Mothers and Children: Feminist Analyses and Personal Narratives, and: The Price of Motherhood: Why Motherhood Is the Most Important--and Least Valued Job in America, and: Mothers and Daughters: Connection, Empowerment, and Transformation (review)

Abstract

It has been fifteen years since I delivered an address to my own institution on motherhood. As a tenure-track, newly minted Ph.D., I spent weeks on research for this address and was frustrated that I found so little in the feminist literature. Of course, there was Nancy Chodorow's psychoanalytic reformulation and Adrienne Rich's work on the institutionalization of the mothering experience. There were other individuals, too, who urged us to consider the transformation process of woman to mother, the love/hate, separation/individuation process between mother and child, self-hate and mother blame, and motherhood as a biologically based [End Page 181] investment. Overall, however, I found a dearth in rich feminist analyses of motherhood. I was particularly excited, therefore, to review three new books that not only privilege a discourse on mothers but that also offer a feminist analysis. The good news surrounding all three works is that the feminist theoretical analyses informing each book are sophisticated and rich, a clear reflection of the substantive development of feminist theory in the past decade. The bad news is that the descriptions of mothers' lives and the experience of motherhood remain virtually the same as that described in my early reading of the literature. As Ann Crittenden puts it in The Price of Motherhood: