Woman Born Research Articles

A Stage Proposal for Hamlet’s Politicised Body: Requiem for a Woman Born to be King

A Stage Proposal for Hamlet’s Politicised Body: Requiem for a Woman Born to be King

Colonized Brown Motherhood: Em and the Big Hoom, Imelda and Indian Mothering

Mothering is a bond mothers share with their children, a feeling they experience subjectively. Yet motherhood is more often seen as a construct to be followed and by which to be judged. This societal expectation takes away what Andrea O’Reilly describes as the mother’s ‘agency’ (2004). Motherhood has been bifurcated in meaning, as Adrienne Rich observes in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), between ‘[…] the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and children; and the institution, which aims at ensuring that that potential –and all women– shall remain under male control’ (Rich 1976: 13). In addition, the way motherhood is experienced is shaped by the way the institution of motherhood and the experience of mothering form a women’s sense of self. Yet on the other hand, mothering can be empowering for women. This article explores the maternal issues raised in the literary work, Em and the Big Hoom, a novel by Jerry Pinto. The article also examines the disparity between the institution and experience of mothering as it affects issues of identity, subjectivity, or agency. Imelda, a daughter and a mother, suffers at the hands of colonized motherhood, which she has been practising since she became a “mudd-dha,” and her life had “turned inside out” (Pinto 2012: 133). The study will investigate how her mother colonized her agency as a mother and how she carried forward the motherhood inflicted by her mother, resulting in her loss of self.

Alias Grace; Not of Woman Born: Representations of Caesarean Birth in Medieval and Renaissance Culture; Abortion Politics; Mothering Rhetorics

Alias Grace; Not of Woman Born: Representations of Caesarean Birth in Medieval and Renaissance Culture; Abortion Politics; Mothering Rhetorics

“A woman ‘in the snow among the clocks and instruments’”: How Adrienne Rich reimagined the lives of women astronomers

The National Science Foundation's (NSF) decision to rename the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in 2020 made it the first U.S. observatory to be named after a female astronomer. While this move fosters a heightened awareness of women's struggles for advancement in the sciences, it also indicates a need for additional historical studies of women in these fields. Our research seeks to create a new narrative for the historical experiences of women in astronomy and astrophysics through the poetry of second-wave feminist Adrienne Rich, author of Diving into the Wreck and Of Woman Born. Rich's 1968 poem “Planetarium” celebrates the career of Caroline Herschel, while also hinting at the more recent accomplishments of women astronomers like Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Literary historiography is a theoretical methodology for understanding historical subjects like Herschel, through their representations in literary works. Despite the intimate format, Rich's retelling does not focus on Herschel's personal relationships but on her professional pursuits. Rich uses astronomy as a metaphor for her and other women scientists' experiences as they struggle to tune out the noise of obligations, expectations, and invisible labour, and strive to locate the signal representing individual motivation and discovery.This paper examines the professional methodologies of women in astronomy from the lens of feminist literary historiography to support science educators and policymakers in adopting gender inclusive practices. Using Rich's poem “Planetarium,” alongside the scientific processes involved in astronomical discovery, this work explores the ways in which Rich's poem reimagines astronomers like Caroline Herschel, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, and Vera Rubin, and how the piece conjures from their lives a new narrative for women in pursuit of their own vocations. The exploration of the intertwining nature of history and culture allows for an analysis of how the professional methodologies of women in astronomy relate more profoundly than differing historical periods would suggest and provides additional insight into the unique challenges currently facing women of colour in these same scientific areas. This paper seeks to contribute a new perspective in space and science communication discussions and help mitigate the dissemination of gender exclusivity in research and education.

