From motherhood to mothering : the legacy of Adrienne Rich's Of woman born
"Of Woman Born is not only a wide-ranging, far-reaching meditation on the meaning and experience of motherhood that draws from the disciplines of anthropology, feminist theory, psychology, and literature, but it also narrates Rich's personal reflections on her experiences of mothering. Andrea O'Reilly gathers feminist scholars from diverse disciplines such as literature, women's studies, law, sociology, anthropology, creative writing, and critical theory and examines how Of Woman Born has informed and influenced the way feminist scholarship "thinks and talks" about motherhood. The contributors explore the many ways in which Rich provides the analytical tools to study and report upon the meaning and experience of motherhood."--Jacket
Print Book, English, ©2004
State University of New York Press, Albany, ©2004
ix, 251 pages ; 23 cm
9780791462874, 9780791462881, 0791462870, 0791462889
54103821
Part 1. Motherhood as institution : patriarchal power and maternal outrage. The Supreme Court of Canada and what it means to be "of woman born" / Diana Ginn ; Of party-state born : motherhood, reproductive politics, and the Chinese nation-state / Sarah E. Stevens ; Murderous mothers : Adrienne Rich's Of woman born and Toni Morrison's Beloved / Emily Jeremiah
Part 2. Mothering as experience : empowerment and resistance. "We have mama but no papa" : motherhood in women-centered societies / Maria-Barbara Watson-Franke ; Mother as transformer : strategic symbols of matrilineage recuperation in Princess Pocahontas and the blue spots / Dannabang Kuwabong ; Of woman (but not man or the nuclear family) born : motherhood outside institutionalized heterosexuality / Kate McCullough ; Feminist mothers : successfully negotiating the tension between motherhood as "institution" and "experience" / Fiona Joy Green ; Immortality and morality in contemporary reworkings of the Demeter/Persephone myth / Karin Voth Harman ; Mothering against motherhood and the possibility of empowered maternity for mothers and their children / Andrea O'Reilly ; The broken shovel : looking back from postmaternity at co-parenting / Margaret Morganroth Gullette
Part 3. Narrating maternity : writing as a mother. Adrienne Rich's "Clearing in the imagination" : Of woman born as literary criticism / D'Arcy Randall ; A "sense of drift" : Adrienne Rich's emergence from mother to poet / Jeannette E. Riley ; Beginning with "I" : the legacy of Adrienne Rich's Of woman born / Ann Keniston