White Feminists and Contemporary Maternity: Purging Matrophobia

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Author: D. Lynn O'Brien Hallstein

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White Feminists and Contemporary Maternity

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White Feminists and Contemporary Maternity Purging Matrophobia

D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein

WHITE FEMINISTS AND CONTEMPORARY MATERNITY

Copyright © D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein, 2010. All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States - a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–60863–4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hallstein, D. Lynn O’Brien. White feminists and contemporary maternity : purging matrophobia/ D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–60863–4 (alk. paper) 1. Women, White. 2. Feminism. 3. Motherhood I. Title. HQ1161.H35 2010 306.874 308909—dc22 2009039969 Design by Integra Software Services First edition: March 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

In memory of my mother, Nancy May O’Brien, who had the foresight to raise me as a pass-the-ERA-now-envelope-licking-NOW-child within white second wave feminism. For my father and cover artist, Richard Hallstein, who was the only feminist father on the Girl Scout camping trips and who continues to be an active feminist thinker, organizer, and painter. To Michel, Jean-Philipp, and Joshua Bruehwiler who helped me throughout the labor of writing this book and also provided encouragement and tips throughout. As Jean-Philipp said, “Mom, make sure the book is interesting or no one will want to read it.” My hope is that I have met his sage advice.


C o n t e n ts

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1 White Second Wave Feminisms and Rich: Historic Feminist Matrophobia

25

2 From Ongoing Silence to Popular Writers’ Matrophobia

47

3 Sisters, Daughters, and Feminist Maternal Scholars: Contemporary Matrophobia

75

4 What’s Wrong with a Little Lingering Matrophobia?: Rhetorical Consequences in Contemporary Analyses

107

5 Purging Matrophobia: Theorizing a Matrophobic-Free Feminist Subject Position on Contemporary Maternity

131

Notes

161

Works Cited

177

Index

187


Ac k n ow l e d g m e n ts

I am grateful for the support I have received throughout the process of writing this book. In particular, I would like to thank the members of the Boston Feminist Writing Group—Lisa Cuklanz, Marlene Fine, and Anne Litwin—for reading and commenting on various iterations of my work on matrophobia during the last four years and for their insightful feedback on chapter drafts. Their astute reading of my work, good humor, and friendship has been invaluable. The impetus for the book began five years ago on a beach in Italy. I was living abroad, and feminist friends told me about the recent publication of both The Mommy Myth and Maternal Desire. I took both books on that Italian vacation to read. I was stunned by how much I agreed with both books, even though I knew immediately that the books had such different understandings of contemporary maternity. It has been my delight and passion to figure out that initial reading. As a result, I am grateful to Susan J. Douglas and Meredith Michaels and Daphne de Marneffe for inspiring this project. I am also grateful to Andrea O’Reilly for being such a powerful role model and leader in the field of feminist maternal scholarship and for also providing such important insights in From Motherhood to Mothering and Mother Outlaws. Because my interest in matrophobia has been an ongoing project, some of the ideas included in this book have been published previously. Some of the arguments in Chapter 1 will be published in “The Intriguing History and Silences of Of Woman Born: Rereading Rich Rhetorically to Better Understand the Contemporary Context,” National Women’s Studies Association Journal 22.1 (2010): at press, while Chapter 3 includes previously published ideas from “Conceiving Intensive Mothering,” Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering

x

Ac k n ow l e d g m e n ts

8.1,2 (summer/winter 2006): 96–108, and “Matrophobic Sisters and Daughters: The Rhetorical Consequences of Matrophobia in Contemporary White Feminist Analyses of Maternity,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 36.4 (June 2007): 269–296.

Introduction

Revision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. (Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken” 540) One motivation for the recent surge of scholarship on the second wave is the renewed importance of understanding its [feminism’s] problems and possibilities during a period when many of its gains are simultaneously taken for granted and under attack. (Bonnie Dow 91)

In 2005, Newsweek devoted its cover story to exploring how contemporary women are managing their lives as second wave beneficiaries once they become mothers. The feature article opens with the following question: “What happened when the girls who had it all became mothers?” (Newsweek). At the heart of this query is a fundamentally important feminist question: How have the changes brought about by white second wave feminism impacted (or not) women’s experiences once they become mothers? While the Newsweek story does not address the subject as a specifically feminist topic, contemporary feminists are beginning to grapple with this question. Even though contemporary feminist writing has begun to offer important answers to this question, the answers are incomplete primarily because the work is riddled with matrophobia. Adrienne

2

W h i t e F e m i n i s t s a n d C o n t e m p o r a r y M at e r n i t y

Rich defines matrophobia in her landmark book, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, as the “the fear not of one’s mother or of motherhood but of becoming one’s mother” (italics in original 235). The primary consequence of matrophobia is it leads to partial but also problematic analyses of, and answers to, the feminist question specifically and contemporary maternity—both the institution of motherhood and mothering— more generally. Indeed, I will argue throughout this book that past and present matrophobia have problematic consequences in terms of feminism’s ability to address, understand, and respond to the contemporary feminist rhetorical and maternal contexts. These consequences, ultimately, result in incomplete analyses of maternity and discourage feminist scholars from understanding fully the contemporary relationship between feminism and maternity. Thus, it is clear to me that, if we want to understand fully presentday maternity, then, we must finally purge matrophobia from our analyses. Purging matrophobia to more fully understand maternity in light of feminism, however, requires looking back in order to move forward. In other words, to purge matrophobia, first, I need to trace both the history of matrophobia and its role in past and present white feminism. Doing so also means the prolonged and complex relationship between feminism and maternity must be understood. This is the case because the relationship between academic feminisms and maternity—both the institution of motherhood and mothering—has long been and continues to be complicated, misunderstood, and permeated by silence.

Feminism and Maternity: Silence and Anti-Motherhood Demonization Feminist scholars (Henry Matrophobia and Generations, Not My; Hirsch “Feminism,” Mother/Daughter; O’Reilly Mother Outlaws; Siegel; Snitow; Umansky) have already established that feminism’s relationship to maternity is complex. Ann Snitow, writing in 1992 about the second wave,1 however, was the first to argue that a significant factor complicating the relationship is the fact that white second wave feminism was misunderstood as “anti-motherhood” or “mothering-hating” both inside and outside feminism. In her 1992 retrospective essay, which explores the relationship between

Introduction

3

second wave American feminism and motherhood, Snitow argues the relationship is best thought of as having three periods.2 The first period is from 1963 to about 1975, which Snitow refers to as the demon texts, and is the period that has had the most long-term consequences in terms of feminism’s perception as anti-motherhood. Snitow argues that demon texts were books that were misread as evidence of white second wave feminism’s mother-hating. As Snitow put it, Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique is the first of my demon texts, by which I mean books demonized, apologized for, endlessly quoted out of context, to prove that the feminism of the early seventies was, in Friedan’s words of recantation, ‘strangely blind’ ” to family and the importance of mothering to many women (36). Demon texts, according to Snitow, are not only perceived as being strangely blind to motherhood, they are also viewed as anti-motherhood, even though there is very little evidence of that mother-hating in the actual work of feminists in this phase. Additionally, even though Snitow argues Friedan’s book is the first demon text, she also suggests the “most famous” and inflammatory demon text is Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. While Snitow finds Firestone’s “undertheorized enthusiasm for cybernetics, her self-hating disgust at the pregnant body (‘Pregnancy is barbaric’), her picture of the female body as a prison from which a benign, nonpatriarchal science might release us” bold and dated, she also claims if you actually look for the mother-hating in the text, “you won’t find any evidence” for it (33). Instead, what readers will find is a sustained critique of motherhood. Equally important, Snitow also suggests the limited number of other feminist texts that did, in fact, begin to address motherhood also simply began the project of addressing motherhood as a topic; they began on the project of breaking the taboo on speaking about mothers and mothers’ experiences (33). Those feminists who were addressing motherhood, then, were doing so to begin the project of raising issues about the ways motherhood influenced women’s lives. Snitow also points out, however, that rather than engaging in this project during the first period, most feminists actually said very little about motherhood. As she puts it, “Finally, in my search for early feminist mother-hating what I found was—mostly—an absence. In the major anthologies like

4


Sisterhood is Powerful, Women in a Sexist Society, and Liberation Now! there are hardly any articles on any aspect of mothering” (37).3 In short, there was a general silence on mothering and motherhood in 1960s and early 1970s white second wave feminism. Thus, rather than mother-hating, the limited number of feminists exploring motherhood did so to begin the project of breaking the taboo on speaking about mothers, while the majority of early white second wave feminists were mostly silent on mothering. As a result, Snitow also argues that what actually led to the demonization of specific texts and second wave feminism more generally was the questioning of the role of motherhood. Or, as Snitow contends, any questioning of the role of motherhood in women’s lives was misread as an attack on mothers, such that, “by the late seventies, both the mothers and the nonmothers were on the defensive. What a triumph of backlash, with internal dynamics” (37). Ironically, then, even though the demonization itself is unwarranted in most 1960s and early 1970s second wave texts and despite the fact that the majority of white second wave feminists were silent about mothering, rhetorically, that demonization “stuck” to feminist writing about motherhood in the first period. The anti-motherhood discourse that emerged also began to be a key pillar in the larger and systematic general backlash against white second wave feminisms such that feminism was on the defensive in relation to past analyses of maternity. Thus, and also significant, the anti-motherhood charge against feminism more generally arose almost in tandem with the emergence of the early second wave, even though most early white second wave feminists were silent about mothering.4 The misunderstanding that feminism was and remains antimotherhood, however, is not just a problem outside of feminism; it is also a problem within feminism. Indeed, despite Snitow’s groundbreaking work, there is a long-standing belief, even debate, about whether or not feminism was and remains anti-motherhood inside of feminism. In fact, feminist scholars (O’Reilly and Short; Ruddick; Taylor; Tucker; Freely; Umansky) continue to debate whether or not second wave and contemporary feminists were and remain anti-motherhood. As Andrea O’Reilly and Patricia Short put it, “Feminists argued, and still argue, about whether the early stages of feminism actually were anti-mother” (2). Thus,

Introduction

5

the anti-motherhood perception and the subsequent demonization of feminism more generally also continue to linger within contemporary feminism. While Snitow does not make any claims about the rhetorical dimensions of the demonization, it is clear in her writing that she recognizes the persuasive power and implications of both within the strategic choices second wave feminists made in relation to the silence on mothering and the response to that silence outside of feminism. Indeed, Snitow’s writing suggests that the combined impact or effects of both white second wave feminism’s early silence on mothering and the anti-motherhood perception that was linked with feminism—the demonization of feminism—worked to stifle the legitimate concerns early white second wave feminists raised about motherhood, while also supporting the early backlash claim that white second wave feminism was against motherhood. As a rhetorician might put it, the strategic choices feminism made in relation to addressing maternity or not were within specific rhetorical situations or contextual elements—purpose, audience, author/speaker, and constraints, to name a few—that played a role in how those choices were produced and perceived both within and outside white second wave feminism. Snitow clearly recognizes that white second wave feminism’s relationship to maternity was shaped by both the internal and external contexts within which it found itself and that those shaping contexts had long-term consequences for how the relationship between feminism and maternity developed. Moreover, even as Snitow was writing about the second wave, her essay makes it clear that at the time that she was writing— 1992—the demonization of white second wave feminism was ongoing, as were the apologies, and both were working to support the backlash against second wave feminist gains and feminist explorations of motherhood, which contemporary feminist scholars (Douglas and Michaels; Evans; O’Reilly Mother Outlaws; Saab; Umanksy) confirm continues today.5 Thus, from the beginning of white second wave feminism and through today, the relationship between white feminism and maternity is complicated by the antimotherhood demonization and the early silence on mothering; both play significant roles in the rhetorical context or rhetorical situations within which any feminist exploration of maternity was and continues to be shaped.

6


Today, making sense of the relationship between white second wave feminism and maternity and any lingering legacy for contemporary feminism is even more complicated because we now understand more about the role matrophobia played within white second wave feminism. Indeed, in the late 1980s, Marianne Hirsch (Mother/Daughter Plot, “Feminism”) began to argue that matrophobia was deeply embedded in the silence. To make this argument, Hirsch explicitly drew on Rich’s understanding of matrophobia. Understanding Hirsch’s use of Of Woman Born and the long-term importance of the book, requires reviewing Rich’s core arguments and the legacy of Of Woman Born.

Of Woman Born and Matrophobia Of Woman Born was one of the first feminist texts to explore motherhood,6 mothering, and matrophobia and is widely credited by contemporary feminist scholars (O’Reilly From Motherhood; Green)7 as being the field-defining text in contemporary feminist maternal scholarship. O’Reilly (From Motherhood), for example, describes Of Woman Born as a (if not “the”) field-defining text in contemporary feminist maternal scholarship, which has influenced how a “generation of scholars thinks about motherhood” (1). Rich’s most basic argument is that motherhood is a patriarchal institution that oppresses women and that mothering has the potential to be empowering to women if they are allowed to define and practice mothering for themselves. In doing so, Rich was the first feminist scholar to introduce the idea that motherhood was ideological and, as a result, also political. Rich explores the history of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering in the first five chapters to argue the institution of motherhood exercises control over women as they bear and rear children to serve the interests of men. As Rich puts it, “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” (45). Even though she did not have the language of “social construction” yet, Rich made one of the first social constructionist arguments when she claimed, “The patriarchal institution of motherhood is not the ‘human condition’ any more than rape, prostitution, and slavery are . . . motherhood has a history, an ideology” (33). Thus, first and

Introduction

7

foremost, Rich views the institution of motherhood as a patriarchal form of social control, while she also views the experience of mothering as potentially empowering if women are allowed to define mothering for themselves outside of the institution of motherhood. As such, Rich made an all-important distinction between the institution of motherhood and the potential empowered relations in mothering. In viewing motherhood as a complex site of women’s oppression and as a potential location of women’s creativity and joy, Rich argued, “I try to distinguish 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” (italics in original 13). Based on this groundbreaking distinction, Rich views the institution of motherhood as male defined, male controlled, and deeply oppressive to women, while she views the experience of mothering as a potentially empowering relationship for both women and children. As a result, Rich’s distinction allowed her to tease apart the oppressive institution of motherhood and the potential in mothering. O’Reilly argues and Fiona Green concurs that Rich’s greatest contribution to contemporary feminist maternal scholarship is this distinction between motherhood as an institution and the potential in mothering. As O’Reilly argues in Mother Outlaws, “Central to Of Woman Born, and developed by subsequent motherhood scholars, is the key distinction Rich makes between two meanings of motherhood, one imposed on the other” (2). By making this distinction, Rich was also able to argue that patriarchal motherhood has tragic consequences for both the mother-daughter relationship and daughters. Rich argues, when daughters come to understand their mothers’ restricted role as a mother under patriarchal motherhood, they begin to both blame and reject their mothers. As Rich put it, 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. (235)

8


As a result, Rich says (drawing on earlier work by Lynn Sukenick, who coined the term matrophobia), daughters develop matrophobia—“the fear not of one’s mother or of motherhood but of becoming one’s mother” (italics in original 235). Thus, Rich’s primary interest in matrophobia is social rather than psychological; she views matrophobia as developing as a result of patriarchal understandings of motherhood. The consequences of matrophobia, then, were deeply troubling for Rich. Most importantly, Rich argues that matrophobia causes splitting—that of daughters from mothers and, ultimately, women from the self. As Rich explains, 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. (237)

Drawing exclusively on examples from literature, Rich then concludes that matrophobia plays a major role in the loss of a potentially powerful and important connection between mothers and daughters because daughters grow up splitting—perform radical surgery—from their mothers rather than connecting with them in their similarity. As a result, according to Rich, “the loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the essential female tragedy” (237). Consequently, Rich also argues another tragic consequence of matrophobia between mothers and daughters is the unwritten potential connection or energy investment that could exist between the two but that is distorted because of patriarchy. Indeed, Rich argues, “the cathexis between mother and daughter—essential, distorted, misused—is the great unwritten story” (225). As such, and always aware of the political implications of her perspective, Rich argued that it was time to find ways to create a female-defined, woman-centered understanding of both the mother-daughter relationship and mothering. As Rich put it, 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,

Introduction

9

anger, shame, power, freedom, onto the “other” woman. But any radical vision of sisterhood demands that we reintegrate them. (253)

White second wave feminism took up Rich’s call. In particular, as Voth Harman describes it, Rich’s early writing on the mother-daughter relationship was taken “as a bugle call that released packs of hounds, chasing pen in hand to ‘write’ (and often ‘right’) the great unwritten cathexis” (137). Rather than focus on Rich’s critique of motherhood or mothering, white second wave feminism utilized Rich’s writing to explore the mother-daughter relationship. This use of Rich’s text has, in fact, been credited by contemporary feminists scholars (Hirsch Mothers and Daughters; Smith; Voth Harman) with “channeling” white second wave American feminist work into one of its most productive and significant areas of scholarship. As a result, feminism’s initial use of Of Woman Born is also worthy of note: white second wave feminism focused almost exclusively on Rich’s writing about the mother-daughter relationship, while remaining silent on Rich’s more general ideas about motherhood and mothering.

Hirsch’s Arguments about Matrophobia Utilizing both Rich’s understanding of matrophobia and the divisive nature of matrophobia, Hirsch argued that matrophobia underlies white second wave feminism’s focus on the motherdaughter relationship and the silence on Rich’s larger critique of motherhood and mothering. Hirsch, in fact, suggests matrophobia becomes most apparent when white second wave feminism’s preference to organize around and critique the larger culture from the standpoint of sisters is explored. Indeed, Hirsch was the first to suggest, and Astrid Henry’s (Matrophobia and Generations, Not My) more recent work also confirms, matrophobia played a key role in white second wave feminism’s rhetorical preference for organizing around the metaphor of sisterhood, which also became a feminist subject position or location of critique from which to explore culture. In “Feminism at the Maternal Divide,” Hirsch argued retrospectively that the metaphor of sisterhood, which served as the foundation for much second wave organizing and location of critique, provided

10 W h i t e F e m i n i s t s a n d C o n t e m p o r a r y M at e r n i t y the possibility of mutuality and reciprocity. The metaphor of sisterhood, though still familial, can describe a feminine mode of relation, an ideal and alternative within patriarchy. It could help women envision a life and a set of affiliations outside of the paradigm of mother/child relations and the compromises with men that motherhood seems to necessitate. It can liberate feminist women from our anatomy and from the difficult stories of our own mothers’ accommodation, adjustment and resignation. “Sisterhood” can free us, as we were fond of saying, “to give birth to ourselves.” (356)

Thus, while a powerful location of critique or feminist subject position, the sisterly subject position that developed was fundamentally built on privileging mutuality and reciprocity between women rather than any reciprocity between mothers and children or mothers and daughters. As a result, the sisterly perspective was fearful of acknowledging the maternal or mothering and hence expelled both from the sisterly location of critique. As Hirsch first argued in The Mother-Daughter Plot, “To say that ‘sisterhood is powerful,’ however, is to isolate feminist discourse within one generation and to banish feminists who are mothers to the ‘mother-closet’ ” (164). Consequently, expelling or separating mothering from the sisterly perspective is matrophobic in its fear of mothering and, equally important, divides and separates feminists from one another. As a result, Hirsch extended Rich by arguing matrophobia was also a problem within academic feminism, including her own earlier work on the mother-daughter relationship. Indeed, Hirsch concludes that matrophobia “exists not only in the culture at large, but also within feminism, and within women who are mothers, ourselves, who have spent a good part of our [academic] careers thinking about motherhood” (365). Thus, even when feminists were addressing motherhood, they did so employing matrophobic perspectives or locations of critique.

Contemporary Matrophobia: Lingering and Problematic Consequences More recent work also confirms (Henry Matrophobia and Generations, Not My; O’Brien Hallstein Matrophobic Sisters, Second Wave Silences; O’Reilly Mother Outlaws) that the matrophobic fear of mothering as a location of critique for feminist analyses, even by

Introduction

11

feminists who actually have children, played a key role in past feminist thinking and analysis, the relationship between feminism and maternity, and continues to play a problematic role in contemporary feminist analyses. Moreover, as I will also show in much more detail in Chapter 3, the explosion of feminist writing on maternity also includes a “rediscovery” and use of Of Woman Born, and contemporary feminists’ use of Rich is also matrophobic. To date, however, no work has explored the lingering and ongoing effects of matrophobia and, equally important, how to eliminate or purge matrophobia from both our feminist subject positions and our analyses of contemporary maternity. That we do so is of particular importance now because the contemporary feminist writing on maternity continues to be matrophobic. Indeed, I argue here the lingering matrophobia has created problematic methodological and theoretical consequences for how contemporary feminists understand and explore contemporary maternity. More specifically, I argue the lingering matrophobia causes contemporary feminist thinkers to underutilize the analytic power and potential of Rich’s all-important distinction between the institution of motherhood and the potential in mothering, creates an either/or theoretical binary, encourages mother blame rather than patriarchy blame, continues to divide and separate feminists and women from one another and women from a part of self, creates analyses that are unable to simultaneously recognize contemporary women’s split subjectivity between old and new gender expectations, is ill-equipped to respond to the contemporary anti-motherhood charges leveled against contemporary feminism, and misdiagnoses how contemporary intensive mothering works as a sophisticated post – second wave8 backlash strategy against second wave feminist gains. These consequences, ultimately, result in incomplete and partial analyses of the contemporary feminist rhetorical situation and discourage feminist scholars from understanding fully the contemporary relationship between feminism and maternity. In short, because of matrophobia, we are unable to answer fully yet what happened when the girls who had it all became mothers. Thus, it is clear to me that, if we want to understand fully both contemporary feminism and maternity and the relationship that exists today between the two, then, we must finally purge matrophobia from our analyses.

12 W h i t e F e m i n i s t s a n d C o n t e m p o r a r y M at e r n i t y

Consequently, the heart of this book is as follows. First, I argue that the discussion of contemporary maternity—both the institution of motherhood and the actual experiences of mothering—is as much about feminism’s past complex and difficult relationship to maternity as it is about contemporary maternity. Equally important, I also suggest white second wave feminism’s early relationship and strategic choices about how or how not to integrate attention to maternity into locations of critique in understanding women’s oppression have long-term and lingering matrophobic legacies in terms of how contemporary feminist scholars use Rich’s ideas and think and write about contemporary maternity. Finally, I argue that the anti-motherhood discourse that emerged in the early second wave continues to play a central, if not defining, role in both the ongoing demonization of second wave and contemporary feminisms and the backlash against second wave successes in ways that continue to complicate the current relationship between white feminism and maternity. In short, I suggest here that we must reread our past feminist history in terms of both its problems and possibilities to understand fully our contemporary feminist and maternal contexts. Thus, with Rich, at the heart of this book is an act of revision of white second wave and contemporary feminism, the kind of reseeing that Rich (“When We”) suggests: “Revision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves” (540). To know “ourselves more fully,” I also explore how the initial complex relationship between feminism and maternity and the strategic choices white second wave feminists made continue to inform “the assumptions in which contemporary feminist understandings of maternity are drenched” in ways that are problematic in terms of a fuller and more complete understanding of our new post – second wave split contemporary maternal context. Thus, the central goals of this book are, first, to explore how matrophobia has played and continues to play a key and problematic role in feminist thinking about maternity; second, to reveal how the antimotherhood demonization continues to fuel the backlash against second wave successes in ways that complicate the current relationship between white feminism and maternity; and third, to finally

Introduction

13

purge matrophobia from contemporary white feminist analyses of maternity. Foundations: Key Terms and Intellectual and Political Commitments I proceed with this exploration by thinking as a feminist rhetorical scholar9 who also believes that understanding both the possibilities and problems maternity holds for contemporary white feminism requires rereading the past and present rhetorically. First and foremost, then, I reread white second wave feminism.10 Because I draw on and concur with Benita Roth’s recent argument in Separate Roads to Feminism that it is essential to recognize second wave feminisms were organized along racial/ethnic lines,11 my definition of white second wave feminism is founded in Roth’s writings. As Roth argues, “The second wave has to be understood as a group of feminisms, movements made by activist women that were largely organizationally distinct from one another, and from the beginning, largely organized along racial/ethnic lines” (3). By white second wave feminism, then, I mean white feminism of the 1960s and through the 1970s that was organized primarily, but not exclusively, by and around white middle-class women and is generally marked as ending with the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment (Dow; Evans). I also view white second wave feminism as a historical phenomenon that continues to be a part of contemporary feminism’s history. Viewing all feminisms of the second wave as history, as Bonnie J. Dow recently argued, allows feminist rhetoricians to recognize the second wave as a historical phenomenon without necessarily suggesting that the second wave is done or over. Rather, it simply means that the “second wave has receded far enough into the past that it has become suitable for treatment as an historical phenomenon” (89). As such, rereading the second wave as a historical phenomenon allows us to build on the second wave rather than break from it. Or, as Sara Evans also argues in the introduction of Tidal Wave, her book is intended “to affirm for future generations that they do indeed have a history, by turns glorious and distressing, on which they can build” (17). Finally, the rereading I do here is important because, as Dow also suggests, rereading the second wave of


feminism can reveal “the renewed importance of understanding its [feminism’s] problems and possibilities during a period when many of its gains are simultaneously taken for granted and under attack” (91).

Contemporary Feminism Defined In defining contemporary white feminism, rather than employ the term third wave feminism, I use the term post – second wave feminism as synonymous with contemporary white feminism. I mark the time period for contemporary feminism with the emergence of what is commonly referred to as third wave feminism,12 which emerged in earnest in the mid-1990s. I resist using third wave feminism for several reasons. First, I concur with Dow and Evans’s position that it is more appropriate to view the second wave as history rather than being “dead.” Or, as Evans argues in Tidal Wave, feminism has been and continues to be an ongoing process of reinvention rather than a series of endings, breaks, and new beginnings. To that end, my understanding and use of the term post – second wave feminism resists the colloquial understanding of the term postfeminism. Colloquially and especially in media, postfeminism is usually used such that the “post” prefix indicates that feminism is passé, no longer necessary, and/or rejects previous feminisms. Indeed, postfeminism suggests that second wave feminism was so successful there is no longer a need for feminism. Ann Braithwaite suggests that this understanding of postfeminism has been employed in problematic ways within American feminism especially. Drawing on the work of non-American feminists, she counters and argues that postfeminism is a word that can and should be employed as a term that indicates continuity and connection between second wave and contemporary feminisms.13 Braithwaite argues, In this view, the “post” in postfeminism in fact signifies a continuing relationship to an earlier moment, as the “post” in other current and equally contentious terms such as postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism. Thus, rather than being an “anti-feminism,” postfeminism instead becomes . . . a way to talk about the changes in and growth of feminist thinking over the last 40 years, especially as it has intersection with a variety of other critical languages and approaches (including the others “posts”). (26–27)

Introduction

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Consequently, because I am also committed to recognizing the ongoing connection between past and present feminisms, I employ postfeminism and post – second wave feminism rather than third wave feminism to describe contemporary feminism. My second reason for resisting the term third wave feminism is because I am also persuaded by Henry’s (Matrophobia and Generations, Not My) recent arguments that the wave metaphor within feminism is matrophobic in its intergenerational disidentification— disavowing of or separation from—from previous waves, an argument that I detail more fully in Chapter 1. Thus, by employing post – second wave feminism as synonymous with contemporary feminism and as a way to indicate the ongoing connection rather than break with 1960s and 1970s white second wave feminism, I am actively refusing to perpetuate the matrophobia embedded in the contemporary understanding of third wave feminism14 as a break from rather than a continuation of white second wave feminism. My desire to recognize the ongoing connection between white second wave feminism and contemporary feminism and to resist the underlying matrophobia in the present understanding of the wave metaphor also serve as the foundation for the following theoretical and political commitments that ground this project. I am committed to the notion that we have a history that we can and must build from and on rather than eradicate or correct. Equally important, I believe it is politically necessary to resist the contemporary backlash notion that white second wave feminism is done or over and the contemporary impulse to disidentify with the second wave and to refuse to learn from both the successes and mistakes of those foremothers. Thus, I use the term post – second wave feminism to indicate and acknowledge my own intellectual commitments that underlie this project, to recognize the ongoing continuity between second wave and contemporary feminisms, to signify a continuing relationship between eras of feminism, and to resist the matrophobic disindentification embedded in the wave metaphor when third wave feminism is employed.

Texts Explored Because feminist writing is also so diverse and informed by a variety of disciplines and theoretical understandings, it is essential that


I more clearly detail the particular body of feminist work I have explored in this book. In addition to rereading what I have already defined as white second wave feminism, I reread just two bodies of contemporary feminist work. More specifically, because Adrienne Rich’s text, Of Woman Born, which first defined matrophobia, is now the landmark text in relation to contemporary feminist analyses of maternity, and I am interested in tracing the past and present use of Rich’s text, here, I analyze contemporary feminist scholarship that utilizes Rich’s ideas. There are, in fact, two different kinds of feminist analyses that employ Rich: one “camp” employs Rich’s ideas without being founded in Rich’s text, while the other “camp” is “Richian” in the sense that Rich’s ideas and thinking serve as the foundation of its feminist maternal scholarship.15 Because the anti-motherhood discourse and demonization of white second wave feminism have been incorporated in many popular writers’ texts about contemporary maternity in ways that continue to fuel rather than challenge contemporary backlash strategies and because it is time for contemporary feminism to quit being on the defensive about the misreading of second wave feminism as anti-motherhood, I also explore key popular texts. For clarity, then, it is also important that I am specific about which popular writers I explore in this book. As with feminist writers,I also cover only a specific kind of popular writing selected—writing that, as I reveal in more detail in Chapter 2, is by women writers who acknowledge that they are second wave beneficiaries without identifying explicitly as feminists. Moreover, as I show in Chapter 2, because these popular writers engage in their own matrophobia in ways that ultimately result in blaming second wave feminism for contemporary women’s difficulties managing contemporary maternity, I also analyze representative examples of the popular writing on maternity to reveal the ways that that writing continues to fuel the ongoing anti-motherhood demonization and fuels contemporary backlash against second wave gains and contemporary feminism.

Method: Reading and Rereading Rhetorically I analyze both academic feminist and popular texts by simultaneously exploring the rhetorical situations16 of white second wave and contemporary feminist scholars and by doing so within the general method of rhetorical criticism. By rhetorical situations, I mean the

Introduction

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shaping factors both within and outside of feminism that play a role in how a rhetorical act—speech, written text, and/or strategic choice—is both produced and perceived by others. My exploration of the rhetorical situations of feminism’s past and present relationship to maternity is also informed by the general method of rhetorical criticism. While much rhetorical criticism emerges from within the field of Communication, it is an interdisciplinary activity focused on both analyzing arguments and making interpretive arguments about how rhetorical artifacts or texts work persuasively. Sonja Foss, in fact, argues that rhetorical criticism is “a qualitative research method that is designed for the systematic investigation and explanation of symbolic acts and artifacts for the purpose of understanding rhetorical processes” (6). Because I am also engaging in a rhetorical rereading, I also engage in the kind of rhetorical analyses that “resees” or “reunderstands” rhetorical artifacts. In short, as William Nothstine, Carole Blair, and Gerald Copeland argue, this kind of rhetorical criticism “takes up a text and re-circulates it, that is, ‘says’ or ‘does’ that text differently, and asks the listener or reader to re-understand and re-evaluate the text, to see and judge it in new ways suggested by the critic” (3). Employing a feminist rhetorical method, then, allows me to reexplore, reunderstand, and reevaluate how the rhetorical situations of the second wave have and continue to shape feminist thinking about and approaches to understanding the rhetorical situations of both contemporary feminism and maternity. I have two primary foci of attention, then, in the rhetorical analysis. Rather than focus on one text, my primary “texts” are white second wave feminism’s and contemporary feminism’s subject position on and analyses of maternity. By doing so, I also explore how the feminist subject positions or locations of critique create matrophobic relationships to maternity with specific rhetorical consequences or effects in terms of understanding maternity. In other words, first, I reread how white second wave feminists developed feminist subject positions or locations of critique from which to analyze society that continue to undergird contemporary feminists’ analyses of maternity, and second, I read contemporary texts— feminist, Richian, and popular—in light of how matrophobia works within those texts. Finally, in exploring the feminist subject positions or locations of critique, I also trace how the silence on mothering as a central


location of critique continued until the mid-1990s. While I concur with both Snitow and Lauri Umansky that feminism addressed motherhood as a topic from the mid-1970s on, as I show in the next chapter, those feminist analyses continued to be matrophobic and sidestepped mothering as a central location of critique. Thus, grounded in Hirsch, my work aims to refine both Snitow and Umansky’s important work and our understanding of how matrophobia worked to keep feminist locations of critique separated from mothering or silent on mothering as a central location of critique. Both my rhetorical rereading of past feminist approaches and my reading of contemporary white feminist and popular approaches to understanding maternity create a new technique to understand the contemporary relationship between white feminism and maternity and the larger maternal context. In fact, while Umansky has also reread feminism’s complex history in terms of motherhood, her work is neither a rhetorical rereading of that history nor does it address the role of matrophobia in that history. And, while Henry’s work explores matrophobia in relation to the wave metaphor within feminism, Henry neither reads matrophobia rhetorically nor in terms of the larger relationship between feminism and maternity. As a result, to the best of my knowledge, there is no other work that explores white feminism and maternity rhetorically nor is there any other work that rereads the second wave as a means of more accurately understanding both white second wave and contemporary white feminism and maternity. More specifically, there has been no work that explores how the rhetorical context and situations within which white second wave feminists found themselves shaped their approaches to understanding maternity and the strategic choices they developed as a result of those contexts and situations. Nor has there been any attention given to the ways that the approaches developed and how strategic choices continue to inform feminist explorations of contemporary maternity. Therefore, this is the first book to both reread and read feminism’s complex relationship to maternity rhetorically.

Intentions: Connecting Rather than Disavowaling The final issue I want to be clear about is what my intentions are for writing this book. With both Rich and Hirsch, my primary aim

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in exploring matrophobia is to reveal how matrophobia works to divide and split women from each other—mothers from daughters and women from the self—and with awareness of these divides, to issue a political call to reintegrate women across these differences. In doing so, it is not my intention to suggest that white second wave feminism or contemporary feminism were and/or are “wrong” or should be rejected. Rather, my intention is to understand better both the problems and possibilities contemporary feminism has inherited from the second wave and to do so because so many of the gains of second wave feminism are simultaneously taken for granted and under attack. As a result, my hope is to recover and continue to celebrate the potential in second wave thinking, while eliminating the problems caused by matrophobia, in order to respond better to contemporary backlash against second wave gains. Equally important, in Chapter 5, in offering one route to purging matrophobia, I draw on much of the work reviewed in earlier chapters. I do so, again, because my intention is not to argue that we must “walk away from” previous work. Rather, I suggest that previous work has both possibilities and problems. As a result, by tracing the history of matrophobia and the lingering legacies of it, this book hopes to fill the gap in our understanding of matrophobia within feminism and to explore both the problems and possibilities that are part of past and contemporary work. In the end, then, my purpose for writing this book is to fulfill two of Rich’s own political goals: to understand the assumptions in which feminism is “drenched” as a way to challenge and finally purge the matrophobia that divides and splits women and feminists apart in the service of understanding and responding in more fruitful ways to both our contemporary feminist rhetorical and maternal contexts.

Chapter Previews I begin looking back to move forward in Chapter 1, “White Second Wave Feminism and Rich: Historic Feminist Matrophobia.” Drawing on Henry’s (Feminism and Generations, Not My) work, I argue matrophobia was deeply embedded within second wave feminism generally and, more specifically, within the sisterly and daughterly subject positions that emerged. To do so, I reread the second wave in light of how and why matrophobia developed as a


result of four key issues or shaping events—the legacy of the Leftist movements, the development of the wave metaphor between first and second wave feminisms, the development of the sister system and the metaphor of sisterhood that drove that system, and the use of Rich’s ideas in Of Woman. I conclude that the strategic choices 1960s and 1970s feminists made in light of these four rhetorical situations created a matrophobic relationship to maternity such that motherhood and mothering were rejected as potential locations for both theoretical and political critiques. Moreover, because, as I will show, Of Woman Born was written from a sisterly subject position and played a key role in the development of the daughterly subject position, I also trace the role matrophobia played in second wave feminists’ use of Of Woman Born and, ironically, the embedded matrophobia in Of Woman Born. I conclude white second wave feminism largely ignored Rich’s writing on motherhood and mothering because both were simply out of “sync” with the sisterly focus that continued to purge mothering from the second wave. For those feminist scholars who did utilize Rich’s work, then, it is also not surprising that they only focused on the mother-daughter relationship because this focus allowed them to continue to circumvent mothering and continue to embrace and enact the sisterly perspective, albeit in a new form. In other words, focusing on the mother-daughter relationship allowed feminists to continue to sidestep mothering and, equally important, privilege the woman-to-woman focus among daughters rather than between mothers and daughters. In terms of Rich herself, I argue both Rich’s location of critique and the text are best thought of as “sisterly,” even though Rich’s text was about motherhood and she made the all-important distinction between motherhood and mothering. Indeed, I contend, even with Rich’s attention to motherhood and the fact that she pried motherhood and mothering apart, both Rich’s location of critique and the text are deeply situated within a sisterly subject position that was primarily silent about mothering and, as a result, was founded on layers of matrophobia. Finally, I suggest the rhetorical consequences or effects of these layers of matrophobia are clear. Matrophobia was deeply embedded in white second wave feminism generally and specifically within both the sisterly and daughterly subject positions, which encouraged feminists to be silent on mothering and to circumvent mothering as a location of critique.