CHALLENGING FEMALE ROLES AND SPACES: ADRIENNE RICH’S OF WOMAN BORN. MOTHERHOOD AS EXPERIENCE AND INSTITUTION

CHALLENGING FEMALE ROLES AND SPACES: ADRIENNE RICH’S OF WOMAN BORN. MOTHERHOOD AS EXPERIENCE AND INSTITUTION

Oh, Mother, Who Art Thou? : The Heart of Maternal Darkness in the Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield

Our culture assumes: No love is as great as that of a mother for her child. Motherhood has been perpetually associated with self-effacement and self-abnegation. Adrienne Rich while making a distinction between the actual lived experience of a mother and the institution of motherhood has argued that motherhood is a cultural construct and a far cry from the real experience of mothering. This article traces and examines representations of motherhood in the select short stories of Katherine Mansfield, in the light of Adrienne Rich’s theories in Of Woman Born. Much like Adrienne Rich, Mansfield discredits the traditional assumption that to be a mother is an essential pre-requisite to be a ‘real woman’. Mansfield’s women characters unleash a plurality of voices that aid the readers at viewing maternity as an ambiguous experience. Instead of romanticizing and idealizing the mother-daughter relationship, she offers a problematic connection between both the figures, often pitting them as rivals against each other. Her women characters progressively revolt from within the four walls of the household by their intermittent display of anger and deliberate attempts at failing to conform to the monolithic ideals of femininity.

Melekler veya Şeytanlar: Dünya Edebiyatında Annelik Olgusu Üzerine Karşılaştırmalı Bir Analiz

From the beginning of the history of humanity, motherhood has been considered as the most sacred and constant attribute in many cultures. During periods, although women’s roles and responsibilities have changed due to the social, politic and economic events, the main responsibility of a woman has always been accepted as ‘‘motherhood’’. With the modern era, as women participated in social spheres, mothering has been shaped in terms of expectations and prejudices. Motherhood has evolved through ages, yet, the expected notions of mothers mirror and recall similar attributes in almost all cultures: patience, self-sacrifice, compassion, charity and unconditional love towards children. There are various conducted studies based on the concept of ‘‘motherhood’’ in psychology, anthropology and literature. However, for this study, in order to exemplify the concept of ‘‘motherhood’’ defined by Adrienne Rich in her work Of Woman Born (1976), certain mother figures from the literary texts of world literature were chosen and comparatively analyzed. The aim of this study was not to generalize the concept of “motherhood” for every culture in world literature, yet, based on the findings of the analysis, it was observed that the perception of ‘‘motherhood’’ has been reflected in similar ways in many literary works of different cultures. Therefore, this study is exemplarily for further comparative literary studies based on motherhood and mothering in world literatures.

‘A hot and savage strength’: The female masculinity of C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry

C. L. Moore is considered a trailblazer of feminist SF because of the short stories she published in the 1930s and 1940s. Her tales ‘Shambleau’ (1933) and ‘No Woman Born’ (1944) have attracted some scholarly attention, but the stories that follow the medieval female warrior, Jirel of Joiry (1934–1939), have yet to be addressed in any depth. In this article I therefore focus attention on Jirel who is, arguably, the first female warrior to appear in SF. Using Judith Halberstam's work (1998. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press), as well as recent studies on the female action hero as my theoretical framework, I argue that Jirel presents the reader with a performance of female masculinity. I demonstrate that her performance of masculinity is channelled by the warrior role she plays into traits such as physical strength, authority, sexual agency and an enjoyment of violence. Her performance of masculinity is significant because of the era in which the Jirel tales were published, and may well constitute the first appearance of a female masculinity in SF. If this is the case, the Jirel stories make a central contribution feminist SF and their value should be acknowledged as equal to that of Moore's other stories.

