When apple pie goes stale: motherhood and patriachy

MOTHERHOOD is an emotion-charged word and ambivalence about it is like snubbing apple pie. It means something different to everyone, depending on their own experience, and it poses different problems to women considering becoming mothers. Certainly it has posed a problem for the feminist movement: while a sizeable majority of women nowadays seems to agree that there is more to life than taking care of children, it is often hard to find a balance between the demands of a career and the needs of a family. "Househusbands" may be part of the solution, but no one would argue that simply handing men the problems women have faced for centuries does anything besides shift the burden elsewhere.

But where do you go, once you have singled out motherhood as an issue? In Of Woman Born: Motherhood as an Experience and Institution. Adrienne Rich takes up this regularly recurring theme of feminist literature. Women's biological attributes, she argues, have forced them to bear the responsibility for continuing the species; but the division of labor in the household between the working father and the nurturing mother has set the foundation for an inflexible social institution, including much more than bearing children. Since the first stirrings of the patriarchal system, she says, women have been valued only by the number of children--particularly sons--they have borne, and barren women have been deigned purposeless. Women are seen through a patriarchal prism; as mothers and lovers, they are trapped by self-fulfilling role patterns. Daughters grow up to become mothers, forced to supply all the emotional support their children will receive, unable to relate on an individual, unstandardized level to the rest of the world.

So far, the argument does not appear to be one that is unique to Rich, although as a poet and mother herself she can skillfully buttress it with details from her own experience. Unfortunately, she does not stop there.

In her effort to show how the patriarchal system has placed a series of contradictory demands on women--viewing them at once as the all-giving earth mother, the chaste, swooning virgin and the corrupting whore--Rich careens into a long historical digression that verges on the paranoic. This is a problem feminist writers have had before, perhaps the unavoidable consequence of the effort to display the extent of women's oppression. But despite her extensive footnoting and bibliography, Rich begins to sound more extreme than most, her enthusiasm leading her to make contradictory and unsatisfying statements. At times, she seems to accept the household division of labor as it existed in subsistence-level lifestyles, blaming the Industrial Revolution for taking the meaning out of women's social roles. At others, she blames men in general for holding conflicting views of women. She spends two chapters tracing the development of contemporary obstetrics, for example, claiming that the modern impersonal birth procedure is the direct result of the male medical profession's desire to take over a process in which males had traditionally been prohibited from participating. By focusing on obstetrics, she ignores a parallel process through which the modern medical profession discredited all traditional medicine, relegating male healers as well as female midwives to disrepute. Rich justifies her paranoia with the claim that men will always support the status quo, because "however much it has failed them, however much it divides them from themselves, [patriarchy] is still their order, confirming them in privilege." Maybe she is right. But she offers no serious discussion of alternatives to patriarchy, unless it be test tube babies. Over and over again, she implies that only women can treat other women with respect and undegrading love, and that men can neither sympathize with women's mysterious control over reproduction nor understand their needs as human beings beyond those predicated on biological attributes. She suggests in passing that matriarchy would accomplish only cosmetic reform of patriarchy, but in a footnote she terms unacceptable the other commonly discussed alternative, androgeny. The only hope, she remarks offhandedly, is post-androgeny--and what that is or how it differs from androgeny remains a gussing game for the reader.

Some of the comments Rich makes about sexual relationships and relationships between women lead one to believe she turned to lesbianism after her husband's death, which might explain some of the inconsistencies in her argument. Parenting--a concept she hardly considers in her eagerness to show the problems with mothering--is a two-gender operation, and her one-sided focus on mothering ignores the satisfaction that both parents could get out of dealing with children. What she really objects to, it seems, is her feeling that her three sons expected her to repress all anger in their interest, to repress her desires and ambitions. But children naturally crave emotional support. While no one could argue that mothers must be the only source of that warmth and loving, it is hard to see why mothers and fathers together couldn't find enough altruism between them to satisfy that need. In Rich's view, motherhood means renouncing relationships in which one is able "to act, to live in myself and to love [my children] for their separate selves"--by her definition she denies herself much of the good that is part of the parent-child bond.

Rich's dismissal of day care centers (she complains that they are usually run by women) and fathering (because in the decade or so since feminism has become a serious factor in society fathers have shown little change in their behavior) is a little too hasty to be persuasive. No one claims we have reached androgeneity yet, and her argument ignores the possibility of change. "This is not the place, nor am I the person," she says, "to draw blueprints for the assimilation of men in large numbers into childcare." We are left with no choice but a separatist future--a vision that precludes children born according to the rather well-established biological pattern, although it does get rid of the motherhood problem.

Her refusal to accept the possibility that men might, change their attitudes to the patriarchal system forms the basis of another theme running through Of Woman Born. For what seems like years, Rich and Susan Sontag have waged an ongoing battle in the pages of the New York Review of Books on the relationship between marxist theory and feminism. According to Rich, the fact that patriarchy existed prior to capitalism proves conclusively that it will continue long after capitalism falls. The real "alienated labor," she suggests, is the labor of the birth process, and "the repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production." The argument shows a rather superficial understanding of marxism, in that no marxist since Kautsky has claimed that changing the relations of production does more than clear the way for effecting change in the social realm. Rich displays exactly the kind of narrowmindedness of which radical feminists are often accused: she failed to extend her analysis of women's oppression to the oppression of anyone else in her society.

In the end, perhaps, that failure is her book's major flaw--nowhere does she undertake a sympathetic examination of the effect of the status quo on anybody other than women. If the structure of mothering in society were really the only source of world problems--Rich blames patriarchy for every problem from anomie to malnutrition--her argument might be valid; if women alone were exploited under the present system, then repossessing our bodies would feed everyone. Her paranoia blinds her, forcing her to reach a puerile conclusion. Which is too bad, because she starts out with an uncontestable argument. It's just that she gets lost somewhere along the way, and the result is a beautifully written disaster.

Motherhood means renouncing action, life in oneself and love of children for their selves.