Challenging female roles and spaces: Adrienne Rich's of woman born. Motherhood as experience and institution

Abstract

Being a woman has traditionally meant pigeonholing in certain roles and spheres that have been determined from the outside by a patriarchal hegemonic system that has tried to keep women away from the public, cultural, and intellectual life and, therefore, from decision-making. This has led women to both subalternity and personal and social silencing: women had to stay at home and fulfill secondary roles always subordinate to those of men: housekeeper, wife and mother. Motherhood has therefore become not merely an option that, obviously, only women can carry out if they desire to, but it has been imposed on them, considering that a woman who is not a mother is not a woman at all (as Rich states about women who do not desire to be mothers: “Perhaps one is a monster –an anti-woman– something driven and without recourse to the normal and appealing consolations of love, motherhood, joy in others…” (Rich, 1986, 22).

In her work Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, published in 1976, American writer Adrienne Rich presents for the first time a study on motherhood in which it does not appear as an idealized experience, but in which the political aspects of motherhood are broken down instead. It offers an interesting distinction between the experience of motherhood and the institution of motherhood, and invites us to reflect on the oppression that being mothers in the way that the system dictates that they should be entails for women.

This article has the aim of analyzing the main issues that this non fiction work contributes to feminist studies, analyzing the different impositions that are made on women through motherhood from a feminist perspective.