Rich’s Essential Essays

Rich’s <i>Essential Essays</i>

The Political Life of Black Motherhood

Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 699 Jennifer C. Nash The Political Life of Black Motherhood In 1976, Adrienne Rich wrote, “We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood.”1 In the four decades since the publication of Rich’s now-canonical Of Woman Born, Andrea O’Reilly has argued for the advent of “maternal theory” as an academic discipline, the maternal memoir has become a highly popular (and profitable) literary genre, and there has been sustained attention to maternal activism with scholarly analyses of such organizations as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Mothers of the Movement.2 If Mamie Till Bradley boldly “let the world see” her son’s mutilated body in a 1955 public plea to make visible black suffering and antiblack violence, Valerie Castile’s statement after a jury found a police officer not guilty in the death of her son continued in the tradition of 1. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 11. 2. See Andrea O’Reilly, ed., Maternal Theory: A Reader (New York: Demeter Press, 2007); Ann Hulbert, “The Real Myth of Motherhood,” Slate, March 8, 2005; Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto, “Strange Intimacies: Reading Black Mothering Memoirs,” Public Culture (forthcoming); Danielle Poe, Maternal Activism: Mothers Confronting Injustice (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016); and Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930–1965 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 700 Jennifer C. Nash Books Discussed in This Essay Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. Edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016. Laboring Positions: Black Women, Mothering and the Academy. Edited by Sekile Nzinga-Johnson. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2013. How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump. By Laura Briggs. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. Birthing Justice: Black Women, Pregnancy, and Childbirth. Edited by Julia Oparah and Alicia Bonaparte. New York: Routledge, 2016. making black (male) pain visible through grief-stricken black motherhood . Castile said, My son loved this state. He had one tattoo on his body and it was of the twin cities, the state of Minnesota with “TC” on it. My son loved this city, and this city killed my son and the murderer gets away. . . . We’re not evolving as a civilization, we’re devolving, we have taken steps forward, people have died for us to have these rights and now we’re devolving, we’re going back to 1969.3 Her emotional plea reveals the political currency of black maternal suffering , one of the few spaces in which black pain is readily culturally visible . Indeed, there has been intensified scholarly and popular interest in representing black motherhood as both a site constituted by grief and expected loss and as a political position made visible (only) because of its proximity to death. It is certainly the case that a cultural inattention to motherhood has been replaced by an intense investment in representing at least some aspects of “the nature and meaning of motherhood” and 3. “Philando Castile’s Mother Reacts to Verdict,” Washington Post video on YouTube , posted on June 16, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJsD4cCpUA . Jennifer C. Nash 701 in representing certain mothers—particularly black mothers—as symbols of trauma and injury, of pain that can be mobilized for “legitimate” political ends and social change. If, as O’Reilly suggests, maternal theory is now a distinct field, it has been fundamentally shaped by the intellectual and political labor of black feminists—Dorothy Roberts, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, Hortense Spillers, and Audre Lorde—who have captured the myriad ways that black maternity is cast as pathological, excessive, and marked by aberrant performances of gender and heterosexuality that threaten both the nuclear family and the heterosexual state. Drawing on a varied archive from the Moynihan Report to cultural panics about “kids having kids,” from ongoing representations of black women’s “failure” to breastfeed as a public health crisis to the racialized underpinnings of birth control, black feminist theory...

Mothering Against Motherhood: The Legacy of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born

I first read Of Woman Born in the summer of 1987 when my two children were three years and six months of age. While with most books I am able to recall reading them, with just a few am I able to re...

Of Woman Born to Mommy Blogged: The Journey from the Personal as Political to the Personal as Commodity

