Feminism & Maternal Desire

Excerpted from
Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life
By Daphne DeMarneffe

Every woman's feminism is a love letter to her mother. "For my mother" is the most usual dedication at the start of a feminist book. Each author offers, among other things, her own reading of her mother's life, and if the book is about motherhood, it grapples with her mother's choices and constraints in light of the author's own. This effort takes as many forms as there are feminists. For some, it is about defining oneself in contrast to one's mother. "As much as I loved my mom," writes the journalist Peggy Orenstein in Flux, "I knew I didn't want to be like her." For others, it involves taking the measure of their mother's thwarting at the hands of male power, as Adrienne Rich does in Of Woman Born. For still others, there is the impulse to repair and redeem the limits of one's mother's life through achievement in one's own, as Betty Friedan poignantly described in The Feminine Mystique. Even when a book grieves a mother's absence or betrayal, it is often a cry of pain about what could have been, were it not for the mother's own suffering in a sexist world.

Whatever else feminist discussions about motherhood may be, they are passionate. The disagreements about children and work, the appropriate role of day care, and the needs of mothers, children, and families are not just glib debates or surface differences. They cut to the core of our values and the human purposes we hold dear. And because our ideas arise in the emotional atmosphere of family, from the wordless observations and lessons we take from our closest kin, we often experience our convictions as unformulated ("I don't know how I know it, I just do"). They can feel as close as our breath.

When feelings run deep, as they do about mothers and motherhood, the temptation to make extreme statements is high. Strong emotions have the singular capacity to polarize our thinking, to make us see the world in black and white. Motherhood is a raw, tender point of identity, and its relationship to other aspects of ourselves-our other aspirations, our need to work, our need for solitude-almost inevitably involves a tension. It is hard to sit with that tension, which is one reason discussions of motherhood tend toward a split view of the world.

Where we side depends on what we see as the most essential threat. For those working for gender equality over the past forty years, an enduring concern has been that women will be marched back home, restricting the exercise of their talents and their full participation in political and economic life. Efforts to mobilize public opinion against that regressive alternative have at times oversimplified women's desire to mother and assigned it to a generally backward-looking, sentimental view of women's place. When taken to the extreme, the argument suggests that women's care for their children, the time spent as well as the emotions aroused, is foisted on them by purely external economic and ideological forces. Locating the sources of the desire to mother "out there" may temporarily banish the conflict, but ultimately it backfires, alienating women who feel it does not take into account, or help them to attain, their own valued maternal goals.

For those who identify most strongly with their role as mother, the greatest threat has been that caring for children and the honorable motivations behind it will be minimized and misunderstood, becoming one more source of women's devaluation. Such women feel they suffer not at the hands of traditionalist ideology but rather from the general social devaluation of caregiving, a devaluation with economic and psychological effects. At times, proponents of this position insist on the essential differences between the sexes and the sanctity of conservative-defined "family values." Such views end up alienating both women who question such prescriptive generalizations and those who feel their own sense of self or their aspirations are not reflected by them.

Most of us feel ill at ease at either pole of this debate, because though the poles represent opposing positions, they both flatten the complexity of mothers' own desires. At the extremes, neither offers a way out of a stale and stubborn dichotomy: either mothers don't need (or shouldn't have) to spend their time caring for children, or mothers don't need (or shouldn't have) to pursue other goals and interests. The challenge instead is to formulate a way of thinking about the self that does justice to mothers' range of goals. And the particular facet of that challenge that concerns me is understanding mothers' desire to care for their children as a feature of their self-development and self-expression, rather than as its negation.

In my investigation, feminism has not always helped me. How many times I have encountered a feminist book filled with innovative ideas for changed gender relations, the acceptance of whose argument requires just one small price: that I relinquish my attachment to spending time caring for my children. The argument elucidates how that attachment compromises my bargaining position in marriage and in work; or it anatomizes the origins of that attachment in social ideology, the better to dispel it; or it intimates that in clinging to this attachment, I shirk painful psychological and political growth and prove myself less than rational or less than just. At that moment, I am struck with the feeling that the author and I inhabit truly different emotional worlds. What seems like a rational, sane, and humane solution to her seems like a Faustian bargain to me. The desire to care for children, which she sees as something of a detail or correctable condition, I see as the core issue that psychology and feminism needs to explore.