Of Woman Born

I loved this book when I initially read it, and return to it time and again. Adrienne Rich is, quite simply, the mother of motherhood studies. 

This book strongly resonates with me and my experiences as a mother, particularly how Rich defines mothering and motherhood as two distinct states of being: Motherhood–the patriarchal institution (this is where we get all the do’s and don’ts of what society expects of us as mothers)–and mothering–the actual affective labor of bringing up children. 

One section in particular–where Rich compares the freedom of the summer break with the return to restrictions of… show more.

This remarkable book is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious and omnivorous prose accounts of birth in the English language.

I encountered it early in my research on birth, when I was hungering for books that explored it as a topic of broad human concern and that went beyond the strictly personal. In critiquing the “institution” of motherhood, and the exploitation that has accompanied it for many women, Rich simultaneously unearths the power within birth – its fertile creativity – and imagines new ways of understanding it.

Rich is a wonderful stylist who uses what she calls an “odd-fangled” approach.… show more.

Though not directly engaging with religion and spirituality, this book by Adrienne Rich is a foundational text of third-wave feminism.

In this 1976 book, Rich discusses her own conflicted experience of motherhood as a window into the influence of patriarchy and politics on the institution of motherhood.

Seeing motherhood as a societal institution rather than just an identity, Rich uses her poet’s voice to describe how motherhood as an experience is always directly influenced by the societal pressures, norms, and expectations of the moment.

Adrienne Rich’s book was a clarion call for second-wave feminists to rethink the history of motherhood in the Western world. It inspired and reflected a wave of scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s that rethought the traditional depiction of childbirth before the advent of male-doctor-dominated hospitals as crude and dangerous. Adrienne Rich examined the idealization of mother love as the purest kind of love and exposed the psychic tensions this had created for generations of mothers who could not live up to this ideal. In her chapter "Hands of Iron, Hands of Flesh" she offered a poetic and stinging rebuttal… show more.