Mommy blogging is a act! proclaimed Alice Bradley, a wellknown and prolific blogger, at the 2005 BlogHer Conference. Her assertion reframed and elevated the genre of online writing that deals with mothering, colloquially referred to as blogs. Blogging motherhood may because it allows for an up-to-the-minute, authentic, and isolated take on motherhood, one that veers from the highly edited and airbrushed version found in other media, such as magazines or television. Bradley articulates the difference here:We readers and authors of parenting blogs are looking for a representation of that we're not getting elsewhere. We sure as hell aren't getting it from the parenting magazines ... [A] parenting magazine will never help you alone, stupid, ridiculous. This is the I think parenting blogs provide-we share our lopsided, slightly hysterical, often exaggerated but more or experiences. If one blogger writes about, say, her bad behavior at the doctor's office, then maybe at some point, some freaked-out new mother is going to read that and a little better-less stupid, ridiculous-about her own breakdown at the pediatrician's, (quoted in Camahort 2006)As Bradley suggests, the service of the blogs is to present an version of motherhood that deviates from the older accounts found in broadcast media (such as parenting magazines), wherein mothering is made to be both instinctual and fulfilling. The blogs provide a space for women, mothers, and caregivers-no matter how freaked out or hysterical-to provide and receive emotional validation. Bradley's use of the terms authentic experience and radical nods to the second wave feminist tradition of consciousness raising but, as I detail in this paper, falls short of it. As Catherine Rottenberg notes, when 1970s feminists discussed personal experiences it was always accompanied by some form of critique of male domination and/or structural discrimination (2013, 14). We find no similar pattern within the mommy blog genre despite their rhetoric that digital media radically reframes their experiences as mothers. For Bradley and other bloggers in this genre, to feel stupid or less alone is the goal; they rarely connect their feelings or experiences to gendered structures of power. For all the bandwidth given to the personal, little attention is given to the political.This article investigates the claim that blogging authentic experience is a political act. Mining personal was the first step in transforming society for second wave feminists. Today, when personal meets up with digital technology, it is mined instead for two intertwined forms of value production: emotional and economic. Emotional value comes from the crowdsourcing of validation, as Bradley's quote makes plain. Economic value comes from the way online platforms turn such digital expressions of care into content, which the proprietors of social media platforms leverage for profits via data accumulation, advertising, and website traffic. Today, has been absorbed into our modern-day digital mode of production. Experience becomes a commodity produced endlessly, in this case, by mothers.To map the shift from the personal-for-politics to the personal-for-production, I compare personal writings on motherhood from two sources separated by approximately forty years: Adrienne Rich's 1976 book Of Woman Born (reprinted in 1986) and selections from mommy blogs, which explore all aspects of motherhood and have a global readership in the millions. Despite being separated generationally from Rich, mommy bloggers discuss their experiences in startlingly similar terms. The blogs are a rich and vast archive of experiences of motherhood, yet the feminist project of situating women's experiences within a larger social context as a way to effect change, as so adroitly done by Rich, has disappeared. …

“Between Creation and Devouring”: Southern Women Writers and the Politics of Motherhood

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In 1989, American audiences flocked to see the sweet southern dream that was Steel Magnolias. The film follows a multigenerational group of women through the wedding, marriage, pregnancy, and death of the young and beautiful Shelby, played by Julia Roberts in an Oscar-nominated performance. Female relationships are the center of this movie, and these big-haired, drawling matriarchs love each other fiercely. M'Lynn, played by Sally Field, donates a kidney to her diabetic daughter Shelby, who fatally chooses motherhood over her own life, deciding to have a child even though she knows her body cannot survive the stress of childbirth and rearing. The film's title is drawn from M'Lynn's discussion of motherhood and the death of her only daughter: find it amusing. Men are supposed to be made out of steel or something ... I realize as a woman how lucky I am. I was there when that wonderful creature drifted into my life and I was there when she drifted out. It was the most precious moment of my life. (1) While the paternal figures in the movie are mostly present for comic relief, mothering is shown as serious business. Steel Magnolias traffics in stereotypes, the most prominent of which is the southern self-sacrificing mother who finds ultimate fulfillment in her children. This regional portrayal of selfless motherhood replicated the pronatalist national culture of the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century--one that is still prevalent today. All too often when motherhood makes the news or the big screen, we are confronted with impossible ideals of full-time motherhood: attachment moms who breastfeed, co-sleep, and literally wear their babies day in and day out, or helicopter helpers who hover, chopper-like, ready to swoop in to do their kids' homework. These women have little time for anything other than mothering, and their presence in the media shames those mothers who can't, don't, or won't spend their days monitoring their children's every hiccup. For those of us who have read Backlash, Susan Faludi's bestselling book about antifeminism, each of these news stories should sound familiar, echoing the New Traditionalist movement of the 1980s in which women allegedly ditched their careers, leapt joyously onto the track, and cocooned at home with their children (a movement that itself imitated the nineteenth-century middle-class cult of domesticity). (2) It is worth noting that our culture has not always been so clearly divided on definitions of good and bad motherhood. Past eras have featured unashamed, public acknowledgement of the complexity of maternity. Specifically, the politics of motherhood have changed drastically in the past two generations. In the 1970s, second-wave feminists provided us with a vibrant, complex analysis of the wide variety of maternal experiences. My children cause me the most exquisite suffering, Adrienne Rich, a major contributor to this feminist analysis of motherhood, told readers on the very first page of her widely read Of Woman Born (1976). The reigning feeling of most mothers toward the experience and of motherhood was, according to Rich, ambivalence. (3) Yet just a few years after Rich wrote those words, the neoconservative backlash--a reaction to, among other things, second-wave feminism's assault on traditional gender roles--took a firm stranglehold on American culture. Despite very public feminist critiques that began in the 1970s, maternal struggles quickly became a taboo subject. By the 1990s, even many feminists at least partially internalized the neotraditional myth that made criticism of the institution nearly impossible. Women, according to this myth, were incomplete without children, and Good Mothers devoted their entire beings--body, soul, time, and mind--to their children. Those mothers who did not fall within the narrow definition of the mommy myth--single, working, or minority mothers--were, of course, Bad Mothers. …

