, 1943), p. 183.
3. Sherry Ortner, “Oedipal Father, Mother’s Brother and the Penis: A
Review of Juliet Mitchell’s Psycho-Analysis and Feminism,” Feminist
Studies, Vol. 2, No.2–3(1975).
4. Robert Briffault, The Mothers (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1969), I
:259-64.
5. George Jackson, Soledad Brother (New York: Bantam, 1970), pp.9–10.
6. Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father (New York: Schocken, 1966), PP*45–
47.
7. Frederick Leboyer, Birth Without Violence (New York: Knopf, 1975),
Pp.26–27.
8. Duncan Emrich, American Folk Poetry (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974)>
P-739
9. D. H. Lawrence, “The Symbolic Meaning,” quoted in Tom Marshall, The
Psychic Mariner: A Reading of the Poems of D. H. Lawrence (New York:
Viking, 1970), p. 53.
10. G. Rachel Levy, Religious Conceptions of the Stone Age (New York:
Harper Torchbooks, 1963), pp. 53, 157; Erich Neumann, The Great Mother
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp.256–58.
11. Leslie H. Farber, “He Said, She Said,” Commentary, March !972,P. 55.
12. Karen Homey, Feminine Psychology (New York: Norton, 1967), pp.
113, 117, 138, 141.
13. Denis de Rougement, Love in the Western World (New York: Anchor
Books, 1956), pp.1–45.
14. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies. I am indebted to Lilly Engler
for the translation of these lines. Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids
Brigge, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: Norton, 1949), pp.120–21.
15. Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. J. B. Greene and M. D. Herter
Norton (New York: Norton, 1945), I:71–72.
16. Vem L. Bullogh, The Subordinate Sex: A History of Attitudes Toward
Women (Baltimore: Penguin, 1974), p. 29.
17. Ibid., pp.231–32.
18. Ibid., pp.173–74.
19. Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex, with a New PostChristian
Introduction by the Author (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1975),
pp.149–52.
20. Bullogh, op. cit., pp.225–26.
21. John S. Haller and Robin M. Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in
Victorian America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1974), pp.100–
101.
22. Viola Klein, The Feminine Character: History of an Ideology (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1972), p. 26.
23. Joseph C. Rheingold, M.D., The Mother, Anxiety and Death: The
Catastrophic Death Complex (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1967), p.119.
24. James Daugherty, Abraham Lincoln (New York: Viking, 1943), p. 160.
25. Margaret Mead, ed., An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth
Benedict (New York: Equinox Books, 1973), p. 123.
26. L. van Gelder and C. Carmichael, “But What About Our Sons?” MS.,
October 1975, pp. 52®.
27. Karen Homey, New Ways in Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1939).
28. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, pp.86–
87. 129
29. Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp.142–43. Bruno Bettelheim,
Symbolic Wounds (New York: Collier, 1962), pp.118–19.
30. Ortner, op. cit., p. 180.
31. Juliet Mitchell, Psycho-Analysis and Feminism (New York: Vintage,
1975).
32. Richard Gilman, “The Feminist Case Against Sigmund Freud,” New
York Times Magazine, January 31, 1971, p. 10.
33. Jean Strouse, ed., Women and Analysis: Dialogues on Psychoanalytic
Views of Femininity (New York: Grossman, 1974), p. 58.
34. Charlotte Baum, Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michel, The Jewish Woman
in America (New York: Dial, 1976).
35. Pauline Bart, “Portnoy’s Mother’s Complaint: Depression in Middle-
Aged Women,” Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review, special issue on
“The Jewish Woman,” No. 18 (Summer 1973), pp.129–41.
36. See Mary Jane Sherfey, The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality
(New York: Vintage, 1973); Niles Newton, “The Trebly Sensuous Woman,”
Psychology Today, issue on “The Female Experience,” 1973; and Newton,
“Interrelationships between sexual responsiveness, birth, and breast
feeding,” and Alice Rossi, “Ma- temalism, Sexuality, and the New
Feminism,” both in J. Zubin and J. Money, eds., Contemporary Sexual
Behavior (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
37. Van Gelder and Carmichael, op. cit.
38. Robert Reid, Marie Curie (New York: Dutton Saturday Review, 1974),
P* 2°6*
39. Klein, op. cit., p. 26.
40. Theodore Stanton and Harriet Stanton Blatch, eds., Elizabeth Cady
Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences (New York:
Amo, 1969), II:38–42. 31,130–31.1 am indebted to Elizabeth Shanklin for
bringing these passages to my attention.
41. Sue Silvermarie, “The Motherbond,” Women: A Journal of Liberation,
Vol. 4, No. 1, pp.26–27.
42. Robin Morgan, “The Child,” part IV of “The Network of the Imaginary
Mother,” in Lady of the Beasts (New York: Random House, 1976).
43. Jane Lazarre, “On Being a Father in the Year of the Woman,” Village
Voice, September 22, 1975.
44. M. Esther Harding, Woman’s Mysteries (New York: C. G. Jung
Foundation, 1971), pp.192–94.
45. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s
Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1973).
46. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1968),
pp.269–70.
47. Olive Schreiner, Dreams (Pacific Grove, Calif.: Select Books, 1971),
PP- 59“62> published 1890.

IX. MOTHERHOOD AND DAUGHTERHOOD

Epigraph from “Mother and Child,” in Like the Iris of an Eye, by Susan
Griffin (New York: Harper and Row, 1976).
1. Alice Rossi, “Physiological and Social Rhythms: The Study of Human
Cyclicity,” special lecture to the American Psychiatric Association, Detroit,
Michigan, May 9, 1974; “Period Piece—Bloody but Unbowed,” Elizabeth
Fenton, interview with Emily Culpeper, The Real Paper, June 12, 1974.
2. Charles Strickland, “A Transcendentalist Father: The ChildRearing
Practices of Bronson Alcott,” History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal
of Psycho-History, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Summer 1973), PP. 23, 32.
3. Midge Mackenzie, ed., Shoulder to Shoulder (New York: Knopf, 1975),
p. 28.
4. Margaret Mead, Male and Female (New York: Morrow, 1975), p. 61.
5. David Meltzer, Birth (New York: Ballantine, 1973), pp. 3, 5,6–8.
6. Lloyd deMause, “The Evolution of Childhood,” in deMause, ed., The
History of Childhood (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), pp.25–26. 120.
7. Jane Lilienfeld, “Yes, the Lighthouse Looks Like That: Marriage
Victorian Style,” unpublished paper, presented at the Northeast Victorian
Studies Association, Conference on the Victorian Family, April18–20.
1975, Worcester, Mass.
8. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927),
pp. 58, 92, 126, 79, 294.
9. Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale (New York: Gros- set and
Dunlap, 1951), p.46.
10. Diaries and letters of Paula Modersohn-Becker, translated by Liselotte
Erlanger, unpublished manuscript, quoted by permission of the translator.
See Diane Radycki, ed., and trans., The Letters and Journals of Paula
Modersohn-Becker (Metuchen, N.J., and London: The Scarecrow Press,
1980).
11. Thomas Johnson, ed., The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), III: 782.
12. Sylvia Plath, Letters Home, ed. Aurelia Plath (New York: Harper and
Row, 1975), pp. 32, 466.
13. Virginia Woolf, op. cit., p. 79.
14. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (New York: Pocket Books,
1974), p. 32; first published 1928.
15. Sue Silvermarie, “The Motherbond,” Women: A Journal of Liberation,
Vol. 4, No. 1, pp.26–27.
16. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual:
Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.” Signs, Vol. 1,
No. 1, pp.1–29.
17. Lillian Krueger, “Motherhood on the Wisconsin Frontier,” Wisconsin, A
Magazine of History, Vol. 29, No. 3, pp.336–46.
18. Lynn Sukenick, “Feeling and Reason in Doris Lessing’s Fiction,”
Contemporary Literature, Vol. 14, No. 4, p. 519.
19. Doris Lessing, A Proper Marriage (New York: New American Library,
1970) p. 111.
20. Kate Chopin, The Awakening (New York: Capricorn, 1964), p. 14; first
published 1899.
21. Cora Sandel, Alberta Alone, trans. Elizabeth Rokkan (London: Peter
Owen, 1965), p. 51; first published 1939.
22. C. Kerenyi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter (New
York: Pantheon, 1967), pp.13–94.
23. Ibid., pp.127–28.
24. Ibid., p. 130.
25. Ibid., pp.132–33.
26. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (New York: Popular Library, , pp.213–
14.218–19.222–23.
27. Jean Mundy, Ph. D., “Rape—For Women Only,” unpublished paper
presented to the American Psychological Association, September 1, 1974,
New Orleans, La.
28. Clara Thompson, “ ‘Penis Envy’ in Women,” in Jean Baker Miller, ed.,
Psychoanalysis and Women (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973). p. 54
29. Robert Seidenberg, “Is Anatomy Destiny?” in Miller, op. cit., pp. 310–
11.
30. Tillie Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle (New York: Delta Books, 1961), pp. 1–
12.
31. Evelyn Reed, Woman’s Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to
Patriarchal Family (New York: Pathfinder, 1975), pp. 12–14.
32. Adrienne Rich, “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman,”
in On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose1966–1978(New York:
Norton, 1980).
33. Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York: Norton, 1961), pp.28-
29.

