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Motherhood: Patriarchal Perversion

Adrienne Rich. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1976.

Badinter, Elisabeth. Mother Love: Myth and Reality. New York: MacMillan, 1981.

By Mary Walsh

Motherhood is perhaps the most emotionally ambivalent state a woman, particularly a feminist, can experience. A mother feels bliss, pride and tremendous satisfaction from her children; she also often feels resentment, depression and even hatred toward them. These latter emotions, however, have only recently been acknowledged; prior to the advent of the modern women's movement, a woman who admitted negative feelings toward her children, or toward motherhood itself, was branded-even by herself as "unnatural".

Why have women felt so guilty about what are, after all, perfectly natural emotions, deriving from the immersion of one's own life into those of her children? Because for centuries, the concept rather than the reality of motherhood has been institutionalized and used by a patriarchal society, very successfully, to devalue women and keep them from the sources of power.

That this was not always so is pointed out in two excellent books dealing with the perversion by maledominated society of the concepts of motherhood and mother love. The first, Of Woman Born, by Adrienne Rich, a poet, teacher and mother, was published in 1976. It is a passionate denunciation of the patriarchal system's isolation and debasement of women, using both motherhood and childlessness as reasons to frustrate women's efforts in any field other than reproduction of the species. The other book, Mother Love: Myth and Reality, by Elisabeth Badinter, was published in France last year and rapidly became a bestseller there. It was translated and published in the U.S. in October. Badinter, a professor of philosophy at the Ecole Polytechnique of Paris and also a mother, has written a welldocumented intellectual rebuttal of the idea that "maternal instinct" is universal to all normal women. The two books draw from different sources and come to some different conclusions, particularly regarding men, but they are in agreement that the concept of motherhood has been used by the male power structure to deny women their full humanity.

Rich draws on psychological studies and on history to show how men's deep-rooted fear of women has led them to construct systems of thought and institutions through which power is granted solely to the male and in which everything uniquely female, such as motherhood, is given secondary status or otherwise debased. In prehistoric times, as shown by archeological evidence found throughout much of the world, there were periods when women were venerated in several aspects, including the maternal. As power became concentrated in men, however, the devaluation of woman proceeded to its current state, where men have taken over even such historically totally female provinces as assisting at childbirth. Rich's discussion of the struggle for male control of midwifery and the concomitant invention in the 16th century of metal obstetrical forceps to replace the softer, more sensitive hands of the midwife is particularly revealing of the methods used by patriarchy over the centuries to wrest power from women.

Rich also includes a provocative discussion of the ambivalent relations between mothers and sons, drawing on her own experience as the mother of three sons during the 1950's. She castigates Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex, leading as it does to the idea of the mother-son relationship being inherently regressive, dependent and unproductive, with pro-

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gress and culture depending solely on the father-son bond.

are

However, Rich is hopeful that development of the positive aspects of the mother-daughter relationship will help destroy, patriarchy. All women daughters, and many of them have experienced their mothers' victimization at the hands of patriarchy. Because of the mother's self-hatred and low expectations, and the daughter's resentment of her mother's example, the psychic interplay between them can be and often is destructive. This need not be so:

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.

Thus motherhood is now beginning to be perceived by feminist women as an avenue toward fulfillment rather than solely as a source of oppression. However, as Elisabeth Badinter points out in her book, this shift in emphasis has happened before,

with disastrous results from women who had previously achieved some emancipation.

Badinter traces maternal behavior in France from the fourteenth century to the present, concluding that the "mother love" is not a law of nature, as men would have us believe, but rather is closely tied to the environment, social mores and government policies. For centuries, many mothers swung between indifference and outright rejection of their children, as shown by the widespread practice of farming out newborn infants to wet-nurses, sometimes for as long as four years. In 1780, for example, of the 21,000 babies born in Paris, 19,000 were sent out to be wetnursed, leaving their mothers free to pursue other aims and activities.