Embodying Knowledge of Breast Cancer in a Disembodied Community?

Embodying Knowledge of Breast Cancer in a Disembodied Community?

Obituary: Lynne Segal on Adrienne Rich

‘She opened doors for us’, fellow American poet and writer Erica Jong said, learning of Adrienne Rich’s death. Fortunately, they are doors that will now never close. Most of those ageing feminists who have been inspired by her thoughts for almost half a century, as well as all the new admirers she gathered throughout her long life, will be returning to her poetry and essays again and again, and pondering her legacy. I know I will. Born in Baltimore, USA, in 1929, not only was Rich a poet and writer whose early and continuing literary success led to wide acclaim as one of America’s best poets, but she was a key dissident voice right up until her death, earlier this year, at 82, from complications of the rheumatoid arthritis that restricted her movement, and brought pain into most of her adult life. In particular, she will be remembered for her landmark 1976 text on motherhood, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution.

Augusta Webster Writing Motherhood in the Dramatic Monologue and the Sonnet Sequence

In many respects, recovery of Augusta Webster may be read as a feminist success story with a now familiar plot. Literary scholars of early- to mid-nineties seized on Webster's powerful dramatic monologues for their cultural and social significance, focusing particularly on her ideological engagement with urgent mid- to late-Victorian social questions related to female sexuality. More recent work has explored her closet dramas, literary reviews, publishing history, and biography. Safely enshrined in anthologies for past decade, Webster's frequent appearances in dissertations, journal articles, and books not only reveals impact of Victorian women's poetry on canon formation, but also ongoing relevance of central feminist questions about literary authority and women's writing. The critical awareness of and interest in Webster's writing might be read as evidence that recovery has done its work, and, as Margaret Russett observes, that gender studies have long since moved beyond reclamation (1) Yet scholarship on Webster's poetry also reveals ways in which literary scholars still struggle with some of same questions that faced feminist scholars thirty years ago. Although we have moved past basic debates over whether or not women authors should be studied at all, study of nineteenth-century women's poetry is still in a powerful transitional phase. As Alison Chapman remarks, the critical effects of recovery of forgotten voices are still making their mark and work of uncovering women's poetry is by no means completed. (2) In what follows, I will suggest a reading of Webster that I hope reveals not only how her work enriches our understanding of nineteenth-century poetry, but also illuminates some of challenges scholars continue to grapple with as they recover lost writers. I will focus on Webster's representation of motherhood. While her entire canon lies outside my scope here, I have chosen to concentrate on two works that I believe serve as touchstone pieces for Webster's interest in relation between maternity and literary creativity: Medea in Athens, a dramatic monologue from her most famous collection of monologues, Portraits (1870), and Mother and Daughter: An Uncompleted Sonnet Sequence (1895), a collection of posthumously published sonnets. Both works offer a complex and equivocal answer to question of whether or not motherhood enhances or undermines a woman writer's poetic authority. I argue that these texts attempt to demonstrate that motherhood can be an important source of creative inspiration for women, but literary forms in which Webster chooses to work--monologue and sonnet--also voice ambivalence about this idea. In Portraits, dramatic monologue performs maternal creativity only by showing impact of its loss, while Mother and Daughter questions sonnet's efficacy to represent mother-daughter bond even as it engages form. Indeed, Webster's sonnet sequence in particular, with its provocative portrayal of a mother-daughter relationship and a mysterious publishing history which suggests that Webster's male editors may have been responsible for its final form, might be seen as haunted by a ghostly matriarchal line that comes to fruition only through disavowal of poetic language and a (possible) abandonment of very tradition it attempts. My argument obviously owes much to legacy of second-wave feminism and critical engagement with motherhood and women's writing inspired decades ago by Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born or French feminism as represented by Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and particularly Julia Kristeva. But by taking a close look at both Medea in Athens and Mother and Daughter, I hope my investigation occasions close readings that bring recovery work into a larger conversation with rejuvenation of formalism. The initial recovery work of women poets tended to focus on social context and cultural representations of identity, particularly ways in which these writers engaged progressively with important political and social questions. …

