Of Woman Born, by Adrienne Rich

Of Woman Born, by Adrienne Rich

Patriarchy is the power of the fathers: a familial-social, ideological, political system in which men- by force, direct pressure, or through ritual, tradition, law, and language, customs, etiquette, education, and the division of labor, determine what part women shall or shall not play, and in which everywhere the female is subsumed under the male. It does not necessarily imply that no woman has power, or that all women in a given culture may not have certain powers. (p. 40)

Under patriarchy, I may live in purdah or drive a truck; I may raise my children on a kibbutz or be the sole bread-winner for a fatherless family or participate in a demonstration against abortion legislation with a baby on my back; I may work as a "barefoot doctor" in a village commune in the People's Republic of China, or make my life on a lesbian commune in New England; I may become a hereditary or elected head of state or wash the underwear of a millionaire's wife; I may serve my husband his early morning coffee within the clay walls of a Berber village or march in an academic procession; whatever my status or situation, my derived economic class, or my sexual preference, I live under the power of the fathers, and I have access to only so much of privilege or influence as the patriarchy is willing to accede to me, and only for so long as I will pay the price for male approval. And this power goes much further than laws or customs; in the words of the sociologist Brigitte Berger, "until now a primarily masculine intellect and spirit have dominated in the interpretation of society and culture- whether this interpretation is carried out by males or females... fundamentally masculine assumptions have shaped our whole moral and intellectual history." (p. 41)

Again: some combination or aspect of patriarchal values prevails, whether in an Orthodox Jewish family where the wife mediates with the outer world and earns a living to enable the husband to study Torah;or for the upper-class European or Oriental couple, both professionals, who employ servants for domestic work and a governess for the children. They prevail even where women are the nominal "heads of households". For, much as she may act as the co-equal provider or so-called matriarch within her own family, every mother must deliver her children over within a few years of their birth to the patriarchal system of education, of law, of religion, of sexual codes; she is in fact expected to prepare them to enter that system without rebelliousness or "maladjustment" and to perpetuate it in their own adult lives. (pages 44-45)

Wow.

I'll admit there are some parts that just lost me- I don't see how the quotes fit in etc. - and I'm not sure if it's me or what. But then there are some brilliant passages. Definitely worth reading for those (and how she expands on them). It's nice to see her take on some of the other feminist writers, too, for what it's worth.

>re: Motherhood and Daughterhood

...whatever our rational forgiveness, whatever the individual mother's love and strength, the child in us, the small female who grew up in a male-controlled world, still feels, at moments, wildly unmothered. When we can confront and unravel this paradox, this contradiction, face to the utmost in ourselves the groping passion of that little girl lost, we can begin to transmute it, and the blind anger and bitterness that have repetitiously erupted among women trying to build a movement together [or just living life] can be alchemized. Before sisterhood, there was the knowledge- transitory, fragmented, perhaps, but original and crucial- of mother-and-daughterhood. (p. 226)

Few women growing up in patriarchal society can feel mothered enough; the power of our mothers, whatever their love for us and their struggles on our behalf, is too restricted. And it is the mother through whom patriarchy early teaches the small female her proper expectations. The anxious pressure of one female on another to conform to a degrading and dispiriting role can hardly be termed "mothering", even if she does this believing it will help her daughter to survive.

Many daughters live in rage at their mothers for having accepted, too readily and passively, "whatever comes." A mother's victimization does not merely humiliate her, it mutilates the daughter who watches her for clues as to what it means to be a woman. Like the traditional foot-bound Chinese woman, she passes on her own affliction. The mother's self-hatred and low expectations are the binding-rags for the psyche of the daughter. (pages 246-247)

"I have always gotten more support from men than from women": a cliche of token women, and an understandable one, since we do identify gratefully with anyone who seems to have strengthened us. But who has been in a position to strengthen us? .... Men have been able to give us power, support, and certain forms of nurture, as individuals, when they chose; but the power is always stolen power, withheld from the mass of women in patriarchy. And, finally, I am talking here about a kind of strength which can only be one woman's gift to another, the bloodstream of our inheritance. Until a strong line of love, confirmation, and example stretches from mother to daughter, from woman to woman across the generations, women will still be wandering in the wilderness. (p. 249)

The double messages need to be disentangled. "You can be anything you really want to be" is a half-truth, whatever a woman's class or economic advantages. We need to be very clear about the missing portion, rather than whisper the fearful subliminal message: "Don't go too far." A female child needs to be told, very early, the practical difficulties females have to face in even trying to imagine "what they want to be." ....

