![]() ![]() ![]() Insistently she argues for self-determination for all women, for a choice in having children, in observing the rituals of childbirth, in determining attitudes toward child care. She documents other attitudes toward mothering from prepatriarchal religions to Judaeo-Christian theology to the proscriptions of modern socialism, seeing a subversion from mother goddess to functionary in the patriarchal interest she finds residual ambivalences in modern mother/son and mother/daughter relationships owing to such interference and manipulation. ![]() A mother three times in four years (in the 1950s when full-time motherhood was in flower), she remembers her own feelings of isolation and anger, passion and fulfillment. ![]() Adrienne Rich, poet and feminist, draws evidence from many fields to explore the contrast between the functional myth of the mother-serene, instinctual, ecstatic (as in Raphael's madonnas)-and the harsher reality of unwanted pregnancies and thwarted human potential. A recognition of motherhood that embraces its many contradictions and an indictment of motherhood as it exists in a patriarchy, a pawn in a male power game. ![]()
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