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Next, in Chapter 2, “From Ongoing Silence to Popular Writers’ Matrophobia,” I trace the rhetorical context of post-1970s feminist successes to the explosion of writing in the popular press. As with Chapter 1, to engage in this rereading, I briefly trace three key shaping events of white feminisms in the 1980s and through the mid-1990s—the early successes of second wave feminism and the almost immediate backlash against those successes; the feminist theory debates, particularly in terms of the commonality-difference and essentialism debates; and the introduction of the so-called third wave feminism. I do so to argue, once again, attention to motherhood and maternity remained out sync with the primary foci of feminists during this time period. And, equally important, I show that the matrophobic strategies first employed by second wave feminists continued in the foundational strategies third wave feminists employed, which further deepened and entrenched matrophobia within the wave metaphor. Moreover, I also argue matrophobia is at work in popular texts in ways that fuel both the anti-motherhood charge against feminism and contemporary backlash strategies. Specifically, popular writers also engage in disidentification and mother blame and, as a result, play a key role in the ongoing antimotherhood charge against white second wave feminism and the backlash strategy that Susan Faludi first described as simultaneously acknowledging second wave feminism’s successes while blaming feminism for contemporary women’s problems via maternity. Thus, I also argue contemporary feminists must appreciate how matrophobia continues to be entrenched in the wave metaphor and in popular texts to understand both the shifting contemporary rhetorical situation contemporary feminism faces today and the way matrophobia works rhetorically outside of feminism to support contemporary backlash. In Chapter 3, “Sisters, Daughters, and Feminist Maternal Scholars: Contemporary Matrophobia,” I explore contemporary feminist texts that employ Of Woman Born in the analysis of contemporary maternity. My goal is to detail how Rich’s ideas are used in the analysis and to argue contemporary feminist analyses are thick with lingering layers of matrophobia. Because there are two different strands of contemporary feminist uses of Rich—feminist writers who employ Rich’s all-important distinction between the institution of motherhood and the potential in mothering to explore intensive mothering and feminist writers who are “Richian” in that


their writing is founded in Rich’s work—I analyze feminist writing by engaging in two different case studies. I do these case studies to show that both lines of work perpetuate matrophobia, although in different ways. The work on intensive mothering, case study one, continues to maintain a divide between either employing a sisterly or daughterly approach, albeit employing contemporary versions of both, disidentifies with one part of Rich’s two-part understanding of maternity, and creates either/or theoretical binaries in terms of understanding the role of feminism in contemporary maternity and feminist strategies of resistance. The Richian scholars, case study two, also disidentify with one part of Rich’s two-part distinction, adopt Rich’s work wholesale, and, as a result, adopt the matrophobia embedded in Rich’s own sisterly location of critique and, simultaneously, also utilize a matrophobic either/or approach to theorizing maternity. Next, in Chapter 4, “What’s Wrong with a Little Lingering Matrophobia? Rhetorical Consequences in Contemporary Analyses,” I reveal the multiple and problematic consequences of matrophobia in contemporary feminist work. I argue the lingering matrophobia reveals an important methodological problem in how Rich’s ideas are used. Specifically, I suggest the splitting of Rich’s two-part distinction between institutionalized motherhood and the potential in mothering separates the two parts of maternity. As a result, I argue feminist thinkers underutilize the analytic power and potential of Rich’s all-important distinction; create an either/or theoretical binary; encourage mother blame rather than patriarchy blame; divide and separate feminists, women from one another, and women from a part of the self; create analyses that are unable to simultaneously recognize contemporary women’s split subjectivity between old and new gender expectations and are ill-equipped to respond to the contemporary anti-motherhood charges leveled against contemporary feminism; and misdiagnose how contemporary intensive mothering works as a sophisticated post – second wave backlash strategy against second wave feminist gains. These consequences, ultimately, result in incomplete analyses of the contemporary feminist rhetorical situation and discourage feminist scholars from understanding fully the contemporary relationship between feminism and maternity.

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Finally, in Chapter 5, “Theorizing a Matrophobic-Free Feminist Subject Position on Contemporary Maternity,” I propose one theoretical route to purging matrophobia. I argue purging matrophobia requires that we continue to identify with feminism, while eliminating the simultaneous disavowal of feminism and one part of Rich’s two-part distinction, and that we retool the underlying relationship between feminism and maternity, second and third wave feminisms, and the two parts of Rich’s distinction. To do so, I draw on Daphne de Marneffe’s theoretical work on connectedness and mutual responsiveness underlying the mother-child developmental relationship. Indeed, I argue de Marneffe’s reconception of the mother-child relationship as grounded in mutual responsiveness and connectedness provides a model for understanding the possibilities of productive and healthy relationships grounded in identification and relatedness rather than identification and separation or disavowal. Then, I suggest de Marneffe’s theoretical findings give us insights about how connectedness and mutual responsiveness can recenter the relationships between feminism and maternity, second and third wave feminisms, the two waves, and in terms of how we conceive our understanding of the relationship between the two parts of maternity. Utilizing de Marneffe’s insights, however, is not enough to forgo the current and deeply problematic binary use of Rich distinction and to insure that we understand fully how the contemporary feminist rhetorical and maternal contexts work. As a result, I then argue that we must also supplement de Marneffe’s insights with moderate postmodern thinking in order to recognize both structural, institutionalized motherhood via the intensive ideology and the everyday practices of empowered mothering. In other words, I maintain our thinking about contemporary maternity requires both the second wave’s modern structural focus on institutional power and the third wave’s postmodern focus on the “micro” practices of power. In doing so, however, I also argue that we do not need to “reinvent the wheel” and, in fact, can draw on what we learned during the 1980s theory debates to find a way to supplement our reorientation and grounding in mutually responsive relationships with a moderate postmodern theoretical perspective that allows us to employ both second and third wave foci. Building on both second and third wave


sensibilities also encourages a theoretical approach to analyzing contemporary maternity that understands the feminist rhetorical and maternal contexts more fully and addresses the contemporary sophisticated backlash and the anti-motherhood charges inside and outside feminism.

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1

W h i t e S e c o n d Wav e F e m i n i s m s a n d R i c h : H i s to r i c Fe m i n i s t M at r o p h o b i a

We can support each other emotionally and become sisters in oppression and, finally, in victory. (Judith Ann 100) For as long as I can remember, I did not want the kind of life my mother felt she could show me. (Nancy Friday 20) Nearly thirty years on, it is possible to interpret Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born as a bugle call that released packs of hounds, chasing pen in hand to “write” (and often “right”) the great unwritten cathexis [between mother and daughter]. (Karin Voth Harman 137)

Understanding the lingering and ongoing effects of matrophobia in relation to contemporary feminist understandings of maternity requires rereading rhetorically the origins of matrophobia within white second wave feminism. The rereading allows me to show how deeply embedded matrophobia was within second wave feminism generally and more specifically within the sisterly and daughterly subject positions that emerged. To do so, I trace the role matrophobia played in the development of the wave metaphor between first and second wave feminism, the preference for organizing around the sisterly system and the metaphor of sisterhood, and


the subsequent development of the sisterly and daughterly subject positions—or locations from which to critique society. Moreover, because, as I will show, Of Woman Born was written from a sisterly subject position and played a key role in the development of the daughterly subject position, I also trace the role matrophobia played in second wave feminists’ use of Of Woman Born and, ironically, the embedded matrophobia in Of Woman Born. These areas of foci for my rereading also allow me to tease out the rhetorical dimensions of how matrophobia worked in relation to the strategic choices second wave feminism made and to reveal how feminism’s response to motherhood and mothering were far more complex than simply just a result of second wave feminism being anti-motherhood. My intention for rereading the history of matrophobia within second wave feminism is to explore how and why matrophobia— the fear of becoming like the mother—was embedded in white second wave feminisms in order, first, to lay the foundation for revealing the problematic legacies of matrophobia in order, second, to create new possibilities in our thinking and writing about both contemporary feminisms and the relationship between feminism and maternity. To lay this groundwork, I reread the second wave in light of how and why matrophobia developed as a result of four key issues and/or events—the legacy of the Leftist movements, the development of the wave metaphor in second wave feminism, the development of the sister system and the metaphor of sisterhood that drove that system, and the use of Adrienne Rich’s ideas in Of Woman—and how all four led, first, to a sisterly approach to analyzing culture and then, second, to a daughterly approach, both of which were permeated with layers of matrophobia.

Matrophobia and the Sisterly Origins The legacy of the left and the wave metaphor While Marianne Hirsch was the first feminist scholar to diagnose matrophobia within feminism, there was little follow-up work on matrophobia until Astrid Henry’s (Matrophobia and Generations, Not My) more recent work on the origins of the wave metaphor in feminism via first, second, and third wave feminisms. As a result, I begin my historic overview of matrophobia by tracing

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Henry’s work on the relationship between matrophobia and the wave metaphor in feminism. The strategic choices 1960s and 1970s feminism made in relation to both the 1960s New Leftists and Civil Rights movements and the Suffrage movement played a crucial role in the subsequent development of matrophobia in white second wave feminism. Initially, women in the mid-to-late 1960s saw the 1960s New Leftists and Civil Rights movements—liberal and radical social movements focused on political activism and mass protests—as the geneses of second wave feminism (Henry Matrophobia and Generations; Klatch; Umansky). Or, as Henry puts it, “While many women were certainly aware that a women’s movement had existed in the previous century, it was not this earlier movement but rather the New Left and civil rights movements of the 1960s that were initially perceived as the forerunners to this new feminism” (Matrophobia and Generations 18). As it evolved, however, the feminist Suffrage movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s began to be seen as the historical precedent of 1960s and 1970s feminism. Indeed, many second wave feminists began to identify with the early feminist movement. This identification created, as Henry also suggests, both an intergenerational structure and wave metaphor within feminism. Thus, feminists of the 1960s identified with the Suffrage movement, classifying feminism as two movements in the same movement—the first and second wave—which resulted in a generational structure between feminists of the Suffrage movement, “the first wave,” and the women of the 1960s and 1970s feminist movement, the “second wave.” Equally important, this identification gave second wave feminism legitimacy and a group identity separate and distinct from the Leftist movements. Women participating in the leftist organizations needed legitimacy because, as Benita Roth argues, a central struggle women faced within the left was convincing both women and men to place gender issues on the New Left’s agenda. One way women in the Leftists movements gained legitimacy was by identifying with the Suffrage movement. Indeed, Henry argues that this identification helped “to validate feminism at a time when it was often ridiculed as silly and demeaned as not politically serious” (Matrophobia and Generations 19). Moreover, Henry also argues, “the second wave’s identification with the first wave granted


feminists in the 1960s a group identity: women involved in the historic struggle for women’s rights” (Feminism and Generations 10). Consequently, the identification gave second wave feminists a historical group of foremothers with whom to compare themselves,1 a group identity, and legitimacy within the Leftist and Civil Rights movements. At the same time that second wave feminists identified with first wave feminism as a way to legitimate the second wave, these feminists also disavowed first wave feminism in ways that were matrophobic. Crucially important to this analysis, how white second wave feminists made this disavowal is central to understanding the underlying role and rhetorical dimensions of matrophobia in white second wave feminism. Henry extends Diane Fuss’s notion of disidentification to help explain how disidentification is also matrophobic. Fuss, building on Judith Butler’s writing, argues that disidentification “might in some cases more accurately be termed a disavowed one-an identification that has already been made and denied in the unconscious” (Henry, Feminism and Generations 10). In other words, disidentification represents a rejection of an identification one has already made unconsciously. Or, as Henry puts it in her dissertation, “Disidentification is a concept that I use throughout the dissertation to describe an indentification against something” (Feminism and Generations, italics in the text 10). In short, disidentification is a negative process of identifying against something or someone, or as not like something or someone. A similar negative process is also at work in matrophobia. Henry, in fact, links Fuss’s ideas directly to Rich’s notion of matrophobia when she argues that identifying against the mother is the fear of recognition of being like the mother, which is also a disidentificatory moment. As Henry suggests, “Matrophobia shares with Fuss’ notion of disidentification, the fear of an identification that one doesn’t want to make, that one ‘fears to make only because one has already made it’ ” (Feminism and Generations 14). In summary, disidentification shares with matrophobia the fear of making an identification one does not want to make but has already made and, as a result, is an identification against something that is a negative identificatory process one does not want and/or does not like about the person, role being disavowed, and/or theoretical and political positions.


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Henry employs Fuss’s idea of disdentification to argue white second wave feminism also employed a matrophobic disidentification strategy with the first wave. Henry argues a key event that defined the future of the second wave and was, simultaneously, a pinnacle disidentification moment occurred during the 1969 inaugural of Richard Nixon. Various women’s groups organized a separate women’s event for the counter inaugural rally being organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam in Washington, D.C. In planning the demonstration, members of New York Radical Women organized a “give back the vote” for which Suffragettes had struggled. Organizing a give back the vote emerged because, as Henry argues, many second wave feminists believed that the focus on the vote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the downfall of that feminism because “first-wave feminists had not fought for ‘real emancipation’ but rather had allowed themselves to be placated by ‘sop’ ” (Feminism and Generations 21). In other words, rather than focus on large-scale institutional change, Suffragettes emphasized on and were placated by an “easy” goal: “simply” gaining the vote for women. This moment of disidentification with the first wave allowed the second wave to articulate what was a “better” and new focus for the second wave. Thus, strategically situating feminism both with and against the Suffragette movement allowed 1960s feminists both to identify and disidentify with the first wave, such that “the ‘dead’ suffrage movement was defined as conservative, misguided, and over, so the ‘new,’ ‘real’ feminism of the present could be posited as truly radical and thus, ultimately, a better kind of feminism” (Henry, Feminism and Generations 21). The anti-inaugural event also was a prelude to another key matrophobic development in the second wave. Also built on a simultaneous identification and disidentification, the anti-inaugural event ultimately led to the sister system driving white second wave feminism. Shortly after the anti-inaugural event, Anne Koedt and Sulamith Firestone formed the New York Radical Feminists (NYRF) and developed organizing principles. Those principles focused on developing leaderless and structureless groups2 organized around units of two or three women. As Koedt and Firestone put it, “Such a Sister System was common to the old feminist movement, and was a valuable aid in overcoming, by means of close mutual reinforcement and intersupplmentation,


the weakness and lack of confidence we have each acquired in different areas due to the constant battering from without” (quoted in Henry, Feminism and Generations 24). In developing cells or brigades for action, they argued that each cell group be named after radical feminists. The NYRF was named the StantonAnthony Brigade. The decision to name their founding brigade after not one but two earlier feminists, then, both enacted the intellectual commitment to identify with the first wave as the foundation for contemporary feminism, while also continuing to entrench the sister system as the primary form of organizing the second wave. This commitment to the sister system, as other scholars (Dill; Fox Genovessee; Hirsch, “Feminism at the Maternal Divide”; Siegel; Umansky) suggest, in fact, became the predominant form of organizing for 1970s white second wave feminism. Henry (Feminism and Generations) concludes, and is worth quoting in length, Taken together, these two events in 1969—the counter-inaugural protest, which used as its grounding principle the misguidedness of first-wave feminism, and the formation of a feminist group, which in its name honored two of the very women who had been an integral part of that earlier movement—suggest the contradictory nature of the second wave’s relationship to the first wave of feminism. On the one hand, the past was repudiated and viewed with disdain. On the other hand, it was honored as a rich source of knowledge and guidance. This contradiction, I contend, was not only irreconcilable but was, in fact, vital to the development of second-wave feminism. (24)3

From the early days of second wave feminism, layers of matrophobia were at the foundation of this feminism and the development of the wave metaphor. Equally important, matrophobia primarily worked through simultaneously identifying and disidentifying with the first wave. These strategies embedded matrophobia within that wave metaphor and entrenched, what I refer to as, the twin rhetorical moves of matrophobia. In other words, the simultaneity of matrophobia goes hand-in-hand, such that both identification and disidentification are at work like a pair set, like “twins.” Thus, the twin rhetorical moves of matrophobia were also at the foundation of white second wave feminism and the wave metaphor.


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Early matrophobic consequences Before exploring in more detail the subsequent sisterly subject position that developed as a result of these commitments and strategic choices in the early days of the second wave, it is important to flesh out the relationship between feminism and maternity that emerged. While Henry’s work clearly reveals how and why matrophobia developed in the early days of second wave feminism and how a sisterly subject position began to emerge, her work does not explore the effects or consequences of the twin rhetorical moves of identification and disidentification on feminism’s relationship to (or connection with) maternity. Coupling Henry’s work with this rhetorical rereading suggests, however, that there are three main consequences in relation to how matrophobia worked rhetorically in the second wave and the effects or impact of that matrophobia in terms of the relationship to maternity that was developed. Clearly, the strategic choice that second wave feminism made in relation to developing a wave metaphor within feminism laid the foundation for an intergenerational and matrophobic relationship between first wave foremothers and second wave sisters, a relationship Henry (Not My) argues continues between so-called second wave mothers and third wave daughters.4 Moreover, because the commitment to the sister system was matrophobic in its fear of becoming like the first wave foremothers, this system also played a significant role in rejecting mothering as a both theoretical or political location of critique. Thus, the twin rhetorical moves of identification and disidentification also helped fuel a particular feminist subject position that was built on separating and distancing feminist sisters from motherhood and mothering.5 To show how these effects were at work rhetorically to entrench matrophobia in the sisterly subject position it is important to explore in more detail the focus of the sisterly critique and how it metamorphosed into the daughterly critique.

Sisterly subjectivity The sisterly subject position in the second wave was founded in the theoretical commitments of the sister system and the metaphor of sisterhood that became a symbol for the sister system. In addition


to enacting the commitment to woman-to-woman organizing, the sisterly subject position focused on modes of thinking and political practices that allowed women to support one another, assumed a shared notion of oppression for women as a group, focused primarily on exploring institutional forms of oppression, and tried to enact leaderless activism. These areas of foci for the sisterly perspective, in fact, were best captured in Robin Morgan’s all-important 1970 edited volume , Sisterhood is Powerful, while, more recently, Deborah Siegel’s 2007 rereading of second wave feminism in Sisterhood Interrupted also reveals how a sisterly location of critique developed. At its core, then, organizing as sisters allowed second wave feminists to identify as women struggling together against patriarchal gender oppression, and this notion was embedded in the metaphor of sisterhood. Indeed, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese argues that sisterhood was a prominent metaphor for the “female solidarity and struggle” that was at the foundation of second wave feminism (94). Supporting one another emotionally while also engaging in the struggle against women’s oppression were also key components of sisterhood. For example, Judith Ann writes in Sisterhood is Powerful, “We can support each other emotionally and become sisters in oppression and, finally, in victory” (100). Moreover, the sisterly location of critique allowed second wave feminists to support one another in what they presumed was a shared group experience of oppression. Or, as Bonnie Dill puts it, “Sisterhood is generally understood as a nurturant, supportive feelings of attachment and loyalty to other women that grows out of a shared experience of oppression” (43). As such, the sisterly location of critique (and the underlying metaphor of sisterhood) assumed female solidarity was both possible and vital as a location of critique against women’s oppression. Moreover, the sisterly focus also led many feminists at the time to focus on institutionalized forms of oppression against women. In fact, speaking of second wave feminism, Dill points out, “The movement’s early emphasis upon the oppression of women within the institution of marriage and the family and upon educational and professional discrimination reflected the concerns of middleclass white women” (45). As a result, while marriage and family were addressed at this time, this was done at the institutional level,


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with very little attention to the actual practices and experiences of mothering and family ‘life gender roles. Because white second wave feminists believed the shared experience of oppression could and did bond women, they also held that this sisterly form of shared oppression could serve as the foundation for women “giving birth to themselves.” In other words, uniting in sisterhood allowed second wave feminists to imagine new possibilities for women outside of the patriarchal roles and positions designated for women. As a result, as noted in the introduction, Hirsch was the first to argue that this commitment to female solidarity and to women giving birth to themselves also encouraged feminists to reject mothering and motherhood as a location of critique and to decouple the connection between femininity and mothering/motherhood. As Hirsch (“Feminism at the Maternal Divide”) argues retrospectively and is worth quoting again in length, sisterhood provided the possibility of mutuality and reciprocity. The metaphor of sisterhood, though still familial, can describe a feminine mode of relation, an ideal and alternative within patriarchy. It could help women envision a life and a set of affiliations outside of the paradigm of mother/child relations and the compromises with men that motherhood seems to necessitate. It can liberate feminist women from our anatomy and from the difficult stories of our own mothers’ accommodation, adjustment and resignation. “Sisterhood” can free us, as we were fond of saying, “to give birth to ourselves.” (356)

The sisterly subject position that developed, then, was fundamentally built on privileging mutuality and reciprocity between women rather than any reciprocity between mothers and children or mothers and daughters. While Henry does not tie the matrophobia of the second wave specifically to the sisterly subject position, as noted in the introduction, Hirsch was the first feminist to argue that the sisterly approach and the metaphor of sisterhood were matrophobic in terms of the relationship created between feminism and maternity. Thus, the sisterly perspective was fearful of acknowledging the maternal or mothering and hence expelled both from the sisterly location of critique. As Hirsch also argued in The Mother/Daughter Plot, “To say that ‘sisterhood is powerful,’ however, is to isolate feminist discourse within one generation


and to banish feminist who are mothers to the ‘mother-closet’ ” (164). Expelling or separating mothering from the sisterly perspective, then, is matrophobic. Moreover, the sisterly focus is also problematic because, as Hirsch (“Feminism at the Maternal Divide”) argued later, feminists—even those who had children— continued to separate and split from mothering and motherhood in connecting as sisters. Rereading the sisterly subject position of the early days of the second wave begins to reveal the layers of matrophobia within that subject position. Indeed, Henry’s work reveals that the disidentification with the first wave was matrophobic and thus helped to fuel and support the sisterly system. Thus, the metaphor of sisterhood that drove the second wave was not only built on matrophobia, at the theoretical level, matrophobia was built into both the intellectual commitments and focus of the sisterly subject position. The sisterly subject position that developed, then, was also fundamentally built on matrophobia and privileging mutuality and reciprocity among women rather than any reciprocity between mothers and children or mothers and daughters and, as a result, developed another layer of matrophobia. Consequently, the primary relationship between feminism and maternity continued to be built on matrophobia. This sisterly perspective also had one key rhetorical consequence, as the second wave feminism moved through the mid-1970s and early 1980s: a matrophobic daughterly subject position emerged directly out of these sisterly theoretical commitments, which is also revealed through an exploration of how second wave feminists used Rich’s work in Of Woman Born.

Matrophobia and the Daughterly Origins In the midst of the heady time of sisterhood, in 1976, Rich published Of Woman Born. From the time it was published, second wave feminists used the ideas in Of Woman Born in an intriguing manner. Even though, as Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels argue, it was widely read by second wave feminists (50), Rich’s critique of motherhood was not what interested feminists at the time. In writing about the initial interest in Rich, Maria-Barbara WatsonFranke argues that “the majority of scholars continued to ignore motherhood as a research topic” (76). Instead, white second wave


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feminists focused on “Chapter IX: Motherhood and Daughterhood.” Chapter IX examines, across disciplines, the absence of or the lack of attention to the unique nature of the mother-daughter relationship. As noted in the introduction, white second wave feminists focused almost exclusively on Rich’s oft-quoted statement that “the cathexis between mother and daughter—essential, distorted, misused—is the great unwritten story” (225). In 1981, five years after Of Women Born was published, for example, Hirsch (“Mothers and Daughters”) wrote, Since Rich demonstrated the absence of the mother-daughter relationship from theology, art, sociology, and psychoanalysis, and its centrality in women’s lives, many voices have come to fill this gap, to create speech and meaning where there has been silence and absence. In fact, the five years since the publication of Rich’s book have seen a proliferation of writings that have both documented implications and uncovered a variety of precedents for their inquiry. (201)

In their initial use of Of Woman Born, then, feminist writers primarily focused on Rich’s call to explore and write the uniquely feminine relationship between mothers and daughters. Moreover, feminists reprioritized the mother-daughter relationship as the most important relationship in girls’ lives and in their future development as women. In fact, in her review essay, “Mothers and Daughters,” Hirsch begins by noting that, in 1976, Rich “alerted us to the silence that has surrounded the most informative relationship in the life of every woman, the relationship between daughter and mother” (200). As a result, many feminists explored the cathexis (a Freudian concept) or energy charge between mothers and daughters as a way to understand better the long-lasting impact the mother-daughter relationship had on daughters’ development, sense of self, and gender-role acquisition. Thus, Rich’s own work on the mother-daughter relationship in Of Woman Born initiated one of the most important bodies of work in the second wave, even if not all feminists working in this area drew directly on Rich’s book. Consequently, within five years from the publication of Of Woman Born, the mother-daughter focus had exploded in feminist writing. In her 1981 review of the mother-daughter focus, Hirsch argued that the most complex “work on the mother-daughter


relationships to date has been undertaken in the area of feminist psychoanalysis” (“Mothers and Daughters” 203). Hirsch also argues that three trends were emerging at that time in feminist psychoanalytic studies: Freudian and neo-Freudian studies, Jungian-based studies, and French feminist theory, all of which drew on the work of Jacques Lacan. While this book is primarily, but not exclusively, focused on American and Canadian texts, it is important to note both the American and non-American “classics” in the mother-daughter relationship as a way to show how the general body of work known as the mother-daughter focus in feminism was written from a daughterly subject position that was also matrophobic. Classic texts in object-relations during this time (Benjamin; Chodorow; Dinnerstein; Flax “The Conflict”; Gilligan) focus on how daughters form their identity in relation to their mothers and the long-term consequences of that identity in terms of acquiring and sustaining feminine gender roles, ways of knowing/thinking, and/or moral reasoning. Hirsch (“Mothers and Daughters”) says feminists also drew on Jungian scholars6 to explore the archetype of the great mother and other maternal or female symbolism. Finally, French feminist work (Cixous; Irigaray; Kristeva) looks at and emphasizes the mother-daughter bond, with Irigarary focusing on the lack of separation between mother and daughter and emphasizing multiplicity, plurality, and continuity and Cixous and Kristeva focusing on deconstructing phallogocentrism in order “to define the specificity of the female experience, which is to be found in the silences and absences, in all that our culture has repressed and suppressed” (Hirsch, “Mothers and Daughters” 210). Moreover, while they draw on different theoretical perspectives, Hirsch (“Mothers and Daughters”) also argues that all three trends focus on the impact of the mother-daughter relationship on the daughter. Because second wave feminists focused almost exclusively on the daughter, another key concern in the exploration of the mother-daughter relationship was the continuation of patriarchal thinking and gender roles as a result of the relationship. Specifically, because mothers were also raised under patriarchy, were shaped by patriarchy, second wave feminists were concerned about how much patriarchy shaped mothers’ own understanding of femininity. In 1978, Jane Flax (“The Conflict”) wrote specifically of this


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concern: “Because her own psychological development occurred under patriarchy, it would have left an imprint upon her feelings about herself, about being a woman and being a mother” (173). Moreover and related, many feminists were also interested in the ways that the mother-daughter relationship plays a key role in perpetuating patriarchal thinking and gender roles. Crucially, however, the primary focus was the fear that the mother played a central role in socializing the daughter into patriarchal femininity because she was also raised under patriarchy. Nancy Friday’s (My Mother/Myself ) opening epithet—“For as long as I can remember, I did not want the kind of life my mother felt she could show me”— is typical of this thinking (20). Thus, a fear of the mother is deeply embedded in much of mother-daughter work, a fear that was also expressed explicitly. Flax (“The Conflict”), for example, writes, “To the extent that the mother lacks the power and the esteem of others, she has already betrayed her daughter. The fear of failure is a fear of being a damaged person like the mother” (182). As this line of thinking developed, Carol Boyd, writing in 1989, and Hirsch (The Mother/Daughter), in 1997, argued that much mother-daughter writing also emerged in tandem with the shift from equality to difference feminism—primarily by drawing on both psychoanalysis and social learning theories—and focuses on the different gender socialization between boys and girls. In this line of thinking, psychoanalytic theories emphasize daughters’ unconscious internalization of maternal values and behaviors, while social learning theorists disregard the idea of unconscious identification and advocate principles of modeling by mothers for daughters. Thus, classic feminist texts during this period (Belenky et al.; Gilligan; Keller) explored the mother-daughter relationship from the perspective of the daughter and explored the differences that resulted between men and women as a result of the dissimilar gendered relationship between mothers and sons and mothers and daughters. As a result, from the time that Of Woman Born was published, the text was used very specifically, and this use of Rich’s text has, in fact, been credited by contemporary feminists scholars (Hirsch “Mothers and Daughters”; Smith; Voth Harman) with “channeling” white second wave American feminist work into one of its most productive and significant areas of scholarship. In particular, as Karin Voth Harman describes it and was already noted


in the introduction, Rich’s early writing on the mother-daughter relationship was taken “as a bugle call that released packs of hounds, chasing pen in hand to ‘write’ (and often ‘right’) the great unwritten cathexis” (137). Thus, white second wave feminists used Of Woman Born as the landmark text in initiating theoretical work on the mother-daughter relationship. By doing so, and equally important, this use of Rich shifted second wave feminism from a sisterly to a daughterly feminist subject position or location of critique. Interestingly, in “writing” and “righting” the mother-daughter relationship, then, feminists did shift from a sisterly to a daughterly subject position because they wrote daughters’ side of the mother-daughter relationship and shifted from equality feminism to difference feminism. While this shift in analytic foci and feminist subject position might suggest that these feminists began to “correct” the matrophobia within white second wave feminism, the rereading makes clear that the shift did not do so because of the exclusive focus on daughters’ lives and experiences of the relationship. Moreover, again, Hirsch was the first feminist to argue that this feminist location of critique was also matrophobic. Indeed, Hirsch (Mother/Daughter Plot) argues, while psychoanalytic feminism added the female child, “the adult woman who is mother, in particular, continues to exist only in relation to her child, never as a subject in her own right. And, in her maternal function, she remains an object, always distanced, always idealized or denigrated, always mystified, always represented through the small child’s point of view” (167). In short, the mother remains secondary, while the daughter is primary, in this kind of analysis. In her later work, Hirsch (“Feminism at the Maternal Divide”) also argues that this grounding in difference feminism gave feminists the means to explore the specificity of women’s lives as distinct from men’s but only from the daughters’ perspective, while continuing to ignore mothers’ perspectives. In short, mothering was, at best, secondary to this daughterly feminist subject position, which almost exclusively privileged the experiences and knowledge gained as daughters. Thus, Hirsch (“Feminism at the Maternal Divide”) concludes that the daughterly subject position that emerged from across the different areas of interest in the mother-daughter focus was still steeped in matrophobia in its fear of fully acknowledging mothering in its own right.


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Why this specific use of Rich? The shift to a daughterly subject position is interesting not only because it kept mothering as secondary but also because little has been written about why it occurred via Rich’s text. More specifically, even though Rich is widely praised for the development of the mother-daughter focus, little has been written about why this particular focus emerged and why so little attention was given to Rich’s larger critique of motherhood or her arguments about the potentially empowering components of mothering. I suggest one answer to these “why” questions is the legacy of the embedded matrophobia within the sisterly subject position that was the foundation of both Rich’s own sisterly subject position and the shift to the daughterly subjectivity. As the rereading here makes clear, the particular rhetorical situation from within which Rich’s text emerged and the feminist context within which it was first read were both within the sister system. Rich’s work was thus first read within sisterly theoretical commitments and a sisterly subject position. As a result, the matrophobia underlying the development of the wave metaphor, the sisterly organizing system, and the sisterly subject position provides one plausible explanation for why white feminists in the second wave ignored Rich’s larger critique of motherhood and her claim about the potentially empowering components of mothering and instead focused on Rich’s writing on the mother-daughter relationship. In light of the underlying layers of matrophobia in white second wave feminism, it is not surprising that this feminism largely ignored Rich’s writing on motherhood and mothering; both were simply out of sync with the sisterly focus that continued to purge mothering from the second wave. For those feminist scholars who did utilize Rich’s work, then, it is also not surprising that they only focused on the mother-daughter relationship because it allowed them to continue to circumvent mothering and continue to embrace and enact the sisterly perspective, albeit in a new form. In other words, focusing on the mother-daughter relationship allowed feminists to continue to sidestep mothering and, equally important, privilege the woman-to-woman focus among daughters rather than between mothers and daughters.7 Thus, while Hirsch reveals how matrophobia continued to work within


the daughterly perspective, the rereading here uncovers why: the lingering legacy of the sisterly subject position fueled the development of the daughterly subject position. In other words, the daughterly perspective did not occur in a vacuum; rather, it was a continuation of the strategic choices made as sisters in using Rich’s ideas, and it was within the sister system that the daughterly subject position emerged. Clearly, because the daughterly focus emerged directly out of a sisterly subjectivity that was matrophobic, matrophobia was embedded within the daughterly focus also. Moreover, the rereading reveals yet another and new understanding about the role matrophobia played in the almost exclusive use of Rich’s text to theorize the mother-daughter relationship, while remaining silent on Rich’s larger critique of motherhood and mothering. The layers of matrophobia worked such that any focus on mothering or motherhood, either theoretically or politically, was simply out of sync—almost impossible—within the system that drove the white second wave and the focus on the mother-daughter relationship. There is, however, another way that matrophobia was at work in second wave feminism’s focus on the mother-daughter relationship that has also not been previously diagnosed: matrophobia was embedded within Of Woman Born itself, even though, and ironically, Rich was the first second wave feminist to theorize motherhood and mothering and matrophobia itself. To unpack how matrophobia is embedded within Of Woman Born, I need to address briefly how Rich’s ideas are used today by feminists.8 While I address the current use of Rich in much more detail in Chapter 3, here, I explore how and why the contemporary focus on empowered mothering developed to reveal the lingering matrophobia within the sister system that permeates a curious silence from Rich herself within the Of Woman Born on the potential of mothering. Rich’s own matrophobia As noted in the introduction, in the early 1990s, Rich’s writing on motherhood and mothering in Of Woman Born was “rediscovered” by feminist maternal scholars. Two contemporary edited volumes published in 2004—Mother Outlaws and From Motherhood to Mothering—and a 2006 double issue of the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, for example, offer very important insights


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into how Rich’s ideas are employed today and make significant contributions to extending Rich’s ideas. Many scholars writing in all three texts currently utilize Rich’s writing on both motherhood and mothering extensively, focusing especially on theorizing the potential of mothering to be empowering to women, if women are allowed to define mothering for themselves. Contemporary feminists, then, take this original idea from Rich and theorize what is described in contemporary terms as empowered feminist mothering. In this context, empowered mothering, as Andrea O’Reilly (Mother Outlaws) argues, is a counter discourse of mothering that “redefines mothering as a female-defined or, more specifically, a feminist enterprise” that emphasizes maternal power and ascribes agency to mothers within everyday mothering practices (160). Thus, in the current use of Of Woman Born, much feminist work focuses on theorizing and exploring the potentially empowering components of mothering for women. This specific focus, then, emerges out of Rich’s distinction between motherhood as an institution and mothering as potentially empowering. As noted in the introduction, Rich argued, “I try to distinguish 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” (Of Woman Born, 13, italics in the original). One reason why contemporary feminist scholars focus on theorizing empowered mothering is because Rich actually said very little in Of Woman Born about what empowered mothering might entail. In other words, even though Rich was the first feminist to suggest that mothering could be empowering and she spends much time in the book detailing the history and methods by which the patriarchal institution of motherhood has been used to oppress and constrain women, she does not give an equal amount of attention to the potential found in mothering. In fact, the only explicit mention of the potential of mothering in Of Woman Born occurs when Rich speaks of a vacation she took with her three boys without her husband. In that passage, which I quote in full in Chapter 3, Rich argues that she rebels against motherhood by refusing to follow all the rules for schedules, naps, and bedtime during the vacation and, by doing so, realizes what living with children could entail. In short, Rich writes that she and


her sons “were conspirators, outlaws from the institution of motherhood; I felt enormously in charge of my life” (194-195). This moment, however, was short lived. As Rich put it in Of Woman Born, “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” (195). This, then, is Rich’s only mention of her own experience of mothering, in her terms, outside of patriarchal expectations of good mothering. Because Rich has only this Vermont reference, there is a noticeable and yet-to-be-explained absence in the book about how mothering could be empowering rather than oppressive to women. O’Reilly (Mother Outlaws) argues, While this absence has puzzled scholars, most agree that—as mothering is not described or theorized in Of Woman Born—the text, in distinguishing mothering from motherhood and in identifying the potential empowerment of motherhood, has enabled [contemporary] feminists to envision empowered mothering for women. (2)

Consequently, much contemporary feminist work fills the void or silence in Rich’s text by exploring empowered mothering. Intriguingly, the contemporary work neither explores nor explains Rich’s silence on mothering. I believe, however, that that one explanation for Rich’s silence is that it is a symptom of the particular sisterly subject position from which she wrote: a radical feminist subject position.9 While not all feminists who embraced the sister system and a sisterly subject position were radical feminists, radical feminism is a sisterly subject position.10 Moreover, even though there was diversity among feminists who claimed a radical feminist subject position, feminist scholars (Umansky; Siegel) suggest that two hallmarks of radical feminism were a commitment to theorizing the personal as political and to theorizing women’s oppression as institutional. Moreover, Umansky also argues that, for the non-separatist radical feminists, “much of the debate within feminism lay not over whether to reject the ‘typical’ [married and with children] woman outright, but in how to understand her oppression” (42). In other words, radical feminists like Rich theorized a previously personal and private sphere issue to focus on understanding how motherhood as an institution oppressed women. Significantly, then, even though Rich described


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one of her own personal experiences mothering her three sons and, by so doing, enacted her commitment to the idea that the personal was political, her primary subject position when writing the text was as a feminist sister rather than as a mother or daughter. Thus, while her actual experience as a mother was embedded in the text and remains important to it, Rich did not primarily write as a feminist mother or feminist daughter; she wrote as a woman-identified-woman from within the sisterly system. As such, Rich’s work created a very a specific relationship between feminism and motherhood; it was a relationship rooted in a structural, institutionalized focus that, ultimately, privileged women’s connection to one another as women rather than as mothers. As the rereading here suggests, one way to understand the woman-identified-woman location of critique that Rich employed is to situate it within the theoretical and political commitments of the sister system that developed in the early second wave and the daughterly subjectivity that emerged as a result of the text. Thus, ironically, it is quite plausible to interpret both Rich’s location of critique and the text itself as “sisterly,” even though Rich’s text was about motherhood and she made the all-important distinction between motherhood and mothering. Indeed, as the rhetorical rereading reveals, even with Rich’s attention to motherhood and the fact that she pried motherhood and mothering apart, both Rich’s location of critique and the text are deeply situated within a sisterly subject position that was primarily silent about mothering and, as has been detailed earlier in this chapter, was founded on layers of matrophobia. As such, the matrophobia underlying the sisterly subject position also begins to reveal one reason why Rich herself may have been silent on mothering. Rich’s curious silence on mothering can be interpreted as a symptom of the matrophobia embedded in the feminist subject position from which she wrote Of Woman Born. In other words, fueled by matrophobia, the sisterly subject position of radical feminism continued to split or separate a feminist intellectual from exploring empowered mothering. Thus, rather than connect with the potential in mothering—detail what empowered mothering might or could mean—Rich’s sisterly subject position and its underlying matrophobia worked to silence mothering in the focus on both institutionalized motherhood and mutuality among sisters. In short, while Rich was able to begin to challenge


patriarchal motherhood and even name matrophobia within the mother-daughter relationship, the underlying matrophobia at work in her feminist sisterly subject position11 may have continued to silence Rich herself about empowered mothering. Thus, rereading Rich’s “curious” silence in light of matrophobia suggests that it might be a symptom of her sisterly radical feminist subject position. Clearly, rereading the second wave in light of matrophobia reveals how and why it developed in the second wave as a result of the strategic choices 1960s and 1970s feminists made in relation to identifying and disidentifying with the Suffrage movement. Indeed, early second wave feminists created a relationship to the Suffrage movement, founded on a wave metaphor, that identified with earlier feminism while simultaneously disidentifying with first wave foremothers. The twin rhetorical moves of disidentification and identification helped to support and encourage the subsequent sisterly system that predominated in the second wave, while also enacting a matrophobic relationship to maternity such that motherhood and mothering were rejected as potential locations for both theoretical and political critique. The daughterly subject position that emerged directly from the sister system and Rich’s ideas on the mother-daughter relationship shifted to a new feminist subject position that remained matrophobic in its focus on the daughters’ perspectives and concerns. Finally, the rereading also reveals how the matrophobia embedded in the radical sisterly subject position from which Rich wrote Of Woman Born also helps to explain Rich’s silence on mothering in the text. The rhetorical consequences or effects of these layers of matrophobia are clear. The sisterly subject position that emerged in the 1970s entrenched a fear and a rejection of mothering in feminist writing and fueled feminist subject positions that remained distant and separate from mothering. Moreover, the sisterly focus also encouraged silence on mothering, even for feminists who were mothers themselves, and an almost exclusive focus on patriarchal institutions and those institutions’ effects on women’s lives. While the daughterly focus shifted feminism toward the impact on the mother-daughter relationship and difference feminism and, as a result, acknowledged mothering to some degree, it also continued to sidestep mothering and theorized the daughters’ perspective and continued to encourage a fear of mothering. Thus, “historic” matrophobia was deeply embedded in both the sisterly and daughterly


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subject positions, as feminists continued to be silent on mothering and to circumvent mothering as a location of critique. In terms of the relationship between feminism and maternity, the layers of matrophobia created a problematic relationship. Specifically, motherhood and mothering continued to be rejected as potential locations of critique, which perpetuated the ongoing silence within feminism on both and continued to make feminism vulnerable to the anti-motherhood charges. However, as I show in the next chapter, the sisterly and daughterly subject positions also created great possibilities for women as second wave feminism began to live with the successes of the second wave in the 1980s and through the 1990s, until the explosion of texts on motherhood and mothering began to emerge. It is to this time that I now turn my attention in Chapter 2.


