Essential Essays

by Adrienne Rich

  Only when we can wish imaginatively and courageously for ourselves can we wish unfetteredly for our daughters. But finally, a child is not a wish, nor a product of wishing. Women’s lives—in all levels of society—have been lived too long in both depression and fantasy, while our active energies have been trained and absorbed into caring for others. It is essential, now, to begin breaking that cycle. Anyone who has read the literature in the obstetrician’s waiting-room knows the child-care booklets which, at some point, confess that “you may get a fit of the blues” and suggest “having your husband take you to dinner in a French restaurant, or going shopping for a new dress.” (The fiction that most women have both husbands and money is forever with us.) But the depressive mother who now and then allows herself a “vacation” or a “reward” is merely showing her daughters both that the female condition is depressing, and that there is no real way out.

  As daughters we need mothers who want their own freedom and ours. We need not to be the vessels of another woman’s self-denial and frustration. The quality of the mother’s life—however embattled and unprotected—is her primary bequest to her daughter, because a woman who can believe in herself, who is a fighter, and who continues to struggle to create livable space around her, is demonstrating to her daughter that these possibilities exist. Because the conditions of life for many poor women demand a fighting spirit for sheer physical survival, such mothers have sometimes been able to give their daughters something to be valued far more highly than full-time mothering. But the toll is taken by the sheer weight of adversity, the irony that to fight for her child’s physical survival the mother may have to be almost always absent from the child, as in Tillie Olsen’s story, “I Stand Here Ironing.”30 For a child needs, as that mother despairingly knew, the care of someone for whom she is “a miracle.”

  Many women have been caught—have split themselves—between two mothers: one, usually the biological one, who represents the culture of domesticity, of male-centeredness, of conventional expectations, and another, perhaps a woman artist or teacher, who becomes the countervailing figure. Often this “counter-mother” is an athletics teacher who exemplifies strength and pride in her body, a freer way of being in the world; or an unmarried woman professor, alive with ideas, who represents the choice of a vigorous work life, of “living alone and liking it.” This splitting may allow the young woman to fantasize alternately living as one or the other “mother,” to test out two different identifications. But it can also lead to a life in which she never consciously resolves the choices, in which she alternately tries to play the hostess and please her husband as her mother did, and to write her novel or doctoral thesis. She has tried to break through the existing models, but she has not gone far enough, usually because nobody has told her how far there is to go.

  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.” Mothers who can talk freely with their daughters about sex, even teaching them to use contraception in adolescence, still leave them in the dark as to the expectations and stereotypes, false promises and ill-faith, awaiting them in the world. “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.

  9

  I talk with a brilliant and radical thinker, a woman scholar of my generation. She describes her early feelings when she used to find herself at conferences or parties among faculty wives, most of whom had or would have children, she the only unmarried woman in the room. She felt, then, that her passionate investigations, the recognition accorded her work, still left her the “barren” woman, the human failure, among so many women who were mothers. I ask her, “But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom, to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?” Yet even as I speak, I know: the gulf between “mothers” and “nonmothers” (even the term is pure negation, like “widow,” meaning without) will be closed only as we come to understand how both childbearing and childlessness have been manipulated to make women into negative quantities, or bearers of evil.

  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. The notion of the “free woman” is strongly tinged with the suggestion of sexual promiscuity, of “free love,” of being “free” of man’s ownership; it still defines the woman by her relationships with men. The ancient meaning of the word “virgin” (she-who-is-unto-herself) is obscured by connotations of the “undeflorated” or intact hymen, or of the Roman Catholic Virgin Mother, defined entirely by her relationship to God the Son. “Amazon” suggests too narrowly the warrior-maiden who has renounced all ties with men except for procreation: again, definition through relatedness. Neither is “lesbian” a satisfactory term here; not all self-identified women would call themselves lesbians; moreover, numberless lesbians are mothers of children.