Editorial Introduction: The Politics and Rhetorics of Embodiment

Editorial Introduction:The Politics and Rhetorics of Embodiment Rebecca Ropers-Huilman This issue of Feminist Formations is about the body. We did not issue a call for papers directly on this topic, but the excellent manuscripts we have recently received about the body indicate that there is clear interest in this complex subject. The articles in this issue represent a range of writing styles, theoretical approaches, (inter)disciplinary orientations, and lived experiences. They also raise compelling questions that beg engagement, yet resist simplistic response and deny the possibility of closure. In our opening article, "Pregnant Pause," Julija Šukys elegantly discusses her research on Lithuanian librarian Ona Šimaitė's life and role in the Holocaust. Šukys explores how her understanding of Šimaitė's life was deeply affected by Šukys's experiences of and beliefs about motherhood. Intertwining her story with Šimaitė's, Šukys reflects to her son: To her, as a librarian, as an archivist and as a writer, what mattered most were the printed text and the written word. Bodies, she would have said, do not endure, and are therefore not worth burying, not worth archiving. . . . And while I understand her and respect her ultimate gift, I see that things are different for us. For you and for me, bodies do matter. Mine gave me you. This article leaves us to ponder: What types of knowing are facilitated, interrupted or transformed by women's experience of bringing life into or saving lives in our world? How are bodies constructed as irrelevant or significant based on the circumstances of one's existence? The second article, D. Lynn O'Brien Hallstein's "The Intriguing History and Silences of Of Woman Born" reconsiders Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution to reclaim its merits for contemporary understandings of motherhood. Acknowledging that white second-wave feminism emphasized Rich's thoughts on the mother-daughter relationship over her ideas about motherhood and mothering, O'Brien Hallstein asks: [End Page vii] What does an analysis of both Rich's own rhetorical strategies and the larger rhetorical situations—both outside and inside feminism—reveal about the historical response to Of Woman Born and the unexplained silences associated with the text? What are the implications and lingering legacies of both within contemporary feminist maternal scholarship? Mothering is taken up as both individual and institutional, biological and sociocultural, and our opening articles argue for its continued importance in the field of women's and gender studies. Subsequent articles turn directly to the politics of reproduction from many different perspectives. Karen Weingarten's "The Inadvertent Alliance of Anthony Comstock and Margaret Sanger" discusses two historical leaders whose rhetoric about women's reproductive rights seemed divergent, yet worked in a complementary fashion to strengthen the argument against legalized abortion. Weingarten asserts that Sanger and Comstock "shared a discourse based on individuated freedoms that works to manage bodies and populations," and that the rights rhetoric used at this time continues to be part of abortion debates to this day. Muriel Lederman's "The Genomic Revolution" also analyzes the construction of rhetoric related to reproductive choices. Lederman discusses how the Human Genome Project is rhetorically constructed for public audiences such that it obscures questions about the ethics and implications of genetic choices and policies. Specifically, she asserts: The [Human Genome] exhibit favors the assumption that genetic information will be used for human benefit. This assumption is unexamined—few, if any, countervailing arguments are presented. There is no indication that such arguments might exist or that discussions about the risks and benefits of the application of sequence information should occur broadly, even though the exhibit says that the impact of the technology can profoundly affect our species. Lederman emphasizes the importance of those translating science into public knowledge presenting a range of perspectives on potentially life-changing scientific developments. Likewise, she urges those of us who will undoubtedly be affected by those developments "to engage with the developers and users of genetic information to make responsible decisions for themselves, as members of the family of humans, and as inhabitants of our planet." Anna Curtis's "Giving 'Til It Hurts" engages the social, medical, and reproductive interactions that become both possible...