Chapter

2

Fro m O n g o i n g S i l e n c e to Po p u l a r W r i t e r s’ M at r o p h o b i a Even though the focus of this book is on conflicts in feminist theory, rather than on the extensive erosion visited by Reaganomics on the hopes and accomplishments of 1970s U.S. feminism, no discussion of either feminism or feminist theory in the 1980s can begin without at least acknowledging the hostility of the larger political, economic, and cultural climate which we have had to endure. (Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller 1) Even feminists are often reluctant to admit that many women’s lives revolve around their children . . . they fear that if women are seen to be mothers first, the very real gains that women have made in the workplace could be jeopardized. (Ann Crittenden 7)

As feminism moved through the 1980s and 1990s, white feminism shifted its focus to beginning to live with the successes of white second wave feminism. As a result, while the daughterly focus remained, little attention was given to motherhood and mothering. However, in the late 1990s, and especially after 2000, there was an explosion of both academic feminist and popular writing on contemporary maternity. Analyzing the academic work, which also initiated a rediscovery of Adrienne Rich, and the popular writing requires understanding the historical and rhetorical contexts


of post-1970s second wave feminism that preceded both kinds of writing. More specifically, it is important to reread key rhetorical exigencies that kept 1980s and 1990s feminists primarily silent on maternity, prior to the explosion of academic and popular interest in contemporary maternity. Moreover, because popular writers are employing the antimotherhood discourse in the service of disidentifying from and blaming second wave feminism for contemporary mothers’ struggles, it is also necessary to reread the post-1970s contexts to understand fully why popular writers’ charges are so effective rhetorically. Thus, in this chapter, I trace key rhetorical exigencies and situations of the post - second wave context and selected texts from the popular writing that began to emerge in 2000, while in Chapter 3, I explore the contemporary feminist writing on maternity. Again, and as with Chapter 1, rereading the rhetorical situations feminists faced allows for a far more complex understanding of feminism’s relationship to maternity than the overly simple charge leveled against feminism that feminism was and remains anti-motherhood. In other words, because second wave feminism is history, we have the opportunity to reread it in light of important rhetorical situations of the time—to reread 1980s and 1990s white feminism as evolving in response to specific historical and rhetorical situations that have important effects on the subsequent contemporary feminist interest in maternity. Analyzing the rhetorical situation also provides the opportunity for a sympathetic rereading of matrophobia—feminism’s lingering problem—to explain feminism’s reluctance to develop a location of critique that makes mothering central and, as a result, has made contemporary feminism so vulnerable to popular writers’ charges that contemporary feminism is anti-motherhood. Equally important, the rereading also lays the foundation to explore later, in Chapter 5, how feminism’s preoccupations during the 1980s and mid-1990s may give us insight into the possibilities of purging matrophobia in contemporary work. Thus, I engage in the rereading to allow me to learn from these problems in order to continue the project of laying the foundation for creating new possibilities for understanding contemporary maternity. As with Chapter 1, to engage in this rereading, I briefly trace three key shaping events1 of white feminism in the 1980s

P o p u l a r W r i t e r s ’ M at r o p h o b i a

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and through the mid-1990s—the early successes of second wave feminism and the almost immediate backlash against those successes; the feminist theory debates, particularly the postmodern turn, the commonality-difference and essentialism debates; and the introduction of the so-called third wave feminism. I do so to argue, once again, attention to motherhood and maternity remained out sync with the primary foci of feminists during this time period. And, equally important, I show that the matrophobic strategies first employed by second wave feminists continued in the foundational strategies third wave feminists employed, which further deepened and entrenched matrophobia within the wave metaphor. Moreover, I also argue that matrophobia is at work in popular texts in ways that fuel both the anti-motherhood charge against feminism and contemporary backlash strategies. Specifically, popular writers also engage in disidentification and mother blame and, as a result, play a key role in the ongoing anti-motherhood charge against white second wave feminism and the backlash strategy that Susan Faludi first described as simultaneously acknowledging second wave feminism’s successes while blaming feminism for contemporary women’s problems via maternity. Thus, I also argue contemporary feminists must understand how matrophobia continues to be entrenched in the wave metaphor and in popular texts to appreciate both the shifting rhetorical situation feminism faces today and how matrophobia works rhetorically outside of feminism to support contemporary backlash.

From White Second Wave Feminism to Post – Second Wave Popular Writing on Maternity Clearly, as white feminism moved into the 1980s, feminists were employing feminist subject positions that were either silent on mothering, focused on institutional issues, and/or exploring the impact on daughters of the mother-daughter relationship, all of which, as Chapter 1 revealed, were approaches that were matrophobic and continued to sidestep mothering. During this time feminists also faced a fundamentally new rhetorical context that continued to encourage silence on maternity. Central to this changing context was feminism living within 1970s successes


and the subsequent backlash that emerged in tandem with those successes. Success and backlash It is irrefutable that white second wave feminisms—of which the sisterly subject position played a key role—had many successes. Indeed, the sisterly focus on challenging patriarchal institutions wrought many changes that continue to be felt. Moreover, as noted in the introduction, as Bonnie Dow reminded us recently, these very gains are simultaneously taken for granted and under attack today. In terms of the specific gains, The Women’s History section of The Encyclopedia Britannica online summarizes these successes succinctly: Women gained access to jobs in every corner of the U.S. economy, and employers with long histories of discrimination were required to provide timetables for increasing the number of women in their workforces. Divorce laws were liberalized; employers were barred from firing pregnant women; and women’s studies programs were created in colleges and universities. Record numbers of women ran for—and started winning— political office. In 1972, Congress passed Title IX of the Higher Education Act, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational program receiving federal funds and thereby forced all-male schools to open their doors to women and athletic programs to sponsor and finance female sports teams. And in 1973, in its controversial ruling on Roe v. Wade, the United States Supreme Court legalized abortion.

As the summary makes clear, the sisterly institutional focus succeeded in gaining entry for women across U.S. institutions— professional, educational, and political. Thus, the rhetorical context of the 1980s through the mid-1990s was fundamentally different from that of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, there was a seismic shift in the rhetorical context—the larger political and cultural context—of 1980s and mid-1990s feminism: feminists began to live with the successes of the hard-fought battles of the 1970s. One key strategy change, then, was that white feminists began to work within rather than outside institutions, in part, because they had gained access to the very institutions that had previously excluded them. This shift, however, was read by many— especially in popular media—as “the death of feminism”2 or signs


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of postfeminism. Writing in 1990, Mary Katzenstein describes this shift: “As the 1990s begin, few feminist subscribe to the popular notion that the women’s movement is dead. Yet we also know that the public face of the feminist movement is not the same. Marches, protests, and demonstrations are infrequent, press coverage is decreased and much of the drama is gone” (27). The forms of action that fueled the second wave, then, had begun to be replaced by mobilization inside educational and professional institutions, with ongoing attention to key feminist concerns in the 1970s: abortion rights, sexual harassment, date rape, pay inequities, women’s double shift responsibilities, and care for the elderly (Katzenstein 27). Equally important was the almost immediate backlash against those successes that developed. As a result, the first rhetorical situation also includes the early backlash against or challenge to white second wave feminist successes. As feminist scholars (Braithwaite; Douglas and Michaels; Dow; Evans; Morgan “Sisterhood Forever”; O’Reilly Mother Outlaws; Snitow; Wolf Beauty Myth) argue, the backlash against second wave feminist gains started in the late 1970s—the anti-motherhood discourse being one of the first of those strategies—but escalated through the 1980s and 1990s. Of course, one of the primary reasons for this escalation is the conservative political and social climate that are the hallmarks of the Reagan presidency in the 1980s. Katzensein summarizes this climate as follows: “The decade of the 1980s was distinctive for ten uninterrupted years of antifeminists, antiliberal, self-identified conservative presidential administrations” (30). Moreover, as Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller concur, “no discussion of either feminism or feminist theory in the 1980s can begin without at least acknowledging the hostility of the larger political, economic, and cultural climate which we have had to endure” (1). Faludi provided one of the first detailed analyses of this 1980s backlash and, in fact, popularized the term backlash in her 1991 book, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women.3 In the book, Faludi argues that a “backlash” against second wave feminist successes has been evident throughout culture, but especially in popular culture and media venues like film, advertising, and television shows since the early 1980s. As already noted in the introduction, Ann Braithwaite argues many feminist scholars, but especially North American,4 understood Faludi’s idea of backlash as


the attempt to roll back or forestall the gains made by second wave feminists in terms of women’s social, professional, educational, and political access. As such, as Braithwaite argues, both feminists and nonfeminists alike have subsequently employed the term backlash to mean an “antifeminism” or “antiwoman” reaction. Braithwaite, however, says Faludi’s initial description of backlash was more nuanced and sophisticated. In substantiating this claim, Braithwaite suggests Faludi recognized that the 1980s and early 1990s backlash was filled with mixed messages that simultaneously celebrated and acknowledged the successes of second wave feminism while also blaming that feminism for any difficulty women might have in managing those changes to their lives. Indeed, Faludi contends, “Behind this celebration of the American woman’s victory, behind the news, cheerfully and endlessly repeated, that the struggle for women’s rights is won, another message flashes. You may be free and equal now, it says to women, but you have never been more miserable” (ix). Thus, Braithwaite concludes that it is more consistent with Faludi’s writing and more sophisticated to conceive of backlash as simultaneously recognizing and celebrating second wave feminism while blaming feminism for women’s difficulty managing the gains brought about by feminism. Central, then, to how the post – second wave backlash works is the rhetorical strategy of blaming feminist successes for creating problems for contemporary women’s lives. Faludi, in fact, concludes that women repeatedly got the message in the 1980s that the cause for women’s misery is feminism itself. As Faludi puts it, “The women’s movement, as we are told time and again, has proved women’s own worst enemy” (x). Thus, and ironically, contemporary backlash simultaneously celebrates second wave feminist successes and insists that women are miserable because of those successes. Clearly, then, as Braithwaite argues explicitly about Faludi, “What is so notable for her about this most recent backlash, though, is the incorporation of feminism’s successes into it, and the series of tensions and paradoxes this inclusion leads to” (21). Thus, contemporary backlash strategies incorporate5 feminist ideas while simultaneously suggesting feminism is to blame for the tensions and contradictions that have arisen since women gained access across cultural institutions. Intriguingly, then, extending Faludi’s


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more complex understanding of backlash in light of its rhetorical dimensions reveals that contemporary backlash also employs the matrophobic strategies of identifying and disidentifying with a form of feminism, in the 1980s and 1990s case, second wave feminism. As a result, the backlash and second wave successes worked to create a new series of demands within feminisms. Key to those demands was how to live within 1970s feminist successes, forestall erosion of those gains, and, equally important, how to begin to address the tensions that resulted. While crucially important, it is clear that these areas of foci continued to discourage discussions of maternity. In short, as Katzenstein argues, much feminist work in the 1980s focused on responding to both women’s new found access and the simultaneous backlash that accompanied those gains. Also important, the analysis of women’s entry into professional and educational institutions focused almost exclusively on women’s experiences within those institutions as women unencumbered by family responsibilities. Or, as Katzenstein described it in 1990, “women’s groups and networks have worked to ‘reinvent’ feminism in ways that attempt to make sense of the daily experience of women located within these institutions” (28). At the same time that feminists were negotiating this new landscape, academics, including feminist academics, began to grapple with what is commonly referred to as the postmodern turn across academic institutions, which played a central role in the second rhetorical situation: the theory debates. Theory debates The second significant rhetorical situation within feminism, then, simultaneously referred to as the theory debates and/or feminism’s retreat into the academy, also emerged during the 1980s. Indeed, as noted already in this chapter, many, especially in popular media, have described feminism in the 1980s as disappearing or as being “dead” as a result of second wave feminism’s successes. Rather than perishing, however, it is more accurate to describe this time as feminism’s preoccupation with theory. Indeed, when women’s entry into academic institutions—especially into women’s studies programs—is coupled with the introduction across the liberal arts


to postmodern and poststructural theories, it far better and more accurate to describe 1980s and early 1990s feminism as preoccupied by theory debates, particularly how to incorporate postmodern thinking into feminism and the implications of postmodern ideas for past and contemporary feminist theorizing. Although the postmodern turn6 is highly complex, diverse, and constituted by various, often conflicting, theoretical tendencies, as Steven Best and Douglas Kellner argued in the early days of the postmodern turn, there is today an emerging postmodern paradigm organized around a family of concepts, shared methodological assumptions, and a general sensibility that attack modern methods and concepts as totalizing and reductionist; that decry utopian and humanistic values as dystopian and dehumanizing; that abandon mechanical and deterministic schemes in favor of new principles of chaos, contingency, spontaneity, and organism; that challenge all beliefs in foundations, absolutes, truth, and objectivity, often to embrace a radical skepticism; relativism, and nihilism; and that subvert boundaries of all kinds. (19)

Because postmodern theories reject totalizations or foundationalism, many postmodern scholars reject the enlightenment belief in self-transparent, self-grounded reasoning; disembedded subjects; and an Archimddean standpoint that transcends historical and cultural contingency or location of thinking and political action (Benhabib; Best and Kellner; Calhoun; Kellner). Following this line of thought, many feminist scholars (Alcoff; Benhabib; Flax “Postmodernism”; Fraser and Nicholson; Fuss “Reading Like”; Hartsock; Hekman; Hutcheon) rejected the universalizing tendencies in white second wave feminism, particularly around the idea of womanhood or sisterhood, and begin to ground theorizing and political thinking and action in the specific, historical, and cultural contexts of people’s everyday lives. Equally important, feminists also challenged and altered modern views of subjects as sharing any sort of group or universal experiences and instead replaced this view with a conception of subjects as constructed through and located in multiple discourses and social positions (Benhabib; Makau; Noddings; Pointer and Young; Wood Who Cares). In short, the postmodern turn challenged many core assumptions of second wave feminism, particularly in terms of


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universalizing a common experience for women or any universal notion of sisterhood. Simultaneously, and equally important, another discussion emerged among feminists: white feminists, rightly, began to attend to criticism raised outside of white feminism about the generalization of white women’s lives as typical of all women’s lives. Many black and lesbian feminists (Collins; hooks Ain’t I ; McDowell; Smith; Smith and Smith; Zimmerman) argued, for example, that white second wave feminists failed to recognize differences among women based on race, class, and sexual orientation when theorizing and advocating for women as a group. Specifically, white second wave feminism was viewed as ignoring the differences among women under the rubric of commonality, particularly commonality as women or sisters. Benita Roth, in fact, summarizes these concerns: Given the existences of racial/ethnic and class disparities among communities, it was hard for feminists of color to accept an unproblematic sisterhood with white feminists from the very beginning. They rejected the idea that their relationships with the men in their communities were, or should be, equivalent to those that existed between white women and white men; they rejected the idea that possessing some upward mobility within their racial/ethnic communities translated to having the same class location as white feminists. (43)

In short, in the service of theorizing a common experience for women, differences based on race, sexual orientation, and class had been ignored and/or minimized in much second wave thinking and activism, especially in the sisterly and daughterly foci. This concern was coupled with what is often referred to as the essentialist/social construction debates among feminists in the 1980s, which were also fueled by the postmodern/poststructural denial of the essential nature or biological femininity in favor of socially constructed views of gender. In this context, as Diane Fuss argues in her landmark book, Essentially Speaking, “essentialism is most commonly understood as the belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable fixed properties which define the ‘whatness’ of a given entity” (xi). Of most importance to feminism, then, was the essentialism of much second wave thinking. In particular, second wave feminism was critiqued for its essentialized


notion of woman as an oppressed category, which was an ahistorical and false universalism that reflects only the experiences of white, heterosexual, and middle-class women. Critiques of sisterhood and daughterhood Both the sisterly and daughterly subject positions were squarely implicated in these debates, and 1980s feminism7 began to critique 1970s white second wave feminism’s reliance on both subject positions. Of paramount importance was the fact that the 1970s approach to organizing as sisters was, first and foremost, a mode of organizing via commonality or unity among women and was essentialist in its denial of differences among women. Or, as Brenda Lyshaug summarizes, While the second-wave appeal to “sisterhood” forged widespread unity, it did so by attributing a set of common interests to women-interests shaped by an allegedly shared experience of oppression-and it thereby suppressed, as it is now widely acknowledged, the distinctive experiences and perspectives of working-class women, lesbians, and women of color. (78)

Sisterhood was also seen as problematic because of the attitudes and assumptions among the white middle-class women who were the primary participants in the second wave. As Lyshaug also argues, and is worth quoting in length, Their appeal to sisterhood expressed presumptuousness and arrogance insofar as it assumed that all women experienced and gave equal priority to the same forms of suffering that they did. Such appeals also expressed their obliviousness and complacency regarding the ways in which they benefited from—and often helped to perpetuate—race- and class-based form of oppression. Some feminists of color have also confronted subtle attitudes of superiority in white allies, which stem from their unscrutinized experience of racial privilege. (83)

In short, sisterhood was viewed as collapsing differences among women in the name of political unity. The daughterly subject position, too, was implicated in difference critiques. Of most importance to this project are the race and class-based assumptions embedded in the mother-daughter


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focus. Indeed, like the sisterly approach, the daughterly focus also presumed a unified version of mother-daughter relationship. It also accepted a racialized—white—and middle-class view of mothering that black feminist scholars have since shown to be quite different for African American mothers. Indeed, black feminist scholars (Collins; Edwards; James; Thomas) suggest that black women’s mothering is driven by othermothering—the practice of accepting responsibility for a child that is not one’s own, in an arrangement that may or may not be formal—and community mothering—the practice of supporting and sustaining the larger community. Othermothering, which emerged initially from Africa, continued to be necessary in America because of the brutal practices under slavery that often separated children and mothers. The mother-daughter relationship is fundamentally different because of these mothering practices and experiences. Thus, the common experience presumed in the mother-daughter focus was both race and class based8 and denied the different experiences and social locations of African American mothers and daughters. Not only did these theory debates, rightly, fundamentally challenge both the sisterly and daughterly subject positions in terms of their unified understandings of women’s lives, they also kept feminists focused on issues other than maternity, which continued to fuel rather than challenge the ongoing silence on maternity. Also noteworthy, 1980s and 1990s feminists did not heed Hirsch’s call to explore matrophobia within feminism. As a result, even as white second wave feminism began these important internal critiques, lack of attention to matrophobia and the silence on maternity were neither acknowledged nor addressed. The emergence of the third wave On the heels of the theory debates, what is generally referred to as third wave feminism9 began to emerge in earnest in the early 1990s in both academic circles and popular culture. As Astrid Henry (Not My) argues, “Around 1991, feminism resurfaced in the public imagination. After a decade in which feminism seemed to have disappeared into the academy, feminism was once again a hot topic—one that people were reading about, organizing around, and discussing” (16). Two 1995 texts, however, are now considered central defining texts of the third wave: Rebecca Walker’s


To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism and Barbara Findlen’s Listen Up: Voices from the Next Generation of Feminists. The writers in both anthologies reveal that the feminism they articulate is organized around a new set of issues and concerns and indicates a real shift in emphasis, concern, and demands among women who had grown up within second wave feminism’s successes. Walker, for example, explicitly argues she and the authors of To Be Real are expanding what constitutes feminism and feminist practices (xxxvi). Although third wave feminists have been raised within a post - second wave context and articulate new areas of emphasis, they do not appear to reject feminism outright and, in fact, appear to embrace a feminist understanding grounded in generational continuity, a continuity based on the notion of a “next generation” emerging. Indeed, as Catherine Orr argues, “both anthologies proudly place themselves in ‘the next generation’ of feminism” (30). In doing so, writers in both anthologies describe themselves as younger feminists in relation to the older generation of second wave feminists. By identifying as younger feminists, third wavers stake out an identity of their own separate from second wave feminism. Henry summarizes this third wave identification strategy: “For third wave, or ‘younger feminists,’ their simultaneous identification with and rejection of second wave feminism is what grants them an identity of their own” (Not My 7).10 Moreover, as they draw on the younger-older structure, many writers in the anthologies also insist that they, in fact, exist. They do so to challenge the postfeminist suggestion that feminism is dead or over. Findlen, for example, writes in Listen Up, “Young feminists are constantly told we don’t exist. It’s a refrain heard from older feminists as well as in the popular media: ‘young women don’t consider themselves feminist.’ Actually, a lot of us do” (xiv). The younger-older generational structure and focus on diversity are also key components of subsequent third wave anthologies. As Henry puts it, subsequent anthologies11 “repeat the framework of the 1995 collections in their vision of a third-wave feminism in which both race and sexuality are centrally located alongside gender. Cross-generational dialogue has also become more common within this new wave’s texts” (Not My 31).


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Third wave sensibilities As a result, although third wave feminism resists easy definition, core sensibilities, initiated by Walker and Findlen’s texts and continuing in later anthologies, exist. First, third wavers, as Catharine Stimpson argues, take “the achievements of the First and Second Wave as much for granted as they do CD-ROMs” (73). As a result, rather than rejecting feminism, third wavers tend to assume women’s equity and emphasize and organize around diversity, multiplicity, and contradiction (Stimpson 73). Indeed, third wave feminism celebrates difference in terms of identity construction, in which signifiers such as race and binary gender are rejected in favor of ambiguity and multiple subject positions. As Walker notes, young women of her generation have been raised with a consciousness of multiculturalism. Consequently, they have trouble using theories that compartmentalize and divide according to race and gender and all those other signifiers. For us, the lines between Us and Them are often blurred, and as a result we find ourselves seeking to create identities that accommodate ambiguity and our multiple positionalities. (Walker xxxiii)

Second, third wave feminists are also committed to a politics of difference rather than commonality. In their review of third wave feminism, Helene Shugart, Catherine Waggoner, and D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein argue, “The politics of difference that drive third-wave feminism thus are manifest in an embracing of contradiction so that apparently inconsistent political viewpoints coexist in the name of third wave feminism” (195). As a result and unlike much second wave politics, third wave feminists organize around differences or diversity among women rather than via a unified concept of women. Consequently, as Shugart, Waggoner, and O’Brien Hallstein also suggest, “empowerment takes on a different meaning in this new feminism in other ways, as well—not in collective terms, as with the second wave, but in very individualistic terms” (195). As a result, third wavers distance themselves from the second wave’s focus on equality, commonality, and collective action for women and instead emphasize diversity, multiplicity, and contradiction. Moreover, unlike the second wave’s grounding in modern ways of thinking and large-scale institutional power, third wavers are


grounded in postmodern ways of knowing and dispersed everyday micro-practices of power. Thus, even though many third wavers eschew theory, the focus of the third wave is postmodernist in that third wavers privilege diversity over commonality, the individual over the collective, and difference over similarity and explore everyday forms of power instead of large-scale structural power. In short, as Catherine Bailey argues, third wave feminism is informed by “inflections of both postmodernist and multiculturalist theorizing about identity and subjectivity” (53).

Matrophobia and the third wave Even though third wave feminism has made important advances in feminist thinking and areas of foci, the younger-older, crossgenerational foundational structure further entrenches matrophobia in the wave metaphor for several reasons. First, the youngerolder structure also reinforces a mother-daughter relationship between the second and third waves. As Henry (Not My) argues, it is quite common for scholars to refer to third wave feminists as younger feminists or to describe third wave feminists as the next generation feminists, such that second wave feminists are viewed as the older feminists and described as feminist mothers of third wave daughters. This structure continues to be matrophobic because the generational distinction, in fact, allows third wavers to distance themselves from—or disavow—the sister system of the second wave and allows third wavers to create a new and different focus for third wave feminism while also distancing third wavers from second wavers. Again, Henry (Not My) describes how matrophobia works between second and third wave feminisms, and is worth quoting in length: Because they have rejected the “sibling horde,” many young feminists seem to remain within the imagined mother-daughter relationship precisely in order to give them a position from which to speak—as daughters rather than sisters. In rejecting a notion of collective sisterhood—but without another model, familial or otherwise, to supplant it—they remain within the mother-daughter relationship, albeit as only children to a controlling mother feminism. “Sisterhood is powerful” has been replaced by a new slogan: “daughterhood is powerful.” (10)


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Henry also argues that doing so has set up a mother-daughter relationship that is deeply embedded in both the wave metaphor itself and the intergenerational delineation between the two waves. As she puts it, “Given the easy mapping of ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ onto the ‘second wave’ and ‘third wave,’ the wave metaphor and the mother-daughter relationship increasingly became synonymous within feminist discourse” (Henry, Not My 4). Once again, however, this intergenerational structure within the wave metaphor is also matrophobic and employs the twin rhetorical strategies of identification and disidentification. Moreover, for third wavers, the disavowed is both second wave feminism itself and a particular kind of second wave mother. As Henry suggests, “For third wave feminists, the disavowed identity that must be kept at bay is often second-wave feminism itself. However, secondwave feminism is described—puritanical, dated, dowdy, asexual, to name but a few common traits attributed to this mother—she has become an easy figure to reject. She stands in the way of the daughters’ freedom” (Not My 11). Thus, unlike the second wave’s disidentification with first wave feminism’s focus on securing the right to vote, third wave feminism’s disidentification is with both second wave feminism in general and specifically second wave mothers. Clearly, the rhetorical situations of the post – second wave context through the mid-1990s made important and sophisticated advances in feminist thinking and practices. The theory debates encouraged feminism to address the deeply problematic issues of essentialism in white second wave feminism; allowed feminism to focus seriously on issues of diversity and inclusion across race, class, and sexual boundaries; encouraged the emergence of a so-called third wave of feminism that began to grapple with the theory debates and focus on a new set of issues for feminists; and presented a new set of issues in relation to women living with the long-term successes of the second wave, primarily the entry of women into professional and educational institutions and the early backlash. As a result, the rhetorical situations feminists faced in the 1980s and mid-1990s continued to encourage silence on maternity. As the rereading makes clear, however, this silence was neither a function of feminism being “dead” or over nor a result of feminism being “anti-motherhood.” Rather, feminists at the time were preoccupied by crucial conversations within institutions that emerged as a result


of feminist successes and the ensuing backlash, theory debates, and contradictions of femininity. Even with the important advances in feminist thinking, again, neither maternity nor the matrophobia within feminist analyses, the wave metaphor, and the intergenerational structure emerged as central issues of focus for feminist scholars. Also important, by continuing to perpetuate the matrophobic strategies of identification and disidentification within the wave metaphor, third wavers continued to entrench the lingering matrophobia that emerged first in second wave feminism. How third wave feminism has done so has also enlarged the scope of that matrophobia to include second wave feminism more generally and to map a specific mother-daughter relationship onto the wave metaphor. Thus, at the structural level, matrophobia became more deeply embedded within feminism and the wave metaphor itself, while the ongoing silence on both maternity and matrophobia continued. As feminism continued to evolve in light of third wave concerns and many second wave beneficiaries became mothers, maternity finally emerged as a crucial topic among contemporary feminists and popular women writers who are second wave beneficiaries.

Popular Writing on Maternity As noted already in the introduction, by 2000, there was an explosion of texts published that addressed contemporary motherhood and mothering. As I detail more fully later in this chapter, the primary issue of interest in the popular writing is contemporary women’s struggle to negotiate their new post – second wave contradictory context, a context that is caught between the old and the new in terms of gender as a result of second wave successes. More specifically, because they are the first generation of women who are second wave beneficiaries, contemporary women are living within a context that Peggy Orenstein, for example, calls “half-changed,” where young women grow up with new expectations about what it means to be female while, simultaneously, traditional patterns, particularly around family life and parenting, remain unchanged. Moreover, as feminist scholars (O’Brien Hallstein “Second Wave Silences”; Ornstein “Flux”; Wood Gendered Lives) also argue, our post – second wave context is one where


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contemporary women’s lives are caught between “old” patriarchal and “new” gender expectations brought about by the successes of second wave feminism. Or, as Julia Wood (Gendered Lives) puts it, American women’s lives are in a “transitional time” between new roles and expectations and persisting and deeply held traditional gender values and roles (17). As contemporary feminist scholars argue (Douglas and Michaels; Hays; O’Brien Hallstein Second Wave Silences; O’Reilly Mother Outlaws) one of the most complex sights of tension between the old and the new is contemporary understandings of “good” mothering. Even though contemporary women have been raised to believe—almost entirely as a result of second wave feminist successes—that they now have the choice to mother or not, feminist scholars (Douglas and Michaels; Hays; O’Brien Hallstein Second Wave Silences; O’Reilly Mother Outlaws) suggest that there is very little choice in terms of how to mother. Indeed, as Sharon Hays first suggested, “If you are a good mother, you must be an intensive one. The only ‘choice’ involved is whether you add the role of paid working woman” (italics in the original 131). Intensive mothering, as feminist academics (Douglas & Michaels; Hays; O’Reilly Mother Outlaws) argue, rests on at least three core beliefs: (1) children need and require constant and ongoing nurturing by their biological mothers, who are single-handedly responsible for meeting these needs; (2) in meeting those needs, mothers must rely on experts to guide them; and (3) mothers must lavish enormous amounts of time and energy on their children. In short, mothers should always put their children’s needs before their own.12 Consequently, even though not all women practice intensive mothering, as Hays argues, it is the proper ideology of contemporary mothering that all women are disciplined into and judged against, across race and class lines.13 In other words, intensive mothering continues to locate all women in the subject position of the all-caring, self-sacrificing “Mother,” despite any gains that women have made in professional and educational institutions. Thus, mothering has become an important and complex site of tension between women’s new found gains and old family life expectations. The 2005 Newsweek “question” first noted in the introduction, in fact, also begins to address the conflict between the old and the new by asking, “What happened when the girls who had it all


became mothers?” The Newsweek cover story and other popular writers (Crittenden; Hewlett; Warner; Williams; Wolf Misconceptions) focus specifically on women’s attempt to make sense of the confusing, contradictory, and new split subjectivity women live as feminist maternal subjects (or women who have benefited from feminist gains regardless of whether or not they identify as feminists) who also experience contemporary understandings of motherhood that encourage the “proper” and oppressive intensive mothering ideology. Hope Edelman, a writer who explores her confusion in an essay entitled “The Myth of Co-Parenting,” captures the very real impact of this split subjectivity for contemporary women after they become mothers: I didn’t sign up for this! Still, I—like many other enlightened, equalityoriented women having babies in this era—had naively thought that a pro-feminist partner, plus my own sheer willpower, would prevent this from happening to me. I hadn’t bargained for how deeply the gender roles of “nurturer” and “provider” are ingrained in us all, or—no matter how much I love being a mother to my daughter—how much I would grow to resent them. (Italics in the text 175)

Thus, it is this new post – second wave maternal subjectivity and subsequent tensions that popular writers explore. There is no doubt that a significant cause for this new attention to maternity stems from the fact that contemporary women are the first generation of women who took advantage of second wave successes before they began to mother.14 It makes sense, then, that a new interest would emerge and a new set of issues would also emerge as second wave beneficiaries—the “girls who had it all”—became mothers within our post – second wave context and its ensuing tensions. Daphne de Marneffe, in fact, argues that unlike their own mothers—women mothering in the second wave—contemporary women need to solve a new problem, “namely, how to take advantage of the access women had gained in the workplace while not shortchanging their desire to mother” (64). In short, the rhetorical context for women continued to evolve such that the time was “ripe” for these discussions to emerge from both popular and feminist academic writers. Unfortunately, as I will show, matrophobia is at work in both popular and feminist writing, albeit in different forms.


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To understand and to purge matrophobia, finally, from our analyses of contemporary maternity, both bodies of contemporary writing must be explored. In the remainder of this chapter, I focus on the popular writers, while the next chapter explores feminist maternal writing that employs Rich. Feminist thinkers need to recognize how matrophobia is at work in popular writers’ texts so that they can understand how the anti-motherhood charge continues to work today and how popular writers’ matrophobia fuels contemporary backlash against second wave gains. Popular writers’ matrophobia Many of the popular writers are second wave beneficiaries in that they all acknowledge feminism’s impact on their lives and women’s lives in general. Most of these writers, however, are not explicitly identified as feminists. Consequently, I describe the popular writers as second wave beneficiaries because, as I show later in this chapter, while they do not identify with feminism explicitly, they do acknowledge the benefits of it. This is the popular writers’ first move in terms of employing disidentification in ways that support the backlash against second wave feminism. As I also reveal in the analysis in the next section, popular writers, however, also employ a second disidentification strategy that facilitates both matrophobia and contemporary backlash: they strategically situate their writing both with and against second wave feminism, which allows them to both identify and disidentify with the second wave such that their writing acknowledges second wave feminism while simultaneously blaming it for mothers’ contemporary problems. Thus, the twin matrophobic strategies of simultaneously identifying and disidentifying with feminism— this time second wave feminism—are at work in the popular writing. Equally important, this identification and disidentification is precisely how Faludi argues backlash against second wave gains works. Consequently, popular writers play a key role in contemporary backlash against second wave gains in their writing about contemporary maternity. To reveal how this matrophobia and backlash work, I first overview the general concerns of popular writers, then, detail how they describe and blame second wave feminism for contemporary mothers’ difficulties.