  There can be no more simplistic formula for women than to escape into some polarization such as “Mothers or Amazons,” “matriarchal clan or guerilleres.” For one thing, in the original matriarchal clan all females, of whatever age, were called “mothers”—even little girls. Motherhood was a social rather than a physical function. “Women . . . were sisters to one another and mothers to all the children of the community without regard to which individual mother bore any child. . . . Aborigines describe themselves as . . . ‘brotherhoods’ from the standpoint of the male and ‘motherhoods’ from the standpoint of the female.”31 And everywhere, girl-children as young as six have cared for younger siblings.

  The “childless woman” and the “mother” are a false polarity, which has served the institutions both of motherhood and heterosexuality. There are no such simple categories. There are women (like Ruth Benedict) who have tried to have children and could not. The causes may range from a husband’s unacknowledged infertility to signals of refusal sent out from her cerebral cortex. A woman may have looked at the lives of women with children and have felt that, given the circumstances of motherhood, she must remain childless if she is to pursue any other hopes or aims.††† As the nineteenth-century feminist Margaret Fuller wrote in an undated fragment:

  I have no child and the woman in me has so craved this experience, that it seems the want of it must paralyze me. But now as I look on these lovely children of a human birth, what slow and neutralizing cares they bring with them to the mother! The children of the muse come quicker, with less pain and disgust, rest more lightly on the bosom.‡‡‡

  A young girl may have lived in horror of he
r mother’s child-worn existence and told herself, once and for all, No, not for me. A lesbian may have gone through abortions in early relationships with men, love children, yet still feel her life too insecure to take on the grilling of an adoption or the responsibility of an artificial pregnancy. A woman who has chosen celibacy may feel her decision entails a life without children. Ironically, it is precisely the institution of motherhood, which, in an era of birth control, has influenced women against becoming mothers. It is simply too hypocritical, too exploitative of mothers and children, too oppressive.

  But is a woman who bore a baby she could not keep a “childless” woman? Am I, whose children are grown-up, who come and go as I will, unchilded as compared to younger women still pushing prams, hurrying home to feedings, waking at night to a child’s cry? What makes us mothers? The care of small children? The physical changes of pregnancy and birth? The years of nurture? What of the woman who, never having been pregnant, begins lactating when she adopts an infant? What of the woman who stuffs her newborn into a bus-station locker and goes numbly back to her “child-free” life? What of the woman who, as the eldest girl in a large family, has practically raised her younger sisters and brothers, and then has entered a convent?

  The woman struggling to cope with several young children, a job, and the unavailability of decent child-care and schooling, may feel pure envy (and rage) at the apparent freedom and mobility of the “child-free” woman (I have). The woman without children of her own may see, like Margaret Fuller, the “dull and neutralizing cares” of motherhood as it is lived in the bondage of a patriarchal system and congratulate herself on having stayed “free,” not having been “brainwashed into motherhood.” But these polarizations imply a failure of imagination.

  Throughout recorded history the “childless” woman has been regarded (with certain specific exceptions, such as the cloistered nun or the temple virgin) as a failed woman, unable to speak for the rest of her sex,§§§ and omitted from the hypocritical and palliative reverence accorded the mother. “Childless” women have been burned as witches, persecuted as lesbians, have been refused the right to adopt children because they were unmarried. They have been seen as embodiments of the great threat to male hegemony: the woman who is not tied to the family, who is disloyal to the law of heterosexual pairing and bearing. These women have nonetheless been expected to serve their term for society as missionaries, nuns, teachers, nurses, maiden aunts; to give, rather than sell their labor if they were middle-class; to speak softly, if at all, of women’s condition. 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 unacclaimed research and scholarship of “childless” women, without Charlotte Brontë (who died in her first pregnancy), Margaret Fuller (whose major work was done before her child was born), without George Eliot, Emily Brontë, 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. The novel Jane Eyre, as I have tried to show elsewhere, can be read as a woman-pilgrim’s progress along a path of classic female temptation, in which the motherless Jane time after time finds women who protect, solace, teach, challenge, and nourish her in self-respect.32 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 toward 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.

  We are, none of us, “either” mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both. Women, mothers or not, who feel committed to other women, are increasingly giving each other a quality of caring filled with the diffuse kinds of identification that exist between actual mothers and daughters. Into the mere notion of “mothering” we may carry, as daughters, negative echoes of our own mothers’ martyrdom, the burden of their valiant, necessarily limited efforts on our behalf, the confusion of their double messages. But it is a timidity of the imagination which urges that we can be “daughters”—therefore free spirits—rather than “mothers”—defined as eternal givers. 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.