The Intriguing History and Silences of Of Woman Born: Rereading Adrienne Rich Rhetorically to Better Understand the Contemporary Context

Adrienne Rich's text Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1986) is a canonical text in Women's Studies generally and specifically for contemporary feminist maternal scholars. From its inception to the present day, both the response to and use of Of Woman Born have been intriguing and permeated by different kinds of silences about mothering. Rereading Of Woman Born within its larger historical situation and within the white second-wave's relationship to motherhood reveals, externally, that the text was situated within a demonizing discourse that positioned the book as "anti-motherhood," and, internally, that the text emerged from within a sisterly feminist subject-position that was founded on "matrophobia"—the fear of becoming like our mothers. Both the external demonization and the internal matrophobia begin to explain both the intriguing history and curious silences on mothering. Thus, contemporary feminist maternal scholars must understand our past and present use of Rich's text to conceive a feminist subject-position that accounts for and anticipates the ongoing external and internal rhetorical situations of contemporary culture and, finally, purges past and lingering matrophobia.

"I envision a future in which maternal thinkers are respected and self-respecting": The Legacy of Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking

year 2009 marks twenty years since the publication of Sara Ruddick's monumental text Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, a book that regarded, along with Adrienne Rich's 1976 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, as the most significant work in scholarship and the new field of motherhood studies. And in 2009 Demeter Press published my edited volume Thinking: Philosophy, Politics, and Practice to commemorate and celebrate this herstoric anniversary. I first encountered Sara Ruddick's work in Joyce Trebilcot's 1 984 collection, Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, which included two essays by Ruddick: Maternal and Preservative Love and Military Destruction: Some Reflections on Mothering and Peace. It was spring 1985 and I was the mother of a ten-month-old son and just finishing my first master's course on the subject of women, violence, militarism, and war. I knew then that I wanted motherhood to be my area of expertise, though this was going to be a hard sell, given that my master's and then my PhD were in the field of English studies. It would be another five years and two more children before I would read Thinking in the summer of 1990. That year I was reading for my Major Field Comprehensive Exam on the topic of women's studies in literature and I had convinced my committee to substitute books on motherhood on the reading list. My plan was to head to my mother's place for three weeks, with my three kids - aged just turned 1, 31A, and 6 - and my son's best friend, also 6, but without my partner, who was home in Toronto. I arrived at my mom's small cottage with a pile of books, four kids under six years old, no partner or car, and little money. My while adoring of her grandkids, was usually too overwhelmed by them to offer much help. Although I came with the best of intentions, to study and rest well, I did not get much rest or studying done in those weeks. But I did read, or more accurately, consume, Thinking, sneaking away to read the book whenever I could, like an addict in need of a hit. Today, close to twenty years later, that original copy ?? Thinking sits on the desk beside the keyboard as I write these reflections on Ruddick's monumental text. cover of the book features an artist's drawing of a woman with her hand to her head, clearly engaged in deep thought, with these words written underneadi: The first attempt to describe, from a philosophical perspective, the thinking that grows out of the work mothers do. For me, and I suspect for most mothers and scholars of motherhood, this what made Thinking so life changing and groundbreaking. Ruddick foregrounded what all mothers know - motherwork inherently and profoundly an intellectual activity - and dieorized the obvious: mothers think. The work of mothering, as Ruddick writes in Thinking, that mothers think; out of this need for thoughtfulness, a distinctive discipline emerges (24). I first read those words on an overcast summer day as my young children played on a nearly deserted windswept beach. lines are underlined and the page number circled twice and the paragraph remains soiled by sand and water. Yes, mothers think! In Thinking Ruddick seeks to divest mothering of biology, nature, instinct, and sentiment so as to define it as a practice, one governed by diinking. practice, according to Ruddick, characterized by three demands: preservation, growth, and social acceptance. To be a mother, continues Ruddick, is to be committed to meeting these demands by works of preservative love, nurturance, and training (1989, 17). When mothers set out to fulfill the demands of motherwork, they are engaged in practice; and this engagement, in turn, gives rise to a specific discipline of thought - a cluster of metaphysical attitudes, cognitive capacities, and values that Ruddick calls maternal thinking. …

