Word: motherhood
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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After months of apple pie, motherhood and the Jimmy and Jerry show, I needed this...
...where do you go, once you have singled out motherhood as an issue? In Of Woman Born: Motherhood as an Experience and Institution. Adrienne Rich takes up this regularly recurring theme of feminist literature. Women's biological attributes, she argues, have forced them to bear the responsibility for continuing the species; but the division of labor in the household between the working father and the nurturing mother has set the foundation for an inflexible social institution, including much more than bearing children. Since the first stirrings of the patriarchal system, she says, women have been valued only by the number...
...ambitions. But children naturally crave emotional support. While no one could argue that mothers must be the only source of that warmth and loving, it is hard to see why mothers and fathers together couldn't find enough altruism between them to satisfy that need. In Rich's view, motherhood means renouncing relationships in which one is able "to act, to live in myself and to love [my children] for their separate selves"--by her definition she denies herself much of the good that is part of the parent-child bond...
...person," she says, "to draw blueprints for the assimilation of men in large numbers into childcare." We are left with no choice but a separatist future--a vision that precludes children born according to the rather well-established biological pattern, although it does get rid of the motherhood problem...
...Motherhood means renouncing action, life in oneself and love of children for their selves...