  10

  As a child raised in what was essentially the South, Baltimore in the segregated 1930s, I had from birth not only a white, but a Black mother. This relationship, so little explored, so unexpressed, still charges the relationships of Black and white women. We have not only been under slavery, lily white wife and dark, sensual concubine; victims of marital violation on the one hand and unpredictable, licensed rape on the other. We have been mothers and daughters to each other; and although, in the last few years, Black and white feminists have been moving toward a still-difficult sisterhood, there is little yet known, unearthed, of the time when we were mothers and daughters. Lillian Smith remembers:

  I knew that my old nurse who had cared for me through long months of illness, who had given me refuge when a little sister took my place as the baby of the family, who soothed me, fed me, delighted me with her stories and games, let me fall asleep on her warm, deep breast, was not worthy of the passionate love I felt for her but must be given instead a half-smiled-at affection . . . I knew but I never believed it that the deep respect I felt for her, the tenderness, the love, was a childish thing which every normal child outgrows . . . and that somehow—though it seemed impossible to my agonized heart—I too must outgrow these feelings. . . . I learned to cheapen with tears and sentimental talk of “my old mammy” one of the profound relationships of my life.33

  My Black mother was “mine” only for four years, during which she fed me, dressed me, played with me, watched over me, sang to me, cared for me tenderly and intimately. “Childless” herself, she was a mother. She was slim, dignified, and very handsome, and from her I learned—nonverbally—a great deal about the possibilities of dignity in a degrading situation. After my sister’s birth, though she still worked from time to time in the house, she was no longer my care-giver. Another nurse came, but she was not the same to me; I felt she belonged to my sister. Twenty years later, when I left my parents’ house, expecting never to return, my Black mother told me: “Yes, I understand how you have to leave and do what you think is right. I once had to break somebody’s heart to go and live my life.” She died a few years later; I did not see her again.

  And, yes: I know what Lillian Smith describes, the confusion of discovering that a woman one has loved and been cherished by is somehow “unworthy” of such love after a certain age. That sense of betrayal, of the violation of a relationship, was for years a nameless thing, for no one yet spoke of racism, and even the concept of “prejudice” had not yet filtered into my childhood world. It was simply “the way things were,” and we tried to repress the confusion and the shame.

  When I began writing this chapter I began to remember my Black mother again: her calm, rea
listic vision of things, her physical grace and pride, her beautiful soft voice. For years, she had drifted out of reach, in my searches backward through time, exactly as the double silence of sexism and racism intended her to do. She was meant to be utterly annihilated.****

  But, at the edge of adolescence, we find ourselves drawing back from our natural mothers as if by a similar edict. It is toward men, henceforth, that our sensual and emotional energies are intended to flow. The culture makes it clear that neither the Black mother, nor the white mother, nor any of the other mothers, are “worthy” of our profoundest love and loyalty. Women are made taboo to women—not just sexually, but as comrades, cocreators, coinspiritors. In breaking this taboo, we are reuniting with our mothers; in reuniting with our mothers, we are breaking this taboo.

  * At the risk of seeming repetitious, I will note here, again, that the institution of heterosexuality, with its social rewards and punishments, its role-playing, and its sanctions against “deviance,” is not the same thing as a human experience freely chosen and lived.

  1986: See my essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985 (New York: Norton, 1986).

  † It can be argued that, just as infanticide in general was a form of population control and even of eugenics (twins, infants who were undersized, malformed, or otherwise abnormal were destroyed, whatever their sex), female infanticide was a way of limiting births, since females were seen primarily as breeders. Still, the implicit devaluation of the female was hardly a message to be lost on women.

  ‡ There are many elisions and omissions, since publication had to be approved by Ted Hughes, Sylvia’s husband.

  § 1986: See Alice Miller, “Sylvia Plath: An Example of Forbidden Suffering,” in For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-rearing and the Roots of Violence (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983)..