x. VIOLENCE: THE HEART OF MATERNAL

DARKNESS

1. The story recounted here is a true one; the statements quoted are from
actual newspaper reports. For obvious reasons of privacy, I have not used
actual names or locations.
2. George H. Williams, ‘The Sacred Condominium,” in John T. Noonan, Jr.,
ed., The Morality of Abortion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1970), p. 150.
3. Oscar H. Wemer, The Unmarried Mother in German Literature (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1917), p. 21.
4. Ibid., pp.24–25.
5. Ibid., p. 1.
6. Ibid., pp.26–27. 9^
7. Ibid., pp.1–4.
8. Ben Barker-Benfield, “Anne Hutchinson and the Puritan Attitude
Towards Women,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall 1972).
9. Edward Moor, ed., Hindu Infanticide. An Account of the Measures
Adopted for Suppressing the Practise of the Systematic Murder by Their
Parents of Female Infants (London: 1811).
10. Ibid.
11. Lawrence Lader, Abortion (Boston: Beacon, 1967), pp.76–79.
12. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, letter to Woman’s Journal, quoted in Alma
Lutz, Created Equal (New York: John Day, 1940), p. 234. I am indebted to
Elizabeth Shanklin’s unpublished paper, “Our Revolutionary Mother:
Elizabeth Cady Stanton” (Women’s Studies Program, Sarah Lawrence
College) for this and the following reference.
13. Lutz, op. cit., pp.162–63. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony,
and Matilda J. Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage (New York: Source
Book Press, 1970), I:597–198.
14. “Infanticide in Japan: Sign of the Times?” New York Times, December
8, 1973.
15. May E. Fromm, M.D., “Psychoanalytic Considerations on Abortion,” in
Harold Rosen, ed., Abortion in America (Boston: Beacon, 1967), p. 210.
16. Henry J. Myers, M.D., “The Problem of Sterilization,” in Rosen, op.
cit., p. 93.
17. Milton H. Erickson, M.D., “The Psychological Significance of
Vasectomy,” in Rosen, op. cit., pp.57–58.
18. Jane Brody, “Birth Control Devices: What Studies Show About Side
Effects,” New York Times, March4, 1975; Harold Schmeck, “F.D.A. Warns
Birth Pill Raises Heart Attack Risk,” New York Times, August 27, 1975.
19. Noonan, op cit., p. 4.
20. Ibid., p. 16.
21. Ibid., pp.29–30.
22. Lader, op. cit., pp.76–79.
23. Ibid.y p. 17.
24. For examples, see Garrett Hardin, Mandatory Motherhood: The True
Meaning of the Right to Life (Boston: Beacon, 1974); Frances-Myma,
“Abortion: A Philosophical Analysis,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall
1972); Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” in M. Cohen, T.
Nagel, and T. Scanlon, eds., The Rights and Wrongs of Abortion (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp.3–23.
25. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s
Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1973), p. 112.
26. Susan Griffin, “Post-Abortion Interviews,” Scanlan’s Monthly, Vol. 1,
No. 5 (July 1970).
27. Harold Rosen, M.D., “The Hysterectomized Patient and the Abortion
Problem,” in Rosen, op. cit., p. 54; Joann Rogers, “Rush to Surgery,” New
York Times Magazine, September 21, 1975.
28. Flanders Dunbar, M.D., “A Psychosomatic Approach to Abortion and
the Abortion Habit,” in Rosen, op. cit., p. 27; Lader, op. cit., pp.22–23.
29. Lader, op. cit., pp.121–22.
30. Carl Djerassi, “Some Observations on Current Fertility Control in
China,” China Quarterly, No. 57 (January-March 1974), pp. 40ff.
31. Rev. George W. Clarke, Race Suicide—England’s Peril, pamphlet
published by the Duty and Discipline Movement (London: 1917).
32. Deborah S. Rosenfelt, ed., “Learning to Speak: Student Work,” Female
Studies X (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1975), P-54
33. Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio: From the Thirties (Boston: Delacorte, 1974),
P. 9.
34. Alta, Momma: A Start on All the Untold Stories (New York: Times
Change Press, 1974), pp.72–73.

OceanofPDF.com
INDEX

Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search
function to locate particular terms in the text.

abortion, x, xv–vii, xxi–xiii, 42, 265–69

Athenian, 132
Black nationalist movement and, 75
conservative backlash, xv–vii
guilt about, 268–69
in literature, 268
violence and, 267–69
Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Luker), xvi
Adonis, 212
adoption, single women and, 250–52
adultery, 61, 270
Aeschylus, 89
Eumenides, 120, 124
African Folktales and Sculpture (Radin),93
Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (Brownmiller), 14, 188, 259–60
Agamemnon, 120
aging, sexuality and, 183
Akhenaton, 123–24
Alaric, 239
Alberta and Freedom (Sandel), 161
Alcott, Abigail, 222
Alcott, Bronson, 222
Alcott, Louisa May, 222
Little Women, 46
Aldred, Cyril, 124
Alpert, Jane:
“Mother-Right,” 72
Alta:
Momma, 279
Amarnan family, Egyptian, 121, 123–25
Amazonism, 85, 249–50
Bachofen on, 87–88
American Tract Society, 44
analgesia, 176, 178–80, 185
verbal, 172
Anath, 122
Anatomies of Pain (Keele), 163
Ancient Tudaism (Weber), 121–22
“Androgyne and the Homosexual, The” (Stimpson), 77
androgyny, 76–77
anesthesia, childbirth and, 158–59, 167–71
anger, 45–46
coexisting with love, 52
toward children, 22, 24, 277–78
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 164–66
Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (Grahn), 210
antisepsis, 151
Anti-Sex, The (Master, Lea), 114
Apache mother-son relationships, 199
Aphrodite, feast of, 122
Aphroditean matriarchy, 88
Apollo, 118, 120, 124–25
Apollodorus, 89
Arabs, infanticide and, 259
Arapesh women in labor, 163
Argentina, birth control in, 273
Arguelles, Lourdes, 5
Aristotle, 266
Arms, Suzanne, 102
Immaculate Deception, 133, 150, 173, 180–81
Artemis, 107, 121, 12.4
Artificial insemination, 76
Asch, Adrienne, xvii
asepsis, 138, 141, 145, 146, 151, 155
Asherah, 120, 122
Ashford, Janet Isaacs, xii
Astarte 72, 120, 122
Aten, 123–24, 226
Athena, 120, 122, 124
Athenian midwifery, 131–32
Attis, 212
Atum, 226
Atwood, Margaret, xxv
Surfacing, 240–42
Augustine, Saint, 266
Aurignacian period, 115
Awakening, The (Chopin), 236–37
axe, lunar, 100
Aztec culture, 109