"You can be anything you really want to be"- if you are prepared to fight, to create priorities for yourself against the grain of cultural expectations, to persist in the face of misogynist hostility. Interpreting to a little girl, or to an adolescent woman, the kinds of treatment she encounters because she is female, is as necessary as explaining to a nonwhite child reactions based on the color of her skin.

It is one thing to adjure a daughter, along Victorian lines, that her lot is to "suffer and be still," that woman's fate is determined. It is wholly something else to acquaint her honestly with the jeopardy all women live under in patriarchy, to let her know by word and deed that she has her mother's support, and moreover, that while it can be dangerous to move, to speak, to act, each time she suffers rape- physical or psychic- in silence, she is putting another stitch in her own shroud. (pages 251-252)

In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture. Throughout this book I have been thrown back on terms like "unchilded", "childless", or "child-free"; we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself. "Unchilded", "childless" simply define her in terms of a lack; even "child-free" suggests only that she has refused motherhood, not what she is about in and of herself. (p. 253)

That is an issue for me. I have for quite a while been tired of being Wo-Man or Fe-Male and I am no longer a girl. I am not merely a wife or a mother or a daughter. Why have we no word? Besides Person which implies that you have no gender whatsoever and so is false. (woman, btw, comes from wif-man, meaning literally wife of man where man means person. so wife of a person. because women weren't persons.)

Ha, she did mention Tellurian, which is so obscure or obsolete that I didn't think anyone else knew it but me and some other nerdy people. It means "of the earth" and I guess if I HAVE to be defined in relation to something, I'd rather it be the earth. But, yeah, still, for now my name will have to do. Minus the patronymic. (Mia MoonRaven doesn't work for me either.)

>Yet ironically, precisely because they were not bound to the cycle of hourly existence with children, because they could reflect, observe, write, such women in the past have given us some of the few available strong insights into the experience of women in general. Without the un-acclaimed research and scholarship of "childless' women, without Charlotte Bronte (who died in her first pregnancy), Margaret Fuller (whose major work was done before her child was born), without George Eliot, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir- we would all today be suffering from spiritual malnutrition as women.

The "unchilded" woman, if such a term makes any sense, is still affected by centuries-long attitudes- on the part of both women and men- towards the birthing, child-rearing function of women. Any woman who believes that the institution of motherhood has nothing to do with her is closing her eyes to crucial aspects of her situation.

Many of the great mothers have not been biological. ... For centuries, daughters have been strengthened and energized by nonbiological mothers, who have combined a care for the practical values of survival with an incitement towards further horizons, a compassion for vulnerability with an insistence on our buried strengths. It is precisely this that has allowed us to survive; not our occasional breakthroughs into tokendom, not our "special cases", although these have been beacons for us, illuminations of what ought to be. (pages 256-257)

>Mothering and nonmothering have been such charged concepts for us, precisely because whichever we did has been turned against us.

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. (p. 257)

I know no woman- virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate- whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves- for whom her body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded meaning, its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silences, its changes and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings. (p. 290)

[Women], in the solitary confinement of a life at home enclosed with young children, or in the struggle to mother them while providing for them single-handedly, or in the conflict of weighing her own personhood against the dogma that says she is a mother, first, last, and always. .... the mothers, if we could look into their fantasies- their daydreams and imaginary experiences- we would see the embodiment of rage, of tragedy, of the overcharged energy of love, of inventive desperation, we would see the machinery of institutional violence wrenching at the experience of motherhood. (p. 285)

"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... Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance... And yet at other times I am melted with the sense of their helpless, charming, and quite irresistible beauty- their ability to go on loving and trusting- their staunchness and decency and unselfconsciousness. I love them."

- from Adrienne Rich's journal as a young mother, from the back cover