Rhetorics of Motherhood by Lindal Buchanan (review)

Despite the power and ubiquity of the Mother and maternal rhetorics in public discourse, these discursive formations have yet to receive the attention they merit from our field. Lindal Buchanan’s Rhetorics of Motherhoood thus forges new and important terrain for rhetorical scholars. Buchanan offers a nuanced argument about “motherhood’s versatility as a rhetorical resource, one that generates persuasive means useful for advocating feminist, resistant, and conservative agendas” (115). At the same time, she shows how motherhood discourses constitute “slippery rhetorical terrain for women… affording them credibility and authority…but positioning them disadvantageously within the gendered status quo” (xvii). Buchanan’s analysis of the power and pitfalls of the rhetorics of motherhood will prove especially generative for R&PA readers with interests in women’s and gender studies, rhetorical history, and public memory.

Chapter 1 lays the theoretical groundwork for the book’s three case studies. Buchanan draws on Roland Barthes’s exploration of first- and second-order signification (denotation and connotation) to describe a “code of motherhood,” which, she argues, “is easy to invoke but difficult to resist” (6). Borrowing from Richard Weaver’s notion of “God” and “Devil” terms, Buchanan explains that the Mother’s exalted status in this code requires an antithesis, a “Devil.” Inspired by Weaver, she develops a framework, the Woman/Mother continuum, “which sheds light on motherhood’s cultural construction and rhetorical implications—both positive and negative—for women” (11). Buchanan’s geneaology of the Mother illuminates how changing perceptions of women’s sexuality, revised understandings of mother-child relations, the attribution to women of a superior moral sensibility, and the gendering of space have worked to encode the positive and negative associations of the Woman/Mother continuum, which, Buchanan demonstrates, “affords rhetors means for exalting or denigrating women, as does the terrain that falls between the extremes” (9). Finally, Buchanan examines how the Mother code disregards differences resulting from identity and social location, producing negative rhetorical consequences for some women, while, at the same time, enabling rhetors to don the God term of Mother and thus mask potentially alienating differences. The Mother code and Woman/Mother continuum will serve as useful heuristics for scholars interested in pursuing studies of women rhetors and Mother rhetorics.

Three case studies span the early twentieth through the early twenty-first century. In chapter 2, “From ‘Wild Woman Writer’ to ‘Mother of Two’: Margaret Sanger, Birth Control, and Ethos Repair,” Buchanan celebrates Sanger’s use of motherhood rhetorics to repair her damaged reputation and revive the faltering birth control movement. By cloaking herself within the Mother, Sanger advanced feminist aims. At the same time, Buchanan shows how Sanger’s maternal framework privileged the interests of elite white woman and elided those of poor immigrant women. In so doing, she provides evidence for her claim concerning the inherent and unavoidable exclusions of maternal rhetorics. Finally, this chapter demonstrates how rhetorical sensitivity to the constraints that necessarily shaped Sanger’s ethos and logos recasts her, a polarizing figure for many feminist scholars, in a more positive light. This chapter’s rich data, including speeches by Sanger, newspaper accounts, photographs, and a documentary film, not only supports Buchanan’s argument about Sanger’s use of the Mother code to advance women’s reproductive freedom but also offers an exemplary methodological model.

Chapter 3, “Motherhood, Civil Rights, and Remembrance: Recuperating Diane Nash,” is a must-read for scholars of public memory. Diane Nash, a civil rights activist in the 1960s American South, was jailed while pregnant as part of the “jail-no-bail” strategy. As readers might expect, Buchanan acknowledges Nash’s strategic use of maternalism to garner support from fellow civil rights activists for the “jail-no-bail” strategy and to critique Southern racism and injustice. Surprisingly, though, her primary interest lies in the ways that Nash was then “held hostage to the God-term Mother” (74). Through a close reading of historical and journalistic accounts of Nash’s activism, Buchanan demonstrates how attention to Nash the Mother elided...