Babylonian culture, 109

Bachofen, J. J., 56, 72 , 85
Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, 86–89
Bambara, Toni Cade, xxv–xvii
Banks Islanders, 186–87
Baptism, midwifery and, 134
Barker-Benfield, Ben, 136
“barrenness,” 119–20, 249
Barry, Kathleen, 137
Bart, Pauline, 203
bastards, 259
and courtly love, 159–60
see also illegitimacy
battered children, 277–78
Beauvoir, Simone de, 56, 252
The Second Sex, 60, 68, 80–81, 251
A Very Easy Death, 243
Bell Jar, The (Plath), 170
“Beloved Image” (Morton), 67
Benedict, Ruth, 195, 250
Berger, Brigitte, 58
on Mothers and Amazons, 86
Bemard, Jessie, 75–76
Bettelheim, Bruno, 102, 104, 113
Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Daly), 56, 213, 266–67
Beyond Psychology (Rank), 99
biology, female:
feminist reaction against, 72
psychology and, 204
radical implications of, 39–40
as source of power, 13, 72, 85
women’s fear of, 284–85
birth centers, xiii
birth control, x, 30, 41, 264–65
abortion and, 269
Athenian, 132
Black nationalist movement and, 75
in China, 75
governments and, 271–74
pills, 73, 265
risks of, 265
Birth Control and Controlling Birth: Woman-centered Perspectives (Holmes, Hoskins and Gross),
xix
Black nationalist movement, 75
Black women, xviii–ix, xxiii, 34–35 44, 75–76, 80, 179, 203–4, 253–54, 268
in literature, xxv, xxvi–xvii
Blank, Robert H., xxi
Blood, see menstrual blood
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–85 (Rich), 219
Bluest Eye, The (Morrison), xxv
Bly, Robert, 77
Bock, Gisela, xxi
Bolshevik Revolution, 192
Boston Female Liberation, 262
Boston Strangler, 187–88
Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, The, xi, 265, 268, 281, 282
Bourgeois, Louise, 187–88
Boytz, Laura, xv
Brahmins:
infanticide and, 262
mother-daughter relationships, 244–45
Braided Lives (Piercy), 268
Breast-feeding, see nursing
Briffault, Robert, 56, 72, 101, 157
on maternal sentiment, 126
on the menstrual taboo, 103–4
The Mothers, 59–60, 86–87, 89–90, 96
Brontë, Charlotte, 252
Brontë, Emily, 252
Brown Girl, Brown Stones (Marshall), xxvi
Brownmiller, Susan:
Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, 14, 188, 259–60
Buck, Pearl:
The Good Earth, 166
Byrthe of Mankynde, The, 138

Caesarean section, 133, 150

Caldeyro-Barcia, Roberto, 178
Calhoun, A. W., 34–35, 49
“California Should Legalize Lay Midwives” (Ashford), xii
Campbell, Joseph, 67, 72, 117
foreword to Mothers and Amazons, 86
on the Great Goddess, 115
on the importance of myth, 102–3
Capital (Marx), xviii
capitalism, 54–55, 102
child-care and, 14
lesbians and, 192
sale of obstetrics and, 180–81
“Capitalism and Gay Identity” (d’Emilio ), 55
Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case of Socialist Feminism (Eisenstein) , xxiii
CARASA News, xvii
castration, 197, 198, 201, 202, 204, 212–13
Catal Hüyük, 96, 121
Catherine the Great, 260
Catholic Church:
abortion and, 266
sexism and, 270
see also Christianity
Catholics For A Free Choice, 281
caudal anesthesia, 170
cave as female symbol, 188
Chamberlen, Hugh, 143–44
Chamberlen, Peter I, 142–43
Chamberlen, Peter 11, 142–43
Chamberlen, Peter Ill, 143
Chamberlen, William, 142
Chamberlen forceps, 142–45, 146
Chapman, Edward, 145
Chekov, Anton:
“Sleepy,” 68
Child, Lydia Maria, 45–46
child abuse, xxxiv, 38
childbirth, 129–55
conflict between midwives and surgeons, 145–51
demedicalization of, xi–ii
effect of Christianity on, 134–48
fear of, 163–67
hospital system and, 129, 163, 171, 173, 176–81, 184
“natural,” 162, 171–75, 182
childbirth (continued)
passivity in, 128–29, 168
“primitive,” 100, 130–31
as province of women, 131–34
puerperal fever and, 151–55
see also labor; midwifery; obstetrics
childbirth fever, see puerperal fever
child-care, free universal, xxxiii–xxiv, 14, 51–52
men and, xxxiii, 211, 216
opposition to, 49–50
“childlessness,” 249–52
“Children and Work in the Lives of Women” (Rossi), 53
Childress, Alice, 255
Florence, xxv
China:
birth control in, 55, 75, 271–73
infanticide in, 259
lesbians in, 55, 192
“China’s Population Policy” (Iver), 272
chlorofonn, for birth pains, 128, 168–70
Chodorow, Nancy, 244–45
Chopin, Kate:
The Awakening, 236–37
Christianity, 120, 121, 192, 270
abortion and, 166
childbirth and, 128, 134–38, 163
infanticide and, 259
circumcision, 197
Civil Rights movement, Black, 80
Clark, Alice, 261
Clark, George W., 273–74
class analysis, 112
class generalization, 236
Clement, Julien, 146
clitoridectomies, 170
cloning, 76, 111, 282
Clytemnestra, 122
colonized peoples, patriarchy and, 65
“Combahee River Collection: A Black Feminist Statement, The,” xxiii
Corner, Lee Sanders, 54
Committee for Abortion Rights and against Sterilization Abuse, xvii, xix
communes, 282–83
Complete Practice of Midwifery (Stone), 150
“Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (Rich), 219
condoms, 265
“Conduct of Normal Labor, The” (Bryand, Danforth, Davis), 146
conservatism, in the 1980s, xiv–v
contagion, 145, 151, 153
“Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever, The” (Holmes), 153
contraception, see birth control
COPE, 269
“COPE-jng with the Aftermath of Abortion” (Lindsay), 269
Cotton, John, 136
courtly love tradition, 159–60
cow as symbol, the, 100
craniotomy, 133
Craton, Michael, xviii–ix
creativity, female, 70
male dread of, 40
Crow, 57
Cuba, homosexuals in, 55
Culpepper, Emily, 106
Cult of the Mother-Goddess, The (James),93
“Cultural Warping of Childbirth, The” (Haire), 179–80
Cuna Indians of Panama, 163
“Cutting Edge: A Look at Male Motivation in Obstetrics and Gyneco]ogy, The” (Barry), 137
Cybele,72
Cycladic female figures, 94
Cypriot female figures, 94