Post – second wave concerns: ongoing institutional barriers Of central concern to popular writers is the ways that institutions have not changed to accommodate mothers and women’s lives after women gained access to professional and educational institutions. In other words, popular writers are concerned with ferreting out the ways that women’s lives are caught between new access to educational and professional institutions and old masculine organizing systems and institutions that continue to presume the ideal male worker with a stay-at-home wife and mother. And, equally important, popular writers are troubled about the fact that women are still primarily responsible for childrearing once children are born, regardless of how equal family life is prior to having children and whether they work outside the home or in the home. Popular writers (Crittenden; Hirshman; Wolf Misconceptions), for example, repeatedly show that women are still overwhelmingly responsible for family and childcare, even when women work, across class lines. As Linda Hirshman puts it, “The assignment of responsibility for the household to women applies in every social class” (11). Ann Crittenden also reveals, “Before the arrival of the first child, couples tend to share the house work fairly equally. But something about a baby encourages the resurgence of traditional gender roles” (25). Equally important to popular writers is the way that professional women are penalized once they become mothers.15 The ways that legal institutions penalize women as mothers, for example, is addressed in Joan Williams’s book Unbending Gender. Williams uses the term the maternal wall to describe how the old and the new are at work in professional structures. Specifically, Williams explores how professional institutions and workplace norms and assumptions are organized by ideal worker norms that are fundamentally premised on masculine perspectives and traditional male gender roles that allow men to privilege work over family life and presume that the ideal worker has no family obligations because there is a stay-at-home wife/mother to manage all private sphere and family life issues. As Williams puts it, The maternal wall is composed partly of old-fashioned stereotyping of women who are capable of performing as ideal workers along with the men. But it is also composed of three practices that drive mothers out of the workforce of their “own choice”: the executive schedule, the


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marginalization of part-time workers, and the expectation that workers who are “executive material” will relocate their families to take a better job. (70)

Thus, the maternal wall works precisely because professional institutions continue to be built on old masculine organizing systems, norms, and structures, even though women have gained access to those very professional institutions. When women have children, then, they face the maternal wall that creates barriers to professional success because of these ideal worker norms. The result, as Williams also argues, is our economy is divided into mothers and others. Having children has a very strong negative effect on women’s income, an effect that actually increased in the 1980s despite the fact that women have become better educated . . . . Given that nearly 90 percent of women become mothers during their working lives, this pattern is inconsistent with gender equality. (2)

As a result, becoming a mother creates new problems for women because they bump up against a maternal wall that presumes and privileges both childless workers and/or workers unencumbered by family responsibilities. Williams is not the only popular writer focused on institutionalized patterns and structures that impact women’s lives, even after they have taken advantage of the educational and professional opportunities brought about by second wave feminism. In Creating a Life, Sylvia Ann Hewlett explores how women—whom she refers to as the breakthrough generation16 —can achieve both a family and a career given the structure of professional institutions. Like Williams, Hewlett is also concerned about the ways that women workers are penalized once they do have children because of the lack of family- or mother-friendly professional policies. In fact, Hewlett argues, “At least in America, government and employers do such a poor job supporting working mothers—providing little in the way of paid parenting leave, job-back guarantees, flextime, or quality childcare—that women routinely become downwardly mobile in the labor market once they have children” (125). Equally important to Hewlett, however, is that, as more and more women gain access to educational and professional


institutions, they delay trying to get pregnant into their 30s and 40s. This delay often makes pregnancy more difficult due to age-related infertility. As Hewlett argues, Fertility rates begin to drop after age 30, then plunge after 35. According to figures put out by the Mayo Clinic, peak fertility occurs between ages 20 and 30. Fertility drops 20 percent after age 30, 50 percent after age 35, and 95 percent after age 40. While 72 percent of 28 year-old women get pregnant after trying for a year, only 24 percent of 38 year-olds do. (214–215)

Thus, Hewlett is worried about the ongoing institutional barriers that remain for mothers and the fertility issues arising among professional women who delay pregnancy for career. This same broad-scale institutional focus is also of concern in Crittenden’s book The Price of Motherhood. Specifically, she explores the economic costs women pay as a result of being the primary parent in most families and the unacknowledged, unpaid labor women do for professional institutions when they do stay home with children and their partner is able to be an ideal worker. Crittenden suggests professional institutions benefit greatly from women’s unpaid and unacknowledged labor in their support of ideal workers. She also argues, “And that free ride on female labor is enforced by every major institution, starting with the workplace” (Crittenden 86). Additionally, Crittenden explores the economic costs of motherhood to both working and stay-at-home mothers. She notes that mostly female academic economists’ research reveals “working mothers not only earn less than men, but also less per hour than childless women, even after such differences as education and experience are factored out” (94). As a result, Crittenden is especially concerned about the long-term economic impact for women who choose to stay home with children for an extended amount of time. Thus, Crittenden concludes, “In sum, women may have come a long way, but mothers have a lot further to go . . . . Moreover, in profession after profession, the accepted structures and conventions repel dedicated parents like a body rejects foreign objects” (35). Even though popular writers recognize the new post – second wave femininity and acknowledge the class and educational bias of the women they describe, their institutional focus is striking


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because that focus suggests second wave sisterly sensibilities.17 Moreover, it is also striking that, in identifying these contemporary issues, popular writers blame second wave feminism for playing a central role in creating the problems contemporary mothers face. Specifically, these writers blame second wave feminism as much as they do the failure of institutions to change for the current problems women face, which also makes this work matrophobic and, equally important, causes this work to fuel contemporary backlash strategies in the complex Faludian understanding of backlash. Second wave feminism blame and disidentification Popular writers, in fact, acknowledge, even appreciate the successes of second wave feminism while, simultaneously, blaming feminism for contemporary women’s problems in relation to maternity. The central critique leveled against second wave feminism and contemporary feminism is the past focus on advocating almost exclusively for women rather than mothers. In particular, these writers suggest that one of the central reasons contemporary mothers struggle in professional settings is because feminists in the second wave “got it wrong” in terms of their silence on mothering. Naomi Wolf (Misconceptions), for example, argues feminist rhetoric and silence on maternity merged well with workplace needs, such that contemporary women’s maternal lives are much more difficult. Indeed and regrettably with a mean-spirited tone, Wolf (Misconceptions) writes, Workplaces in the United States, emboldened by the egalitarian language of second wave feminism, which often insisted women can do the job just like men (for instance, 1970s feminism objected to employee benefit guidelines that gave women reduced hours for pregnancy, categorizing the condition as a “disability”), covertly coerced working women to delegate the details of pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood to some offstage setting—as if all this were some messy, slightly alarming private hobby, like taxidermy or beekeeping, to be dealt with strictly in one’s off hours and kept politely out of the field of vision of clients and co-workers. (229)

The above passage makes clear Wolf recognizes the successes of second wave feminism while also blaming it for its focus on


advocating for women rather than for mothers. Thus, as with other popular writers, she is also employing the backlash strategy of simultaneously acknowledging and refuting second wave feminism. Hewlett’s writing also reveals an explicit example of acknowledging feminist success while, simultaneously, blaming second wave feminism when she describes playwright Wendy Wasserstein’s life and struggle to become pregnant. In using Wasserstein as an example of the “breakthrough generation of women,” Hewlett argues, “These women reaped the benefits of the equal rights legislation of the 1960s and 1970s, which dramatically increased the range of opportunities available to them” (35). Hewlett, however, also argues, “Yet for Wasserstein, the women’s movement did little to help with that other set of goals that revolve around marriage and children” (36). In this same vein, Crittenden also acknowledges the gains of second wave feminism, while simultaneously holding feminism responsible for women’s contemporary maternal struggles: “Changing the status of mothers, by gaining real recognition for their work, is the great unfinished business of the women’s movement” (7). In short, the popular writers explored here simultaneously identify with second wave feminism while disidentifying and blaming its silence on mothering as a root cause for contemporary women’s problems. The second primary criticism is the perceived ongoing silence within contemporary feminism on mothering. Judith Warner, for example, not only blames feminism for the problems professional women face after they become mothers, she also suggests that feminism is responsible for contemporary quality-of-life issues: “The feminist movement these days is all but silent on the issue of child care and truly silent on the question of middle-class mothers’ general quality of life” (53–54). Crittenden also suggests contemporary feminists continue to be unwilling to even acknowledge that mothering is central to many women’s lives, and feminists are concerned that doing so will erode feminist successes. As she puts it, “Even feminists are often reluctant to admit that many women’s lives revolve around their children . . . they fear that if women are seen to be mothers first, the very real gains that women have made in the workplace could be jeopardized” (Crittenden 7). Thus, popular writers continue to describe feminism as


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silent on mothering, which is a more contemporary form of the anti-motherhood demonization. Finally, many of the popular writers also argue feminism itself needs to be reworked if maternity is to be central in feminism. While Williams does acknowledge that much of the anti-motherhood rhetoric surrounding feminism is a popularculture creation, she continues to suggest feminism is problematic for many women because of feminism’s earlier foci of attention. As she puts it, “In the popular imagination, feminism is still linked with the glorification of market work and the devaluation of family work. This leaves many women confused once they have children. When they feel the lure and importance of family work, they are left with the sense that feminism has abandoned them” (Williams 41). Consequently, Williams suggests a new primary focus for feminism: “Feminists need to abandon the full commodification model in favor of a reconstructive feminism that pins hopes for women’s equality on a restructuring of market work and family entitlements” (41). While Williams’s read of feminism is somewhat sympathetic, Crittenden continues to take feminism to task for silence on maternity. As she puts it, “In short, the disproportionate vulnerability of mothers is not seen as a major feminist issue, or as a pressing issue affecting children and out ability to invest in human capital; that is, our economic future” (Crittenden 256). Thus, popular writers also perceive contemporary feminism as continuing to be silent on mothering and blame this silence for ongoing problems today. The rhetorical power of the anti-motherhood charge Clearly, it is seductive to argue that popular writers are simply off the mark in their criticism of second wave feminism. And, even though popular writers are misreading the historical and rhetorical causes of the silence, unfortunately, their work does reveal the sisterly focus of the second wave and the subsequent daughterly focus have left contemporary feminism vulnerable to the very charges popular writers level against contemporary feminism. Moreover, even though the next chapter explores the newly emerging feminist work on mothering and motherhood, this work is new and, as a result, these charges against feminism are rhetorically powerful precisely because of the sisterly and daughterly locations of


critique and the foci of attention in the 1980s through the mid1990s, all of which sidestepped mothering as a location of critique. Consequently, no matter how sympathetic we are to second wave feminism, there is no denying the underlying matrophobia and foci of attention make it easier to blame feminism—there are very real historical problems—which is why the anti-motherhood charge and demonization continue to be such rhetorically powerful arguments. Equally important, however, is the fact that popular writers are using white feminism’s past in the service of employing disidentification strategies that support backlash against second wave feminist gains. Indeed, strategically situating their writing both with and against second wave feminism allows popular writers to both identify and disidentify with the second wave, such that their writing acknowledges second wave feminism while, simultaneously, blaming it for mothers’ contemporary problems. Simultaneously acknowledging and blaming feminism for women’s contemporary problems, of course, is precisely how Faludi argues backlash against second wave gains works. Consequently, at the same time that popular culture writers identify with second wave feminism, they also disavow or disidentify with it in ways that are matrophobic. Unlike second wave feminists who primarily employed this disidentification within feminist circles, popular writers are doing so outside of feminism and within popular media. Consequently, and crucially important, in addition to being a disidentificatory form of matrophobia, popular writers’ disidentification strategy also supports, even fuels, contemporary backlash against second wave feminist gains and encourages the ongoing anti-motherhood demonization of second wave and contemporary feminism in popular media. As a result, popular second wave beneficiaries’ work on contemporary maternity is also thick with layers of matrophobia that contribute to the ongoing backlash against second wave feminist gains. Thus, popular writers are also perpetuating matrophobia primarily via disidentification and, equally troubling, perpetuate a matrophobic backlash a la Faludi’s more complex understanding of backlash. The complexity of contemporary maternity is also revealed by feminist writers who employ Rich’s ideas in exploring it. Of primary interest to feminist writers is how contemporary understandings of


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good mothering also work to constrain women’s lives. While these analyses reveal important and significant insights about contemporary maternity, matrophobia is also at work in feminist writers’ explorations. In the next chapter, I analyze the contemporary feminist work to argue contemporary feminist writers’ work is thick with lingering layers of matrophobia.


Chapter

3

S i s t e r s , D au g h t e r s , a n d F e m i n i s t M at e r n a l S c h o l a r s : C o n t e m p o r a r y M at r o p h o b i a

She [Rich] saw motherhood as a patriarchal institution imposed on women “which aims at ensuring that . . . all women-shall remain under male control.” (Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels 50) The power of Rich’s vision was that, by dividing the experience of mothering into the patriarchal overlay of oppressive ideas and the raw female potential for experience, she created a place for maternal passion. (Daphne de Marneffe 30) While the increasing centrality of motherhood in feminist scholarship has been studied by Umansky among others, what has been less recognized is how this new field of feminist inquiry has been developed in reference to one theoretical work, namely Rich’s Of Woman Born, recognized as the first and arguably still the best feminist book on mothering and motherhood. (Andrea O’Reilly, From Motherhood to Mothering 1)

Chapter 2 reveals that contemporary popular writing on maternity is matrophobic in relation to second wave feminism, primarily by disidentifying with and blaming second wave feminism for


contemporary women’s struggles in relation to maternity. As a result, popular writers also fuel both contemporary backlash strategies and the contemporary anti-motherhood demonization of feminism. While the popular writers do not identify as feminists when they acknowledge that they have benefited from second wave feminism, self-identified feminists are also exploring contemporary maternity and have rediscovered Adrienne Rich’s ideas in Of Woman Born in those explorations. Unfortunately, matrophobia is also present in feminist explorations of contemporary maternity, albeit inadvertently and in a different form from popular writers’ matrophobia. Thus, this chapter analyzes contemporary feminists’ matrophobia. Because there are two different strands of contemporary feminist uses of Rich—feminist writers who employ Rich’s all-important distinction between the institution of motherhood and the potential in mothering to explore intensive mothering and feminist writers who are “Richian” in that their writing is founded in Rich’s work—I analyze feminist writing by engaging in two different case studies. I do these case studies to show that both lines of work perpetuate matrophobia, although in different ways. The work on intensive mothering, case study one, continues to maintain a divide between employing either a sisterly or daughterly approach, albeit employing contemporary versions of both; disidentifies with one part of Rich’s two-part understanding of maternity; and creates either/or theoretical binaries in terms of understanding the role of feminism in contemporary maternity and feminist strategies of resistance. The Richian scholars, case study two, also disidentify with one part of Rich’s two-part distinction and adopt Rich’s work wholesale; as a result, they adopt the matrophobia embedded in Rich’s own sisterly location of critique and, simultaneously, also utilize a matrophobic either/or approach to theorizing maternity. To substantiate these findings, first, I analyze Susan J. Douglas and Meredith Michaels’s The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women and Daphne de Marneffe’s Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life. In the second case study, I analyze two texts edited by Andrea O’Reilly: From Motherhood to Mothering: The Legacy of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born and Mother Outlaws: Theories and Practices of Empowered Mothering.

S i s t e r s , D au g h t e r s , M at e r n a l S c h o l a r s

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Case Study One: Contemporary Sisters and Daughters The Mommy Myth and Maternal Desire are particularly good for this analysis because they have strikingly similar rhetorical contexts: both books were published in 2004 and were widely distributed in popular rather than just in academic publishing outlets, both books garnered much media attention,1 the authors are selfprofessed feminists who employ feminist theory and principles and argue that the primary motive for writing the texts is to benefit both feminism and women’s daily lives, and, finally, at the core, both analyze and explore intensive mothering.2 Intriguingly and most important for this analysis, it is also striking how different the authors’ assessments are of the contemporary feminist rhetorical and maternal contexts and the rhetorical strategies they employ in the texts. As I will show, these striking differences result from the contemporary sisterly and daughterly locations of critique that the authors employ and, as such, they are good representative examples of how matrophobia continues to be embedded in contemporary sisterly and daughterly locations of critique. To proceed, first, I establish the sisterly and daughterly subject positions that underlie the texts. Then, I explore how matrophobia works rhetorically in both texts—the strategies and structure of the texts themselves—by analyzing key rhetorical elements—how each text employs Rich’s work; the rhetorical assessment and view of feminism utilized; the rhetorical style, voice, and tone of the authors; and the assumed audience—in both texts. Second, based on the findings of this analysis, I argue that the rhetorical analysis suggests that both texts perpetuate matrophobia and matrophobic splitting and estrangement from mothers.

Second wave sisters That The Mommy Myth is best thought of as a sisterly location of critique becomes apparent in a careful reading of how the authors describe the feminism they employ, their writerly voice and style, and their use of Rich’s ideas. In terms of their own positioning as mothers and feminists, Douglas and Michaels describe themselves as “mothers with an attitude problem” in the introduction of the


book (2). Also, in describing who they are, Douglas and Michaels ask a rhetorical question, “So who the hell are we, the authors, and what biases might we bring to this tour down motherhood’s recent memory lane?” (21). They answer this rhetorical question by asserting that they are “of a certain vintage—let’s say that if we were bottled in the 1960s, we would be about to go off right now. So we have lived through the women’s movement and its aftermath, and, between the two of us, have been raising kids from the 1970s to the present” (21). Additionally, in their chapter on feminist history—“Revolt against the MRS”—Douglas and Michaels make it clear that they are both feminists and mothers (30) and are working to recover or rebirth much of the second wave’s focus. Indeed, they argue explicitly that they have a very specific agenda in terms of feminism: they hope that their book is a “call to arms” to reinvigorate or “rebirth” a feminist movement for women (26). By aligning themselves so explicitly with the second wave, Douglas and Michaels make it clear that their own feminism is of the second wave feminist “vintage,” and they hope to utilize that “flavor” of feminist analysis in rebirthing (not revising) second wave feminism. Positioning themselves so specifically within second feminism, then, is the first indicator of their sisterly location of critique. The voice and style that they employ are also significant indicators of the sisterly underpinnings of their critique of contemporary maternity. Interestingly, both the writerly voice and tone of The Mommy Myth were noted in media reviews of the book. Indeed, reviews of the book had titles such as “Confronting the Mommy Myth” and “Shattering the Mommy Myth,” while the humorous tone and style was also noted in reviews and on the back cover.3 This humorous style and tone are carried throughout the text and is best described as sardonic in that Douglas and Michaels make fun of and “talk back” to the intensive mothering ideology, what they describe as the new momism. That Douglas and Michaels employ this as a rhetorical strategy becomes quite clear in how they position themselves as authors in the book and through a careful reading of what they argue are subversive mediated representations of the new momism. Douglas and Michaels write that they speak as mothers who succumb to and defy the new momism. And our main points is this: Media imagery that seems so natural, that seems to


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embody some common sense, while blaming some mothers, or all mothers, for children and a nation gone wrong, needs to have its veneer of supposed truth ripped away by us, mothers. (22)

Douglas and Michaels also suggest that it is time for mothers—like themselves—to tell the truth about motherhood. Or, as Douglas and Michaels argue, Let’s go back to a time when many women felt free to tell the truth about motherhood4 —e.g., that at times they felt ambivalent about it because it was so hard and yet so undervalued—and when women sought to redefine how children were raised so that it wasn’t only women who pushed strollers, played Uncle Wiggly, or quit their jobs once kids arrived. (27)

In short, Douglas and Michaels write in a very sardonic voice, with the goal of telling the truth about motherhood and unmasking the veneer of the new momism and the ways that media support it. The primary way that Douglas and Michaels tell the truth, which is also another indicator of their sisterly location, is in their use of Rich’s work to focus on institutionalized motherhood. Indeed, they also make it clear that they will employ the second wave institutional focus in their analysis of contemporary maternity when they use Rich’s ideas specifically. In utilizing Rich’s understanding, Douglas and Michaels argue Rich’s book is the pinnacle of feminist work on motherhood and describe Of Woman Born as perhaps “the most moving and inflammatory analysis of motherhood to appear during” the 1970s (50). The most important point they make about Rich’s analysis is that she was the first feminist to argue motherhood was neither biological nor hormonal; instead, Rich “saw motherhood as a patriarchal institution imposed on women ‘which aims at ensuring that . . . all women-shall remain under male control’ ” (50). They also note Rich’s book “was a brave and powerful act of exposure” of the institution of motherhood (Douglas and Michaels 51). They do not, however, articulate her all-important distinction about motherhood as both an institution and a potential relationship. Even though they do not explicitly acknowledge Rich’s allimportant distinction, it is clear that they recognize it in their explanation of Rich’s understanding of the relationship between motherhood and mothering, which is also quite revealing in


terms of Douglas and Michaels’s use of the distinction. Douglas and Michaels argue Rich’s critique of institutionalized motherhood emerged out of her understanding that everyday mothering could be “hell,” even though she continued to love her children enormously (51). They also argue that it was Rich’s own ambivalence about mothering that made Rich launch “a scathing critique, not of mothers or of motherhood itself, but of the institution it had become” (51). As a result, even when they acknowledge the importance of mothering in Rich’s work, they focus only on Rich’s writing that recognized the difficulty of mothering without acknowledging the potentially empowering relationship.5 Thus, Douglas and Michaels’s primary rhetorical strategy in employing Rich is to use her ideas about institutionalized motherhood in the service of exposing the truth and also launch a brave and scathing critique of institutionalized contemporary motherhood. Echoes of the second wave sisterly location, then, are abundant. Douglas and Michaels position themselves as second wave feminists who employ Rich’s all-important distinction to launch a critique of institutionalized motherhood. And, in doing so, like early white second wave feminists and Rich herself, Douglas and Michaels employ a location of critique that focuses almost exclusively on the institutional level. By doing so, Douglas and Michaels also continue to sidestep, or distance their analysis from, the potential of mothering in their focus on institutionalized motherhood. With this institutional approach as background and their sisterly location of critique, Douglas and Michaels’s analysis focuses on revealing and telling the truth about how media create and sustain, what they call, the new momism. Douglas and Michaels’s basic argument is that media have harnessed feminist gains and reshaped them to support intensive mothering6 so that women, as mothers, are positioned in an ever-demanding, constantly failing “ideal” mother subjectivity that constrains and confines women’s agency primarily within the private realm of mothering and outside of the public realm. As such, Douglas and Michaels’s analysis is an extension of Sharon Hays’s groundbreaking description of intensive mothering, which they cite specifically in their book (5), and is detailed in the previous chapter. Douglas and Michaels argue that media do so primarily through fear tactics, guilt, and celebrity mom profiles. Television news


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stories, for example, repeatedly caution women about the “threats from without” to their children: Satanism; abduction; consumer safety problems with car seats, toys, cribs; and food allergies from peanuts (Douglas and Michaels 85). Celebrity mom profiles, on the other hand, begun in the 1980s and well established by the 1990s, primarily work to encourage guilt and failure in mothers because these profiles always show celebrity moms juggling it all—work, family, and mothering—with a smile on their face and in glowing pictures with their healthy, well-behaved children. In short, celebrity moms and other media strategies have the effect of creating and supporting intensive mothering in ways that keep mothers constantly striving for perfection and all-consuming vigilance. In the end, to use Rich’s language, even though the potential relationship women have with their children separate from patriarchy is acknowledged, Douglas and Michaels’s analysis of intensive mothering focuses almost exclusively on the institution of motherhood and reveals how media promote maternal images and practices that exhaust women and position them as failures in both their mothering and the public realm. Unlike Douglas and Michaels, de Marneffe employs a contemporary daughterly location of critique. Her contemporary daughterly subject position is best described as a post – second wave daughterly subject position. As I reveal next, it is also has vestiges of the lingering matrophobia of the 1980s daughterly subject position.

The post – Second Wave Daughter Similar to Douglas and Michaels, de Marneffe announces her commitment to a particular form of feminism and her primary location of critique early in Maternal Desire and, as a result, begins to reveal her contemporary daughterly location of critique. In the preface, de Marneffe reveals that that she grew up during the 1960s and 1970s, when traditional notions of family life were “up for grabs” (vii). Moreover, she also clearly identifies herself as a feminist when she writes, “My goal for this book is to provide a framework for thinking about women’s desire to care for their children in a way that is consistent with feminism and free from sentimentality and cliché” (xiii). In her own chapter on feminism and unlike Douglas and Michaels, de Marneffe clearly situates herself as writing after


the second wave rather than within second wave sensibilities. As she argues, unlike the daughters of “forties and fifties mothers, like Chodorow and Benjamin” who analyzed the problem of women trapped in the confining and narrow mother subject position, “the daughters of sixties and seventies mothers, like me, needed to solve something different: namely, how to take advantage of the access women had gained in the workplace while not shortchanging their desire to mother” (64). In short, de Marneffe writes as a post – second wave daughter of feminism, from within a daughterly feminist location of critique. Thus, unlike the early daughterly location of critique, however, de Marneffe’s daughterly location of critique is clearly situated within second wave successes and as a feminist daughter rather than as a daughter of a 1950s and 1960s mother. As with Douglas and Michaels, de Marneffe’s daughterly location is also revealed by her writerly voice. Unlike Douglas and Michaels’s sardonic voice and style, de Marneffe’s voice and tone are warm, inviting, filled with sympathy for mothers, full of pleasure, and filled with maternal love. As with the The Mommy Myth, this particular style and tone were noted in reviews of Maternal Desire. Indeed, one reviewer described the book in the following manner: “At times this well-researched book contains flashes of insight and expressions of deep sympathy.”7 Moreover, another reviewer described Maternal Desire as “a love letter to the maternal impulse, to the sensual, physical pleasure of caring for small children.”8 Similar to The Mommy Myth, this delighted style and tone become apparent in the way that de Marneffe opens her book. De Marneffe grounds the preface of her book in an experience she had during her third pregnancy. She writes that she had wanted and planned the child, but how she felt, “surprised me. I had imagined that once I became pregnant, my spirit of welcome would be subtly tempered by an array of practical worries” (vii). She reveals, however, that she felt “light” (vii). Later, de Marneffe discloses that what she has figured out is that she felt a moment of “freedom” that was compelling because she shifted from a “shaky model in which children were fitted into my previous life to a desire for a life centered on mothering, from which other priorities flowed” (vii). This shift in emphasis toward mothering “felt so transgressive” (viii) because it challenged contemporary ideas that mothering was


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simply fit into women’s new found freedom and professional lives. Thus, de Marneffe’s opening lays the groundwork for the delighted tone and style of the book and clearly reveals her grounding in post – second wave successes. Thus, de Marneffe is a feminist daughter whose goal is to reveal a “transgressive” maternal tale of women’s mothering within their new found freedom as second wave beneficiaries. The primary way de Marneffe reveals her transgressive tale, which is also another indicator of her daughterly location, is in her use of Rich’s work to focus on the experience of mothering and the potential relationship a woman has with her children. Unlike Douglas and Michaels, de Marneffe does acknowledge Rich’s distinction between motherhood as an institution and as, de Marneffe calls it, an embodied field of relating between persons (30). Moreover, de Marneffe argues that it was “Adrienne Rich who took the crucial step of teasing apart the pleasures offered by mothering and its oppressive aspect” (30). De Marneffe describes Rich’s work as an “unsparing opus” that laid the groundwork for her own conceptualization of maternal desire. As de Marneffe writes, “The power of Rich’s vision was that, by dividing the experience of mothering into the patriarchal overlay of oppressive ideas and the raw female potential for experience, she created a place for maternal passion” (30). Rich also, according to de Marneffe, offered a politically important component when she argued the difficulties in mothering were due to the effects of patriarchy, not necessarily within mothering per say. In doing so, de Marneffe notes that Rich, then, argues that the best thing mothers can do for their children, especially their daughters, is to stand up to patriarchy. De Marneffe argues, however, that Rich’s work was incomplete because “Rich’s emphasis on the mother as a model of resistance in that emotional relationship, and especially the early needs of the developing child, rarely cooperate with political categories” (31). Moreover, de Marneffe contends that Rich does not flesh out fully what the little girl, or any child, might need prior to her needing her mother as a role model in the world. What if those needs depend on her mother’s presence, and particularly her mother’s delight at being present-her mother’s desire to be, and love of being with her? (Italics in the original 31)


In short, de Marneffe’s primary rhetorical strategy in using Rich is to revise Rich’s work and to explore mothering as a location of empowerment for women. Consequently, de Marneffe hopes to extend Rich’s work to articulate and define maternal desire and an empowered mothering9 within the ideology of intensive mothering. Echoes of a daughterly location of critique, then, are abundant. This, however, is a new post – second wave daughterly location that employs Rich’s all-important distinction to theorize maternal desire. And, in doing so, similar to Douglas and Michaels and Rich herself, de Marneffe focuses only on one side of Rich’s allimportant distinction. Unlike them, however, she focuses on the potential of mothering as a post – second wave daughter. With this potential-in-mothering approach and daughterly location of critique, de Marneffe begins her project of articulating maternal desire, exploring empowered mothering, and extending Rich by also revising Nancy Chodorow’s and Jessica Benjamin’s (The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis) classic feminist works, which viewed the mother-infant relationship as primarily one of merger. De Marneffe’s core argument is that the mother-infant, and later mother-child, relationship is best thought of as mutually responsive rather than as a merger. De Marneffe makes this argument by suggesting recent “mother-infant research has shown that the infant expresses his or her agency in encounters with the caregiver, and that the caregiver and baby are extraordinarily attuned to their unique interaction from very early on” (66). As a result, even within the demanding first six months of an infant’s life, more recent research suggests that the dynamic between mother and child is best thought of as mutually responsive, a mutually responsive pattern of attentiveness. When the relationship is viewed as such, then, genuine relating is at the core of it and the interaction between a mother and baby gives both parties “a great deal more individuality than the somewhat swampy metaphor of merger evokes” (de Marneffe 68). Moreover, de Marneffe also suggests viewing the relationship as mutually responsive fundamentally alters what counts as psychologically “healthy” interaction between a mother and her child and contemporary understandings of women’s subjectivity and agency as mothers. Drawing on recent attachment literature and, again, more current mother-infant research, de Marneffe


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argues that instead of physical separation as a sign of a mother’s “health,” which is Benjamin’s view, a caregiver’s self-reflective responsiveness to a child is far more important. Indeed, a mother’s ability to reflect on and communicate about her own childhood experiences with her child is, according to de Marneffe, a sign of the mother’s own healthy sense of self and agency and is more crucial to a child’s ability to develop both an independent sense of self and a recognition of the mother’s own individual subjectivity and agency. As de Marneffe puts it, “When the mother recognizes her child as someone with his own intentions, desires, and needs and responds to him accordingly, she creates the conditions for the child’s reciprocal recognition of her intentions, desires, and needs” (79). In other words, a mother’s own internal or inner life and her ability to communicate that to and in relationship with her child is far more important to healthy mutual recognition of agency and connection for both the mother and the child. Consequently, rather than view women’s subjectivity, mothering, and a woman’s desire to give care to her children as a potential sign of women’s oppressive internalization of the “ideal” mother position or a sign of “bad” health, de Marneffe argues for a psychological perspective that sees all three as connected through the mutual and ongoing challenge mothers’ face to “integrate love and loss, togetherness and separateness, and connectedness and autonomy in ourselves and in our relationships with children” (83). In the end, then, to invoke Rich, de Marneffe’s work reveals how the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children contains a maternal desire that represents a potentially empowering and different mothering subject position and agency. When viewed together, the texts reveal the legacy of sisterly and daughterly feminist subject positions on maternity. Noticeably, The Mommy Myth emerges out the legacy of the “sisterly” paradigm, even though Douglas and Michaels are not taking up the same sisterly perspective that drove the early second wave. They are quite clear about distancing themselves from the essentializing and elitist understandings that emerged in much of that work.10 Also, in updating Rich’s notion of institutionalized motherhood to fit with contemporary culture and briefly acknowledging mothering, The Mommy Myth is an important step toward including maternity within a sisterly perspective, as Douglas and Michaels


“rebirth” a contemporary feminist movement that challenges patriarchal motherhood. Even with these important advances within the sisterly paradigm, however, like the sisters of the early second wave, Douglas and Michaels’s perspective keeps its distance from maternal desire or the potential of mothering. In fact, their work is quite resistant to women embracing maternal desire; this desire is only acknowledged superficially in their institutional approach. Maternal Desire, on the other hand, clearly emerges out of the legacy of the “daughterly” paradigm. Similar to Douglas and Michaels, de Marneffe enlarges the daughterly feminist subject position in important ways. First, she articulates a post – secondwave daughterly perspective that includes the mother’s side of the all-important first relationship that drives the psychoanalytic perspective. Indeed, she begins to articulate a feminist maternal desire. Thus, in this way, de Marneffe is unlike Douglas and Michaels because she faces the matrophobia within feminisms and attempts to grapple with the desire to mother without the fear of becoming wholly like the “ideal” mother; she begins to theorize maternal desire within her daughterly subject position in feminist ways. Even with these advances in the daughterly paradigm, because she only focuses on the potential of mothering and ignores the very real and ongoing need to grapple with and challenge the institution of motherhood, de Marneffe theorizes a perspective that fails to account for institutionalized motherhood. Thus, like Douglas and Michaels, de Marneffe keeps her distance from one part of Rich’s understanding of maternity as both an institution and an experience. In their use of Rich, then, both texts utilize her work but do so only by performing a radical surgery on Rich’s all-important distinction between the institution of motherhood and the practices of mothering. Grounded only in Rich’s understanding of mothering as a patriarchal institution, The Mommy Myth articulates clearly and persuasively contemporary, institutionalized intensive motherhood, while rejecting or disavowing Rich’s understanding of the potentially empowering relating in mothering. Conversely, de Marneffe, deeply embedded in Rich’s notion of the power of the potential relationship a mother has with her child, articulates clearly and persuasively her understanding of the potential empowered relationship any woman


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has to her powers of reproduction and to her children within intensive mothering, while rejecting or disavowing Rich’s understanding of institutionalized motherhood. Thus, together, the texts split apart Rich’s all-important distinction between institutionalized motherhood and the potentially empowering components of mothering. Splitting apart Rich’s distinction is matrophobic because motherhood and mothering are split from one another, which separates and divides the two parts of women’s maternal lives. As noted in Chapter 1, this kind of splitting was what worried Rich the most about matrophobia. Indeed, Rich argues that matrophobia causes splitting—the splitting of daughters from mothers and, ultimately, women from the self. As Rich explains, 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. (237)

As a result, when the writers in this case study only employ one part of Rich’s two-part distinction at the theoretical and conceptual levels, it is matrophobic because the splitting performs a “radical surgery” in its rejection of one part of a two-part maternity that includes both institutionalized motherhood and the potential of mothering and, doing so, ultimately encourages women to split from a part of their maternal lives. Moreover, this splitting apart of Rich’s distinction also reveals how identification and disidentification are at work in this first case study. Unlike popular writers who identify with second wave successes but disidentify with contemporary feminism, Douglas and Michaels and de Marneffe identify with Rich’s understanding of maternity as constituted by both motherhood and mothering but, ultimately, disidentify with one part of her two-part understanding of maternity. Thus, even though they split apart different sides of the two-part distinction, Douglas and Michaels’s and de Marneffe’s strategies are matrophobic in their inability to theorize both parts of maternity and in their use of Rich’s all-important two-part distinction. The key rhetorical effect of identifying and


disidentifying is that it divides and separates women and creates either/or binaries. This either/or splitting also permeates Douglas and Michaels’s and de Marneffe’s understanding of feminism’s role in relation to contemporary maternity.

Defending versus Revising Feminist Approaches to Maternity The authors of both texts recognize that the relationship between feminism and maternity has been complex, sometimes difficult. As such, in both texts, the authors articulate what they believe is the contemporary feminist “problem” in relation to feminism and maternity and, in doing so, also suggest what they believe ought to be the primary contemporary feminist goal in terms of maternity. The rhetorical analysis reveals that the authors assess that landscape differently, almost in opposing ways. Once again, the matrophobic splitting embedded in the sisterly and daughterly subject positions appears to be at the core of this difference. This time, however, the matrophobic splitting manifests itself in an “inside/outside” dichotomy. Indeed, the rhetorical analysis reveals that Douglas and Michaels diagnose the “problem” for feminists as outside of feminism. As such, Douglas and Michaels’s overarching rhetorical goal is to defend second wave feminism’s understanding of maternity to rebirth a contemporary feminist approach to maternity. De Marneffe, on the other hand, diagnoses the “problem” for feminism as within feminism. As such, de Marneffe’s overarching rhetorical goal is to revise second wave feminism’s understanding of maternity to rethink a contemporary feminist approach to maternity. Douglas and Michaels reveal this strategy of defense when they articulate the two goals they specifically have for feminism. First, and as noted earlier in this chapter, Douglas and Michaels state explicitly that they hope that their book is a “call to arms” to reinvigorate or “rebirth” a feminist movement for women (26). Moreover, in an interview about the book, Douglas also argued that she believed that “motherhood is the unfinished business of the women’s movement. One of the things the women’s movement did was raising groups where women got together and talked


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about the myths surrounding the men and how to challenge them. Women need to get together today.”11 Second, also revealed in an earlier section of this chapter, Douglas and Michaels hope, finally, to tell the truth about how media have distorted feminist attention to motherhood as a way to counter the long-held belief that feminism has been and remains antifamily and anti-motherhood. In fact, Douglas and Michaels recognize the anti-motherhood demonization of second wave feminism and argue that secondwave feminism “got a bad name” via media and has been cast as both “antifamily and antimotherhood,” primarily as a result of media stereotypes and the backlash against feminism in the 1980s (30). In substantiating this argument, they humorously argue that the 1980s produced a group called the Committee for Retrograde Antifeminist Propaganda (CRAP), which had the simple mission of rewriting the history of the women’s movement and “distort[ing] what feminists said and did” in the second wave, which, as they argue, has been well documented in a variety of media scholarship (30–35). According to Douglas and Michaels, some of the “Ministers” of CRAP are Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, and George Will, who conveniently forgot that the focus of second wave feminism was patriarchy rather than mothering. And, in doing so, they have created media stereotypes that position feminism as antifamily (31). A position, it is important to note, that popular writers are perpetuating in their own discussion of contemporary maternity. Obviously, then, Douglas and Michaels wish to correct media distortion and backlash. In doing so, their primary rhetorical strategies are to defend early second wave feminism’s approach to motherhood and to rebirth a new feminist movement. In short, Douglas and Michaels hope to persuade readers, first, that “feminism got it right” and that media distorted feminism’s critique of motherhood by demonizing second wave feminism12 and, as a result, second, feminism’s original critique must be rebirthed to deal with contemporary maternity. And, as the analysis has already made clear, it is the second wave sisterly approach that their writing suggests. De Marneffe’s revisionist strategy becomes apparent when she reveals that her primary feminist goal in writing Maternal Desire is


to revise feminist approaches to maternity to account for the real gains in women’s lives as a result of second wave feminism. De Marneffe suggests the need to revise feminism became apparent to her when, as a mother, she returned to the classic texts of feminist psychoanalytic scholars like Chodorow and Benjamin. She describes her experience in the following way: “I felt that although they acknowledged that women may find gratification in mothering, this gratification was never treated as a motivator or first cause; the desire to mother was not fully articulated, almost as if it were politically suspect or theoretically inconvenient” (64). Theorizing a feminist maternal desire, then, is necessary because, as noted previously in this chapter, de Marneffe argues her generation needs to explore “how to take advantage of the access women had gained in the workplace while not shortchanging their desire to mother” (64). Moreover, theorizing maternal desire is also necessary because, as de Marneffe put it, critiques of sentimental images of devoted motherhood or the “perfect mother” appear disdainful, and at times almost phobic, of the notion that women might seriously aspire to the connection, fostering of growth, and shared pleasure that are also at the heart of those images. In a strange way, in our effort to free women by bringing to light the oppressive aspects of maternal experience, we have to some extent mischaracterized its opportunities for enjoyment. (141)

In short, it is time to “complete the feminist project by including maternal desire” in contemporary feminist work (26). Thus, de Marneffe’s primary rhetorical strategies are to persuade her readers, first, that maternal desire can be fully feminist and, second, as a result, feminism itself must be revised to accommodate this desire. It is also important to note here, as the previous analysis made clear, it is a contemporary post – second wave daughterly revision that de Marneffe’s writing suggests. As such, it is also very similar to third wave feminism’s younger-older structure and the mother-daughter relationship between the second and third waves. As I argued in Chapter 2 drawing on Astrid Henry’s recent writing, this structure continues to be matrophobic because the generational distinction, in fact, allows third wavers to distance themselves from—or disavow—the sister system of the


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second wave and permits them to create a new and different focus for third wave feminism while also distancing them from second wavers. When viewed together, it becomes apparent that the authors’ fundamental positioning in terms of feminism is quite different. Rather than view the contemporary feminist rhetorical context as complex and requiring reflection on issues both within and outside feminism and about feminism’s past problems and contemporary possibilities, the authors create an “inside/outside” schism within feminism. Specifically, they create an understanding of the contemporary rhetorical context of maternity that suggests that the feminist “problem” is either outside feminism (Douglas and Michaels) or inside feminism (de Marneffe). This, then, divides feminists from one another because it encourages readers to make an either/or choice in terms of their understanding of the role feminism might play in understanding and responding to contemporary maternity. As a result, it also reveals an underlying matrophobic, either/or binary splitting that works to divide and separate feminists. In short, to echo Rich’s understanding of how matrophobia works, and as Hirsch’s later work also confirmed, the either/or binary continues to polarize women—feminists—from one another. The matrophobic splitting embedded in the sisterly and daughterly subject positions also manifests itself in the authors’ rhetorical strategies in terms of overarching rhetorical style, voice, tone, and assumed audience. Again, rather than employ rhetorical elements that suggest that contemporary motherhood is a complex site of women’s oppression that requires both resistance—rebellion— against the institution of motherhood and celebration of mothering as a potential location for women’s creativity and joy—delight in mothering—the authors, once again, split these two parts of maternity apart. One way to conceptualize the difference in these rhetorical elements and this form of the matrophobic splitting is to view Douglas and Michaels as using a Roseanne-like style, voice, and tone to speak to other women who want to rebel against the institution of motherhood, while de Marneffe uses a delightedfeminist mother style, voice, and tone to speak to other women who revel in the creative desire and joy in mothering. Unpacking these very different rhetorical styles and elements is the final focus in case study one.


