Notes from Rich

Rich, A. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Institution and Experience. W. W. Norton & Company. 1976.

“longing to be free of responsibility, tied by every fiber of one’s being.” (22)

“Unexamined assumptions: First, that a “natural” mother is a person without further identity, one who can find her chief gratification in being all day with small children , living at a pace attuned to theirs; that the isolation of mothers and children together in the home must be taken for granted; that maternal love is, and should be quite literally selfless; that children and mothers are the “causes” of each others’ suffering.” (22-23)

“That calm, sure, unambivalent woman who moved through the pages of the manuals I read seemed as unlike me as an astronaut. Nothing to be sure had prepared me for the intensity of relationship already existing between me and a creature i had carried in my body and now held in my arms and fed from my breasts…No one mentions the psychic crisis of bearing a first child, the excitation of long-buried feelings about one’s own mother, the sense of confused power and powerlessness, of being taken over on the one hand and of touching new physical and psychic potentialities on the other, a heightened sensibility which can be exhilarating, bewildering, and exhausting.” (36)

“And the mother too is discovering her own existence newly. She is connected with this other being, by the most mundane and the most invisible strands, in a way she can be connected with no one except in the deep past of her infant connection with her mother. And she too needs to struggle from that one-to-one intensity into new realization, or reaffirmation, of her-being-unto-herself.” (36-37)

“But it is not enough to let our children go; we need selves of our own to return to.” (37)

“To have borne and reared a child is to have done that thing which patriarchy joins with physiology to render into the definition of femaleness. But also, it can mean experiencing of one’s own body and emotions in a powerful way.” (37)

“In tribal or even feudal culture a child of six would have serious obligations; ours have none. But also, the woman at home with children is not believed to be doing serious work; she is supposed to be acting out of maternal instinct, doing chores a man would never take on, largely uncritical of the meaning of what she does. So child and mother alike are depreciated, because only grown men and women in the paid labor force are supposed to be “productive”. (38)

“Patriarchal thought has limited female biology to its own narrow specifications . The feminist vision has recoiled from female biology for these reasons…In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality , our bond with the natural order, the corporeal ground of our intelligence.” (39)

“No wonder that many intellectual and creative women have insisted that they were human beings first and women only incidentally, have minimized their physicality and bonds with other women. The body has been made so problematic that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit.” (40)

“Slowly I came to understand the paradox contained in “my” experience of motherhood; that although different from other women’s experiences it was not unique; and that only in shedding the illusion of my uniqueness could I hope, as a woman, to have any authentic life at all.” (40)

“Institutionalized motherhood demands of women maternal “instinct” rather than intelligence, selflessness rather than self-realization, relation to others rather than the creation of self.” (42)

“…my temper was a dark, wicked blotch in me, not a response to events in the outer world. …that “temper is a defect of character, having nothing to do with what happens in the world outside one’s flaming skin. Mother-love is supposed to be continuous, unconditional. Love and anger cannot coexist. Female anger threatens the institution of motherhood.” (46)

“From earliest settle life until the growth of factories as centers of production, the home was not a refuge place for leisure and retreat from the cruelty of the “outside world” ; it was a part of the world a center of work a subsistence unit. … A woman was rarely if ever alone with nothing but the needs of a child or children to say to. Women and children were part of an actively busy social cluster. Work was hard laborious often physically exhausting but it was diversified and usually communal. Mortality from childbirth and pregnancy and the loss of infant lives was extremely high. The lifespan of women brief and it would be naïve to romanticizing existence constantly threatened by malnutrition, famine, and disease. But motherhood and the keeping of the home as a private refuge were not, could not be, the central occupation of women, nor were mother and child circumscribed into an isolated relationship.” (47)

“It is quite time this question of maternity was taken up, and we must let the men know we are human beings with ideals, and aspire to something higher that to be mere objects on which they can satisfy themselves.” (51)

“Love and anger can exist concurrently; anger at the conditions of motherhood can become translated into anger at the child, along with the fear that we are not “loving”; grief at all we cannot do for our children in a society so inadequate to meet human needs becomes translated into guilt and self laceration.” (52)

“The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.” (53)

“How much does this really have to do with capitalism, and how much with the system which, as Eli Zaretsky points out, predated capitalism and has survived under socialism—patriarchy?” (54)

“In no socialized country does the breakdown of the division of labor extend to bringing large numbers of men into childcare.” (54)

The terms “matriarchy,” “mother-right” and  “gynocracy” or “gynarchy” tend to be used in precisely, often interchangeably. Robert Briffault goes to some pains to show that matriarchy in primitive societies was not simply patriarchy with a different sex in authority; he reserves the term “gynocracy” for a situation in which women would have economic domination and control through property. He points out that the matriarchal elements in any society have had a functional origin— i.e. the maternal function of gestating bearing nurturing and educating children; and that with this function in early society went a great deal of activity and authority which is now relegated to the male spirit outside the family.  Briffault’s matriarchal society is one in which female creative power is pervasive, and women have organic authority rather than one in which the woman establishes and maintains domination and control over the man, as the man over the woman in patriarchy. There would be according to Briffault, a kind of free consent to the authority of women in a matriarchal society, because of her involvement with the essential practical and magical activity of that society he must sees matriarchy as organic by nature: because of the integration of agriculture, craft, invention, into the life centered around the mother and her children women would be involved in a variety of creative and productive roles. Patriarchy, in Briffault’s, view develops when men revolt against this organic order by establishing economic domination and by taking over magical powers previously considered the domain of women. “Gynocracy,” like patriarchy, would thus mean a holding of power through force or economic pressure and could only exist with the advent of private ownership and the economic advantage of one group over another.” (59-60)

“Powerlessness can lead to lassitude, self-negatiation, guilt, and depression; it can also generate a kind of psychological keeness, a shrewdness, an alert and practiced observation of the oppressor—”psyching out developed into a survival tool.” (65)

“In de Beauvoir’s words, “It was as Mother that woman was fearsome; it is in maternity that she must be transfigured and enslaved.” The idea of maternal power has been domesticated. In transfiguring and enslaving woman, the womb—the ultimate source of this power—has historically been turned against us and itself been made into a source of powerlessness.” (68)