Daly, Mary, 62., 77, 80, 12.1–22, 252

Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation, 56, 213, 266–67
Dangerous Sex, The (Hays), 114
Daphne,24
Das Mütterrecht (Bachofen), 88–89
Daughter of the Earth (Smedley), 47
Davis, Angela, xviii–ix, 58
Davis, Elizabeth Could:
The First Sex, 72, 86, 91–93
death:
and the idea of the Mother, 108
mother-son relationships and, 188–89
deMause, Lloyd, 226
Demeter,72
Eleusinian cult of, 122, 238–40
Demetrian matriarchy, 88
d’Emilio, John, 55
demonic, see magic
De Partu Hominis, 138
DeSalvo, Albert, 188
destructive obstetrics, see obstetrics, destructive
Deutsch, Helene, 168
Diana of Ephesus, 72, 94
diaphragms, 265
Dickinson, Emily, 229–30, 252
Dick-Read, Grantly, 162, 166, 171–73, 175
Diner, Helen:
Mothers and Amazons, 56, 72, 85, 86
Dionysian matriarchy, 88
Dionysus, cult of, 12;
“Distrust Between the Sexes, The” (Homey), 111
divine family image, changes in, 121–23
Djerassi, Carl, 75, 271–72
Dominated Man (Memmi), 251
Douglas, Mary, 10;
Downer, Carol, xi
dragons, 11 7–18
Drama of the Gifted Child: How Narcissistic Parents Form and Deform the Emotional Lives of Their
Talented Children (Miller), 38
dream analysis, Freudian, 196
Duino Elegies, The (Rilke), 189–90

Ebers Papyrus, 132

ecology movement, 74–76, 271
Egypt, 109, 132
Amarna period, 123–25
female figures, predynastic, 94
Ehrenreich, Barbara:
For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women, x
Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, 135, 137–39
Eisenstein, Zillah, xxiii
Eleusinian mysteries, 122, 237–40
Eleusis (Kerenyi), 238–40
Eliot, George, 252
Ellis, Havelock, 168
embryotomy, 133
employment laws, see labor laws
employment statistics, women, 51, 53
Engels, Frederick, 56, 80, 110–13, 119
English, Deirdre:
For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women, x
Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, 135, 137–39
environmental protection movement, see ecology movement
episiotomies, 177–78
ergot, effects of, 140
Erikson, Erik, 97
Essay for the Improvement of Midwifery (Chapman), 145
Eternal Eve (Graham), 132
Etiology, the Concept and the Prophylaxis of Childhood Fever, The (Semmelweis), 153
Eumenides (Aeschylus), 120, 124
Euripides, 89
Eve, myth of, 44–45, 119, 128, 156, 168
extrauterine reproduction, 174, 282

factories, growth of: women and, 46–52

Falk, Marcia:
“What about God?” 67
family, the, 60–61, 127
in the American colonies, 43–44
Briffault on, 89–90
kibbutzes and, 200
“protective” legislation and, 49
socialism and, 54–55, 112, 119
“Family Structure and Feminine Personality (Chodorow), 244–45
Fanon, Frantz, 214
“Fascinating Fascism” (Sontag), 79
fascist aesthetics, cult of, 79
father-son relationship, 57, 197, 226
Faust (Goethe), 260
fear of childbirth, 163–67
fear of women, 40, 70–71, 103–5, 111–18, 213–14
Fear of Women, The (Lederer), 114
“Female World of Love and Ritua1: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,
The” (Smith-Rosenberg), 233–34
“feminine principle, the,” 76–77, 87, 95
feminist movement, xii–v, 79–81, 282
challenge to socialism, 112
criticism of mothers, 224–25
female biology and, 39–40
scholarship and, 16–17
having sons and, 204–9
Ferguson, Vera, 156, 163
feudalism:
father-son relationships and, 57
power relationships, 64
Fine, Michelle, xvii
Finney, R. P.:
The Story of Motherhood, 132
Firestone, Shulamith, 72, 76, 77, 80, 174
First Sex, The (Davis), 72, 86, 91–93
Flight from Womczn, The (Stern), 76
Florence (Childress), xxv
foam (birth control), 265
“Folklore of Birth Control, The” (Gordon) , xix
Forced Labor (Shaw), x
forceps, 142–50, 170, 177–78
 Chamberlen, 142–45, 146
For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (Ehrenreich and English), x
Forster, E. M., 81
Howards End, 65–66
For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Childrearing and the Roots of Violence (Miller), 38, 231
Fox, Robin, 113
Frederick the Great, 260
Freedman, Lawrence, 156, 163
Freeman, Jo, xi
Freud, Sigmund, 73, 80, 210
“On Femininity,” 204
mother-son relationship and, 196–198, 200–204
“On Negation,” 63–64
Totem and Taboo, 99
Frobenius, Leo, 126
From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (Hams), 255
Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda, 110, 183, 198
frontier, women and the American, 234–35
Fuller, Margaret, 250–52
Fuller, Nancy, 156–57

Gaea, 122
Galen, 133, 134
Gandhi, Indira, 200
Gardner, Augustus K., M.D., 142
Gavron, Hannah, 53
Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth, 77, 285
genetic revolution, xv, 76, 282
Giddings, Paula, 80
Goddess-worship, see Great Goddess
Goethe, Johann von, 210
Faust, 260
Good Earth, The (Buck), 166
Gordon, Alexander, 153
Gordon, Linda, xix
Graham, Harvey:
Eternal Eve, 132, 144–45
Grahn, Judy, 210
Graves, Robert:
The White Goddess, 72, 86
Great Goddess, 72, 93–101, 107–9, 115–18
destruction of, 119–27
Great Mother, see Great Goddess
Great Pulse: Japanese Midwifery and Obstetrics Through the Ages, The (Standlee), 137
Greeks, The (Kitto), 114
Greenburg, Dan, 203
Greenland, Garry, xix
Griffin, Susan:
“Rape: The All-American Crime,” 13–14, 74
Grimal, Paul, 93
Grimké sisters, 69
Gross, Michael, xix
gynarchy, 59, 72
gynocentric period, evidence of, 93–101, 107–9
gynocracy, 59–60