The Rebellious Roseannes As already noted in this chapter, the writerly voice and tone of The Mommy Myth are challenging and humorous, both of which were mentioned in media reviews of the book. The humorous and rebellious tone and style also become apparent on the first page of the book. Douglas and Michaels open their book with a funny vignette that reveals the difference between the mediated images of institutionalized motherhood and the reality of mothering. They also make it clear to those they speak to—other mothers who are dealing with the “hellish” reality of everyday mothering. The opening of the vignette (Douglas and Michaels) is as follows: It’s 5:22 P.M. You’re in the grocery checkout line. Your three-year-old is writhing on the floor, screaming because you have refused to buy her a Teletubby pinwheel. Your six-year-old is whining, repeatedly, in a voice that could saw through cement, “But mommy, puleeze, puleeze” because you not bought him the latest “Lunchables,” which features, as your food groups, Cheetos, a Snickers, Cheez Whiz, and Twizzlers. (1)

This description is followed by the mother turning to the checkout magazine display as a way to distract herself from the stares of the other shoppers because of her children. When looking through the magazines, the mother reads inside People magazine: Uma Thurman gushes “Motherhood is Sexy.” Moving on to Good Housekeeping, Vanna White says of her child, “When I hear his cry at six-thirty in the morning, I have a smile on my face, and I’m not an early riser.” Another unexpected source of earth-mother wisdom, the newly maternal Pamela Lee, also confides in People, “I just love getting up with him in the middle of the night to feed him or soothe him.” Brought back to reality by stereophonic whining, you indeed feel as sexy as Rush Limbaugh in a thong. (Douglas and Michaels 1)

That this voice and tone are best described as “Roseanne-like” and are important and rebellious is suggested in Douglas and Michaels’s writing about the television show Roseanne. In their chapter “The Mommy Wars,” Douglas and Michaels trace the rise in media of the mommy wars between stay-at-home mothers and working mothers


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that began in the 1990s. Douglas and Michaels argue the mommy wars coincided with the rise of the new sun-drenched domesticity—i.e., the Martha Stewartization of America—in which impossible images of uncluttered, immaculate, breezefilled, lavender-scented, voile-curtained homes invited women to pour themselves into decorating and crafts, and to see the home as the one, true, most rewarding domain to master. (205)

At the same time as this glorification of domesticity emerged, Douglas and Michaels argue, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were antidotes to the domesticity: Married with Children, Roseanne, The Simpsons, and Grace under Fire (214–215). These shows were antidotes to the ideology of intensive mothering because each show had a maternal character who defiantly challenged domesticity and gave real women “permission to speak the truth, to talk back” to the new momism (220). In describing Roseanne specifically, Douglas and Michaels suggest that the power of Roseanne lay in her portrayal of a mother who challenged the all-nurturing, always available good mother with a mother who “took up as much space as she wanted without apology, she cackled, yelled, and delighted in the insults she hurled at her kids, and, unlike the mother in most other family sitcoms, she appeared often in the workplace as an actual working mother” (218). In short, Roseanne challenged and rebelled against the intensive model because she told the truth about motherhood and attacked “sexism by name and the suffocating, hypocritical norms surrounding the new momism straight on” (Douglas and Michaels 218). Thus, for Douglas and Michaels, it is clear that they believe that those who both tell the truth and attack sexism through yelling, cackling, and hurling insults—women who are sardonic—employ powerful rhetorical strategies that expose the norms surrounding the new momism straight on. Clearly, then, one way to conceptualize the style and tone of The Mommy Myth is to view Douglas and Michaels as enacting a rebellious Roseanne-like style and tone because, like the Roseanne character, Douglas and Michaels “cackle,” “yell,” and take up as much space as they want, without apology. As they do so, they also attack and ridicule the hypocritical


norms straight on of institutionalized intensive mothering to and for other mothers who are as fed up as they are about the new momism. While powerful and important, this rebellion, sadly, continues to be founded on layers of matrophobic splitting. In addition to initiating a rebellion that is split from the potentially empowering relating in mothering, Douglas and Michaels’s Roseannelike rebellion is also matrophobic because it represents a “not that kind” of mother position. Specifically, the Roseanne-like location is not the all-giving, all-nurturing ideal mother. As a result, Roseanne’s character represents for Douglas and Michaels a mother who fundamentally rejects, differentiates, and splits herself off from that ideal. In short, Douglas and Michaels employ a Roseanne-like style, voice, and tone to reveal the ways that they also differentiate themselves from the all-giving, all-caring ideal. Employing this rhetorical style, thus, remains deeply matrophobic because it is a location of critique that is still implicated in splitting from rather than connecting with mothers and rejects mothers by employing a “not-like-her” disidentificatory strategy. As such, the Roseanne-like style echoes Rich’s own matrophobic rejection of her mother: “I too shall marry, have children13 — but not like her. I shall find a way of doing it all differently” (219). Douglas and Michaels, the Roseanne character, and Rich herself, then, all reveal how they are “not like her,” which also reveals a matrophobic positioning that encourages daughters to grow up splitting and disidentifying from their mothers in their difference rather than connecting with them in their similarity.

The Delighted-Feminist Mother Because de Marneffe’s daughterly subject position works to theorize the creative joy in mothering, while splitting off the institution of motherhood, it is not surprising that her style, tone, and assumed audience are entirely at the other end of the rhetorical spectrum from The Mommy Myth. Rather than yelling, cackling, and confronting intensive mothering directly, as noted earlier, de Marneffe’s voice and tone are warm, inviting, filled with sympathy for mothers, full of pleasure, and filled with maternal love.


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De Marneffe’s tone and style are also revealed by her language of desire, passion, and ache in mothering. In her description of the desire to care for children, de Marneffe writes, This process can be one of extraordinary pleasure. There is the sensual, physical pleasure of caring for small children; the satisfaction of spending most of your waking hours (and some of our sleeping hours) with people we love the most, taking care of their needs; the delight in being able to make our child happy and in being made happy by our child. There is the pleasure of being “alone together,” of doing things near one another, feeling comforted by the presence of the other while attending to our own activities. (9)

While powerful and important, this delighted-feminist rhetorical style, sadly, also continues to be founded on layers of matrophobic splitting. In addition to only supporting a delighted-feminist celebration of the creative potential of mothering, while splitting from the institution motherhood, de Marneffe’s delightedfeminist-mother style is also matrophobic in its rejection and disidenfication of a specific type of mother. Like Douglas and Michaels, de Marneffe’s inviting delighted-feminist-mother strategy represents a rejection of a “not-like-her” mother position. Unlike Douglas and Michaels’s rejected mother, however, de Marneffe’s rejected mother is a second wave feminist mother. In other words, the rhetorical analysis makes it clear that de Marneffe is rejecting the second wave feminist mother position, the second wave sister. Thus, as with third wave feminism’s general strategy of disidentifying with second wave feminist mothers, de Marneffe’s delighted-feminist-mother style represents for her a feminist daughterly subject position on maternity that fundamentally rejects, differentiates, and disidentifies from what she believes is a second wave feminist mother ideal. Employing this rhetorical style remains deeply matrophobic, then, because that location of critique is still implicated in splitting from rather than connecting with mothers and rejects mothers by employing a “not-like-her” strategy. As such, this rhetorical style also echoes Rich’s own rejection of and disidentification from her mother: “I too shall marry, have children—but not like her. I shall find a way of doing it all differently” (219). This matrophobic splitting and rejection of mothers, then, ultimately encourages


post – second wave daughters to grow up splitting from and rejecting their sisterly second wave mothers in their difference rather than connecting with them in their similarity. The first case study reveals how the contemporary feminist discussion of maternity is thick with layers of matrophobia. As the analysis reveals, the matrophobia emerges from both contemporary sisterly and daughterly subject positions and the splitting and disidentification of one part of Rich’s two-part understanding of maternity. This splitting also creates layers of matrophobia in terms of rejecting a specific mother, by engaging in a not-like-her disidentificatory strategy, and creates an either/or divide between rebelling against institutionalized motherhood and embracing the empowering potential of mothering. Like the first case study, the second case study reveals layers of matrophobic splitting based on the same either/or approach to Rich’s all-important distinction while also importing the matrophobia embedded in Rich’s work.

Case Study Two: Contemporary Richian Scholars The second case study in this chapter focuses on two key texts in the area of feminist maternal scholarship, which I name here as Richian Scholarship. Feminist maternal scholars are distinct from the work under the rubric of maternal scholars. Maternal scholars explore how daily mothering practices of caring for and nurturing children create motherist political and ethical perspectives that privilege preservation, growth, and social acceptance. Thus, maternal scholars focus on maternal thinking and motherist politics, without necessarily being committed to feminism.14 Conversely, feminist maternal thinkers, as O’Reilly (From Motherhood to Mothering) argues, are first and foremost feminists who explore a specifically feminist counternarrative to institutionalized motherhood (10). Feminist maternal scholars explore mothering as a potential location of agency for women and as empowering to women rather than oppressive. As a result, feminist maternal scholarship makes mothering central to a feminist location of critique and analysis of contemporary culture. The approach is different from de Marneffe’s focus on empowered mothering, however, because feminist maternal scholars are not concerned with positioning themselves


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as daughters of feminists. Rather, first and foremost, they position themselves as feminists interested in making mothering central to feminism and explore mothering as empowering to women and as a potential site of agency for mothers. Thus, they have also begun to develop, for the first time, a feminist maternal subject position. The two key feminist maternal texts explored here—From Motherhood to Mothering: The Legacy of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born and Mother Outlaws: Theories and Practices of Empowered Mothering—are founded directly in Rich’s writing in Of Woman Born. Indeed, both texts celebrate Rich’s work in Of Woman Born and have the same editor, Andrea O’Reilly. From Motherhood to Mothering explores the legacy of Rich’s ideas in Of Woman Born, while Mother Outlaws uses Rich’s ideas to explore empowered mothering or mothering that is outside the institution of motherhood. Even though the foci of attention are different, in the introduction to both, O’Reilly argues Of Woman Born was a landmark text for contemporary feminist maternal scholarship. Moreover, O’Reilly argues that, today, Of Woman Born is a (if not “the”) field-defining text in contemporary feminist maternal scholarship, which has influenced how a “generation of scholars thinks about motherhood” (Mother Outlaws 1). Finally, in both texts, O’Reilly argues and Fiona Green concurs that Rich’s greatest contribution to contemporary feminist maternal scholarship is her distinction between motherhood as an institution and the potential in mothering. As O’Reilly suggests in Mother Outlaws, “Central to Of Woman Born, and developed by subsequent motherhood scholars, is the key distinction Rich makes between two meanings of motherhood, one imposed on the other” (2). Unlike Douglas and Michaels and de Marneffe, who only employ Rich’s distinction between motherhood and mothering, then, both texts are “Richian” in the sense that they credit Rich with initiating and founding both their work and area of scholarship. This, then, is why I refer to these scholars as Richian scholars. Thus, both texts are good representative examples of feminist maternal scholarship squarely grounded in Rich’s thinking in Of Woman Born. Richian scholars, then, have initiated the first feminist maternal location of critique. This subject position views maternity as a central location from which to theorize and challenge patriarchal


culture and insists mothering is a potential source of agency for women. By doing so, the Richian scholars have ended the long silence on maternity as a location of critique within feminism. Sadly, however, as I show in the analysis to come, this location remains matrophobic. As I will argue, while essential because Richian scholars have made maternity central to contemporary feminism, both texts are problematic because they adopt the lingering matrophobia embedded within Rich’s text and sisterly subject position when they import Rich’s ideas wholesale. Moreover, similar to Douglas and Michaels and de Marneffe, Richian scholars perpetuate a matrophobic split approach—a disidentificatory either/or approach—in their use of Rich’s distinction between motherhood and mothering. To unpack these arguments, as with the first case study, I analyze the texts rhetorically. Because both texts are edited volumes and I am interested in exploring what I believe is a general contemporary “Richian” approach in relation to explorations of contemporary maternity, the rhetorical analysis in case study two focuses on the general themes and structures of each text rather than on the details of each argument made by the various writers. Thus, unlike the first case study, I focus on the shared pattern in terms of how Rich is used, the structure and organization of each text, and the overall focus in each text rather than detail the specific arguments of the various writers that make up the edited volumes. I begin with the either/or splitting that permeates this work.

Either/Or Splitting: Terminology Employed Both texts employ an either/or approach in terms of how they utilize Rich’s distinction. Specifically, even though both texts are founded in Rich’s all-important distinction between motherhood as an institution and the potential of mothering, neither book utilizes the “and” in Rich’s distinction and instead are primarily divided by a focus either on the institution of motherhood or empowered mothering. In other words, as with the writers in the first case study, the Richian scholars primarily use Rich’s twopart distinction by splitting it apart and, ultimately, identify with one part while disidentifying with the second part of the distinction. The either/or splitting of Rich’s distinction begins to be revealed in the terminology that these scholars use to recognize and


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employ Rich’s distinction. Based on Rich’s all-important distinction, Richian scholars employ the terms motherhood and mothering as follows: “The term ‘motherhood’ refers to the patriarchal institution of motherhood which is male-defined and controlled, and is deeply oppressive to women, while the word ‘mothering’ refers to women’s experiences of mothering which are female-defined and centered, and potentially empowering to women” (O’Reilly, Mother Outlaws 2). While these two terms are important tools to clarify which part of Rich’s distinction is employed, they continue to keep the two parts of maternity distinct because no third, all-encompassing term has been developed to capture both at the same time. Indeed, the lack of an all-encompassing term to capture both motherhood and mothering, simultaneously, not only keeps the two distinct, it also closes off the possibility of understanding the symbiotic connection between the two—one is superimposed on the other—that Rich first suggested in Of Woman Born. Thus, at both the conceptual and theoretical levels, the terminology employed to represent Rich’s two-part distinction works to keep the two parts split apart when a third, all-encompassing term to capture both the institution and the potential in mothering is not also employed or developed.

Either/Or Splitting: Focus and Structure of Texts These two key terms also set the groundwork for understanding the focus and structure of each text. In both texts, writers focus on either motherhood or mothering. So, for example, From Motherhood to Mothering is primarily divided between writers who explore contemporary institutionalized motherhood or empowered mothering. Indeed, part one of the book, “Motherhood as Institution: Patriarchal Power and Maternal Outrage,” as O’Reilly explains, builds “upon Rich’s theoretical concept of the institution of motherhood, [and] the contributors in part 1 examine how motherhood operates as a patriarchal institution to constrain, regulate, and dominate women and their mothering” (4). Conversely, part two of the text explores empowered mothering. O’Reilly describes this part, titled “Mothering as Experience: Empowerment and Resistance” (9), as follows: “The first two chapters of part 2 consider why


and how the mother role is a site of power and resistance in nonWestern cultures,” while the last five chapters of the book “consider mothering as a site of power in and for these cultures” (italics in the text 10). Clearly, then, the same binary either/or approach that is represented in Douglas and Michaels’s and de Marneffe’s work is built into both the writers’ analysis and the very structure of From Motherhood to Mothering. Thus, similar to the first case study, this either/or approach is matrophobic in its failure to embrace both parts of Rich’s distinction, in the distancing and disidentification from one part of the two-part maternity first described by Rich. While From Motherhood to Mothering is divided between institutionalized motherhood or empowered mothering, Mother Outlaws does recognize the tension between the two in its focus on the practices of “mother outlaws.” How Rich’s distinction is used in practice and the adoption of the underlying second wave sisterly tenets embedded in Rich’s work, however, ultimately reveal an either/or splitting in Mother Outlaws. To uncover how this splitting occurs, first, I describe the impetus and focus of Mother Outlaws. The idea of mother outlaws, and the book itself, was “developed in response to Rich’s call for a theory and practice of outlaw mothering” (O’Reilly, Mother Outlaws 2). Rich makes this call in her description of her Vermont vacation with her sons. In that passage, Rich describes herself and her sons as outlaws from the institution of motherhood (195). In the Of Woman Born passage, which O’Reilly also quotes in full on page one of Mother Outlaws, Rich writes, 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 . . . 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 mother and wife with no room for being simply, myself. Driving home once, after midnight, from a late drive-in movie . . . with three sleeping children in the back of the car, I felt wide awake, elated;


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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. (194–195)

As Rich makes clear in this passage, she reacts against patriarchy by refusing to follow the rules of institutionalized motherhood. In this way “bad mothering” has the potential to be “good mothering” for women because it makes women “mother outlaws” under patriarchy. The passage also reveals Rich’s belief that “bad mothering” also made room for women to have a space for a sense of personhood outside of mothering. In other words, Rich suggests mothering did not have to mean a complete loss of self or a sense of self when a woman mothers; a woman could be both a mother and a person if she freed herself from the rules of patriarchy and could define mothering for herself. Thus, like Douglas and Michaels, Rich’s primary rhetorical strategy is to rebel against patriarchal motherhood as a way to engage in outlaw mothering. This, however, is the only passage in Rich’s texts about mothering against patriarchy. Indeed, as already noted in Chapter 1, other than this one exception, Rich was silent about the potential of mothering or what non-patriarchal mothering might entail in Of Woman Born. As a result, the writers in Mother Outlaws focus on theorizing empowered mothering because of Rich’s silence on what empowered mothering might entail within the text. Or, as O’Reilly states in Mother Outlaws, “There is no discussion of empowered mothering or how its potentiality may be realized in Rich’s book, with the notable exception cited above” (O’Reilly, Mother Outlaws 2). Moreover, and again as already noted in Chapter 1, O’Reilly suggests in Mother Outlaws, While this absence has puzzled scholars, most agree that—as mothering is not described or theorized in Of Woman Born—the text, in distinguishing mothering from motherhood and in identifying the potential empowerment of motherhood, has enabled [contemporary] feminists to envision empowered mothering for women. (2)

Even though she acknowledges the silence, neither O’Reilly nor any of the contributors of the text explain the silence. In other


words, despite Rich’s puzzling silence, the writers in Mother Outlaws initiate their own silence on Rich’s silence by focusing almost exclusively on what Rich did not describe, without attending to why Rich was silent on mothering. Based on this passage and Rich’s understanding that mothering could be empowering if women were able to define mothering for themselves, then, the writers in Mother Outlaws explore empowered mothering. In this context, empowered mothering, as O’Reilly (Mother Outlaws) argues, is “a counter narrative of mothering, empowered mothering is concerned with imagining and implementing a view of mothering that is empowering to women as opposed to oppressive. Alternatively called authentic, radical, feminist, or gynocetnric mothering, this mode of mothering positions mothers, in Rich’s words, as ‘outlaws from the institution of motherhood’ ” (12). Finally, picking up Rich’s belief that women could retain a sense of self and mother, the writers in Mother Outlaws explore how mothering can be beneficial rather than oppressive to women. These writers, then, share de Marneffee’s desire to theorize an empowering maternal desire that benefits women’s lives. Or, as O’Reilly puts it, “Empowered mothers seek to fashion a mode of mothering that affords and affirms maternal agency, authority, autonomy, and authenticity, and which confers and confirms power to and for mothers” (15). Thus, the focus on empowered mothering also allows these feminist scholars to theorize the real potential mothering has as a form of agency for women. All five sections of Mother Outlaws are devoted to empowered mothering. Structurally, then, all the contributors of Mother Outlaws explore different empowered mothering practices. Unlike previous texts, Mother Outlaws does so by attending to differing mothering practices rather than presuming one—white, heterosexual, middle-class—mothering practice. Indeed, as O’Reilly argues, “The first three sections of the book, ‘Feminist mothering,’ ‘Lesbian mothering,’ and ‘African-American mothering’ analyze mothering as a site of power for mothers while the final two sections, ‘Mothers and daughters’ and ‘Mothers and sons,’ examine mothering as a location for social change” (Mother Outlaws 3). As a result and as a notable advance, the writers in Mother Outlaws recognize differences among women in terms of mothering practices based on race, sexuality, or feminist commitments.


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Moreover, by recognizing different mothering practices, these Richian scholars are clearly informed by the 1980s and early 1990s theory debates. That this recognition is central to Richian scholars in general is noted by Maria-Barbara Watson-Franke. In her own review of feminist interest in Rich in From Motherhood to Mothering, Watson-Franke argues, The 1990s, however, created a new interest in mother as person and Self, which includes the issue of maternal agency. This was accompanied by a critique of the Western middle-class framework, which defined the discussion up to this point. Now critical voices called for a multicultural perspective on motherhood and the debate became also, at last, internalized. (76)

As a result, while there is no explicit discussion of the kind of feminism employed in this work, the focus on empowered mothering specifically and Richian scholarship more generally suggests third wave sensibilities in terms of the recognition of diversity among women and mothering practices, the recognition of and resistance to the essentializing view of women that drove the white second wave, and the commitment to theorizing everyday practices of mothering. However, at the same time, even though the work is grounded in these commitments, the writers continue to focus only on one part of Rich’s two-part distinction in the basic structure of the texts, how they actually use Rich’s two-part distinction, and the terminology employed. Consequently, although they make important advances, matrophobia remains in Richian scholars’ either/or approach to using Rich’s two-part distinction, as do the writers in case study one. In all fairness to the writers in Mother Outlaws and Richian scholars in general, they employ Rich as they do because the writers make the same key second wave sisterly assumption that Rich did about the relationship between the personal and political— that engaging in empowered mothering practices as mothers in the private sphere will challenge the public institution of motherhood. Indeed, one of Rich’s greatest contributions as a feminist scholar was to argue for the first time that motherhood and mothering were not biological imperatives, but were instead socially constructed to serve the interests of patriarchy. As Watson-Franke puts it, “The book challenged people to understand the personal


and political aspects of motherhood by studying it ‘as experience and institution’ ” (76). Consequently, the rhetorical strategy employed by writers in Mother Outlaws specifically and Richian scholars in general is to explore how private sphere mothering challenges public, institutionalized motherhood. As O’Reilly (Mother Outlaws) summarizes, “The articles in the first three sections on Feminist, Lesbian, and African-American mothering explore the many and diverse ways that empowered mothers resist the six attributes of good—i.e., intensive—motherhood and the mandate of powerless responsibility” (14). Following Rich’s lead, then, the writers in Mother Outlaws recognize that institutionalized motherhood continues to define what resistance entails; resistance means challenging public, institutionalized motherhood via private sphere mothering practices. In short, the writers in Mother Outlaws adopt one of Rich’s own key rhetorical strategies of resistance: the second wave idea that the personal is political, that is, changing personal relationships, changing mothering practices, will have a direct impact on the public institution of motherhood. Or, as O’Reilly notes in describing how empowered mothering challenges institutionalized intensive mothering norms that suggest that only blood-mothers can and should care for their children, “Feminist mothers look to friends, family, and their partners to assist with childcare while lesbian mothers often raise their children with an involved co-mother” (14). As a result, two second wave beliefs embedded in Rich are present here: the key second wave idea that the personal is political and, consequently, the political belief that changes in personal, private relations can change public institutions.15 Significantly, unlike From Motherhood to Mothering, Mother Outlaws does acknowledge the relationship between institutionalized motherhood and empowered mothering. In fact, O’Reilly explicitly states the relationship between the two as one where institutionalized motherhood supersedes empowered mothering in that institutionalized motherhood first and foremost defines what constitutes “good mothering” in patriarchal culture. As O’Reilly (Mother Outlaws) puts it, However, such [empowered] mothering, it must be emphasized, is practiced in a culture wherein patriarchal motherhood is the norm. In other


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words, empowered mothering, as it seeks to challenge patriarchal motherhood, remains defined by it. Consequently, while empowered mothering, in theory, may be clearly defined and realized, empowered mothering, in practice, is far more contested and elusive, achieved and expressed through negotiation with the institution of patriarchal motherhood that it resists. (15)

Thus, even though the relationship between institutionalized motherhood and empowered mothering is acknowledged in Mother Outlaws, empowered mothering is the exclusive focus of the chapters in the texts. Consequently, and again, while important advances for contemporary feminism are made in Mother Outlaws in terms of recognizing diversity and differences among women and the relationship between institutionalized motherhood and the potential in mothering is finally acknowledged, in practice, only empowered mothering is explored fully, while two second wave sisterly tenets are embraced with little-to-no reflection. As a result, Mother Outlaws also almost entirely takes up one part of Rich’s allimportant distinction while adopting the political and intellectual second wave sisterly grounding wholesale. The sisterly grounding, as the previous chapter revealed, was matrophobic. Thus, theoretically, adopting Rich wholesale also means adopting the embedded matrophobia in her sisterly subject position. Moreover, another primary problem emerges in the texts of case study two because the writers adopt so much of Rich’s ideas wholesale. When Rich’s ideas are imported wholesale without exploring why Rich was silent on mothering, the cause of Rich’s silence is also adopted. As I argued in Chapter 1, Of Woman Born was written from a matrophobic sisterly subject position and matrophobia is embedded in Rich’s silence in the text on mothering. While Richian scholars in Mother Outlaws fill the same void de Marneffe’s work does by theorizing components of empowering mothering, they import Rich’s matrophobia in their acceptance of Rich’s silence and in her second wave sisterly political assumption that the personal is political and changes to the personal can challenge public, institutionalized practices. As such, when Richian scholars adopt Rich’s work with little-to-no reflection or understanding of how Rich’s own matrophobia worked in Of Woman Born, they import that matrophobia in their own analyses. And, equally important, by grounding their work in Rich’s work, intended or not, the Richian


scholars are perpetuating lingering tenets of a matrophobic sisterly subject position, even as they try to develop a feminist maternal subject position. Even though both texts in the second case study adopt Rich’s ideas wholesale, they make important advances and contributions to making mothering central to feminist thinking. Most important to this project, unlike previous work, both texts explore the potential of mothering as a feminist enterprise and as a location of critique. Moreover, Mother Outlaws explores empowered mothering by attending to differences and diversity among women based on race, sexuality, and feminist commitments. Consequently, in bringing feminist mothering to the forefront, these texts recognize diverse mothering practices. Clearly, what remains untouched in this important work, however, is Rich’s original distinction, the political and intellectual underpinnings of that distinction, and there remains a silence on Rich’s own almost exclusive focus on only one part of her two-part distinction. Like Rich herself, then, who never fully realized how to think about the institution and the potential found in mothering, simultaneously, writers of both texts also primarily employ Rich with the same either/or strategy found in the first case study, which also echoes Rich’s own matrophobic focus on institutionalized motherhood. Thus, to date, ironically and inversely, Richian scholars also, like Douglas and Michaels and de Marneffee, fail to employ fully Rich’s two-part distinction and, at the same time, perpetuate rather than challenge matrophobia. Both case studies reveal contemporary feminist work continues to be built on the lingering matrophobia. Thus, even though contemporary feminist work reveals much about maternity today, it remains deeply problematic because of the lingering matrophobia. Indeed, as I show in the next chapter, the lingering matrophobia has troubling consequences for how feminism understands the contemporary maternal, rhetorical, and feminist contexts. Detailing those consequences is the focus of the next chapter, Chapter 4.

Chapter

4

W h at ’s W r o n g w i t h a L i t t l e L i n g e r i n g M at r o p h o b i a ? : R h e to r i c a l C o n s e qu e n c e s i n C o n t e m p o r a r y A n a ly s e s

I try to distinguish 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. (Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born, italics in the original 13) One motivation for the recent surge of scholarship on the second wave is the renewed important of understanding its [feminism’s] problems and possibilities during a period when many of its gains are simultaneously taken for granted and under attack. (Bonnie Dow 91)

Chapter 3 reveals that contemporary feminist analyses of maternity are thick with lingering layers of matrophobia. These lingering layers are primarily, but not exclusively, founded on scholars’ simultaneous identification and disidentification with one part of Adrienne Rich’s two-part understanding of maternity as both institutionalized motherhood and the potential in mothering. The lingering layers of matrophobia that result have important and troubling


consequences in terms of the contemporary relationship between feminism and maternity and for understandings of both the contemporary rhetorical and maternal situations feminists face. The focus of this chapter, then, is to detail those consequences and to reveal why the lingering matrophobia is so problematic. More specifically, I argue that the lingering matrophobia causes feminist thinkers to underutilize the analytic power and potential of Rich’s all-important distinction; creates an either/or theoretical binary; encourages mother blame rather than patriarchy blame; divides and separates feminists, women from one another, and women from a part of the self; creates analyses that are unable simultaneously to recognize contemporary women’s split subjectivity between old and new gender expectations and is ill-equipped to respond to the contemporary anti-motherhood charges leveled against contemporary feminism; and misdiagnoses how contemporary intensive mothering works as a sophisticated post – second wave1 backlash strategy against second wave feminist gains. These consequences, ultimately, result in incomplete analyses of the contemporary feminist rhetorical situation and discourage feminist scholars from understanding fully the contemporary relationship between feminism and maternity. Fortunately, however, once these consequences are understood, matrophobia can be purged while also drawing on the strengths of both Rich and the contemporary work analyzed here. In other words, purging matrophobia requires understanding both the problems and possibilities of feminist work—building on both our glorious and distressing work. Thus, I address the consequences in more detail as this chapter unfolds in order to move toward purging matrophobia in Chapter 5. I begin by revealing the multifaceted and far-reaching consequences of the split approach when using Rich’s two-part understanding of maternity.

Underutilizing Rich Employing a disidentificatory use of Rich’s two-part distinction, at the theoretical level, means that matrophobia fundamentally undergirds the analyses developed because disidentification, as Chapter 1 revealed, is matrophobic. Equally important, however, is that Rich’s landmark work is being underutilized by feminist scholars. In other words, ironically, even though all the feminist work

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analyzed in Chapter 3 recognizes the importance of Rich’s twopart distinction, a commonality among the scholars is that they all underutilize the power and potential of that distinction because the underlying matrophobia causes each scholar to separate the two parts of maternity. Indeed, even though Rich’s own matrophobia caused her also to underutilize the distinction, theoretically, Rich understood that a complete understanding of maternity required thinkers to recognize both the institution of motherhood and the potential in mothering and, crucially, that they were interconnected; one is superimposed on the other. Thus, theoretically, a more complete and full understanding of maternity requires attention to both the institution of motherhood and the potential in mothering. It is critical, then, to remember why Rich made the theoretical distinction in order to reveal the missed potential in its contemporary use. To argue that motherhood and mothering were not one and the same, Rich had to separate the institution of motherhood from the potential in mothering. To do so, Rich made one of the first social constructionist arguments about motherhood, even though she did not have the social constructionist language that we do today. In fact, Rich was the first feminist thinker to introduce the idea that motherhood was, as we would argue today, a socially constructed patriarchal institution. To make the case, as noted in Chapter 2, Rich explores the history of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering in the first five chapters of Of Woman Born to argue motherhood is an institutionalized, ideological form of patriarchal control of women. As such, she argues the institution of motherhood exercises control over women as they bear and rear children to serve the interests of men. As Rich puts it, “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” (45). Rich, then, concluded that “the patriarchal institution of motherhood is not the ‘human condition’ any more than rape, prostitution, and slavery are . . . motherhood has a history, an ideology” (33). In short, Rich argued motherhood is a patriarchal institution that serves the interests of those in power while subordinating women. In addition to revealing how motherhood has been constructed by patriarchal demands, Rich also details the history of motherhood


to make an equally important argument: women have not been allowed to define mothering themselves. As a result, Rich was able to make two related arguments: mothering could be empowering to women if women were allowed to shape and define it themselves. To do so, her basic argumentative strategy was to pry motherhood and mothering apart in order to articulate both the oppressive and potentially empowering components of motherhood and mothering. Rich did so, of course, when she argued, “I try to distinguish 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” (italics in the original 13). Creating this two-part distinction, then, was necessary both theoretically and politically in order to tease apart the oppressive institution of motherhood and the potential empowering experiences of mothering. Prying apart the institution of motherhood and mothering was, at the time, a brilliant rhetorical move on Rich’s part. It is easy to forget in our contemporary context just how revolutionary and necessary Rich’s original distinction was. As Kate McCullough puts it, “Yes, yes,” today’s feminist reader might think, “we already know all this: motherhood as social institution that works to circumscribe women and protect the status quo of patriarchy; motherhood is not simply a personal experience but one deeply shaped by the forces of the state, defined by legal systems . . .”. And perhaps this alleged banality is in fact something to be celebrated for it suggests that feminists have learned something in the past three decades. That is, thanks precisely to the work of feminists like Rich, we now understand much more about the workings of patriarchy and the social constructions of gender and sexuality. (104)

In short, Rich challenged what was most fully linked (and may still be) to femininity—motherhood—and opened the door for future feminists to think in new ways about the assumed “natural” connection between motherhood and femininity. Equally important, Rich also gave feminists an important new way of thinking and analytic tools to explore both the oppressive components of motherhood and the potential in mothering.


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Rich had to tease apart the two parts of maternity, then, in order separate the oppressive institution of motherhood from the potential in mothering. At the core of her thinking, however, was Rich’s recognition that the institution and the potential in mothering were symbiotically interconnected (13). In fact, Rich’s foundational claim in making the distinction is that one is superimposed on the other and that they work together—both are “true” and symbiotically linked together. Thus, Rich’s text was a political call to arms to find new ways to resist the institution of motherhood, while also suggesting for the first time that feminists could think simultaneously about mothering as a potential source of agency for women. The primary problem that has emerged as a result of the lingering matrophobia, then, is how feminists, including Rich herself, have used or employed the distinction. In short, from the beginning, matrophobia has caused feminist thinkers, including Rich herself, to underutilize Rich’s all-important distinction. As a result, the underlying matrophobia in feminist analyses creates a deeply problematic methodological concern: from its inception, how Rich’s distinction has been and continues to be used is incomplete and, as a result, any analysis that separates the two parts is also incomplete and, equally important, matrophobic. In short, the analytic focus and forms of assessment employed in feminist analyses of contemporary maternity cannot capture fully both the institution of motherhood and mothering, simultaneously. Currently, then, how Rich’s distinction is employed creates a limiting binary model that, ultimately, underutilizes the analytic power of Rich’s original work and results in problematic and incomplete analyses of maternity. To suggest that analyses that separate Rich’s two-part distinction are incomplete, however, does not mean that the analyses that have emerged from that work should be disregarded. To the contrary, clearly, both case studies reveal important and vital insights about contemporary maternity. In the first case study, for example, by employing a sisterly location of critique, Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels articulate clearly and persuasively contemporary, institutionalized intensive mothering, while rejecting or disavowing Rich’s understanding of the potentially empowering relating in mothering. Conversely, by employing a daughterly


location of critique, Daphne de Marneffe articulates clearly and persuasively her understanding of the potential empowered relationship any woman has to her powers of reproduction and to her children within intensive mothering, while rejecting or disavowing Rich’s understanding of institutionalized motherhood. Moreover, Richian scholars have initiated, finally, a feminist maternal location of critique that recognizes diversity among women and in mothering practices. Equally important, the Richian scholars also contribute much to our understanding of the potential mothering holds for women’s agency and how contemporary institutionalized motherhood continues to be a form of patriarchal control, while rejecting or disavowing one part of Rich’s two-part distinction. The issue, then, is not that these analyses should be ignored. Rather, the problem is that they are incomplete in that they reveal important but partial analyses of contemporary maternity. In other words, I am extending Bonnie Dow by arguing we must understand both white second wave and contemporary feminisms’ problems and possibilities before we can purge matrophobia. To put the argument another way, I am suggesting that Rich’s all-important distinction still holds great possibilities for today, even though the distinction has its own problematic history and ongoing problematic use in contemporary work. Thus, theoretically, keeping the two parts of maternity separated when using Rich’s distinction underutilizes the potential power of Rich’s work and creates either/or binaries in analyses—analyses focused on either the institution of motherhood or mothering—which, ultimately, lead to important but partial analyses of contemporary maternity.

Separating Feminist Scholars Another important matrophobic consequence that emerges from the binary use of Rich’s two-part distinction is scholars’ analyses of contemporary maternity work to divide and separate feminist scholars. Indeed, even though the matrophobia manifests differently in both case studies, the analyses split contemporary feminist concerns into either/or binaries—either institutionalized motherhood or empowered mothering, either rebellion by sisters or delighted celebration by daughters or feminist mothers. Disidentifying with


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one part of Rich’s distinction, then, has divisive consequences; the disindentification works to divide and separate feminists. Moreover, at the conceptual level, conceptual terms are also employed by Richian scholars that eventually make it difficult for feminists to “talk” to one another and to talk about and hence think through both parts of maternity. As Chapter 3 revealed, the Richian scholars employ the term motherhood to indicate institutionalized motherhood and mothering to indicate women’s experiences of mothering that are empowering to women. While these terms are key to understanding how scholars can distinguish the two parts of Rich’s distinction, it is theoretically problematic that only these two terms are utilized without a third, all-encompassing term to capture both institutionalized motherhood and the potential in mothering. Because a third term is not employed, as they are used, the two terms draw divisions between scholars who explore motherhood or mothering and keep the two bodies of work separated. In short, to echo Rich’s understanding of how matrophobia works, the either/or binary works to polarize women—feminists— from one another and creates two separate feminist “camps” and conceptual approaches to understanding maternity. Until an allencompassing term is used consistently,2 another matrophobic consequence of how Rich’s distinction is used is that the driving terms employed, ultimately, reflect and reinforce divisive theoretical understandings of contemporary maternity and divisions among feminists.