On Maternal Thinking

On Maternal Thinking Sara Ruddick (bio) Thirty years ago, in the late 1970s, I spent some time hovering over a possibility suggested by Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born. Could it be, Rich asked, that women are "even now thinking in ways which traditional intellection denies, decries or is unable to grasp?" I had no use for the special graces of "women's intuition" or "feminine sensibility," gifts that marked the absence of mind, not its distinction. Women could reason with the best of "us"; the capacity to reason was a human good. The ways of women's thinking that intrigued me would arise from the activities in which women engaged and that strengthened them. Women bear a disproportionate responsibility for the labor required by people who are ill, illiterate, frail, despairing, very young or very old—who are, in sum, in need of care. I set out to elucidate the "rationality of care," 1 taking mothering, and the maternal thinking it expresses, as a primary instance. Now, thirty years later, I am returning to my question, only with more specificity. Could it be, I ask, that practices of mothering prompt or require distinctive cognitive capacities, metaphysical attitudes, and conceptions of virtue? If so, to what uses could this maternal thinking be put? Three feminist thinkers have joined me in reflecting on this question: Ranjana Khanna, Andrea O'Reilly, and Amy Richards. I am grateful for their generous attention, which helps me to understand my ideas. Andrea O'Reilly gives us an opening by providing a scene for reading that is also a motherhood scene. With little money and no car, Andrea has left her partner at home and traveled with four children, six years old and younger, to her mother's small cottage. Her intention is to rest and prepare for an upcoming eight-hour exam. But her mother, who adores her grandchildren, is too overwhelmed by the crowd in the small cottage to offer much help. Andrea can barely study or rest. She does, however, begin to read Maternal Thinking. Sometimes she sneaks off with the book, like "an addict in need of a hit." Other times, her children play in the near distance, [End Page 305] as she watches closely but not too closely, "scrutinizing" as she reads about scrutinizing in the book. The cover of the edition Andrea reads portrays a woman of indeterminate ethnicity who is somewhat lost in thought. The blurb on the cover describes the book as "the first attempt to describe from a philosophical perspective the thinking that grows out of the work that mothers do." Andrea cites from the book lines that she believes were life changing for many women: "The work of mothering demands that mothers think; out of this need for thoughtfulness, a distinctive discipline emerges" (24). Andrea writes: "The lines are underlined, and the page number circled twice and the paragraph remains soiled by sand and water. Yes, mothers think!" Elsewhere, Andrea has said that she is drawn to the details of Maternal Thinking. "I love scrutinizing, I love holding, I love concrete thinking, welcoming change, humility and so forth." I love Andrea for loving the details. But here she outlines major organizing themes of my account of maternal practices, more clearly and energetically than I could manage. I believe, however, that I have sowed a confusion that needs neatening. I have said, and Andrea emphasizes, that the work or practice of mothering is distinct from the identity of the mother. Mothering may be performed by anyone who commits him- or herself to the demands of maternal practice. Mother is as mother does. Nonetheless, it makes sense to say, "This mother mothers other mothers' children at a distance from her own children whom she mothers indirectly" (I describe a familiar situation of immigrant mothers). The self of mothering should not be slighted. It is inherently relational and generational—marking temporal identities that are at once past and future, legacy and promise. Our maternal stories tell us who we are as well as what we do. Raising children righteously up—a marvelous phrase left us by Grace Paley—signals relationship, identities, and, emphatically, the work that we do. Amy...