Haire, Doris:
“The Cultural Warping of Childbirth,” 179–80
Hall, RadclyfIe, xxv, 231–32
Hampshire, Stuart, 42–43
Harding, Esther, 107, 212–13
on the menstrual taboo, 104–5
Hanis, Trudier, 255
Harrison, Beverly Wildung, xii, 267
Harrison, Jane, 56, 72, 92, 124–2 5
on the Eleusinian mysteries, 240
on Pandora, 122
Harrison, Michelle, x
Hartley, C. G., 104
Harvey, William, 140, 141, 152
Hathor, 123
Hays, H. R.:
The Dangerous Sex, 114
health-care movement, women’s, x–ii, 173, 281
Heilbron, Carolyn:
Toward a Recognition of Androgyny, 76–77
Hera, 122
Herodotus,88
hero myth, 117–18
Hesiod, 122
heterosexuality, institutionalized, 41–43, 54–55, 61, 218–19, 250
“Hidden Woman, The” (Styron), 283
Higgins, Reynold, 93
Hindu:
childbirth, 132–33
law, women and, 192
Hippocrates, 132–34
History of the Art of Midwifery, A, 142
Holmes, Helen B., xix
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 152, 153, 167, 169
“The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever,” 153
home, the:
history of, 46–52
as an institution, 44
loneliness and, 53
socialism and, 54–55
Homeric Hymns, The (Sargent), 238
“Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution: Notes toward an Understanding of the Cuban
Lesbian and Gay Male Experience” (Arguelles and Rich), 55
homosexuals, 210–11
 in cuba, 55
psychoanalysis and, 196, 210
see also lesbianism
Hook extraction, 133
Homey, Karen, 71, 207
“The Distrust Between the Sexes,” 111
on the fear of women, 113–14
on the Oedipus complex, 196–98
Horns, 212
Hoskins, Betty B., xix
hospital system, childbirth and, 129, 163, 171, 173, 176–81, 184
Howards End (Forster), 65–66
How To Be a Jewish Mother (Greenburg), 203
Hubbard, Ruth, 282
Hughes, Ted, 230
“Human Sterilization: Emerging Technologies and Re-emerging Social Issues” (Blank), xxi
Hunter, William, 147–48
hunting, 115, 121
Hutchinson, Anne, 70, 105, 135–37
Hyde Amendment, xx
hypnosis, childbirth and, 172
hysterectomies, 268

Ibsen, Henrik, 42
illegitimacy, 42, 58, 61
infanticide and, 259–60
medieval, 159–60
Immaculate Deception (Arms), 133, 150, 173, 180–81
“implicational analysis,” 101–2
“ImpIicational Structures in the Sexual Division of Labor” (White, Burton, Bmdner, Gunn) , 101–2
“Incarcerated Mothers Kept from Children” (Boytz), xv
incest taboo, 104, 186
India:
childbirth in, 163
infanticide in, 261–62
mother-daughter relationship in, 244–45
Indians, American, xx
industrialization:
father-son relationships and, 57
motherhood and, 44, 46–52
infanticide, 68, 136, 256–58, 263–65, 277–78
female, 120, 195, 226–27
history of, 259–62
infants, 38, 101–2
mortality, x, 47
infection, see puerperal fever
In-Hospital Birth Centers in Perspective (Olsen), xii
International Childbirth Education
Association, 1 79
International Women’s Year, East Berlin World Congress of Women, 274
International World Population Conference (Bucharest, 1974), 74–75
intuitive knowledge, patriarchy and, 62
Ion (Euripides), 89
Iroquois mother-son relationship, 199
Ishtar, 72, 120
Isis, 72, 122, 123
“I Stand Here Ironing” (Olsen), 247
IUDs, 26;
Iver, Gwen, 272

James, E. O., 93, 121

Jane Eyre (Bronte), 252
Janeway, Elizabeth, 202
Japan:
abortion in, 271
infanticide in, 259, 262
Jewish-American mothers, 202–3, 235–36
see also Judaism
Jewish Woman in America, The (Baum, Hyman, Michel), 203
Johnston, Jill, 85
Jones, Margaret, 135
Jordan, Brigitte, 156–57, 177–78
Joseph, Gloria I., xxvii
Journey Is Home, The (Morton), 67
Judaism:
childbirth and, 128, 156, 163
the Great Goddess and, 121–22
the menstrual taboo and, 106
Jung Carl, 95, 122, 213

Kabbalah, 122
Kali, 116, 118, 188
Keele, K. D., 163
Kelly, Joan, 16
Kerenyi, C.:
Eleusis, 238–40
Kitto, H. F.:
The Greeks, 114
Kitzinger, Sheila, 164, 173, 180
Kogawa, Joy, xxix
Kollwitz, Kathe, 276
Koran, 120, 122
Korê, 238–40

labor, 156–85
anesthesia and, 158–59
artificial induction of, 178–79
pain and, 157–59, 165–66, 168–76, 181
terrorization of, 133
Victorian era and, 169–70
see also childbirth
labor laws, for women and children, 48–49
Labrys in gynocentric culture, 100
Ladner, Joyce, xxvi, xxvii
Lady, The (Putnam), 71
Lamaze, Femand, 172–74
language, patriarchy and, 42, 58, 67, 249
Larousse World Mythology (ed. Grimal),93
Las Bases (Argentina), 172
laudanum, for birth pains, 128
Lazarre, Jane, 211
Lea, Edward:
The Anti-Sex, 114
Leake, John, 145–46
Lederer, Wolfgang:
The Fear of Women, 114
Lerner, Gerda, 16–17
“Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges,” 16–17
lesbianism, xxx–xxii, 42, 105–6, 231–32, 249–52
mother-daughter relationships and, 231–33
socialism and, 54–55
“Lesbian Mothers: An Overview and Analysis of the Research” (Pollack) , xxxi–xxii
Lesbian Mothers’ National Defense Fund, 281
Lessing, Doris, xxv, 160, 236
Letters Home (Plath), 230–31
Letters of Olive Schreiner, 168
Lévi-Strauss, Claude:
“The Science of the Concrete,” 100
Levret, André, 146–47
Levy, G. Rachel:
Religious Conceptions of the Stone Age, 94, 108, 115–18
Lifton, Robert jay, 201
Like One of the Family . . . Conversations from a Domestic’s Life (Childress), 255
Lilienfeld, Jane, 227
Lincoln, Abraham, 193
Lindsay, Karen, 269
lithotomy position, 146, 170, 177–78, 180
Little Women (A1cott), 46
Lorde, Audre, x, xxvi, xxviii, 268
Los Angeles Feminist Women’s Health Center, xi
Louis XIV, 139
Luker, Kristen, xvi
Luna, 107

