Rethinking Motherhood, Sisterhood, Sexuality, Sexual Hierarchies

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Rethinking Motherhood, Sisterhood, Sexuality,
Sexual Hierarchies

• Womanhood its Coercions
• Power seems to engender a kind of willed
  ignorance, a moral stupidity, about the
  inwardness of others, hence of oneself.
• 5 May 2005

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Womanhood its coercions

• Motherhood Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born
  Motherhood as Experience and Institution
  (National Book Award 1976)
• My children cause me the most exquisite
  suffering of which I have any experience. It is
  the suffering of ambivalence the murderous
  alternation between bitter resentment and
  raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and
  tenderness. . . .

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Womanhood its coercions

• Is motherhood integral to womanhood?
• Are females who dont want and dont choose to be
  mothers unnatural? Not-women? Lesser
  women?
• Womanhood as experience more blood-letting every
  day across the world by women than in war
• Motherhood
• As Experience
• You seemed to feel as if you should love us all
  the time. But there is no human relationship
  where you love the other person at every moment.
  (Adrienne Richs oldest son, age 21 at the time,
  after reading journal entries about her anger
  toward him when he was a child)

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Womanhood its coercions

• As Institution
• Father-right and the end of the matrilineal clan
  identified with the beginnings of private
  property and slavery. Patriarchy, according to
  this view, is primarily economic greed.
  (Frederick Engels)
• Yet mother-son and mother-daughter relationships
  also create the sexual politics of male
  supremacism
• The Family -- what does it look like and how
  does it domesticate motherhood?

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Womanhood its coercions

• Traditional rhetoric within the family has been
  that the father, the male, protects the female
• If we are to assume that from womans original
  child-nurturing function flowed a natural
  division of all labor, generally accepted as
  natural by women and men, how do we account for
  the fact that laws, legends, and prohibitions
  relating to women have, from the early
  patriarchal myths (e.g., Eve) through the
  medieval witch-massacres and the gynocide of
  female infants down t modern rape laws,
  mother-in-law jokes, and saidstic pornography of
  our time, been hostile and defensive, rather than
  protective?

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Womanhood its coercions

• Are mans contributions to culture his way of
  compensating for the lack of the one, elemental,
  creative power of motherhood? (Freud)
• Are male initiation rituals outgrowths of deep
  male envy of the female power to bear children?
  (Bruno Bettelheim, whose work informed The Empire
  Strikes Back)
• In the very earliest ages of human history the
  magical force and wonder of the female was no
  less a marvel than the universe itself (Joseph
  Campbell)

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Womanhood its coercions

• Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)
• See also Titanic Operas, Emily I Are
  Absolutely Different in the Details of Our Lives
  http//www.emilydickinson.org/titanic/brooks.html
  
• the mother (1945)
• How does Brooks feel, what does she think about
  abortion?
• What qualities of motherhood are cataloged here?

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Womanhood its coercions

• Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
• The Disquieting Muses
• Mother, mother
• Childless Woman
• Edge
• Both poems probe a womans struggle to define
  herself outside of motherhood

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Womanhood its coercions

• Minnie Bruce Pratt (1944 - )
• What constitutes a family? What are its
  necessary components, elements?
• Poems for My Sons
• Motherhood as experience
• Literary forebears remarked to remind reader of
  motherhood as institution (Coleridge, Yeats)

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Womanhood its coercions

• Margaret Atwood (1939 - )
• Giving Birth
• But who gives it? And to whom is it given?
  Certainly it doesnt feel like giving, which
  implies a flow, a gentle handing over, no
  coercion.
• See also Toi Derricottes 1029 from Natural
  Birth -- http//www.emilydickinson.org/titanic/der
  ricotte5.html

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Womanhood its coercions

• No one ever says giving death, although they are
  in some ways the same, events, not things. And
  delivering, that act the doctor is generally
  believed to perform who delivers what? Is it
  the mother being delivered, like a prisoner being
  released? Surely not nor is the child delivered
  to the mother like a letter through a slot. How
  can you be both the sender and the receiver at
  once? Was someone I bondage, is someone made
  free? Thus language, muttering in its archaic
  tongues of something, yet one more thing, that
  needs to be renamed. (Atwood, Giving Birth)