Misdiagnosing the Feminist Rhetorical Situation Moreover, because contemporary feminist scholars continue to split apart Rich’s distinction in analyses, both case studies split the feminist rhetorical situation into an inside/outside binary, albeit each case study does so differently. More specifically, in analyzing what are the contemporary “problems” or political challenges for feminism in relation to maternity—exploring the contemporary rhetorical situations feminism faces—both case studies split apart these challenges or problems into either/or binaries such that scholars focus on issues either inside or outside feminism rather than both inside and outside feminism. In other words, rather than explore feminism’s contemporary rhetorical situation—the shaping


factors and context—as feminist challenges both within and outside feminism, contemporary work splits the two apart. Unlike the Richian scholars, the authors in the first case study address feminist issues explicitly. These scholars create an explicit inside/outside binary in terms of the issues within feminism and the larger feminist rhetorical situations outside of feminism. This splitting, in fact, leads the authors to assess the contemporary feminist “problem” and response to maternity in opposing, almost paradoxical ways. Indeed, the rhetorical analysis in Chapter 3 reveals that Douglas and Michaels assess the contemporary feminist “problem” as almost exclusively one of rebelling against and challenging, what they argue is, a larger public sphere backlash against second wave feminist gains. By viewing the contemporary maternal context as only an issue in terms of backlash outside of feminism and in the public sphere,3 Douglas and Michaels’s analysis almost entirely ignores second wave gains and the new challenges within feminism for the beneficiaries of those gains, which de Marneffe details so well. Conversely, as Chapter 3 also reveals, even though de Marneffe grapples with the very real aftermath of second wave feminist gains that do impact women’s mothering lives, she assesses the contemporary feminist “problem” as almost exclusively one of inviting revision within feminism to include the gains of second wave feminism in the private sphere. By viewing the contemporary maternal context as only an issue in terms of a revision within feminism, de Marneffe’s analysis almost entirely ignores what are the very real and ongoing outside constraints of contemporary, patriarchal institutionalized motherhood, which Douglas and Michaels detail so well. In short, similar to their use of Rich, the authors in the first case study create an inside/outside dichotomy within feminism and, as a result, diagnose the “feminist” problem or feminist rhetorical situation as one that is inside of feminism or outside of feminism, rather than recognizing that the contemporary rhetorical situation might entail both. The Richian scholars, on the other hand, have not created such an explicit inside/outside division. Indeed, Richian scholars do not address what they believe is the primary feminist problem. Instead, Richian scholars only address feminism explicitly when they insist that feminist mothering can and should be empowered mothering, and when they recognize that institutionalized motherhood is


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still a patriarchal form of social control of women. Even so, in practice, Richian scholars implicitly create an inside/outside dichotomy when they split contemporary feminist concerns into a focus either on institutionalized motherhood or empowered mothering. Moreover, in Mother Outlaws, by implicitly adopting the second wave politics embedded in Of Woman Born, Richian scholars focus only on private sphere mothering and issues within feminism, while sidestepping the public sphere political challenges outside of feminism. Consequently, this approach also reentrenches rather than challenges a public-private split between public institutionalized motherhood and private sphere mothering, which also creates the same kind of public-private split embedded in case study one scholars’ work. This public-private separation, then, splits the politics of maternity into a focus either on institutionalized motherhood or empowered mothering in both case studies rather than recognizing the contemporary rhetorical context might entail both.

Mother Blame When the lingering matrophobia causes feminist thinkers to split apart Rich’s distinction in their use of it, both case studies encourage, albeit inadvertently, rather than discourage mother blame. Doing so is problematic and, in fact, was one of Rich’s most important insights about why matrophobia is problematic both socially and politically. As noted in the introduction, when daughters come to understand their mothers’ restricted role as a mother under patriarchal motherhood, they begin to both blame and reject their mothers. As Rich put it, 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. (235)

Thus, Rich understood that keeping women divided from one another not only encourages mother blame, it is also a deeply entrenched rhetorical strategy of patriarchal motherhood. Because both case studies engage in binary thinking in their use of Rich’s distinction and engage in a form of theoretical separation


and division between women and feminists, they ultimately support mother blame rather than patriarchy blame. In the second case study, for example, the Richian scholars polarize one part of maternity from the other part, which continues to reentrench intellectual and theoretical divisions between feminists and women. This is a form of intellectual mother blame, albeit unintended. In the first case study, however, the mother blame is much more explicit. The analysis in Chapter 3 revealed, for example, that both the sisterly and daughterly feminist subject positions employed by the authors are built on layers of matrophobic splitting and estrangement from an ideal type mother. Even though each subject position purges a different ideal type mother—The Mommy Myth ultimately rejects the domesticated mother and Maternal Desire rejects the second wave feminist mother—both feminist subject positions continue to be implicated in patriarchal estrangement from a particular kind of mother. Thus, another consequence of the matrophobic splitting is that both case studies continue to encourage “mother blame,” albeit inadvertently, rather than patriarchy blame and, ultimately, work to reinforce a key rhetorical strategy of patriarchal motherhood.

Ill-Equipped to Address Women’s Split Subjectivity Yet another consequence of the lingering matrophobia and the split approach to using Rich’s two-part distinction is the inability to recognize how much contemporary women’s lives are caught between old and new gender expectations in their maternal lives. Because feminist scholars do not simultaneously recognize how contemporary maternity is constituted by both institutionalized motherhood and empowered mothering, they are unable to recognize fully how contemporary women’s lives are caught between “old” patriarchal and “new” gender expectations brought about by the successes of second wave feminism. Indeed, as already noted in Chapter 2, scholars (O’Brien Hallstein “Second Wave Silences”; Orenstein; Wood) suggest that American women’s lives are, as Julia Wood argues, in a “transitional time” between new roles and expectations and persisting and deeply held traditional gender values and roles (17). To put it another way, contemporary women’s subjectivity is


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split between new and old gender assumptions and that this is the case is no more apparent than contemporary maternity. In fact, as already noted in Chapter 2, many writers in the popular realm are explicitly addressing women’s post – second wave maternal lives as split between new gender expectations brought about by the successes of second wave feminism and old gender expectations in terms of institutionalized motherhood. Because the authors in both case studies employ a binary approach to exploring maternity, the authors are unable to analyze completely this split subjectivity in relation to maternity. In other words, even though the case studies reveal, first, that institutionalized motherhood via the intensive ideology continues to function as an old form of patriarchal social control of women and, second, there is enormous potential in mothering and empowered mothering can be a location of both agency and joy for women whose lives have benefited from the changes brought about by white second wave feminism, the feminist scholars are unable to explore both together. Thus, another equally troubling consequence of the lingering matrophobia associated with splitting apart motherhood and mothering, then, is that this use of Rich’s distinction makes feminist scholars ill-equipped to explore fully contemporary women’s post – second wave split subjectivity.

Inability to Respond to the Anti-Motherhood Charge The inability to attend to contemporary women’s split subjectivity also leads to problems in terms of responding to the contemporary anti-motherhood charges leveled by popular writers. As Chapter 2 revealed, popular writers’ matrophobia works such that writers ultimately blame second wave feminism’s long silence and anti-motherhood approach4 as the root causes of contemporary women’s struggle managing their split subjectivity, which also plays a key role in the contemporary backlash against feminism. At the most basic level, then, academic feminist writers are unable to respond to these charges because they use binary approaches that preclude them from even recognizing women’s split subjectivity and, as a result, the role of old and new gender roles in contemporary maternity.


When this is coupled with the long-standing debate within feminism over whether or not second wave feminism was antimotherhood and the failure to address these concerns more directly in contemporary work, our ability to respond to the contemporary anti-motherhood charges becomes even more difficult. In other words, as long as we continue to misunderstand our past rhetorical situation and engage in the kind of binary thinking and approaches that drive contemporary scholarship on maternity, we will be unable to think through contemporary women’s split lives and, consequently, are also unable to address popular writers’ anti-motherhood charges. As a result, yet another powerful consequence of the lingering matrophobia, then, is that feminist scholars are unable to respond fully to the contemporary ways that the anti-motherhood discourse continues to be perpetuated, and we are also ill-equipped to respond to the contemporary rhetorical situation in which feminism finds itself. Thus, the antimotherhood discourse will remain a powerful antifeminism strategy until we can begin to theorize both women’s split subjectivity and employ theoretical approaches that eschew the current binary approach. The lingering matrophobia and the resulting binary approaches to understanding contemporary maternity also result in a deeply troubling intellectual problem in terms of how contemporary feminism understands the new contemporary relationship between feminism and maternity. Specifically, because feminist analyses continue to split the focus between either institutionalized motherhood or empowered mothering, this scholarship also misreads how intensive mothering has created a new relationship between feminism and maternity and how intensive mothering has developed into a new post – second wave form of sophisticated backlash that has incorporated second wave feminist ideas and rhetoric.

Theoretical Consequences: Intensive Mothering as Sophisticated Backlash These problematic intellectual consequences become most visible when feminists’ understandings of intensive mothering in Chapter 3 are unpacked in more detail in order to rethink those insights in ways that are more consistent with a Faludian notion of backlash.


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To do so, however, requires intervening in several theoretical “discussions” related to intensive mothering and employing central and important insights from Andrea O’Reilly’s and Douglas and Michaels’s5 work on intensive mothering. Thus, in order to reveal yet another reason why it is necessary for contemporary scholarship to address old and new gender issues embedded in maternity, to understand the new contemporary relationship between feminism and maternity, and to reveal how contemporary intensive mothering is working as a sophisticated post – second wave backlash strategy against second wave feminist gains, it is necessary to overview contemporary feminist work on intensive mothering. This review of intensive mothering also requires resolving a dispute between Sharon Hays (who first defined intensive mothering) and O’Reilly about when to mark the beginning of contemporary intensive mothering and linking the resolution of that dispute with Douglas and Michaels’s argument that the rise of the new momism also indicates a fundamental change in the nature of the relationship between feminism and maternity. I begin with a brief review of intensive mothering and how intensive mothering is currently understood in relation to women’s lives.

Intensive Mothering as Reactionary Backlash As was noted in Chapter 3, scholars in both case studies view intensive mothering as the lynchpin of contemporary institutionalized motherhood. As a review, intensive mothering is founded on at least three core beliefs: (1) children need and require constant and ongoing nurturing by their biological mothers, who are singlehandedly responsible for meeting these needs; (2) in meeting those needs, mothers must rely on experts to guide them; and (3) mothers must lavish enormous amounts of time and energy on their children. In short, intensive mothering is exhausting, demanding, and reinforces the notion that women should be the primary caregivers to children. Thus, even though not all women practice intensive mothering, as Hays argues, it is the proper ideology of contemporary mothering that all women are disciplined into and measured against, across race and class lines. In addition to being the lynchpin of institutionalized motherhood and reinforcing the old patriarchal idea that childrearing is still women’s responsibility, intensive mothering is problematic for


women in terms of their ability to participate in professional life. Because the scholars in both case studies draw upon Hays’s initial understanding of intensive mothering, and she makes the case so well, her arguments about how intensive mothering impedes women’s ability to participate in the professional realm are worth quoting in length. Hays suggests that intensive mothering does so because it contains two central problems for women in terms of subjectivity and agency and women’s ability to participate fully in professional institutions: First, it [intensive mothering] tends to absolve the public world from responsibility for the values of unselfish care, commitment to the good of others, and willingness to carry out such obligations without direct or material remuneration. Second, it contributes to the continued power and privilege of men by creating a social role for women that marks them, in cultural terms, as ill-prepared and unsuitable participants in the public world and leaves many, in concrete terms, too exhausted to successfully compete for positions of higher authority and prestige in that world. (175–176)

In other words, intensive mothering continues to reinforce old gender ideals that give women primary responsibility in the private realm for childrearing and men primary responsibility for professional participation in the public realm. As a result of these problematic implications of intensive mothering, there is agreement among scholars that intensive mothering is a backlash discourse. Indeed, the work in both case studies suggests that intensive mothering is a backlash against white second wave feminist successes, particularly in terms of gains in education and access to professional institutions. Or, as O’Reilly (Mother Outlaws) puts it, like the beauty myth that Naomi Wolf (Beauty Myth) argues regulates women by demanding impossible-for-mostwomen-to-meet standards of beauty and slenderness, the ideology of intensive mothering is viewed as a “counterattack” against white second wave feminist successes. The intensive ideology is primarily viewed as a counterattack because it works to regulate women by demanding impossible-for-most-women-to-meet standards of mothering. In fact, as O’Reilly (Mother Outlaws) argues, “it seems that just as women were making inroads and feeling confident, a new discourse of motherhood emerged which made two things


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inevitable: that women would forever feel inadequate as mothers, and that work and motherhood would be forever seen as in conflict and incompatible” (10). Thus, previous work has primarily established that intensive mothering is a reaction against or rollback of second wave feminist gains. Intriguingly, then, the understanding of backlash that is employed by scholars in both case studies6 is not that which Susan Faludi described. As noted in Chapter 2, Ann Braithwaite argues that a Faludian understanding of backlash entails recognizing how contemporary backlash simultaneously integrates feminism in the service of blaming feminism for any difficulty women experience in managing their post – second wave lives. Or, as I argued in Chapter 2, a Faludian understanding of backlash must recognize that contemporary backlash is built on the twin rhetorical moves of matrophobia—simultaneously identifying with and disavowing feminism. I contend, then, within the context of maternity, this more sophisticated understanding is also necessary to recognize the deeply problematic theoretical limitations contemporary feminist work on maternity faces as a result of the lingering matrophobia that continues to promote binary approaches to understanding contemporary maternity. At the most basic theoretical level, the binary approach precludes the possibility of simultaneously theorizing how the twin rhetorical moves work within the intensive ideology because the two parts of maternity are kept separate and distinct. This theoretical problem, however, is “simple” in comparison with a set of complex theoretical issues that must also be worked through before feminists can employ a Faludian understanding. In fact, before Faludi’s work can be both further justified and utilized, two related theoretical issues must be addressed. First, it is necessary to resolve an important dispute between O’Reilly and Hays over when to mark the advent of contemporary intensive mothering, and second, Douglas and Michaels’s understanding of how the new momism changed the relationship between feminism and maternity must also be explored. I begin with the dispute between O’Reilly and Hays, move through the discussion of Douglas and Michaels, then, I tie the theoretical discussions together in the service of articulating why contemporary feminist work must address and forgo the troubling theoretical legacy of the ongoing matrophobia and binary approaches that result from it.


When to Mark the Beginning of Intensive Mothering? While O’Reilly and Hays agree that motherhood is neither natural nor biological and instead is socially constructed and reconstructed to meet changing economic and social needs, O’Reilly disagrees with Hays over when the intensive ideology as we know it today began. Indeed, as O’Reilly (Mother Outlaws) argues, “Sharon Hays argues that intensive mothering emerged in the post-war period [post-WWII]. I contend, in contrast, that while the origins of intensive mothering may be traced back to this time, intensive mothering, in its fully developed form came about in the 1970s” (7). After noting that most feminist scholars mark intensive mothering—as Hays does—as beginning in the post-WWII period, O’Reilly argues that she sees the “post-war discourse of motherhood as covering the period between 1946 to the mid-1970s, the time when children of the baby boom generation were being raised, and before they themselves were mothers” (7). O’Reilly views this time period as best thought of as “custodial” or “flowerpot” mothering—the idea that if children were well cared for and fed well, then, they would “flower” into successful, healthy adults. Clearly, then, domesticity and a focus on housekeeping were equally important to good mothering and women’s primary role as caretaker. In contrast, O’Reilly (Mother Outlaws) argues intensive mothering as we know it today emerged in the 1970s and is practiced by the daughters of the baby boom era—those born between 1946 and 1962—who became mothers in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s (7). Understanding the shift from custodial to a more formed intensive mothering is crucial because, as O’Reilly (Mother Outlaws) suggests, to fully understand how patriarchal ideologies of “good” motherhood function as culturally constructed practices, ones that are continuously redesigned in response to changing economic and societal factors, we must . . . distinguish between custodial and intensive mothering because these two discourses emerged in response to two very different cultural transformations. (7)

To put it another way, custodial and our fully formed intensive mothering of today emerged in response to two different rhetorical situations.


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Custodial mothering emerged in response to industrialization and post-WWII political and economic changes, while a fully formed intensive mothering emerged in response to women’s changing lives—in response to 1970s white second wave feminism. While she does not make the link directly to second wave feminism, O’Reilly (Mother Outlaws) does make the following argument: Today, for the majority of middle-class women, motherhood is embarked upon only after a career is established, when the woman is in her thirties . . . [and] intensive mothering, in its emphasis upon enrichment—toys, books, games, activities, programs, camps, holidays, theatre and so forth— emerged in response to mothers earning an income of their own, and having a say on how household money is to be spent. (9–10)

In short, intensive mothers of today are no longer primarily practicing custodial intensive mother and instead, as beneficiaries of second wave feminism, practice a post – second wave intensive mothering that integrates second wave feminism. Rather than focus on domesticity and “flowering” children, this new post – second wave intensive mothering focuses on utilizing and harnessing women’s gains as second wave beneficiaries in the service of their mothering when women bring their new found professional and educational skills to their mothering practices. I contend, then, that contemporary intensive mothering is utilizing feminist gains in the service of constraining women’s lives and reconfining women to mothering. And, as such, today’s intensive mothering now positions all women as “second wave beneficiaries”—women who have benefited from and taken advantage of second wave feminist successes regardless of whether or not any particular woman actually views herself as a feminist—and demands that all women bring their new found gains in education and professional skills to their mothering.7 Clearly, then, it is much more fruitful and productive to view contemporary women’s mothering lives as split between these second wave gains and institutionalized motherhood such that intensive mothering is working as a backlash strategy in the more complex Faludian sense: contemporary intensive mothering has incorporated the changes to women’s lives that have primarily been brought about by white second wave feminism. As a result, O’Reilly’s contention that a more fully developed intensive


mothering began in the 1970s seems much more accurate and fruitful in terms of how to understand contemporary intensive mothering. As such, viewing the contemporary intensive mothering as a specifically post – second wave intensive mothering is also important to understand how a more fully formed intensive mothering began to integrate second wave feminist gains in terms of the Faludian understanding of backlash. Linking O’Reilly’s work with Douglas and Michaels’s work on second wave feminism and choice is also necessary to recognize further how much contemporary intensive mothering functions as a complex backlash and to reveal how this new post – second wave intensive mothering has changed the relationship between feminism and maternity. Of most importance to this project is unpacking Douglas and Michaels’s argument that the relationship between feminism and intensive mothering changed as a result of the shift to the new momism in the 1980s. Doing so will also allow me to trace how intensive mothering has adopted the twin rhetorical moves of simultaneously drawing from and refuting white second feminism’s rhetoric of choice and further substantiates O’Reilly’s claim that intensive mothering of today is different from domesticated intensive mothering.

The Contemporary Relationship between Feminism and Maternity In their focus on mediated images of intensive mothering, Douglas and Michaels argue that feminism and intensive mothering were competing discourses during 1970s feminism.8 Indeed, they suggest that 1970s feminism had “given women permission to say that the rosy myths of marriage and motherhood weren’t what they were cracked up to be, we began to see the rise of the mouthy mother [in media representations of mothers], sometimes deadly serious, most often making a joke of her predicament” (74). In other words, the mouthy mothers were mothers who “mouthed off” to and challenged the domesticated intensive ideology. As a result, Douglas and Michaels also argue there was a conflict between intensive mothering and the women’s movement, such that a “new ‘common sense’ about motherhood began to emerge, although it to was not without major contradictions” (80). Consequently, this conflict suggested that it was acceptable, often


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necessary, for women to work and to even let housework go, to let go of domesticity. In short, the conflicting discourse that feminism provided in relation to mediated images of intensive mothering allowed the possibility of seeing the images of the domesticated intensive mother as problematic, as creating conflict with the goal of gender equality for women that drove white 1970s second wave feminisms. Feminism’s relationship as counter discourse, however, began to change with the rise of the new momism in the 1980s. As a refresher, the new momism is, according to Douglas and Michaels, “the insistence that no woman is truly complete or fulfilled unless she has kids, that women remain the best primary caretakers of children, and that to be a remotely decent mother, a woman has to devote her entire physical, psychological, emotional, and intellectual being 24/7, to her children” (4). As noted in the last chapter, Douglas and Michaels argue that the new momism is a direct descendant of what Betty Friedan called the “feminine mystique,” although the new momism appears to be more progressive and hip because women now have choices women did not have when Friedan coined the feminine mystique. As Douglas and Michaels put it, embedded in the new momism is the idea that women have their own ambitions and money, raise kids on their own, or freely choose to stay at home with kids rather than being forced to. . . . Central to the new momism, in fact, is the feminist insistence that woman [sic] have choices, that they are active agents in control of their own destiny, that they have autonomy. (Italics added 5)9

As the new momism arose in the 1980s, then, rather than compete with feminism, the new momism began to integrate feminist ideas and the rhetoric of choice explicitly.10 Douglas and Michaels also conclude that this integration of the ideology and rhetoric of choice are no more apparent than in the emergence of the supermom ideal that emerged as second wave feminism gained prominence in culture. Douglas and Michaels, along with Parker West, argue that the supermom image and subsequent label emerged in direct response to 1970s second wave feminism. The classic example of the supermom is, as Douglas and Michaels remind us, the famous 1970s Enjolie perfume ad of a woman who could do it all and make everyone happy. In the ad,


the “new modern mom shimmied onto the screen singing, ‘I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never, ever let you forget you’re a man’ ” (79). The supermom, then, was a woman and mom who could “do it all”—who could do both private mothering work and public, professional work. Thus, the ideological message communicated in the supermom image is that women can choose to be both: a public professional and a private mother. While the supermom label appears to embrace feminist ideas, even support the changes in women’s lives, from the beginning, the label worked rhetorically to entrench the language of choice while, simultaneously, making it clear that women would be responsible for managing any difficulty or struggle brought about by women’s newly gained choices. Indeed, the supermom label was the first to integrate the idea of choice while, simultaneously, beginning both to blame feminism and women themselves for any difficulty women experienced by having “it all.” As Douglas and Michaels put it, “If women wanted to work, they were just going to have to add it on to their other endless responsibilities. If they couldn’t hack it, well, too bad for them” (81). Thus, the public access to professional life came with a clear message about “personal responsibility” in terms of mothering: if a woman chose work and mothering and found it too difficult, it was her choice and a problem that resulted from second wave feminism. In short, it was women’s freedom to choose that created the difficulties women might be experiencing managing these new found choices in terms of mothering and working rather than, for example, unchanged male professional organizing systems that presume and require unencumbered workers. Equally important, the relationship between intensive mothering and second wave feminism also fundamentally changed with the rise of the new momism and the supermom image. Indeed, while there had been two “camps” or conflicting discourses between feminism and intensive mothering, by the 1980s, feminism was subsumed in the images of the new momism. As Douglas and Michaels argue, Advertisers, often paving the way, had a solution [to the conflict]: be a supermom. Embrace feminism and intensive mothering. This was not quite what feminist had in mind. But this was exactly the fusion—between the two ethics impossible to reconcile—that the media, and million of


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mothers, began to go with as the Gipper [Ronald Regan] took the helm. (Italics in the text 84)

Consequently, with the advent of the supermom, the relationship between feminism and the new momism—a post – second wave intensive mothering—was changed: feminism was fused with the intensive ideology such that feminism was connected or linked to the new momism rather than challenging it. Reading Douglas and Michaels’s findings in relation to understanding how choice works rhetorically in the supermom ideal reveals interesting insights about how the feminist relationship to intensive mothering specifically and how feminism’s relationship to maternity more generally have changed as a result of this new post – second wave intensive mothering. Clearly, the supermom ideal does recognize the fact that women did gain access to educational and professional arenas, and as such, the label does integrate second wave feminist gains. This, then, is the first move toward integrating second wave feminism within intensive mothering. However, as Douglas and Michaels’s analysis also reveals, whether to mother or not went hand-in-hand with depoliticizing choice to mean a personal choice and, as a result, mothers were responsible for working out how to manage that access in the private realm. The supermom label, then, linked the language and idea of choice to intensive mothering but, importantly, not the politics that were originally part and parcel of the rhetoric of choice and, instead, blames feminism for any difficulty contemporary women might experience as a result of their “own” choices. Thus, it seems quite clear that contemporary intensive mothering is a sophisticated backlash strategy a la Faludi’s understanding of backlash because this post – second wave intensive mothering simultaneously acknowledges and refutes second wave feminism. Following O’Reilly’s distinction between custodial and contemporary intensive mothering, while also viewing contemporary intensive mothering as also fully emerging as a direct result of white second wave feminism, then, provides productive and new ways of understanding how intensive mothering works as a more sophisticated backlash and provides a new way of viewing the relationship between intensive mothering and feminism today. Rather than view intensive mothering as simply a reaction against second wave gains, we can view intensive mothering of today as incorporating second


wave feminist ideas and rhetoric in the service of blaming feminism for the tensions women experience via maternity. Thus, rather than just viewing intensive mothering as a reactive backlash discourse, we can also view contemporary intensive mothering as having an important new relationship to both feminism and the rhetoric of choice that also emerged in tandem with white second wave feminism. In other words, rather than just viewing the new momism as only a reaction or counterattack, it is more productive and fruitful to also view the new momism as creating a new relationship between intensive mothering and second wave feminism such that the new momism fused feminism with intensive mothering in deeply troubling and problematic ways. As such, this shift also suggests that the relationship between intensive mothering and contemporary feminism is far more complex than simply just backlash and constraints. Moreover, viewing the new momism and contemporary intensive mothering as specifically post – second wave ideologies allow for a more thorough understanding of our contemporary rhetorical and feminist contexts. Consequently, we need analytic tools that allow us to capture this complexity. When contemporary intensive mothering is viewed as a specifically post – second wave ideology that simultaneously identifies and disidentifies with white second wave feminism, the theoretical limits of the binary use of Rich’s two-part distinction (our contemporary tools) become much clearer. Indeed, contemporary analyses cannot and do not recognize how intensive mothering has integrated white second wave feminist rhetoric and successes in the service of blaming second wave feminism for women’s struggle in their maternal lives. Contemporary analyses also fail to attend to the new post – second wave feminist and maternal rhetorical situations created by this new relationship between feminism and maternity. These consequences, ultimately, result in incomplete analyses of the contemporary feminist rhetorical and maternal contexts, discourage feminist scholars from understanding fully the contemporary relationship between feminism and maternity, and perpetuate rather than challenge the lingering matrophobia. As such, as long as we resist finding a way to theorize contemporary maternity in light of both institutionalized motherhood and the potential in mothering, we will continue to use analytic tools that do not allow us to capture the complexity of maternity.


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In short, we will continue to misread and misdiagnose our contemporary feminist rhetorical and maternal situations, as Dow argues, “during a period when many of its [white second wave feminism] gains are simultaneously taken for granted and under attack” (91). Fortunately, however, understanding these problems embedded in contemporary sisterly, daughterly, and feminist maternal subject positions does allow us to create new possibilities for purging matrophobia from contemporary analyses. Equally important, recognizing and understanding the matrophobic origins of these problems allows us to build on rather than forgo both our history—by turns glorious and distressing—within our contemporary context when many of white second wave feminist gains are simultaneously taken for granted and under attack. Doing so theoretically is where I now turn my attention in the fifth and final chapter of this book.


Chapter

5

P u r g i n g M at r o p h o b i a : Theorizing a M at r o p h o b i c - F r e e F e m i n i s t Subject Position on C o n t e m p o r a r y M at e r n i t y

My hope is to contribute to an ongoing conversation about the meanings of that larger picture [post – second wave feminism], to affirm for future generations that they do indeed have a history, by turns glorious and distressing, on which they can build. (Sara Evans 16–17) 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. (Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born 253)

The “big” question in Chapter 4 is, What’s wrong with a little lingering matrophobia? When both chapters 3 and 4 are read together, the “quick” answer is, the contemporary sisterly, daughterly, and new feminist maternal subject positions and lingering matrophobia embedded in all three have created important partial


but problematic analyses of the contemporary feminist rhetorical and maternal contexts. The more detailed answer is as follows: Chapter 3 reveals that contemporary feminist analyses of maternity are thick with lingering layers of matrophobia, which are primarily but not exclusively founded on scholars’ simultaneous identification and disidentification with one part of Adrienne Rich’s two-part understanding of maternity as both institutionalized motherhood and the potential in mothering. Chapter 4 revealed the lingering matrophobia causes feminist thinkers to underutilize the analytic power and potential of Rich’s all-important distinction; creates an either/or theoretical binary; encourages mother blame rather than patriarchy blame; continues to divide and separate feminists, women from one another, and women from a part of the self; creates analyses that are unable to simultaneously recognize contemporary women’s split subjectivity between old and new gender expectations; is ill-equipped to respond to the contemporary antimotherhood charges leveled against contemporary feminism; and misdiagnoses how contemporary intensive mothering works as a sophisticated post – second wave1 backlash strategy against second wave feminist gains. These consequences, ultimately, result in incomplete analyses of the contemporary feminist rhetorical and maternal contexts and discourage feminist scholars from understanding fully the contemporary relationship between feminism and maternity. It is now time, however, to build on the findings in chapters 3 and 4, while purging matrophobia. Purging matrophobia is possible but requires “reseeing” and building on the strengths of the texts analyzed in chapters 3 and 4, revising the underlying theoretical approaches that guide our use of Rich’s two-part distinction, employing a contemporary daughters-and-sisters feminist maternal subject position on maternity that updates Rich’s understanding of domesticated intensive mothering to a post – second wave intensive mothering, while eliminating, finally, binary understandings and matrophobic approaches from our analyses and feminist subject positions. Doing so will also allow contemporary feminist maternal scholars to retool the contemporary feminist relationships between feminism and maternity, second and third wave feminisms, and between the two parts of maternity, to challenge the long-standing anti-motherhood debate within feminism and

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demonization outside feminism, and recognize that we have different feminist rhetorical and maternal contexts that are shaped by a sophisticated post – second wave backlash.

“Revisioning” Feminist Relationships: From Disavowing to Mutual Responsivness Peeling away the lingering layers of matrophobia requires focusing first on the three matrophobic relationships that are at the heart of contemporary feminist maternal scholarship: between feminism and maternity, between second and third wave feminisms, and between the two parts of Rich’s distinction. As I have argued throughout this book, matrophobia, particularly the twin rhetorical moves of indentification and disidentification, is embedded in each of these relationships. As a result, each relationship is built on identification with and against either feminism or one part of Rich’s two-part distinction. Thus, each relationship is built on identification and separation or identification and disavowal. At the theoretical level, we need to find a way to continue to identify with feminism while purging the matrophobic disavowing. If, as I have argued throughout by drawing on both Bonnie Dow and Sara Evans’s recent work, we must build on rather than reject, deny, or ignore both our glorious and distressing feminist history, then, identifying with past feminist thinking is not problematic. Or, as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese2 puts it, “Recognition of our historical mortgages need not entail resignation or complacency. Rather, it should sharpen our political determination and strategy” (94). Moreover, as I have shown in different chapters in this book, throughout our feminist history, identifying with feminism has served important and long-term advances in feminism and, as a result, identification serves an important and central function both at the theoretical and political levels. The primary matrophobic problem is how we have made that identification in order to disavow or disidentify with feminism. To put it another way, rather than privilege separating and identifying against a particular kind of feminism, a particular kind of mother, or one part of Rich’s two-part distinction, we must find a way to make these identifications while eschewing the simultaneous disavowing, distancing, and/or separation. In short, we must reimagine what


is at the core of the three relationships in order to find news ways to purge the binary thinking and use of Rich’s two-part distinction that are also key components of the lingering matrophobia. As I will argue next by drawing on a central insight of Daphne de Marneffe’s work, one way to do so is to employ de Marneffe’s theoretical work on connectedness and mutual responsivness underlying the mother-child developmental relationship. Indeed, I will argue de Marneffe’s reconception of the mother-child relationship as grounded in mutual responsiveness and connectedness provides a model for understanding the possibilities of productive and healthy relationships grounded in identification and relatedness rather than identification and separation or disavowal. Then, I will suggest de Marneffe’s theoretical findings give us insights about how connectedness and mutual responsiveness can recenter the relationships between feminism and maternity, the two waves, and in terms of how we conceive our understanding of the relationship between the two parts of maternity. Utilizing de Marneffe’s insights, however, are not enough to forgo the current and deeply problematic binary use of Rich distinction and to insure that we understand fully how the contemporary feminist rhetorical and maternal contexts work. As a result, I will then argue that we must also supplement de Marneffe’s insights with moderate postmodern thinking in order to recognize both structural, institutionalized motherhood via the intensive ideology and the everyday practices of empowered mothering. In other words, I maintain our thinking about contemporary maternity requires both the second wave’s modern structural focus on institutional power and the third wave’s postmodern focus on the “micro” practices of power. In doing so, however, I also argue that we do not need to “reinvent the wheel” and, in fact, can draw on what we learned during the 1980s theory debates to find a way to supplement our reorientation and grounding in mutually responsive relationships with a moderate postmodern theoretical perspective that allows us to employ both second and third wave foci. Building on both second and third wave sensibilities also encourages a theoretical approach to analyzing contemporary maternity that understands the feminist rhetorical and maternal contexts more fully and addresses the contemporary sophisticated backlash and the anti-motherhood charges inside and outside feminism.


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From separation to mutual responsiveness Before I can employ de Marneffe’s insights as one possible first step to purging matrophobia, however, I need to review her basic arguments and provide additional detail that I have not covered in previous chapters. As noted in Chapter 3, de Marneffe begins her project of articulating maternal desire by challenging traditional feminist psychological understandings of the mother-infant and later mother-child relationship as one of merger, which also requires mothers to separate from their children to show good health and agency. As de Marneffe puts it, “Again, it seems that the only way for psychological separation to be accomplished is for the mother to insist on her independent selfhood, repeatedly operationalized by Benjamin as the ability to leave” (75). Thus, the kind of separation traditional psychological understandings of a mother’s healthy independence assumes and encourages is a negative process in that the mother is judged by her ability to be separate or distant from her child. De Marneffe challenges this negative process by arguing healthy independence or a healthy sense of self a mother needs in relation to her child are internal processes that are not dependent on separation. As she puts it, “But the kind of independence Benjamin is really getting at is an internal autonomy, a connectedness to one’s own desires, a sense of authorship in one’s life” (de Marneffe 75). Thus, de Marneffe suggests the internal psychological processes— how a mother actually maintains her own healthy sense self as she mothers—are far more important than a mother’s ability to leave or separate from her child. Moreover, de Marneffe also argues part of the reason why separation seems so important is because of the underlying assumption that the mother-child relationship is merged. Alternatively, de Marneffe suggests it is far more accurate and healthy if we view the mother-infant and later mother-child relationship as mutually responsive rather than as a merger. De Marneffe makes this argument by suggesting recent “mother-infant research has shown that the infant expresses his or her agency in encounters with the caregiver, and that the caregiver and baby are extraordinarily attuned to their unique interaction from very early on” (66). As a result, even within the demanding first six months of an infant’s life, more recent research suggests the dynamic between


mother and child is best thought of as mutually responsive, a mutually responsive pattern of attentiveness. When the motherchild relationship is viewed as mutually responsive, then, genuine relating is at the core of it and the interaction between a mother and baby and gives both parties “a great deal more individuality than the somewhat swampy metaphor of merger evokes” (de Marneffe 68). Equally important, conceiving the relationship as mutually responsive forgoes the need for separation and instead views independence as developing within connection rather than separation. As a result, de Marneffe also challenges the notion that individuality and autonomy are gained via separation and distance and instead argues a caregiver’s self-reflective responsiveness to a child is a far better indicator of the mother’s own healthy autonomy and is far more important for a child to develop both. De Marneffe further substantiates her argument by suggesting a mother’s ability to reflect on and communicate about her own childhood experiences with her child is a sign of the mother’s own healthy sense of self and agency and is more crucial to a child’s ability to develop both an independent sense of self and recognition of the mother’s own individual subjectivity and agency. As de Marneffe puts it, “When the mother recognizes her child as someone with his own intentions, desires, and needs and responds to him accordingly, she creates the conditions for the child’s reciprocal recognition of her intentions, desires, and needs” (79). In other words, a mother’s own internal or inner life and her ability to communicate that to and in relationship with her child is far more important to healthy mutual recognition of agency and connection for both the mother and child. Consequently, rather than view women’s subjectivity, mothering, and a woman’s desire to give care to her children as a potential sign of women’s oppressive internalization of the “ideal” mother position or a sign of “bad” health, de Marneffe argues for a psychological perspective that sees all three as connected through the mutual and ongoing challenge mothers face to “integrate love and loss, togetherness and separateness, and connectedness and autonomy in ourselves and in our relationships with children” (83). While mutual responsiveness may be more challenging and complex simultaneous processes of love and loss, togetherness


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and separateness, and connectedness and autonomy, at its core, mutual responsiveness is a positive process of connectedness and relating that is built on interdependence rather than a negative process of separation and identification against the other. In short, de Marneffee suggests a way of thinking about relationships and simultaneity grounded in identification and reciprocal recognition between autonomous individuals. Although de Marneffee does not say so explicitly, I believe it is consistent with her work to argue she challenges a more general relational process of developing a sense of self and agency that is negative and grounded in an identification against something. In other words, de Marneffe challenges a particular kind of relational model that turns on a negative process that is rooted in separation, distance, and disavowal and instead offers an alternative relational model grounded in a positive process that is rooted in connectedness and mutual responsiveness. Indeed, the parallels between de Marneffe’s description of the traditional psychological perspective and the twin rhetorical moves of matrophobia and the relationships imbricated in matrophobia are striking. As a result, I believe de Marneffe challenges and revisions a similar kind of negative relating that is at the heart of the three relationships and matrophobia: disidentification. As a reminder, disidentification represents a rejection of an identification one has already made unconsciously. Or, as Astrid Henry’s (Matrophobia and Generations) puts it in her dissertation drawing on Diane Fuss’s work, “Disidentification is a concept that I use throughout the dissertation to describe an indentification against something” (italics in text 10). In short, disidentification is a negative process of identifying against something or someone, or as not like something or someone. Henry also argues a similar negative process is also at work in matrophobia. Henry, in fact, links Fuss’s ideas directly to Rich’s notion of matrophobia when Henry argues identifying against the mother is the fear of recognition of being like the mother, which is also a disidentificatory moment and, equally important, creates a particular kind of relationship between a mother and daughter that requires separation between the two for autonomy. Consequently, I believe the underlying fear of being like the mother that encourages disidentification is the same kind of fear


of merger that de Marneffe attributes to traditional psychological perspectives on the mother-child relationship. As a result, de Marneffe provides key theoretical insights about how we might retool the three relationships imbricated in matrophobia from our current negative process of identification and disavowal to a positive process of identification and responsiveness. Thus, I believe de Marneffe’s work provides a theoretical model for reconceiving the core relationships imbricated in matrophobia and offers insights about one way to challenge the underlying process of disidentification at work in the three relationships specifically and matrophobia more generally. Mutual responsiveness in practice: empathy and self-correction Before we can utilize de Marneffe’s work to recenter the grounding for the three relationships, however, we need a model for how mutually responsive relationships work in practice. In talking about how a mother-child relationship works, how relating actually is enacted, de Marneffe argues empathy is at the core of the relating. De Marneffee suggests, “A mother’s responsiveness combines both her willingness to enter into emotional states with her child—what we commonly call empathy—and her ability to reflect and offer a different perspective” (italics in text 78). Responsiveness fosters mutual recognition through what de Marneffe calls the loop of empathy. For de Marneffe, the loop of empathy emerges in what she describes as fully saturated moments of mutual responsiveness between a mother and child. As she puts it, when a child demonstrates she recognizes her parent for who they are, they are “fully saturated moments, bringing us satisfaction of two kinds: pleasure in our children’s eagerness to know us and make us happy, and a sense of successes in having nourished our child’s own empathetic capacities through our responsiveness to [her] him” (81). Equally important, de Marneffe argues “perfect” empathy neither happens all the time nor is necessary for a healthy relationship. Rather, efforts to self-correct are far more important. Indeed, as she argues, empathy is rarely complete because miscommunication happens all the time. However, she suggests it is efforts to repair and self-correct that develop both healthy offspring and indicates


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a healthy relationship. De Marneffe is worth quoting in length on this point: Researchers have found that a baby’s development into a happy, confident, curious child is likely associated not with a caregiver’s perfect responsiveness but with her ongoing attempts to repair or self-correct after misinterpreting her children’s signals, and to find ways to restore positive feelings after negative interactions. (81)

Thus, mutually responsive relationships work via empathy and ongoing attempts to repair or self-correct unsatisfying interactions. As such, de Marneffe’s perspective has four principles at its core. First, it eschews conceiving healthy relationships as grounded in the need to separate and focuses instead on healthy relationships as grounded in mutual responsiveness. As a result, at the core of a healthy relationship is simultaneous connectedness and autonomy. Second, de Marneffe’s position suggests relationships grounded in mutual responsiveness can work such that a mother can maintain her own individual subjectivity and agency, while also maintaining a connection to her child and recognizing the child’s own agency and subjectivity. As a result, third, de Marneffe’s work on the “loop of empathy” also suggests mutual responsive does not eliminate either the mother or child from having different perspectives—a different area of focus or interest, for example. Indeed, empathy in the way de Marneffe conceives it allows for both a mother and her child to have the ability to reflect and offer a different perspective from the one offered by the other without the need to disavow or distance from the other. Fourth and finally, de Marneffe’s insights suggest a different kind of simultaneity: rather than demanding an identity grounded in separation, distance, and disavowal, de Mareneffe suggests that identification grounded in connection and mutual responsiveness allow identification and autonomy while maintaining a connection. As a result, as de Marneffe suggests, “two parts” can work together—love and loss, together and separate, and connected and autonomous—in mutual responsiveness rather than distance and separation without either having to merge or disavow; both happen at once and are fostered by mutual responsiveness and empathetic interaction between the two. With these four principles in mind, we can utilize de Marneffe’s ideas to provide important insights how to retool, revise


and resee the contemporary complex relationship between feminism and maternity, second and third wave feminisms, reorient the connection between the two-parts of Rich’s distinction, and we can retool the twin rhetorical moves of matrophobia from indentification and disidentification to a matrophobic-free identification and mutual connection. Conceiving relationships as mutually responsive to purge matrophobia If we apply de Marneffe’s focus on mutual responsiveness and healthy interaction to the relationship between second and third wave feminisms generally and more specifically to our understanding of the connection between Rich’s two-part distinction, then, we can find a new and more productive way of understanding the three relationships, the evolution of feminism, how feminism can continue to evolve while maintaining connection among the waves, and how we can use Rich in ways that are more consistent with her original notion of the two parts of maternity as symbiotically connected. I want to begin by reconceptualizing the underlying understanding of the wave metaphor, then, I move to how de Maraneffe’s ideas can specifically transform the relationship between second and third wave feminisms. First, as I have maintained throughout this book, if we insist on ongoing connection rather than separation between past and present iterations of feminism, then, we cannot break or reject past feminisms. Instead, we need connections between the past and the present at the same time that we need to understand both the possibilities and problems of previous and current iterations of feminism. To that end, we need a wave metaphor that is focused on connections rather than breaks or separations. Thus, the problem is not the wave metaphor per say; rather, the problem is the matrophobic relationship that was created both between the first and second wave and the second and third wave and how the wave metaphor has been understood and developed in practice. Indeed, the metaphor of a wave does not have to indicate the kinds of breaks and disavowals that it has in the past between first and second and second and third wave feminisms. Instead, the wave metaphor can indicate continuity and mutual connection.