McIntosll, Maria, 45
MacKenzie, Midge, 169
McKinley, Laura, 274
Madrigal v. Quilligan, xx
magic, 13, 57, 164
of menstrual blood, 101, 105–6
prepatriarchal pottery and, 96–98
 women seen as, 70, 102, 114, 125–27
see also witchcraft
Male and Female (Mead), 71, 120–21, 179
Malinowski, Bronislaw:
The Sexual Life of Savages, 99
Malle, Louis, 186
Manheim, Ralph, 86, 89
Maoism, see China
Marcuse, Herbert 77
Maria Theresa of Austria, 260
Mariceau, François, 143–44
marriage, 64
women’s employment and, 48–49
Marshall, Paule, xxvi, xxviii
Marx, Kar1, xviii
Marxism, xxiii, 54–55, 80–81, 100–12
Masters, R. E. L.:
The Anti-Sex, 114
Masters and Johnson, 183, 204
Maternal Emotions (Newton), 64
Maternity: Letters from Working Women, 256, 269–70
“Matriarchists, The,” 52
matriarchy, 58–60
Aphroditean, 88
controversy over, 72–73
Demetrian, 88
Dionysian, 88
Goddess-worship, 93–101, 107–9
theories about, 84–93
matrilineal societies, 57–59
Matronit, 122
“matrophobia,” 235–36
Mayan Indian women in labor, 156–57
Mead, Margaret, 105, 126, 156
Male and Female, 71, 120–21, 179
Medea, 116, 122
Medea (Euripides), 89
Medicaid, xx
Médici, Marie de, 141
Medicine, Bea, xxvii–xviii
“Medley” (Bambara), xxv
Medusa, 118
Meir, Golda, 200
Mellaart, James, 96, 121
Memmi, Albert, 251
menstrual blood, 57, 103–7, 221
“magic” of, 101, 105–6
taboo, 103–7, 117
Menstruation and Menopause (Weideger),10;
Michulski, Joanne, 256–58, 263–65, 277
midwifery, xi–ii, 129–55, 179–81
Athenian, 131–32
conflict with surgeons, 145–51
diminishing effectiveness of, 141–42
male, 129, 135, 139–41
by priests, 132
Roman, 133–34
witchcraft and, 135–58
Milestones in Midwifery (Radclyffe), 148
Miller, Alice, 38, 231
Millett, Kate:
Sexual Politics, 56, 60, 97
mills, see textile industry
Minoan and Mycenean Art (Riggins), 93
Minoan female figures, 94
Mitchell, Juliet, 198, 200–201
Mitscherlich, Alexander, 57
Modersohn-Becker, PauIa, 229
MOMMA, 2.81
Momma (Alta), 279
monotheism, patriarchy and, 66–67, 119–27
moon, 100, 103
Mothers, 107
worship of, 107, 108, 123, 125
Moraga, Cherríe, xxviii
Morgan, Robin, 208–9, 272
morphine, 170
Morris, Janis, 75
Morrison, Toni, xxv, xxvi
mortality from childbirth, 47
Morton, Nelle:
“Beloved Image,” 67
“Motherbond,” the, 207–8, 232–33
mother-daughter relationship, xxiv–xx, 218–55
early American, 233–35
Eleusinian mysteries, 237–40
Jewish mother, 202–3, 235–36
lesbianism and, 231–33
in literature, xxv–xix, 227–31, 236–37, 240–42, 247
matrophobia, 235–36
and the need for nurture, 242–48
motherhood, 13, 35–38
ancient, 67–68
“childlessness” and, 249–52
examination of, ix–
history of American, 43–53
maternal violence and, 256–80
nonbiological, 252–54
see also motherhood, institution of; mother-daughter relationship; mother-son relationship
motherhood, institution of, 13, 33–34, 39, 42, 218–19, 222–23, 250, 251, 263, 275–80
 capitalism and, 54
history of, 41–53
resistance to, 263–65
socialism and, 54–55
see also motherhood; motherdaughter relationship; motherson relationship
Motherhood in Bondage (Sanger), 4 1
mother-in-law taboo, 186–87
“Mother-Right” (Alpert), 72
Mothers, The (Briffault), 59–60, 86–87, 89–90, 96
Mothers and Amazons (Diner), 56, 72, 85, 86
Mother’s Book, The (Child) , 45–46
mother-son relationship, 186–217, 216
death and, 188–89
feminism and, 204–9
Freudians and, 196–98, 200–204
mother-son (continued)
guilt feelings and, 206
Jewish-American culture and, 202–3
separation and, 209–10
mud, linguistic connection to mother, 108
Murmer of the Heart (Malle), 186
myth, 92, 102–3
of creation, Persian, 110
of Eve, 44–45, 119, 128, 156, 168
of feminine guilt, 111
hero, 117–18
Olympian, 122–23
Myth, Religion, and Mother Right (Bachofen), 89

National Abortion Rights Action League, xxi, 281

National Geographic, 116
nationalism, 45
National Organization for Women, xxi
National Welfare Rights Organization, 281
natural childbirth, see childbirth, natural
Natural Childbirth (Dick-Read), 175
Navaho mother-in-law taboo, 187
“Navaho Women and the Resistence to Relocation” (Seggerman), xxix–xx
Nazis, xxi–xii, 271
Nazism, eroticization of, 79
nembutal, 170
neolithic era, 94, 100, 108, 115–18
Nepthys, 123
Neumann, Erich, 56, 67, 76, 9596, 111
on male maturity, 118
“Psychological Stages of Feminine Development,” 111
on taboos, 104
New Left, 78
“New Reproductive Technologies” (Hubbard with Sanford), 282
Newton, Niles, 163, 183, 204
 Maternal Emotions, 64
New York Psychoanalytic Institute, 197
New York Times, xiii, xv, 262, 273
“Niddah: Unclean or Sacred Sign?” (Culpepper), 106
Nightingale, Florence, 229
Nihell, Elizabeth:
Treatise on the Art of Midwifery, 146–50
Noonan, John, 270
Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, The (Rilke), 190
nursing, 35, 36, 220–21, 261–62
erotic response to, 183
Nut, 123

Oakes-Smith, Elizabeth, 79–80

Obasan (Kogawa), xxix
Observations Diverses (Bourgeois), 140–41
Observations on Midwifery (Willughby), 141
obstetrical chair, 146, 178
bstetrical Practice (Speert, Guttmacher), 170
obstetrics, X, 102, 128–55, 171–74
destructive, 133, 147, 150
forceps delivery, 142–50, 170, 177–78
puerperal fever, 151–55
takeover by men, 138–50
ocean as symbol, 108
Oedipus complex, 196–200
“Old Left’ Divided in Berlin over the ‘Woman Question,’ The” (McKinley, Russell), 274
Olsen, Katherine, xii
Olsen, Tillie:
“I Stand Here Ironing,” 247
Yonnondio: From the Thirties, 278–79
Olympian mythology, 122–23
On Femininity” (Freud), 204
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (Rich), xix
“On Negation” (Freud), 63–64
“On the Crevices of Anger” (Wong), xxviii–xix
opium:
for birth pains, 128
infanticide with, 261–62
Orestes, 120
orgasm, pregnancy and, 183
Ortner, Sherry, 200
OSiriS,212
Our Bodies, Ourselves, “The New" (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective), xi, xvii, 265, 268,
281, 282
Our Dead Behind Us (Lorde), x
Our Right to Choose: Toward et New Ethic of Abortion (Harrison), xii, 267
ovariotomies, 170
Ovid, 88

