Modern Maternity

Five recent works address the perennial question of the significance for feminism of the capacity for mothering, the social arrangements that structure its impact on women's lives, and women's efforts to transform the meanings and consequences of motherhood in their own lives and the broader social world. In The Impossibility of Motherhood, Patrice DiQuinzio argues that motherhood is not only a heavily contested domain in the contemporary politics of the United States (and elsewhere), but also is an equally contested site within feminist theory. One of the core principles of feminism is resisting what DiQuinzio calls "essential motherhood," the ideology that defines both the value and essence of women individually and as a group in terms of motherhood. Feminism has also resisted the individualism of Western culture that conceives of humans atomistically, as isolated and independent beings, and produces an understanding of subjectivity as rational, coherent, unified, and stabilized. The chief feminist mode of resistance to individualism has been through difference feminism, "a theoretical discourse that emphasizes the significance of difference for theorizing women's subjectivity and representing women's situations and experiences" (6).

The challenge for feminism, however, is that "when feminist theory appeals to accounts of subjectivity that, unlike individualism, recognize the significance of difference for subjectivity, it may weaken feminism's claim of women's equal subjectivity and thus jeopardize its claim of women's equal entitlement and agency" (6). This circumstance produces a direct tension between the feminist imperative of resisting individualism and that of resisting essential motherhood. Not surprisingly, this tension, DiQuinzio argues, is nowhere more evident than in feminist efforts to theorize motherhood. In order to gain recognition for women as moral agents and political subjects (rather than beings whose destiny, as determined by our bodies, can only be motherhood, understood as servitude to men and children), feminists have participated in various ways in the individualist framework of Western culture. DiQuinzio argues that this use of dominant discourse represents not an unprincipled capitulation to the terms of patriarchy but rather an unavoidable condition of any participation in public discourse under the ideological conditions of the present and the foreseeable future.

DiQuinzio traces this tension in the work of selected feminist theorists to establish what she sees as irresolvable contradictions in any attempt to provide a comprehensive theory of motherhood and its significance for feminism. Her account sheds light on repeated dilemmas in twentieth-century feminist efforts to address mothering, as three examples indicate. First, DiQuinizio illustrates how the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Ellen Key influenced feminism of the 1920s and '30s to take up an individualist notion of mothering, prioritizing the choices of women as individuals, while the need for various forms of social support for mothers went unheeded—despite Gilman's and Key's arguments for the necessity of social support for mothers, a phenomenon that DiQuinzio attributes to the ideological contexts feminists faced at the time. She also illuminates conflicting impulses in Simone de Beauvoir's work: on the one hand, problems of mothering are linked to female embodiment, thus limiting mothering (and potentially women) to the domain of immanence or "being-in-itself"; while on the other hand, Beauvoir also sometimes faults the social organization of mothering for the constraints it places on women's lives, leaving open the possibility that, with social transformation, mothering could be a condition of transcendence, "being-for-itself." Finally, Adrienne Rich and Patricia Hill Collins each mount a simultaneous challenge to individualism and essential motherhood that is successful in many ways, yet in DiQuinzio...