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Buddhists (Kornfield; Rinpoche) thinkers, for example, use a wave metaphor to describe the interdependent nature of the universe. As Rinpoche describes it, Think of a wave in the sea. Seen in one way, it seems to have a distinct identity, an end and a beginning, a birth and death. Seen in another way, the wave itself doesn’t really exist but is just the behavior of the water, “empty” of any separate identity but “full” of water. So when you really think about the wave, you come to realize that it is something made temporarily possible by wind and water, and that it is dependent on a set of constantly changing circumstances. You also realize that every wave is related to every other wave. (37)

This passage suggests a way of understanding the wave metaphor that is also consistent with de Marneffe’s thinking about mutually responsive and connected relationships. In fact, we can transform our understanding from separation and breaks between waves to each wave as dependent on “a set of constantly change circumstances”—constantly change rhetorical situations—and as related—connected—“to every other wave.” If, with de Marneffe’s perspective as background, we reconceive the wave as a metaphor that indicates a relationship grounded in connection and mutual responsiveness—if we view the second and third waves as part of the large “water” of feminisms—then, we can continue to employ the wave metaphor, while retooling how we conceive the nature of the relationship between the two waves. Moreover, if we insist on identification and forgo disidentification for mutual responsiveness grounded in empathy, then, we can challenge the matrophobia that undergirds the present enactment of the wave metaphor, recognize different areas of focus between eras of scholars—the ability to reflect and offer different perspectives—and draw on both our glorious and distressing history. In short, to paraphrase de Marneffe, we might discover eventually that a happy, confident and curious third wave feminist is likely associated not with a her perfect responsiveness to past feminism but with her ongoing attempts to repair or self-correct after misinterpreting second wave signals, and to find ways to restore positive feelings after negative interactions. Equally important, mutual responsiveness would demand the same of second


wave feminists. Again, paraphrasing de Marneffe, a happy, confident and curious second wave feminist is likely associated not with a her perfect responsiveness to third wave feminism but with her ongoing attempts to repair or self-correct after misinterpreting third wave signals, and to find ways to restore positive feelings after negative interactions. And, in so doing, both the nature of the wave metaphor and the foundation of the relationship embedded in it would be built on identification and connection rather than identification and disidentifcation. As a result, matrophobia would be purged from both the wave metaphor and between second and third wave feminism. Retooling the wave metaphor as one grounded in continuity and mutual responsiveness also has implications for our ongoing use of the terms second and third wave feminisms. Because I believe that we can continue to use the wave metaphor if we reconceive the relationship between second and third wave feminism as mutually responsive, I also believe this means that we can continue to employ the terms second and third wave feminisms. By fundamentally challenging the nature of the interaction or connection between the two and shifting the process of identification from distance and separation to responsiveness grounded in connections and efforts to self-correct and repair, we also change what we mean by the terms second and third wave feminisms and the relationship between the two terms. In other words, I am suggesting that we can retool what we mean by the terms today in the same way Braithwaite argues that we can mean something different when we employ postfeminism to mean “as a result of second wave feminism” rather than to mean “feminism is dead or no longer necessary.” Of course, “taking back” or retooling what words mean have been a cornerstone of contemporary social movements; Braithwaite’s call to redefine postfeminism is not a new strategy. Lesbians and gays, for example, have fundamentally retooled what they mean by queer. Indeed, contemporary gays and lesbians have changed the term from a negative and threatening form of oppression (sometimes accompanied with real and dangerous violence) to mean a positive and powerful term for lesbian and gay lives and thinking. Queer theories or thinking, for example, are not only recognized by most intellectuals as important ways of thinking about sexuality and gender studies, the word queer now means something different to those who are informed by and about queer theories.


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Thus, I believe that we too can do the same kind of redefining intellectually, symbolically, and at the relationship level once we purge the underlying matrophobia in our conceptualization of the relationship between second and third wave feminisms. Moreover, as I made clear in the introduction, I choose to use the language of post – second wave feminism as synonymous with contemporary feminism. I do so to indicate my own lineage in relation to white second wave feminism—I was raised within it as an active member from the time I was born—and to indicate the ongoing connection between second and third wave ideas. I believe that to do so is also consistent with my commitment to retooling the term postfeminism as Braithwaite suggests. As she puts it, “As argued by Brooks and others, then, interpreting the prefix ‘post’ in this way translates postfeminism to simply mean feminism today; rather than something separate from and earlier feminism, it instead simply both refers and draws attention to all the shifts in feminist thinking over the past 40 years, as it has engaged with a greatly expanded range of considerations” (27). Regardless of the terms we adopt as contemporary feminists, if ongoing connection, the loop of empathy, and efforts to self-repair are the foundation between the two waves, then, we can employ the terms second, third, and post – second wave feminisms, while also purging any underlying matrophobia embedded in our understanding and use of those terms. Autonomy and connection: eschewing disavowal to achieve autonomy Moreover, de Marneffe’s work also gives insight about how different generations of feminists can simultaneously maintain their own autonomy or area of interest—their own different perspective—and connection without being driven by an underlying fear of merger. As I argue above, the negative identificatory process that underlies the fear of merger is strikingly similar to the underlying fear of becoming like the mother at work in matrophobia. In fact, at the core of the matrophobia between second and third wave feminisms (and between second and first wave feminisms for that matter) is a desire to be distinct and different from the previous era. This desire is coupled with the real need to respond to the changing rhetorical situations that each era found itself within. Thus, it is


both intellectually and politically important that different eras of feminism have different areas of foci and perspectives, if feminism is to continue to evolve and develop in new ways as our ideas and thinking develop and as our rhetorical contexts change. To have different perspectives or areas of interest and emphasis, then, are not problems. The problem, again, is how we conceptualize the relationship between different generations and different eras of feminism. Fortunately, de Marneffe’s model of healthy mutually responsive relationships grounded in empathetic relating reveals ways we can maintain different areas of foci and perspectives while staying connected. If we enact a model of relating grounded in the loop of empathy, then, we can also have autonomy from past feminism, recognize different perspectives, and maintain connection. Once more, to paraphrase de Marnefffe, I am suggesting here that a second wave feminist’s responsiveness combines both her willingness to enter into theoretical states with a third wave feminist—what we commonly call empathy—and a second wave feminist’s ability to reflect and offer a different perspective. The same, of course, would also be true for third wave feminists: third wave feminists would need to be willing to enter into theoretical states with second wave feminists while reflecting and offering a different perspective. This kind of responsiveness between generations or eras of feminisms would foster mutual recognition through what de Marneffe calls the loop of empathy, which could provide fully saturated moments between autonomous and connected generations rather than disavowed and disconnected generations and could begin to restore cathexis—the potential connection or energy investment—between the two. Equally important, this reorientation does not require “perfect” empathy all the time nor is necessary for a healthy relationship between feminists. Rather, efforts to self-correct are far more important and develop healthy “offspring” or eras and enact a healthy relationship between autonomous yet still connected generations. Thus, a mutually responsive relationship between second and third wave feminisms grounded in empathy and ongoing attempts to repair or self-correct unsatisfying interactions would allow for both autonomy and different perspectives that are responsive to different rhetorical situations, while maintaining ongoing


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connection and, equally important, would purge matrophobic relating between generations. Additionally, when the relationship between second and third wave feminism is built on connection and mutual responsiveness, then, we can find a new and more productive way of understanding feminism as an evolving process—both glorious and distressing— while challenging the contemporary understanding of feminism as a series of separations and breaks. We can, in short, have a theoretical foundation and core relationships that allow us to recognize the second wave as having a history that we can build on rather than eschew. We can also then recognize both the possibilities and problems that we have inherited without having to “throw out” past feminism and, equally important, “reinvent the wheel” each time the rhetorical situations change in ways that a new era of focus is warranted. Finally, this reconceiving also encourages feminism to continue to evolve while maintaining ongoing connection among the waves. Retooling and reorienting Rich’s all-important distinction In terms of Rich’s two-part distinction, if we forgo the underlying matrophobia between the second and third wave for mutual responsiveness and connection, then, we can also retool our fundamental orientation toward Rich’s distinction between motherhood as institution and the potential in mothering. Rather than focusing on the two parts as separate, we can begin to think of them as fundamentally connected and interdependent. This then would allow us to update Rich’s own underlying matrophobia and restore our understanding of the two parts as symbiotically related or, in de Marneffe’s terms, as having an ongoing connection. In short, our positioning in relation to Rich’s distinction would be more consistent with her original notion of the two-parts of maternity as symbiotically connected, while purging Rich’s own underlying matrophobia and beginning to resist the current matophobic binary use of Rich’s distinction. Doing so, however, as I began to suggest in Chapter 4, also requires resisting the current binary practice of employing only the terms motherhood or mothering without adopting and using a


third all-encompassing term that acknowledges both terms and the symbiotic connection between the two. I have suggested throughout this book that I believe maternity can be employed as the third all-encompassing term. The key issue, then, at the theoretical level is that we must consistently employ a term that indicates the symbiotic connection between motherhood and mothering. If we insist on adding this third term to the present contemporary terminology, then, we can resist the present binary terminology and resist the matrophobic splitting that accompanies that binary. Finally, employing maternity as the third term enables us to quit drawing divisions between scholars who explore motherhood and those who explore mothering, lays a foundation for scholars to “talk” to one another rather than to reside in “two camps,” and encourages us to purge, finally, the theoretical mother blame and the resulting separation between feminists, women, and woman from self that result when the two parts of maternity are kept distinct both theoretically and in our use of only two terms.

Supplementing Mutual Responsiveness with Moderate Postmodern Thinking Reorienting our understanding of the relationship between the two waves, the two parts of Rich’s distinction, and employing a third all-encompassing term, however, are not enough to forgo the current and deeply problematic binary use of Rich distinction and to insure that we understand fully how the contemporary feminist rhetorical and maternal contexts work. In short, as chapters 3 and 4 reveal, we must also employ a theoretical perspective that recognizes both structural, institutionalized motherhood via the intensive ideology and the everyday practices of empowered mothering. Moreover, as I also argued in Chapter 4, we need to recognize how women’s maternal lives are split between ongoing patriarchal constraints via a new post – second wave intensive motherhood, which Douglas and Michaels’s work details so well, and the gains of second wave feminism via empowered mothering, which de Marneffe and the Richian scholars’ work detail so well. Finally, Chapter 4 also reveals we must employ a theoretical perspective that helps us account for a Faludian understanding of backlash as simultaneously acknowledging and refuting feminism,


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which also means acknowledging the feminist and maternal rhetorical situations have changed as a result of white second wave feminism. Based on the findings and arguments made in Chapter 4, I believe we can do so if we employ theoretical understandings that encourage us to acknowledge both the second wave’s modern structural focus and the third wave’s postmodern focus on the “micro” practices of everyday mothering. Fortunately, however, we do not need to “reinvent the wheel” and, in fact, can draw on what we learned during the 1980s theory debates to find a way to supplement our reorientation and grounding in mutually responsive relationships with a theoretical perspective that allows us to employ both second and third wave foci. Doing so will also encourage a theoretical approach to analyzing contemporary maternity that more fully recognizes the feminist rhetorical and maternal contexts and addresses the contemporary sophisticated backlash and the anti-motherhood charges inside and outside feminism. Drawing on the 1980s postmodern turn and theory debates As I detailed in Chapter 2, if nothing else, the theory debates taught us at the most general level that we need to eschew essentializing and recognize diversity, multiplicity, and contradiction among women, incorporate everyday forms of resistance within feminist politics and understandings of power, acknowledge that a new era of focus has emerged and is informed by both multicultural and postmodern insights—the third wave—with a new set of rhetorical situations as a result of white second wave feminism’s successes. When the shifts in feminist thinking that have emerged as a result of the 1980s theory debates and the postmodern turn are linked with the analyses in chapters 3 and 4 and the popular writing analyzed in Chapter 2,3 however, it becomes apparent we need a theoretical perspective that recognizes that women’s maternal lives are caught between ongoing structural constraints and new forms of power, in part as a result of white second wave feminism’s successes. In short, we need a theoretical perspective that allows us to recognize both structural power and everyday micro-practices; we


need to theorize both second and third wave notions of power and politics. Or, as I argued in Chapter 4, we need both the modern understanding of power embedded in the contemporary sisterly rebellion of Douglas and Michaels and postmodern delight in feminist mothering offered by both de Marneffe and the Richian scholars, if we hope to challenge the forms of power that construct women’s maternal lives and if we want to respond more fully to both our feminist rhetorical and maternal contexts. Thus, we need a way of thinking that allows us to integrate what we learned from the theory debates, recognizes both modern and postmodern understandings of power and politics, and permits us to recognize both parts of contemporary maternity simultaneously. Contemporary maternity: caught between structural and disciplinary power I contend that doing so requires us to employ moderate postmodern theories to supplement our reorientation to mutually responsive relationships, which also allows us to recognize both modern and postmodern forms of power. To insist that we need to recognize both modern forms of structural power and postmodern micro-practices of power—both second and third wave areas of focus—is neither inconsistent nor unwarranted. Even though we have made the postmodern turn in contemporary feminist thinking, this does not also mean that we live in a fully postmodern world, particularly in regard to power. Indeed, our current epoch is, as scholars (Best and Kellner; Calhoun; Kellner; O’Brien Hallstein Postmodern Caring) argue, caught between the modern and postmodern. As a culture, then, social relations continue to be grounded in material and economic structures that constrain and condition our lives and produce advantages and disadvantages based on structural positions due to relations among race, class, gender and sexuality. In the context of maternity, giving up fighting to challenge and resist the unequal positioning and disadvantages women as a group continue to face under institutionalized motherhood, then, would be fatal for feminist scholars; to do so would ignore the real material and ideological structures


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that continue to influence, impact, and structure women’s maternal lives. At the same time, however, power has been displaced from many cultural structures, in part, because of white second wave feminism, which also influences women’s maternal lives and has created continuously changing and different forms of power and discourses that influence women’s everyday experiences and mothering practices as second wave beneficiaries. Thus, in light of our contemporary maternal context, it is, in fact, consistent and warranted to argue for an approach that focuses on every day micro-practices of power and structural power to supplement the reorientation of the three underlying relationships that guide our thinking and analysis of contemporary maternity. Recognizing the second wave’s structural and the third wave’s micro-practices foci, however, also require that we employ a theoretical perspective that recognizes both sovereign and disciplinary forms of power. In exploring the general conception of power and politics in both second and third wave feminisms, Natalie Fixmer and Julia Wood argue that the second wave drew on a sovereign model of power, while the third wave draws on poststructural, postmodern models of everyday micro-forms of power. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s writing, Fixmer and Wood argue, “The sovereign model associates the political with the structural and institutional operations of the state, most notably the laws. Assuming that changes in cultural life flow from the top down, the sovereign view of power targets institutions as the focal point for political reform” (235). Again, drawing on Foucault, Fixmer and Wood argue, “However, a disciplinary conception of power recognizes that power may also operate in a bottom-up fashion— what Foucault (1980) described as ‘ascending analyses of power, starting, that is, from its infinitesimal mechanisms (99)’ ” (italics in text 236). Theoretically, then, we need to employ a theoretical perspective that recognizes both modern structural forms of power—the sovereign power that drove white second wave feminism and continues in Douglas and Michaels’s contemporary sisterly work—and ascending power—the micro-forms of power that drives third wave feminism and is embedded in both de Marneffe’s contemporary daughterly and Richian scholars’ feminist maternal work.


Advocating for both modern and postmodern views of power and politics does not mean that I am suggesting adopting “old” patriarchal modern perspectives nor extreme postmodern thinking.4 Indeed, with Harding, I am arguing that we need “updated” forms of modern understandings and a particular kind of postmodern theory. As Harding argues, “At this moment in history, our feminisms need both Enlightenment and Postmodernist agendas—but we don’t need the same ones for the same purposes or in the same forms as do white, bourgeois, androcentric, heterosexist Westerners” (187). We need what Steven Best and Douglas Kellner describe as moderate postmodern theories. Employing moderate postmodern thinking to understand contemporary maternity According to Best and Kellner, moderate postmodern theories do not make the same kind of break from modernity as do extreme postmodern theories and instead retain continuity and connection between the modern and postmodern. As they put it, Other less extreme forms of the appropriation of postmodern positions include the work of the theorists such as Bernstein, Fraser, Harding, Nicholson, Seidman, Smart, and West who use postmodern categories and insights to rethink modern theory without abandoning its core features, such as concern for truth, objectivity, ethics, and normative critique. Such theorists combine modern and postmodern perspectives, drawing on both traditions as providing resources to do theory and critique in the present age—a position with which we identify. (25)

Thus, moderate postmodern theories combine modern and postmodern perspectives that privilege the ongoing connections between modernity and postmodernity. Clearly, moderate postmodern thinking is also consistent theoretically with de Marneffe’s understanding of mutual responsiveness grounded in ongoing connection and my argument throughout this book that second and third wave feminism must begin to eschew disavowal for ongoing connection. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere (Postmodern Caring), moderate postmodern


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thinking is particularly important for feminist theorizing5 because it simultaneously allow us to recognize that subjects are constructed through and located in various and multiple discourses and social positions, while also recognizing structural forms of oppression based on ongoing key material and structural relations that continue to order and undergird culture (47). As a result, I also argued (Postmodern Caring) moderate postmodern insights allow us to view subjects or women as socially constructed through and located in various and multiple discourses and social positions, which positions women differently in relation to one another and acknowledges diversity among women based on race, class, power, and sexuality. However, core features of modern theorizing remain; structural forms of oppression are recognized because moderate postmodern theories retain the modernist position that key material and structural relations continue to order and undergird current society. These structural relations continue to position men and women as two distinct groups in relation to one another and, as a result, create a common positioning for men as a group and for women as a group. Thus, in the context of maternity, supplementing mutually responsive relationships with moderate postmodern thinking can create an “updated” theoretical perspective that provides one route for us to acknowledge simultaneously structural sovereign and ascending micropractices of power, commonality and diversity among women in the context of maternity and, ultimately, purge the underlying matrophrobic theoretical binary that separates sovereign and micro-practices of power and politics in contemporary maternal scholarship. While some might be troubled with the call to recognize both commonality and difference among women in the context of maternity, I believe that we must recognize both. Indeed, the analysis in both chapters 3 and 4 made it clear that institutionalized intensive motherhood continues to be the contemporary standard of motherhood that all women, as a group, are judged against and disciplined into, while empowered mothering, particularly the work by the Richian scholars in Mother Outlaws, acknowledges diversity within everyday mothering practices. Thus, within the context of maternity, we must recognize both commonality and differences,


simultaneously, if we hope to understand fully women’s maternal lives as caught between both institutionalized motherhood and empowered mothering practices. Suggesting contemporary feminist maternal scholars need to theorize both commonality and difference—to employ a perspective that simultaneously encourages and discourages metanarrative-like theorizing—is neither “bad” thinking nor inconsistent with moderate postmodern theory. Indeed, if our current epoch generally and maternity specifically are caught between the modern and postmodern, between modern and postmodern forms of power, then, it is not inconsistent to suggest that we need both commonality and difference and modern and postmodern forms of power. Rather, feminists need to recognize both commonality and difference to account for the continued influence of larger cultural structures and the demise to some degree of those vary structures brought about by white second wave feminist successes. Moreover, if we have shifted our understanding of contemporary feminism as built on both second and third wave feminisms and as founded in connections rather than breaks between the two, then, we can eschew white second wave essentializing for an “updated” understanding that women are still positioned as a group in our current epoch and especially under intensive motherhood, while simultaneously recognizing women’s lives are shaped differently by race, class, and sexuality and differing mothering practices among women. Understanding more fully women’s maternal lives If we can simultaneously employ second and third wave sensibilities and notions of power, then, we can begin fully thinking through our contemporary feminist rhetorical and maternal contexts and begin to understand more fully women’s maternal lives. As I argued in Chapter 4, it is more fruitful and accurate to describe our contemporary feminist rhetorical context and women’s maternal lives as within a post – second wave context caught between the “old” and “new” as a result of the successes of white second wave feminism. In Chapter 4, I also argued that this means that structural intensive motherhood has integrated second wave feminism and rhetoric, particularly the rhetoric of choice, while simultaneously encouraging a sophisticated form of backlash that


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also blames second wave feminism for any difficulty women have managing those successes. Harnessing moderate postmodern thinking allows us to think through these issues with much more clarity and precision. Specifically, because moderate postmodern theories acknowledge our contemporary epoch is caught between old and new forms of power, they provide a more complex theoretical ground to explore women’s maternal lives as caught between old and new forms of power as a result of the changes brought about by white second wave feminism. This, then, would also allow us to recognize women’s split subjectivity between two different forms of power— structural and ascending—and within a culture caught between old and new gender expectations for women in relation to maternity. Thus, when we are grounded in mutually responsive relationships supplemented by moderate postmodern thinking, we have the necessary theoretical tools to explore women’s maternal lives caught between structural motherhood and empowered mothering practices and women’s split subjectivity between the old and the new, while eliminating the matrophobic consequences that made it difficult for contemporary scholars to understand fully women’s split subjectivity and our feminist rhetorical and maternal contexts. Understanding more fully the feminist rhetorical situations The reoriented approach I advocate also would encourage us to resist the matrophobic inside/outside feminist “problem” binary. As I argued in Chapter 4, contemporary work splits the feminist rhetorical situation into an inside/outside binary. The contemporary sisterly perspective assesses the contemporary feminist problem as almost exclusively one of rebelling against and challenging the public sphere backlash against second wave feminist gains. Conversely, de Marneffe’s contemporary daughterly subject position assesses the contemporary feminist problem as almost exclusively one of inviting revision within feminism to include the gains of white second wave feminism in the private sphere via mothering practices. Finally, the Richian scholars also create an inside/outside dichotomy when they split contemporary feminist concerns into either a focus on institutionalized motherhood or empowered mothering. As a result, Richian scholars reentrench


rather than challenge the public-private sphere split that is also at work between the contemporary sisterly and daughterly subject positions. As should be clearer now, one way to understand the inside/ outside binary is to view it as symptomatic of the differing conceptions of power and politics embedded in the feminist subject positions or locations of critique employed by the scholars analyzed in chapters 3 and 4. To put the issue another way, the differing diagnoses of the feminist rhetorical situations turn on the different view of power and politics embedded in the feminist subject positions. The sisterly subject position utilizes a sovereign model of power and argues for a sisterly rebellion to challenge the structural problems outside of feminism in the public sphere, while de Marneffe explicitly and the Richian scholars implicitly argue for a third wave celebration and delight in mothering to challenge the problems inside of feminism and in the private sphere. To forgo our current matophobic binary approach between rebellion or delight and to diagnose and respond to both the problems inside and outside of feminism, then, as I argued in Chapter 4, we need both the sisterly rebellion against sovereign power outside of feminism and feminist celebration and delight to challenge the problems within feminism. Because moderate postmodern theories acknowledge that our current epoch is caught between both forms of power, at the theoretical level, they encourage us to recognize both forms of power and the problems inside and outside feminism, which would also encourage us to challenge both the problems inside and outside—engage in sisterly rebellion in the public sphere and feminist delight in empowered mothering in the private sphere—while also exploring how the two are symbiotically connected. Responding to the contemporary anti-motherhood charge The reorientation I advocate also creates the conditions to analyze and respond more fully to the anti-motherhood charge and demonization of feminism. As I argued in Chapter 4, contemporary work has difficulty doing so because the underlying matrophobic binary analysis. More specifically, at the most basic level, academic feminist writers are unable to respond to these


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charges because they use binary approaches that preclude them from even recognizing women’s split subjectivity and, as a result, the role of old and new gender roles in contemporary maternity. Moreover, I also suggested, when this is coupled with the long-standing debate within feminism over whether or not second wave feminism was anti-motherhood and the failure to address these concerns directly in contemporary work, our ability to respond to the contemporary anti-motherhood charges is also limited by the matrophobic binary approach. As a result, I concluded, as long as we continue to misunderstand our past rhetorical situation6 and engage in the kind of binary thinking and approaches that drive contemporary scholarship on maternity, we will be unable to think through contemporary women’s split lives and, consequently, are also unable to address popular writers’ anti-motherhood charges. Because mutually responsive relationships supplemented with moderate postmodern insights allow us to recognize women’s split subjectivity, we can begin to respond to the anti-motherhood charges outside of feminism. This is the case, of course, because the reorientation provides a route for feminist scholars to begin to recognize and think through women’s split subjectivity as caught between both structural and ascending power and old and new gender roles. Outside of feminism, we can begin, finally, to answer the contemporary anti-mother charge because we are now able to analyze women’s split subjectivity in more complex and sophisticated ways. As a result, outside of feminism, we can begin to at least offer alternative views to the claim that the root cause of women’s difficulties managing their lives as post – second wave maternal subjects is feminism’s fault. We could, for example, begin to suggest that institutions did not change enough to accommodate women’s lives as mothers and, in fact, are now using feminist ideas and rhetoric in the service of constraining women’s lives and blaming white second wave feminism so institutions do not have to continue to change. Regardless, outside of feminism, we will be much better equipped to answer the contemporary anti-motherhood charges and begin to offer different and better analyses of women’s contemporary struggles and joys mothering as second wave beneficiaries. Inside feminism, my hope is this book, along with others under analysis here, can also begin to correct the record within feminism


and end the internal debate over whether or not white second wave feminism was anti-motherhood. White second wave feminism was not “anti-motherhood.” Rather, as I hope my analysis of the rhetorical situations white second wave and 1980s-1990s feminisms faced reveals, the long-standing silence and complex relationship between feminism and maternity were not fueled by a feminist anti-motherhood position. Indeed, the long-standing silence was shaped by the rhetorical situations within which different eras of feminism emerged, the immediate demonization of white second wave feminism, and by matrophobia, albeit an overemphasized fear of the social role of the mother. Matrophobia, then, as I have tried to show here, is not the same thing as being anti-motherhood. While matrophobia is problematic and it is time now to purge matrophobia, it is neither the same kind of problem as being anti-motherhood nor was it fully unwarranted, particularly in the early days of white second wave feminism. As a result, in light of this analysis, shifting to a foundation in mutually responsive relationships and moderate postmodern insights will allow us to begin to explain feminism’s long and complex history with maternity more accurately and, finally, to quite apologizing within feminist circles and, as a result, “silence” or resolve the longstanding debate within feminism over whether or not feminism was and remains anti-motherhood. Exploring the post – second wave maternal context more completely In the last chapter, I argued it was essential for contemporary scholars to realize the relationship between intensive mothering and contemporary feminism is far more complex than simply just backlash—reaction—and constraints. Instead, I suggested our post – second wave institutionalized intensive ideology incorporates a more sophisticated backlash that simultaneously incorporates and refutes white second wave feminism. Moreover, viewing contemporary intensive mothering as a specifically post – second wave ideology is necessary for a more thorough understanding of our contemporary rhetorical and feminist contexts. Lastly, this also means we must update Rich’s work to include a post – second wave intensive mothering rather than the domesticated intensive mothering that Rich assumed.


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I believe the reorientation I am advocating here allows us to account for and think through our post – second wave contemporary context and more sophisticated backlash because it integrates both second and third wave sensibilities and politics and recognizes contemporary maternity as constituted by both institutionalized motherhood and the potential in mothering. In short, we can explore contemporary maternity as within a post – second wave context that simultaneously incorporates and refutes second wave feminist ideas and rhetoric. As such, we can more fully understand and diagnose our contemporary feminist rhetorical and maternal situations, as Dow argues, “during a period when many of its [white second wave feminism] gains are simultaneously taken for granted and under attack” (91). Employing a matrophobic-free feminist maternal subject position The final issue to address is changing, finally, our feminist maternal location of critique or subject position. Clearly, as I have argued above, grounding our theoretical approach to analyzing contemporary maternity in mutually responsive relationships and moderate postmodern theory allows us to reorient our foundational grounding and to bring together the various binaries that have separated feminists from one another and Rich’s two-part distinction. The final implication of this new foundation is that it would also allow us to bring together the sisterly and daughterly subject positions and reorient the current feminist maternal subject position. We could, in short, restore the cathexis—the potential connection or energy investment—between sisters and daughters and heal, what Rich argued, is the “great female tragedy” between women because of patriarchy. That we must do so is also echoed by Rich when she argued, “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” (253). Previously, I (Conceiving; Matrophobic Sisters and Daughters) have argued that we need a “daughters-and-sisters” subject position on maternity as a way to heal the division between the two


locations of critique, to meet Rich’s call, and to purge matrophobia. While I continue to think that we must bring them together, I have come to believe that the best way to name and describe this “daughters-and-sisters” location of critique, while also being theoretically consistent with the arguments made throughout this book but especially in this chapter and Chapter 4, is to utilize the term feminist maternal subject position. Employing this term allows feminist thinkers to incorporate both the contemporary sisterly and daughterly locations of critique, while also drawing on the location of critique first initiated by the Richian scholars. As with my call to employ the third all-encompassing term maternity, I am suggesting we need a third all-encompassing subject position or location of critique. This updated feminist maternal subject position would draw on both the contemporary sisterly and daughterly subject positions while also purging the underlying matrophobia in the Richian feminist maternal subject position. If the feminist maternal subject position is grounded in both moderate postmodern theorizing and mutually responsive relationships, then, it provides new ways to think about and understand contemporary maternity. A feminist maternal subject position grounded in mutually responsive relationships and moderate postmodern thinking also allows us to finally meet Rich’s challenge to feminists over 40 years ago when she argued, “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” (253). In our contemporary context, we can revision and reimagine our feminist location of critique such that we can be both sisters and daughters together as feminist maternal critics. Equally important, a feminist maternal subject position grounded in mutually responsive relationships and supplemented by moderate postmodern thinking purges, finally, matrophobia from our subject position, theoretical understandings, and analyses. And, by doing so, this subject position makes maternity central to feminist work, is grounded in second and third wave politics and conceptions of power, while maintaining generational connections and mutual responsibility. Finally, because it encourages us to recognize the relationship between feminism and maternity in more complex, sophisticated, and unapologetic ways, a feminist maternal subject position is more attuned to our contemporary feminist rhetorical and maternal situations and, as a result, provides more


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complex and sophisticated answers to the Newsweek question, What happened when the girls who had it all became mothers? We can, in short, answer the feminist question complexly, “Richly,” and from a matrophobic-free feminist subject position that begins to retool the cathexis between sisters and daughters by building on rather than breaking from our past—both glorious and distressing—and at a time when many second wave successes are simultaneously taken for granted and under attack.


N ot e s Introduction 1. At the time she was writing, Snitow did not make any distinctions among the different kinds of feminisms within the second wave. It is clear from her writing and the texts she references, however, that she is almost exclusively describing what we now understand as the white second wave, which I define more precisely later in the introduction. 2. Snitow describes period two—from 1976 to 1979—as the time when “feminist work of exploring motherhood took off and books central to feminist thinking in this wave were written, both about the daily experience of being a mother and about motherhood’s most far-reaching implications” (38). Although Snitow argues work on motherhood “took off,” I believe that this period and many of the books she notes in period two are better categorized as either sisterly scholarship or under the rubric of the “mother-daughter” scholarship that emerged in light of Rich’s text. Snitow even acknowledges the following of Nancy Friday’s book My Mother/Myself : “Nancy Friday’s book, popularized the motherhood discussion in feminism, though it is has often been criticized as essentially a daughter’s book” (38). Because my primary interest is in the location of critique from which feminism has and continues to explore maternity, I am trying to refine Snitow’s groundbreaking work. As a result, I view periods one, two, and three as primarily sisterly then daughterly phases. See chapters 1 and 2 for more specific details about both. Snitow also marks period three—1980–1990—with Sara Ruddick’s 1980 article, “Maternal Thinking.” She argues that this piece pushed the work of the 1970s to its logical conclusions such that “Ruddick took seriously the question of what women actually do when they mother” (italics in original 39). Snitow also argues “ ‘Maternal Thinking’ is the fullest response since Adrienne Rich to the call to end my first taboo, the taboo on speaking the life of the mother” (40). Even this piece, however, has also been misunderstood and demonized. As Snitow argues, “A whole separate study deserves to be made of how this much-reprinted article has been read, reread, misread, appropriated into a variety of arguments” (39). And, importantly to the analysis that follows, I still see Ruddick’s work—both the

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N ot e s original article and the book that emerged with the same title—as part of the problematic trend of continuing to separate motherhood and mothering rather than viewing them together, which I cover in chapters 3, 4, and 5. Moreover, even though Ruddick acknowledges feminism in the later book, I believe the book is not an example of feminist maternal scholarship because it is not first and foremost a feminist text. See footnote 10 for more detail about the distinction I make between maternal and feminist maternal scholarship. Snitow continues by arguing, “Nothing strange about this blindness. The mouse had only just started down the python; most of the writers were young” (37). While I believe that these factors likely played a part in the silence or absence, I believe that they are also more likely symptoms of the sisterly location of critique. See Chapter 1 for more detail about the sisterly location of critique. Snitow argues that this silence was broken to some degree in phases two and three. Moreover, Umanksy’s more recent work also reviews early feminist texts on motherhood. However, both texts detail what I describe as sisterly and daughterly texts on maternity. While these texts did explore motherhood, they did so by sidestepping mothering and continuing to employ locations of critique that were matrophobic. Thus, I believe the general silence continued and, most important to this analysis, the feminist subject position on maternity remained matrophobic by sidestepping mothering as a central location of critique. Evans, in fact, argues that the anti-motherhood charge and description of feminists as “mannish” have been continuous and ongoing charges outside of feminism. As she puts it, “The conservative attack on the women’s movement has trumpeted the same themes for more than a century, warning against ‘mannish’ women and the endangered patriarchal family. In the 1970s, aroused conservatives like Phyllis Schlafley attacked feminists as ‘anti-family, anti-children, and pro-abortion’ ” (6). Snitow places Rich in phase two. Elsewhere, I (Intriguing) argue it is better to place Rich in phase one because the book and Rich herself were so vilified—demonized. Here, I am referring specifically to the Richian scholars who I detail later in the chapter. But, as I show in Chapter 3, even the nonRichian scholars credit Rich’s text as being a landmark text in feminist scholarship. As I make clear later in this introduction, I employ the term post to indicate “as a result of” second wave feminism rather than to mean a “rejection of” second wave feminism.