Paean, 124
pain, childbirth and, 157–59, 165–66, 168–76, 181
Paley, Grace, 235
Palfyne, Jean, 144
Palmer, Leonard, 121
Pandora, 122
Pankhurst, Christabel, 225
Pankhurst, Emmeline, 169
Paré, Ambroise, 139, 140
passivity in childbirth, 128–29, 168
Patai, Raphael, 120–22
patriarchy, xxiii–xiv, 56–83
Briffault on, 90
definition of, 57
destruction of female deities, 119–27
and the family, 127
and the fear of women, 118
and feminist movement against, 79–81
Freud and, 197–98
genetic revolution and, 76
and the history of women, 16–17
labor pain and, 159
male bonding, 199–200, 209–10
male “movements” against, 73–75
male problems with, 211–17
motherhood and, 107, 160, 226, 251–53
mother-son relationships and, 211–12
power relationships under, 64–73
Slater on, 123
women’s function in, 37–38, 43, 45
“patriochialism,” 16
“patrivincialism,” 16
Patterson, Orlando, xviii
peace movement, 78
penis:
“envy,” 114, 198, 200–201, 244
supernaturalizing of, 61
see also phallus
peonies, 124
perineum, tearing of, 177–78
Persephone, see Korê
Perussi, Tucho, 178
Peruvian Indians, 116
Petchesky, Rosalind, xxiii
phallus, in prepatriarchal culture, 99–100
see also penis
Piercy, Marge, 268
pig as symbol, 100, 122, 239
pills, birth control, see birth control pills
Pius, IX (pope), 266
(Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges” (Lerner), 16–17
Planned Parenthood, 271
Plath, Aurelia, 230
Plath, Sylvia:
The Bell Jar, 170
Letters Home, 230–31
Plato, 266
Plntarch, 88
PInto, 238
podalic version, 132, 139, 150
political prisoners, female, 283
Politics (Aristotle), 266
Politics of Women’s Liberation, The (Freeman), xi
Pollack, Sandra, xxxi–xxii
Polwhele, Richard, 168
population-control movement, 74–75, 102, 265, 271
Population Control Politics: Women, Sterilization, and Reproductive Choice (Shapiro), xx
Porlnoy’s Complaint (Roth), 203
Poseidon, 238
pottery making, 100–101, 116
as taboo for men, 96–97
as transfonnative, 97–98
power, patriarchial, 38, 64–73
colonialism, 65
over others, 64–66
psyche of the powerless, 65
women’s experiences of, 67–71
POwers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (Snitow, Stansell, and Thompson), 55
pre-Columbian female figures, 94
pregnancy, 63–64, 263–64
intercourse demanded during, 50–51
primitive theories on, 99
sexual responsiveness and, 183
unwanted, 267–69
vomiting during, 64
see also childbirth; labor
prepatriarchal:
consciousness, 115–18
life, 126
“primitive” childbirth, 100, 130–31
property:
gynocracy and, 59
patriarchy and, 60–61
prostitution, 270
“protective” legislation, xviii, 48–49
psychiatry and maternal violence, 263–64
“Psychological Stages of Feminine Development” (Neumann), 111
“psychoprophylactic method” of analgesia, 172
“psychosexual” method of childbirth, 173
puberty, male, 104, 199–200
puerperal fever, 151–55
Puritans:
infanticide and, 261
witchcraft and, 135–37
Purity and Danger (Douglas), 105
Putnam, Emily James:
The Lady, 71

Race Suicide-England’s Peril (Clark),273–74

racism, sexism and, 34–35, 65, 78, 253–55
“Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization and the State” (Bock),
xxi
Radcliffe, Walter, 148
radical femirism, see feminist movement
Radin, Paul, 93
Rank, Otto:
Beyond Psychology, 99
rape, 13–14, 34–35, 63, 73–74, 244
by abortionists, 267
Brownmiller on, 14, 188, 259–60
Griffin on, 13–14, 74
infanticide and, 259–60
within marriage, 265, 269–70
war and, 259–60
“Rape: The All-American Crime” (Griffin), 13–14, 74
“rationality,” partriarchy and, 62
Reid, Robert, 206
Relf sisters, xx, 75
Religious Conceptions of the Stone Age (Levy), 94, l08, 115–18
Republic (Plato), 266
Reston, James, xv
Rhea, 72, 122, 240
rhythm method, 265
Rich, Adrienne, xix, 219
Rich, B. Ruby, 55
“Right-to-Life” argument, 270
Rilke, Rainer Maria:
and Clara Westhoff, 190
Duino Elegies, 190
The Notebooks of Malte laurids Brigge, 190
“Third Duino Elegy,” 189–90
Rodriguez-Trias, Helen, M.D., xix, 268
Rome, pre-Christian:
abortion, 270
infanticide in, 259
Rongy, A. J., 139–40
Rossel Islanders, 120
Rossetti, Christina, 252
Rossi, Alice, 183, 204, 220
“Children and Work in the Lives of Women,” 53
Rosslin, Eucharius, 140
Roth, Philip:
Portnoy’s Complaint, 203
Rothman, Lorraine, xi
Rougemont, Denis de, 76
Rush, Benjamin, 130
Russell, Diana, 274

saddle-block anesthesia, 170

Sanchez, Tomas, 266
Sandel, Cora, 176–77, 237
Alberta and Freedom, 161
Sanford, Wendy, 282
Sanger Margaret, 30
Motherhood in Bondage, 41
Sargent, Thelma, 238
Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthome), 160
Schneider, David, 59
scholarship and women, 16–17
Schotz, Myra, 106
Schreiner, Olive, 168, 215
Letters of Olive Schreiner, 168
The Story of an African Farm, 69–70
Science and Liberation (Arditti, Brennan and Cavrak), 268
“Science of the Concrete, The” (Lèvi-Strauss), 100
scopolamine, 170
SDS,78
Seabirds Are Still Alive, The (Bambara), xxv
Seaman, Barbara, 100
Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica (Craton with Greenland), xix
Second Sex, The (de Beauvoir), 60, 68, 72, 80–81, 251
Segal, Barbara, 75
Seggerman, Victoria, xxix–xx
Selene, 107
Semmelweis, Ignaz Philipp, 153–55
serpent, in gynocentric culture, 100
Sexual Life of Savages, The (Malinowski), 99
Sexual Politics (Millett), 56, 60, 97
sexual revolution, 73
Shapiro, Thomas M., xx, xxii
Shaw, Nancy Stoner, x
Shekina, 122
Sherfey, Mary Jane, 204
Shoulder to Shoulder (MacKenzie), 169
Siegmundin, Justine, 146
Silvermarie, Sue, 207–9, 232–22
“To a Boy-Child,” 208
Simpson, Agnes, 128
Sisterhood Is Global (Morgan), 272
Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers, 281
Sixtus V (pope), 266
Slater, Philip, 72–73, 77, 122–23, 125, 132
slavery, xviii–ix, 44, 64, 65, 253
rape and, 34–35
Slavery and Social Death (Patterson), xviii
“Sleepy” (Chekov), 68
Smedley, Agnes:
Daughter of Earth, 47
Smellie, William, 146–47
Smith, Lillian, 253–54
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, xxv, 16, 233–34
Snitow, Ann, 55
socialism, women and, 54–55, 100–112, 192
de Beauvoir on, 80–81
Society of Friends, 271
sodium amytal, 170
“Some Observations on Current Fertility Control in China” (Djerrasi), 75, 271–72
son:
figure in religion, 121
initiation rites, 199–200
see also mother-son relationship
Sontag, Susan:
“Fascinating Fascism,” 79
Soranus of Ephesus, 134, 265–66
Southern Poverty Law Center, xx, 75
spenn:
banks, 76
romanticization of, 106
“Spirit-sister,” 252
Standlee, M. W., 137
Stansell, Christine, 55
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 206–7, 262
Stanton, Theodore, 206
Stephen, Julia, 227–28
sterilization, xix–xii, 29–30, 75, 102, 264, 268
“Sterilization Abuse” (RodriguezTrias), 268
Stem, Karl:
The Flight from Woman, 76
Stimpson, Catherine:
“The Androgyne and the Homosexual,” 77
Stone, Sarah, 146, 150
Complete Practice of Midwifery, 150
Story of an African Farm, The (Schreiner), 69–70
Story of Motherhood, The (FinneY), 13 2
Strabo,88
Styron, Rose, 283
Suffrage movement, 170, 206
Sukenick, Lynn, 235
Sula (Morrison), xxvi
sun-worship, 123–25
super-ego, 197–98
surgeons, conflict with midwives, 145–51
“Sylvia Plath: An Example of Forbidden Suffering” (Miller), 231

taboo:
female body as, 169
idealization of mother love, 38
incest, 104, 186
menstrual blood, 103–7, 117
mother-in-law, 186–87
pottery making, 96
pregnancy, 131
woman-to-woman, 255
Talbye, Dorothy, 261
Tanit, 120
Taylor, G. Rattray, 90
Tertullian,266
Textbook of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 146
textile industry, women and, 48–50
“There Are No Honest Poems about Dead Women” (Lorde), x
“Third Duino Elegy” (RiIke), 189–90
Thompson, Clara:
on penis envy, 198, 244
Thompson, Sharon, 55
Tiamat,72
Tietze, Christopher, 265
“To a Boy-Child” (Silvennarie), 208
Tolstoy, Leo:
Anna Karenina, 164–66
War and Peace, 165–66
Totem and Taboo (Freud), 99
To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 227–28, 237, 243
Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (Heilbrun), 76–77
transformation, pottery as a symbol of, 97–98
Treatise on the Art of Midwifery (Nihell),146–50
tree as symbol, 100, 124–25
Triptolemus, 239–40
tubal ligation, 268
“Twilight Sleep,” 170, 185