With rising nationalism and industrialization, however, children became a natural resource and motherhood the "manifest destiny" of all women. The concept of the nuclear family, held together by mother love, came into vogue. Political leaders encouraged this trend, as did the theories of Freud and Helene Deutsch with their emphasis on maternal masochism. A mother was revered by society-but actual power remained with men.

Badinter suggests, however, that men as well as (continued on page 10)

Margie Adam Performs

By Alice

Margie Adam's concert at Kent State University's University Auditorium on Sunday evening, April 25, drew two standing ovations from an audience of about 200 women and men. My guess is that enthusiasm was an affirming response to both the message and the medium, and not a little to the smooth delivery of both.

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Adam's is a polished style with lots of interesting resources for an audience to focus on and relish. Her Berkeley, California home base almost guarantees her a sense of the leading edge of the "progressive" and "women's" movements, which she avowed several times are alive and well in even remote spots in this country. The lyrics of her songs and her relaxed, chatty monologue held compassion, encouragement, comfortable companiable familiarity that dissolved the artist-listener barrier and established a high degree of community throughout the evening. Her messages-directed to women and men who seek to redress oppression, violence to living things, and bias-were successfully transmitted in this setting in relatively low-profile statements.

In "Mama Lion," for example, she celebrated Malvina, a septuagenarian role model for her own decision to enter a public concert career that necessitated the courage to love and take control of her own life. There were moments, as in "Fury" and her new "Babychild," that suggested defiant resistance to all-too-common brutal intrusion of societal authorities in the lives of those who, like lesbian mothers, experience a double vulnerability by their unpopular or atypical lifestyle and their role as parent to equally vulnerable young children. The lyrical side of her life, with both the scars and the joys, showed up too; in "Love Song" and "Tender Lady," rounding off a full perspective of issues and events that have shaped her perspective and expression in her music.

Adam's music seems, unexpectedly, doublelayered. On one hand, in general her melodic ideas, basic harmonic structures, and vocal demands are relatively ordinary to anyone whose training is in this field; she uses these elements well and has a nice variety of technical options to pull from. Her

judicious selection of materials in the second half of the concert especially provided a satisfying pace at Kent. She is adequate and certainly interesting vocally, with a pleasing color to her voice, although by late in the concert there were signs of fatigue that suggested a few vocal production flaws.

On the other hand, though, Adam herself clearly recognizes her pianistic strength as superior to her vocal abilities. There was plenty of evidence to corroborate her reputation as a talented keyboard artist. "Naked Keys," a longish instrumental solo which gives her new album its title, is rich in motion and plenty easy to listen to. More intriguing than "Keys," though, is the degree to which her keyboard accompaniments to her songs draw on Bach-like progresions of rhythmic, harmonic, and keyboard patterns. At Kent, her discussion of the development of her musical style suggested that she settled on the baroque-sounding perpetual motion as a means to transcend potentially deadly repeated block chords, but she has almost backed into another problem of having to avoid monotony in this heightened keyboard style. "Naked Keys" as a solo doesn't escape the problem largely because it's built on too simple a harmonic progression, and the keyboard style, fairly heavy and unchanging throughout, flashes a lot but seems not to go far in lifting the work to extraordinary musical levels. Curiously, the most interesting work musically is still "Sleazy,' which has exceptionally fine descriptive chromatic harmonic progressions and delightful metrical slips that give the song unusual elasticity and verve.

Any thought of the Kent concert would be incomplete without mentioning the contribution of Juliet Johnson, who signed all the verbal information for the hearing impaired. Johnson is a talented Cleveland-area, actress/communicator whose body language and facial expressions vividly reinforced the verbal content of the concert. She's tremendously flexible in her capacity to express conversational patterns as distinct from song texts, and certainly rose to the occasion when Adam suddenly decided to spring "Sleazy" on the audience on the spur of the moment.

Margie Adam and her cohort Juliet Johnson are another feather in the cap of Kent's Tenth Muse Productions-long may they continue!