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9. My interest in this project was born from my own personal experience as a feminist mother. Even though my personal experience serves as the impetus for this project, my primary interest in the book is to think like an academic feminist rhetorical critic. In other words, while the experiences of mothering, including my own, are central to women’s lives and my own, this book focuses almost exclusively on the theoretical level, primarily on the ways that white second wave feminism has theorized and thought about maternity as a feminist location of critique and how that thinking informs contemporary feminist maternal scholarship. Ultimately, however, I hope that the theoretical thinking here helps mothers understand more clearly and precisely their split subjectivity as second wave beneficiaries and mothers within the institutionalized intensive ideology, as it has done so for me in my everyday mothering practices. 10. From this point on, I will use white second wave feminism and second wave feminism interchangeably. 11. Recognizing that race was central in terms of how second wave feminisms organized is also important to challenge the conventional narrative that racism was the sole reason that there was a paucity of women of color in white second wave feminisms. Moreover, as Roth also suggests, this conventional narrative “is an inaccurate conception that negates the agency of feminists of color. Different contexts for doing politics influenced how feminists situated in Black, Chicano/a, and white oppositional communities were able to relate to their movements of origin, and to one another; . . .” (6). 12. My more detailed understanding of third wave feminism is described in Chapter 2. 13. Braithwaite also argues that non-American feminists have been in the forefront of viewing postfeminism as indicating continuity rather than a break in feminism. She says, “As argued by Brooks and others, then, interpreting the prefix ‘post’ in this way translates postfeminism to simply mean feminism today; rather than something separate from and earlier feminism, it instead simply both refers and draws attention to all the shifts in feminist thinking over the past 40 years, as it has engaged with a greatly expanded range of considerations” (27). 14. In Chapter 5, I argue, once matrophobia is purged from our understanding of the wave metaphor and we have retooled the relationship between second and third wave feminisms as mutually responsive, then, employing the term third wave feminism is no longer problematic. Even so, as I also argue in Chapter 5, I still prefer to resist using the term given my own relationship to second wave feminism. 15. For clarity, because there is a large body of work under the rubric of maternal scholarship, it is also important to articulate how the

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Richian feminist maternal scholars I explore here are distinct from the well-known maternal scholars. Maternal scholars explore how daily mothering practices of caring for and nurturing children create motherist political and ethical perspectives that privilege preservation, growth, and social acceptance. Thus, maternal scholars focus on maternal thinking and motherist politics, without necessarily being committed to feminism. Conversely, feminist maternal scholars, as O’Reilly (Mother Outlaws) argues, are first and foremost feminists who hope to find ways to theorize simultaneously empowering modes of mothering that embrace both maternal thinking and feminist thinking. As a result, feminist maternal scholarship makes mothering central to a feminist location of critique and analysis of contemporary culture. The approach is different from maternal scholars, then, because the feminist maternal scholars addressed here, first and foremost, position themselves as feminists interested in making mothering central to feminism and are committed to exploring mothering as empowering to women and as a potential site of agency for women. Ruddick’s book Maternal Thinking, is the classic field-defining text in maternal politics, while edited scholarly volumes (Koven and Michel; Lorentzen and Turpin; Jetter, Orleck, and Taylor) extend or further explore the implications of maternal politics. In Maternal Thinking, Ruddick does identify her work as feminist, although she acknowledges that her early work was not as explicitly identified as feminist. Drawing specifically on Harsock’s writing on feminist standpoint theory, Ruddick argues that feminist standpoint theory gives maternal thinking a feminist grounding. As Ruddick suggests, “This gave maternal thinking, as part of the feminist standpoint, a criticial power I had not imagined” (131). Even so, much maternal thinking and scholarship is not explicitly identified as feminist. Thus, feminist maternal scholars are explicit in their feminism as a way to distinguish their work from nonfeminist identified maternal thinking. 16. First coined by Lloyd Bitzer in 1968, a rhetorical situation is a speech act—written or spoken—that is always shaped by contextual elements—purpose, audience, author/speaker, and constraints, to name a few—that play a role in how the act is produced and perceived by its audience.

Chapter 1 1. Doing so was also rhetorically important because, as Roth argues “in continuing to respond to White new left opposition to women’s liberation, feminists moved from using the argument that gender

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oppression was like racial oppression to an assertion that gender oppression was universal, a rhetorical shift that made the case for feminism even stronger” (189). While this move was rhetorically important to the formation of white second wave feminism at the time, it also clearly complicated the relationship to that feminism and women of color. Other feminist scholars (O’Reilly and Porter; Hirsch; Dill;) have also suggested the focus on leaderlessness in 1970s feminist theorizing was due to second wave feminists’ ambivalence about anger, power, and authority. These ambivalences emerged because all three were perceived as both patriarchal and male value systems and beliefs. These ambivalences also encouraged the development of leaderless, woman-to-woman approaches to organizing. Clearly, some women and feminists rejected their real, biological mothers also. However, what I am suggesting theoretically is it was the social role that most white second wave feminists were concerned about rather than their biologic mothers or all “real” mothers: women with children. I detail the present matrophobic relationship between second wave sisters and third wave daughters in Chapter 2. While I am arguing the fear of mothering is problematic, I am very sympathetic about why white second wave feminists were so concerned with being too closely identified with mothering and its accompanying social roles for women. O’Reilly and Porter describe this concern: “Because women’s reproductive capacity historically had been used to define them, motherhood was rightly seen as the paramount source of oppression” (2). As a result, many early second wave feminists, rightly, were interested in breaking out of the previously exclusive-to-women roles of mother and housewife and instead hoped to develop a different location of critique. Moreover, understandably, many feminists understood the ways that their mothers’ lives had been confined via both roles. Nancy Friday, in fact, was one of the first second wave feminists to articulate this concern in her thenlandmark text, My Mother/Myself. As indicated in the opening epithet, Friday suggested, “For as long as I can remember, I did not want the kind of life my mother felt she could show me” (20). In short, many second wave feminists were fearful of employing the roles that so obviously had constrained their mothers’ lives and had the potential to constrain their own lives. However, as Rich first argued, this role need not be constraining if women define mothering outside of patriarchy. It is the silence on Rich’s argument about the potential in mothering rather than the initial fear of mothering that is so troubling to me.

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6. Hirsch explicitly notes the following Jungian scholars: Nor Hall, Neumann, Kerenyi. See the works cited for the complete citations. 7. Clearly, the emphasis on daughterly separation is also a class-based focus that privileges middle-class women’s lives. In her review of the mother-daughter writing in 1995, for example, Adams argues, “When feminists have theorized mothering, in many ways respects they have replicated the concerns of mainstream theorizing, focusing on white middle-class girls’ or women’s conflicted relationships with their mothers” (414). 8. A caveat is necessary before I proceed. By focusing on how Rich’s ideas were used by white second wave feminists it is not my intention to suggest that Rich has any culpability in terms of the use of her book. Rather, my intention is to understand better why Rich’s ideas were used so specifically by white second wave feminists in order to learn more about both white second wave feminism generally, the specific relationship that was cultivated between feminism and motherhood/mothering at that time, and to lay the groundwork to show how this past relationship continues to inform our contemporary relationship. Thus, the discussion that follows is intended to be descriptive rather than evaluative of Rich. 9. Rich makes it clear in Of Woman Born that she wrote the text from the perspective of radical feminism. In addition to resituating her text as primarily a feminist text, for example, Rich also makes it evident in the second edition that she wrote Of Woman Born from a radical-feminist location or subject position, which Rich explicitly acknowledges in the introduction (xxiii) and contemporary feminist scholars also note about Rich (Umansky; Sheridan). Writing from this subject position shifted Rich the well-known woman poet to a feminist social critic. Indeed, Sheridan describes Of Woman Born as representing Rich’s transition from “just” being a poet to joining “the ranks of feminist social critics: the politics of her writing could no longer be ignored or seen as less than integral to its art” after the book’s publication (29). Thus, Of Woman Born was also a key moment in Rich’s development of a feminist social criticism from within a radical feminist perspective. 10. Radical feminism is almost exclusively a sisterly perspective because of the focus on institutionalized patriarchy. As Dill puts it, “The insistence of radical feminists upon the historical priority, universality, and the overriding importance of patriarchy in effect necessitates acceptance of a concept of sisterhood that places one’s womanhood over and above one’s race” (46). 11. For clarity, I am not suggesting that all radical feminism is matrophobic; rather I am arguing that Rich’s particular radical feminism and location of critique are matrophobic.

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Chapter 2 1. As with second wave feminisms, rereading 1980s and 1990s feminism is complicated by the diversity of feminisms at this time. Again, however, I am primarily focusing on the implication of white second wave feminism on 1980s and 1990s feminism, especially within academic feminism, and the implications in terms of the ongoing silence on maternity. Doing so, of course, means that I am setting artificial boundaries on the diverse feminist work occurring in the 1980s and 1990s. See Evans and Roth for recent detailed histories of the second wave. 2. Again, the rhetoric of feminism’s death—a key element of the backlash—inappropriately describes the rhetorical situation feminism faced in the 1980s to mid-1990s as centered on feminism’s demise. Henry (Not My) also challenges the view of feminism as dead, when she argues, “While many in the popular press have tended to depict feminism as disappearing in the 1980s—whether because it became academicized, achieved its goals, or lost its appeal for women— feminism did not, in fact, die out” (18). Instead, as I argue here and is consistent with Henry’s work, it is much better to think of this time period as one where feminism faced a new rhetorical situation and context, which changed the foci of feminism. 3. Noami Wolf’s The Beauty Myth is also considered a key early text on how the backlash works in terms of impossible-for-most-women-tomeet standards of beauty. After noting that both Backlash and the The Beauty Myth received a great deal of critical and media attention, Henry (Not My) argues that “these two books signaled a new generation of popular feminist writing” (17). It is also important to note that Henry views both of these texts as pivotal texts in launching third wave feminist scholarship, which I detail later in the chapter. 4. In fact, Braithwaite argues that there is a geographical divide in terms of reconceptualizing both postfeminism and backlash. As she puts it in a footnote specifically about postfeminism but which is also consistent with her writing about backlash, “Interestingly, this redefinition of postfeminism as similar to other current (and complex) theoretical languages so far appears quite geographically divided. Brooks and Gamble, for example, who ultimately argue for this shift in understanding, publish in Australia and England respectively, while the more popular understanding I outlined earlier [in the essay] is almost entirely one found in North American writing about the term” (footnote 20, p. 31). 5. Katzenstein uses the term intermixing to describe this process of incorporating feminism with backlash against it. As she writes, “What

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N ot e s is also significant about the spread of gender consciousness is its diffusion across a libereal-conservative axis. This diffusion gives rise to an interesting intermixing of feminism with continued strains of antifeminist thinking” (31). I am drawing explicitly on Best and Kellner’s idea of a postmodern turn. They argue forms of postmodern theory have “circulated through every domain of academic discourse and have challenged and transformed intellectual practice in a plethora of fields. . . . The postmodern turn is exhilarating in that it involves an encounter with experiences, ideas, and ways of life that contest accepted modes of thought and behavior and provide new ways of seeing, writing, and living” (Best and Kellner viii–ix). Here, with Henry, I am describing 1980s feminism as the time between the heyday of 1970s feminism and the emergence of the third wave. As noted already, this time period in feminism is often marked as “feminism’s retreat into the academy.” Moreover, hooks (Feminist Theory) later argued the early critique of motherhood was also unique to white feminism. hooks (Feminist Theory) argues specifically of the second wave, “Had black women voiced their views on motherhood, it would not have been named a serious obstacle to our freedom as women. Racism, availability of jobs, lack of skills or education... would have been at the top of the list—but not motherhood” (133). For clarity and so as not to confuse, I will employ the term third wave feminism in this review even though I am eschewing the term in this book, for reasons noted in the introduction. Bailey also notes the generational divide between second and third wave feminisms. Moreover, like Henry, Bailey also views the generational metaphor as problematic. Bailey notes the “notion of a ‘third’ wave may be problematic because it creates an artificial boundary between ‘older’ and ‘younger’ feminists or ‘second and third wave’ feminists” (19). Henry (Not My) cites the following texts specifically: (Heywood and Drake) Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism; (Edut) Adios Barbie: Young Women Write about Body Image and Identity; (Bondoc and Daly) Letters of Intent: Women Cross the Generations to Talk about Family, Work, Sex, Love and the Future of Feminism; (Hernandez and Rehman) Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism; and (Dicker and Piepmeier) Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century (31). Moreover, as I argue in much more detail in Chapter 4, intensive mothering as we know it today is also a uniquely post – second

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wave form of mothering that simultaneously incorporates and refutes second wave feminism. 13. The work of contemporary feminist scholars also makes it clear that the intensive ideology is based on a racial hierarchy that privileges white women and devalues and sanctions black women’s mothering practices. Indeed, feminist scholars (Douglas and Michaels; Hays; O’Reilly) argue intensive mothering is based on white privilege, even though many black women have resisted intensive mothering through community and other mothering practices and they have been sanctioned as a result. Indeed and sadly, the practices of other and community mothering are viewed as “deviant” within the intensive mothering ideology because these practices challenge and resist the belief that bloodmothers can only care for children, refuse the practice of mothering only in isolation, and defy the notion that mothers must lavish all their attention on their children at their own expense. Thus, these “deviant” mothering practices challenge intensive mothering ideologies, even though they are viewed as problematic within the intensive ideology and many black women have been vilified for these practices, particularly in terms of discussions of welfare mothers (Douglas and Michaels). 14. As O’Reilly (Mother Outlaws) argues, “Today, for the majority of middle-class women, motherhood is embarked upon only after a career is established, when the woman is in her thirties. For these mothers the hurriedness of intensive mothering is a continuation of their busy lives as professional women; where once their daybooks were filled with buiness lunches, office meetings and the like, as intensive mothers, home with their children, gymboree classes and ‘moms and tots’ library visits schedule their daytimers” (9–10). 15. One of the “buzz” terms that is emerging among both popular and academic writers about the struggle between family care and professional norms is the work/life balance. The term work/life balance is shorthand for a whole set of issues that professional women face once they become mothers, which also includes many of issues of concern for the popular writers reviewed here. It is important to note that the term itself is problematic because it also places the burden for managing the difficulty of balancing work and family life squarely on individuals. As Grace argues, “The term ‘balance’ suggests that one might achieve this state by individual ingenuity and commitment, as with an aspiration to a balanced diet. It depoliticises the issue and puts responsibility on to the individual rather than the social arrangements that make this lack of ‘balance’ a social problem rather than an individual matter” (313).

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16. Hewlett describes breakthrough women as “the first generation of women who broke through the barriers and became powerful figures in fields previously dominated by men” (1). 17. All of the popular books reviewed are almost exclusively written for and about college-educated professional women. While there are varying degrees of recognition among the writers in terms of acknowledging the privileged class of women they analyze, all the authors do make it clear that they understand whom they address. Crittenden, for example, describes the women whom she is writing about and to as women who “have followed a pattern of career then family, pursuing their professional dreams and postponing children until they run up against the biological clock, and then, as they approach middle age, putting those children first” (italics in text 33). Finally, as noted in footnote 16, Hewlett is clear that she is describing the “breakthrough generation” of successful professional women. Williams, however, is the most sensitive writer in terms of diversity among women. In Chapter 5 of Williams’s book, “How Domesticity’s Gender Wars Take on Elements of Class and Race Conflict,” Williams provides a detailed analysis of how domesticity creates what she calls “gender wars” among women based on race and class.

Chapter 3 1. Both books were reviewed extensively in print and online forums, and the authors received a lot of media attention in a variety journals and magazines. Douglas even appeared on The CBS Early Show on February 9, 2004, to talk about The Mommy Myth. 2. Douglas and Michaels specifically use the language of intensive mothering. De Marneffe, on the other hand, only mentions the term intensive mothering once in her discussion of maternal desire. Rather than use the language of intensive mothering, however, de Marneffe argues that the ideal of the all-giving, self-sacrificing mother has shifted to the ideal of the “supermom” and “this cultural ideal pressures mothers to perform excellently on all fronts, in a job, with their children, with their partner, at the gym, and in the kitchen, making those fifteen-minute meals” (10). That this supermom ideal is part and parcel of intensive mothering is clear in Hays’s analysis of intensive mothering (132). As a result, it is clear de Marneffe’s work simply takes a different approach in the terms she uses to describe intensive mothering. 3. On the back cover of the book, Katha Pollitt describes The Mommy Myth as having “humor” and “wit,” while another reviewer calls the book “Fascinating, funny, smart, scary, and long overdue.”

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4. Douglas and Michaels’s reference to “going back to a time when women felt free to tell the truth about motherhood” is embedded in their larger discussion of the Women’s Liberation Movement in their first chapter, “Revolt against the MRS.” The sources they cite are all from the early 1970s and seem to be consistent with Snitow’s phase one timeline, where the limited number of feminist scholars writing about motherhood were discussing institutionalized motherhood. Additionally, Douglas and Michaels reference many popular magazine and newspaper articles written in the 1970s rather than feminist scholarship. Finally, they also recognize the 1970s was when the anti-motherhood demonization of second wave feminism began, regardless of what writers were actually arguing. See their first chapter for further details. 5. Douglas and Michaels do acknowledge love and desire to mother well are components of contemporary maternity. In their limited attention to this issue, however, once again, they frame the issue around women’s desire to both work and mother well. They articulate this as, “Many of us want to be both women: successful at work, successful as mothers” (Douglas and Michaels 12). Here also, then, they do not utilize Rich’s position that mothering has the potential to challenge institutionalized motherhood or that mothering itself can be empowering for women. Thus, to use Rich’s language, even though the potential relationship women have with their children separate from patriarchy is acknowledged, Douglas and Michaels’s analysis of contemporary maternity focuses almost exclusively on the institution of motherhood. 6. Douglas and Michaels view the new momism as a new kind of intensive mothering that began in the 1980s, which is an argument that I draw on in the next chapter. As a review, Hays, an academic sociologist, first defined and described contemporary mothering as intensive mothering, which has three primary components. First, intensive mothering demands that women continue to be the primary, central caregivers of children. As Hays argues, “There is an underlying assumption that the child absolutely requires consistent nurture by a single primary caretaker and that the mother is the best person for the job. When the mother is unavailable, it is other women who should serve as temporary substitutes” (8). Second, intensive mothering requires mothers to lavish intensive amounts of time and energy on their children. Indeed, Hays argues, intensive mothering is “construed as child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive” (italics in the text 8). Third, intensive mothering takes a logic that separates mothering from professional paid work, which supports the notion that children

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7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

N ot e s and the work of mothering are completely outside the scope of market valuation because children are now considered innocent, pure, and “priceless,” deserving special treatment due to their special value (Hays 122–129). Thus, Hays argues intensive mothering continues to position all women in the subject position of the all-caring, selfsacrificing ideal “Mother,” with limited and constrained agency in the public, professional realm and, importantly, is the proper ideology of contemporary mothering for women across race and class lines, even if not all women actually practice it (9, 86). “Books of The Times” Maternal Desire: Mothering and Its Cultural Discontents. The New York Times, Sunday March 21, 2004. San Francisco Chronicle, March 24, 2004, by Patricia Cohen. While I do not classify de Marneffe as a Richian scholar because she only draws on Rich rather than being grounded in Rich’s ideas, I believe that she is also trying to theorize empowered mothering in ways that are consistent with Richian scholars’ work. As a result, I describe de Marneffe’s approach as empowered mothering and draw on O’Reilly’s (Mother Outlaws) definition. As O’Reilly (Mother Outlaws) argues, empowered mothering is a counter discourse of mothering that “redefines mothering as a female-defined or, more specifically, a feminist enterprise” and emphasizes maternal power and ascribes agency to mothers within everyday mothering practices (160). Douglas and Michaels are unambiguous about their anti-essentialism: they repeatedly situate their analysis in terms of race, class, and sexual orientation. Douglas and Michaels, for example, argue that media always create mothering heroes as white middle-class women and mothering villains as almost always African-American working-class women (20). CBS Early Show, “Books,” February 9, 2004. Again, as noted in endnote 4, it is important to recognize that Douglas and Michaels seem to rely primarily on second wave feminist critiques in magazines and newspapers. Moreover, while Douglas and Michaels do not explicitly employ the terms demonization to describe the media’s anti-motherhood and antifamily reading of second wave feminism, I believe their writing is consistent with my argument that second wave feminism was demonized for any critique of motherhood such that the anti-motherhood perception permeates feminist critiques of motherhood, regardless of what any feminist actually says or writes. Rich recognizes that matrophobia is deeply embedded in institutionalized heterosexuality when she argues that the connection between mothers and daughters is broken under patriarchy because daughters must transfer early feeling for the mother toward men to be “normal”

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women under patriarchy and institutionalized heterosexuality. As Rich puts it, 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. (218–219) Thus, matrophobia is also entwined with both patriarchy and heterosexism. 14. Ruddick’s book Maternal Thinking, is the classic field-defining text in maternal politics, while edited scholarly volumes (Koven and Michel; Lorentzen and Turpin; Jetter, Orleck, & Taylor) extend or further explore the implications of maternal politics. In Maternal Thinking, Ruddick does identify her work as feminist, although she acknowledges that her early work was not as explicitly identified as feminist. Drawing specifically on Harsock’s writing on feminist standpoint theory, Ruddick argues that feminist standpoint theory gives maternal thinking a feminist grounding. As Ruddick suggests, “This gave maternal thinking, as part of the feminist standpoint, a criticial power I had not imagined” (131). Even so, much maternal thinking and scholarship is not explicitly identified as feminist. Thus, feminist maternal scholars are explicit in their feminism as a way to distinguish their work from nonfeminist identified maternal thinking. 15. In From Motherhood to Mothering, O’Reilly does recognize Rich’s second wave strategy of resistance may no longer be as effective as was believed during the second wave. O’Reilly argues, “While the patriarchal institution of motherhood can never be destroyed as Rich wished and believed, it is being ambushed on all side by mothers who have imagined and put into place feminist mothering, informed and inspired by Rich and other feminist maternal scholars’ radical vision of an empowering and empowered maternity” (20). Even so, as my analysis suggests, Richian scholars in general implicitly adopt this second wave assumption when they adopt Rich’s ideas wholesale. Equally troubling, as I argue in the next chapter, doing so also reentrenches a public-private split that is problematic for contemporary politics.

Chapter 4 1. As noted in the introduction, I employ the term post to indicate “as a result of” second wave feminism rather than to mean a “rejection of” second wave feminism.

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2. In other words, we only have terms to “match” each part of the distinction and we have no third all-encompassing concept that allows us to think through the two-parts simultaneously. This then is why I employ maternity throughout the book as a rubric to capture both parts of the contemporary maternal context. 3. Later in this chapter, I do draw on Douglas and Michaels to argue they recognize to some degree that the new momism has shifted the relationship between feminism and maternity because the new momism has integrated second wave feminist rhetoric and ideas. Even so, as I also argue, Douglas and Michaels’s work is incomplete and they do not address fully how this integration has changed the relationship between feminism and maternity nor do they employ Faludi’s more sophisticated understanding of backlash when making their arguments. 4. Clearly, as I have been trying to establish definitively, the antimotherhood charge is inaccurate. However, popular writers write as if it is “fact” regardless of the evidence. 5. Although it may appear inconsistent both to critique and use O’Reilly’s and Douglas and Michaels’s work, I believe that doing so is consistent with one of the overall arguments I make in this book drawing on both Evans and Dow: we need to understand both the problems and possibilities of past work. I take this to mean we can both employ and critique past and present work. Moreover, throughout this book, I have argued that all of the feminist scholarship analyzed offers crucially important but incomplete analyses. As such, my goal is to utilize the possibilities of each work while purging out the underlying problem of matrophobia. Finally, I also make this explicit argument in the next chapter when I employ de Marneffe’s work on mutual responsiveness as a foundation for purging matrophobia. 6. Intriguingly, Douglas and Michaels and O’Reilly in the introduction of Mother Outlaws do recognize that the intensive ideology is changing in light of second wave feminism, but none of these scholars develop fully the impact of those changes to the more general relationship between feminism and maternity nor do they flesh out a Faludian understanding of backlash in the same way I do. Thus, my goal is to enhance and extend the scholars’ work. 7. While O’Reilly does not explicitly makes this argument, what she does say makes it clear that extending her work in this way is both appropriate and consistent with her basic arguments. 8. As noted in Chapter 3, footnote 4, Douglas and Michaels are primarily drawing on popular newspaper and magazine articles in their description of 1970s feminism rather than academic writing.

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9. It is striking that Douglas and Michaels’s language here mirrors O’Reilly’s argument that contemporary intensive mothering adopts women’s economic power in the service of intensive mothering, which also provides additional support for agreeing with O’Reilly that we should mark contemporary intensive mothering as different from custodial intensive mothering. 10. As I suggest in Chapter 2, as second wave feminism was being integrated into intensive mothering, feminists were engaging in theory debates within the academy while continuing to be silent on mothering. Thus, it is not surprising to me that this integration took place with little notice from feminists at that time.

Chapter 5 1. As I have argued throughout this book, I employ the term post to indicate “as a result of” second wave feminism rather than to mean a “rejection of” second wave feminism. 2. I am well aware of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s own complex relationship to feminism. Even so, I do not believe it is inconsistent to draw on her work in this way in light of the larger argument I make in this book: we must draw on the strength of past and present work, while eschewing the problematic. This, of course, means that I resist rejecting “problematic” work outright and instead suggests, as I detail more fully in the chapter, responsiveness to past work. 3. As much as the popular writing troubles me in terms of the matrophobic blaming of second wave feminism, as with the other writing analyzed, I believe that that does not mean we should disregard all of the writing. Of most importance to me about the popular writing is the analysis of ongoing structural constraints and the insight that contemporary women’s lives are caught between the old and new. 4. Again, I am drawing on Best and Kellner’s framework that distinguishes between “moderate” and “extreme” postmodern theory. Extreme postmodern thinking does not acknowledge any modern tendencies or structural forms of power. As Best and Kellner argue in making the distinction between moderate and extreme postmodern theories, At one pole, there is what might be called extreme postmodern theory, which posits a radical rupture between modernity and postmodernity and between modern and postmodern discourse and practice. Such extreme, or “strong,” postmodern theory puts its emphasis on the post and its break from the modern and finds its ideal type in the texts of Baudrillard and his followers, as well as in

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5. The particular kind of moderate postmodern theory that informs my analysis is feminist standpoint theory. For a more thorough review, see my essay Postmodern Caring. 6. Umansky also corrects the historical record in terms of the antimotherhood charge. Umanksy, however, does not address how white feminism’s matrophobia played and continues to play a key role in making the anti-motherhood charge rhetorically powerful. Moreover, Umansky does not address the contemporary anti-motherhood charge. Thus, I believe Umansky’s work plays a key part in beginning to understand the anti-motherhood charge, while my work on matrophobia adds to Umansky’s important work by revealing the rhetorical dimensions of the anti-motherhood charge and the role matrophobia plays in the effectiveness of anti-motherhood charge both past and present.

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Index

Please note that page numbers in italics indicate an endnote. absence of mother-daughter focus, 35 absence or silence on mothering, 3, 162 absence or silence Rich’s on mother, 42, 44, 101 anti-motherhood charge, 4, 21, 49, 65, 71–3, 162, 176 demonization, 2–5, 16, 71–2, 76, 89, 171 inability to respond, 117–18 responding to, 154–6 rhetorical power of, 71–3 backlash, 4–5, 49, 51, 89, 167 popular writers, 65, 72, 76 post-second wave, 11, 51–3, 108, 114, 118–19, 120–4, 127–9, 132, 146, 153 reactionary, 119–21, 156 sophisticated Faludi, 51–2, 121, 132, 174 bad mothering as good mothering, 100–1 Benjamin, Jessica, 36, 82, 90, 135 binary approach, 117–18, 121, 154, 155 binary thinking, 115, 118, 134, 155 Braithwaite, Ann, 14, 51–2, 121, 142, 143, 163, 167 breakthrough generation, 67, 70, 170

cathexis, 8, 9, 25, 34–9, 144, 157, 159 Chodorow, Nancy, 36, 82, 90 community mothering, 57, 169 conceiving relationships as mutually responsive, 140–3 contemporary feminism defined, 14–15 contemporary maternity commonality-difference, 151–2 incomplete analyses, 2, 22, 108, 111, 128, 132 popular writers, 16, 48, 62–73 structural and dispersed power, 148–50 understanding more fully, 152–3 contemporary women’s lives caught between old and new, 154–6 Crittenden, Ann, 47, 66, 68, 70, 71, 170 daughterhood critiques of, 56–7 daughterhood and second wave, 35, 56 third wave, 60–1 daughterly delight in mothering, 94–6 subjectivity and use of Rich, 39–40 defending vs. revising feminist approaches, 88–92

188 delighted-feminist mother, 91, 94–6, 154 de Marneffe, Daphne, 64, 76–7, 81, 82, 85, 89, 116 psychoanalysis, 84–5, 135–7, 138–40 disidentification, 28–9, 108, 132–3, 137 daughterly subjectivity, 95, 96 matrophobic consequences, 31, 34 mother blame, 11, 49, 108, 115–16, 132, 146 popular writers, 65, 69–72 Richian scholars, 99–106 Rich’s two-part distinction, 95–6, 100, 107, 108–13, 132 second wave, 28–30, 61 second wave feminism blame, 69–71 sisterly subjectivity, 40, 87, 96 third wave, 60–2 Douglas and Michaels, 76–81, 88–9, 92–4, 124–7, 170 Dow, Bonnie J., 1, 13, 14, 50, 107, 112, 129, 133, 157, 174 drawing on 1980s theory debates, 147–8 Edelman, Hope, 64 either/or use of Rich focus and structure of texts, 99–106 splitting, 11, 22, 64, 88, 98–9, 116–18, 132, 153, 155, 163 splitting terminology used, 108–12 empowered mothering, 41–2, 84, 96, 97, 99–102, 103, 104–6, 114–15, 117, 151–3, 172

Index ending the silence on mothering, 45, 62 Evans, Sara, 13, 14, 131, 133, 162, 167, 174 feminism essentialism, 49, 55–6, 61, 172 retreat into the academy, 53–6, 168 feminist psychoanalytic scholars, 84–6 Suffrage movement, 27, 29 feminist rhetorical context, 22, 91, 152, 153–4 1980s-1990s, 48–60 contemporary feminism, 88–96, 113–15 second wave, 26–39 understanding more fully, 153–4 Findlen, Barbara, 58–9 first wave feminism, 27–8, 30 Fixmer, Natalie, 149 Flax, Jane, 36–7 From Motherhood to Mothering (O’Reilly), 40, 96–106, 173 Fuss, Diane, 28, 55, 137 generations autonomy and connection, 143–5 good mother, 42, 63, 93, 122 Hays, Sharon, 63, 119–21, 122, 171, 172 Hewlett, Sylvia, 67–70, 170 ideal worker norms, 66–7 identification, 23, 133 mutual responsiveness, 135–40 second wave, 23, 27–8 third wave, 58, 62 institutional professional barriers, 66–9

Index institution of motherhood, 6–8, 41–2, 81, 97, 98–102, 109–12, 173 intensive mothering, 63, 119 custodial, 122–3, 127 post - second wave, 60, 148–50 post second wave backlash, 22, 118–29, 132, 156, 168–9 proper ideology, 63, 119, 172 reactionary backlash, 119–21 when to mark beginning, 122–4 Listen Up (Findlen), 58–9 location of critique, 9–10, 17–18, 26–34, 45, 72, 77–81, 94–5, 165 daughterly, 34–8, 81–2, 84, 111–12 feminist, 96–8, 106, 112, 157–8, 164 sisterly, 26–34, 43, 76, 77–8, 111, 162 maternal desire, 83–6, 90, 102, 135, 170 feminist, 6, 21–2, 96–106 Maternal Desire (de Marneffe), 76–7, 81, 82, 89, 116 maternal wall, 66–7 maternity defined, 2, 145–6 matrophobia daughterly subjectivity, 38–40, 57, 81–8, 88–91, 94–6 defined, 2, 6–9 Henry, 18, 26–31, 33, 57, 60–2, 137 Hirsch, 9–10, 33–4, 38 Historic, 26–39, 44 leftists movements, 26–31 lingering, 11, 22, 48, 62, 81, 98, 106, 107–29 past, 26–31 Richian scholars, 96–106

189

Rich’s own, 40–5 splitting, 87–8, 91–6 sisterly subjectivity, 77–81, 88–91, 92–4 matrophobic consequences ill-equipped, 116–17 inability to respond to anti-motherhood, 117–18 inability to respond to contemporary context, 11–12, 22, 26, 87–8, 118, 119, 128–9 methodological problems, 111–12 misdiagnosing contemporary context, 113–15 mother blame, 115–16 separating feminist scholars, 112–13 splitting, 87–8, 91–6 theoretical, 118–29 underutilizing Rich, 108–12 matrophobic-free identification, 135–40, 142, 143–5 matrophobic-free location of critique, 157–9 Misconceptions (Wolf), 64, 66, 69 mother-child relationship, 83–5, 134, 135–8 Mother/Daughter Plot (Hirsch), 6, 33, 37, 38 mother-daughter relationship, 7–9, 10, 20, 35–40, 43–4, 49, 57 class race, 56–7 psychoanalysis, 35–7 third wave, 60–2, 90 “writing” and “righting”, 38 motherhood as patriarchal institution, 6, 41, 75, 79, 81, 86, 99, 109, 173

190 mothering experience of, 7, 42, 75, 83 potential of, 40–1, 84, 86, 95, 96, 98, 101, 106 split subjectivity, 62–4 Mother Outlaws (O’Reilly), 7, 41–2, 96–106, 115, 120, 122–4, 151, 164, 169, 172, 174 mutually responsive relationships, 134–42, 145, 150 mutual responsiveness moderate postmodernism, 146–52 in practice, 138–40 new momism, 78–80, 93–4, 119, 121, 124–8, 171, 174 Newsweek, 1, 63, 64, 159 New York Radical Feminists (NYRF), 29–30 1980s-1990s feminist theory debates, 53–6, 147–8 Of Woman Born matrophobia of, 6–9, 34–5, 36–7, 40–5, 76, 97, 109 ongoing silence on mothering, 45, 57, 61–2, 70 O’Reilly, Andrea, 6, 7, 41, 42, 96–106, 119–24, 164, 169, 172, 173, 174, 175 other mothering, 57, 169 Perfect Madness, 70 personal as political, 42, 103–4 post-feminism, 14–15, 51, 142–3, 163, 167 post feminist defined, 14–15, 142–3, 163, 167

Index postmodern extreme theory, 150, 175 moderate theory, 23, 87, 134, 146–58, 176 theory debates, 54, 84, 147–8 turn, 49, 53– 54, 168 post - second wave concerns, 66–9 feminism, 14–15, 116–17, 131, 143, 152–3, 167 maternal context, 83–4, 152–3, 156–7 maternal context explained more fully, 156–7 maternal subjectivity, 62–5, 117, 155, 156 potential of mothering, 40–1, 84, 86, 95, 96, 98, 101, 106 powerless responsibility, 104 private sphere, 42, 66, 103–4, 114, 115, 153–4 professional masculine organizing systems, 66–7 public sphere, 114, 115, 153–4 purging matrophobia, 2, 19, 23, 48, 108, 132–5 radical feminism and Rich, 42–3, 166 rebelling against motherhood, 91, 92–4, 96, 101, 114, 153 reconceptualizing wave metaphor, 140–3 relationship between feminism and maternity, 2–6, 11, 12, 18, 26, 31, 34, 45 contemporary, 108, 118–19, 124–9, 132, 140, 156, 158, 174 relationship between second and third wave, 57–62, 140–5 revisioning feminist relationships, 133–45

Index rhetorical consequences, 17, 20, 44, 107–18 criticism, 16–17 rereading, 16–18, 31, 43 situation, 16–17, 39, 48, 49, 51, 53, 108, 113–15, 118, 164, 167 Rich, Adrienne rediscovery of, 11, 47 silence on mothering, 41–5 use of de Marneffe, 83–4 use of Douglas and Michaels, 79–80 use of Richian scholars, 96–8 Vermont vacation, 42, 100–2 Richian scholars, 96–106 Rich’s two-part distinction, 7–8, 22, 23, 87, 99, 103, 106 eliminate binary, 133–40, 145–6, 157 ill-equipped, 116–17 inability to respond to anti-motherhood charge, 117–18 methodological problem, 111–12 misdiagnosing feminist rhetorical situation, 113–15 mother blame, 115–16 retooling, 145–6 separating feminist scholars, 112–13 theoretical consequences, 118–29 underutilize, 108–12 why Rich made, 109–11 second wave beneficiaries, 1, 62, 64, 83, 123, 149, 155, 163 popular writers, 65, 66–9 Separate Roads to Feminism (Roth), 13

191

from separation to mutual responsive, 135–8 Siegel, Deborah, 32, 42 silence on mothering, 2–5, 17–18, 69, 70, 71–2 ending silence, 64 sisterhood, 4, 9–10, 26–34, 56–7, 157 critiques of, 54–5, 56–7, 60, 166 is powerful, 10, 33, 60 second wave, 26–34 Sisterhood Interrupted (Siegel), 32 Sisterhood is Powerful (Morgan), 4, 32 sisterly rebellion contemporary, 92–4, 148, 154 Snitow and motherhood/ mothering, 2–6, 18, 161, 162 split subjectivity old and new, 62–4, 108, 111–12, 116–18, 132, 153, 155 The Beauty Myth (Wolf), 120, 167 third wave feminism, 14–15, 57–60, 142, 145, 149–50, 163 Henry, 57–8, 60–2, 167, 168 intergenerational structure, 58, 60–2 matrophobia, 60–1 mother-daughter structure, 61–2 postmodern theory, 59–60 power, 59–60, 149 sensibilities, 59–60 The Mommy Myth (Douglas and Michaels ), 76–81, 88–9, 92–4, 124–7, 170 The price of motherhood, 67, 68 The Price of Motherhood (Crittenden), 68

192 To Be Real (Walker), 58–9 twin rhetorical moves, 30–1, 44, 121, 124, 133, 137, 140 popular writers, 65, 69–72 Umansky, Lauri, 18, 42, 75, 176 Unbending Gender (Williams), 66 Walker, Rebecca, 58–9 Warner, Judith, 70 wave metaphor, 15, 18, 21, 26–31, 39, 44, 49, 60–2, 163 reconceptualizing, 140–3

Index white second wave feminism, 51–3 critiques of, 56–7 defined, 13–14, 163 disidentification, 124–9 feminism blame, 65, 69–71, 72 Hirsch, 9–10, 26–31 metaphor, 26–31 power, 149 Rich, 20, 25, 34–40 success and backlash, 50–3 Williams, Joan, 64, 66–7, 71, 170 Wolf, Naomi, 69, 120 women as primary caregivers, 66, 67, 119, 120, 126 Wood, Julia T., 63, 116, 149 work/life balance, 169

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