U .S. Agency for International Development, xx

U .S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, xx, xxii
Unmarried Mother in German Literature, The (Werner), 260
Upanishads,226
Uri, Connie, M.D., 268

Vallière, Louise de la, 139

vasectomy, 264
Vaughan, Hester, 262
Veblen, Thorstein, 71
Vellay, Pierre, 174
Very Easy Death, A (de Beauvoir) , 243
Victoria, Queen, 169, 262
Victorian era, xxiv, 34, 169–70, 192
father-son relationships, 57
infanticide, 262
Vietnamese women in labor, 163
Vietnam War, 78
Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A (Wollstonecraft), 284–85
violence:
in hero myths, 117–18
maternal, 38, 256–80
virgin, ancient meaning of, 107, 121, 249
Virgin Mary, 115, 121, 168, 183
vomiting during pregnancy, 64

Walbiri, the, 105

War and Peace (Tolstoy), 165–66
Washington, Mary Helen, xxvi
water as a symbol of the Goddess, 108
Weathermen, 78
weaving, women and, 48–49, 100–101
Weber, Max:
Ancient Judaism, 121–22
Weideger, Paula:
Menstruation and Menopause, 105
Weil, Simone, 158
Well of Loneliness, The (Hall), 231–32
Werner, Oscar, 260
Westhoff, Clara, 191
“What about God?” (Falk), 67
When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (Giddings), 80
White Goddess, The (Graves), 72, 86
Whole Birth Catalogue: A Sourcebook fOr Choices in Childbirth (Ashford ), xii
Willughby, Percival, 141
witches, 67, 111, 115, 252, 260
midwifery and, 135–40, 149
Puritans and, 135–37
Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (Ehrenreich, English), 135, 137–39
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 152, 168
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 284–85
Womancare Childbearing Clinic (San Diego), 281
Woman in Residence (Harrison), x
Woman Question in Europe, The (Stanton), 206
Woman’s Body, Woman’s R.ight: A Social History of Birth Control in America (Gordon), xix
Women, Class and Race (Davis), xviii
Women’s Cooperative Guild, 50, 256
women’s movement, see feminist movement
Women Under Attack: Abortion, Sterilization Abuse, and Reproductive Freedom, xix
Wong, Nellie, xxviii–xix
Woo, Merle, xxix
Woolf, Leonard, 227
Woolf, Virginia, xxv, 56, 252
To the Lighthouse, 227–28, 237, 243
work, women and:
in frontier homes, 46–48
in nineteenth-century factories, 44, 48–50
as wives of workers, 50–51
Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, The a (Clark), 261
“Working Mother as Role Model, The,” xii

Yonnondio: From the Thrities (Olsen), 278–79

Yucatan, the:
childbirth in, 178–79
mother-in-law taboo, 187

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Lorde), xxvi, xxviii, 268

Zaretsky, Eli, 54, 112
zero population growth movement, 74–75, 271
zeus, 120, 122

OceanofPDF.com
 Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007—2010
A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1997—2008
Poetry & Commitment: An Essay
Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004—2006
The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000—2004
What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics
The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 1950—2000
Fox: Poems 1998—2000
Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations
Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995—1998
Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991—1995
Collected Early Poems 1950—1970
An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988—1991
Time’s Power: Poems 1985—1988
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979—1985
Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems
Sources
A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978—1981
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966—1978
The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974—1977
Twenty—one Love Poems
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
Poems: Selected and New, 1950—1974
Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971—1972
The Will to Change: Poems 1968—1970
Leaflets: Poems 1965—1968
Necessities of Life
Snapshots of a Daughter—in—Law: Poems 1954—1962
The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems
A Change of World
OceanofPDF.com
One of our most distinguished poets, ADRIENNE RICH was born in
Baltimore in 1929. Over the last forty years she has published more than
seventeen volumes of poetry and five books of nonfiction prose, including
Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations; On Lied, Secrete, and
Silence; Blood, Bread, and Poetry; and What is Found There: Notebook) on
Poetry and Politico. She has received numerous awards, including the Ruth
Lilly Prize, the Lambda Book Award, the National Book Award, and the
Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. She lives in California.

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“In order for all women to have real choices all along the line,” Adrienne
Rich writes, “we need fully to understand the power and powerlessness
embodied in motherhood in patriarchal culture.” Rich’s investigation, in this
influential and landmark book, concerns both experience and institution.
The experience is her own — as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother
— but it is an experience determined by the institution, imposed in its many
variations on all women everywhere. She draws on personal materials,
history, research, and literature to create a document of universal
importance.

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Copyright © 1986, 1976 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Grateful
acknowledgment is made for permission to quote from the following: Conditions. From “On the
Crevices of Anger” by Nellie Wong in Conditions, 3:52-57. Reprinted by permission. Lilly Engler.
From the Third Elegy of the Duino Elegies, by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Lilly Engler.
Reprinted by permission of the translator. Harper & Row. From “Mother and Child” in Like the Iris
of an Eye by Susan Griffin. Copyright © by Susan Griffin. Reprinted by permission of Harper &
Row, Publishers, Inc., and the author. Hoosier Folklore. From “The Hanging of Sam Archer,” a folk
poem reported, with music, in Hoosier Folklore, 5 (1946). Reprinted by permission. Edite Kroll.
“The Child,” Part 4 of “The Network of the Imaginary Mother,” copyright © 1976 by Robin Morgan.
Reprinted from Lady of the Beasts by Robin Morgan, by permission of the author % Edite Kroll.
David Meltzer. From Birth, by David Meltzer, a verse translated by John A. Wilson. Reprinted by
permission of the author and North Point Press. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. From “There Are No
Honest Poems About Dead Women” in Our Dead Behind Us by Audre Lorde. Copyright © 1986 by
W. W. Norton. Reprinted by permission. Sue Silvermarie. From “To a Boy-Child,” by Sue
Silvermarie, which appeared in Women: A Journal of Liberation. Copyright © 1974. Reprinted by
permission. Sinister Wisdom Books. From A Gathering of Spirit: Writing and Art by North American
Indian Women edited by Beth Brant, Sinister Wisdom Books, Montpelier, VT, 1984. Reprinted by
permission. Times Change Press. From a poem by Alta that appeared in Momma: A Start on all the
Untold Stories, pp. 72-73, copyright © 1974 by Times Change Press. Reprinted by permission of the
publisher and the author.

Norton paperback edition published 1986; reissued 1995

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Rich, Adrienne.
Of woman born.

Includes index.
1. Motherhood. 2. Mother and child. 3. Feminism
I. Title.
HQ759.R53 1986 306.8’743 86-12687

ISBN 978-0-393-31284-3

ISBN 978-0-393-34810-1 (e-book)

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