Motherhood Reconceived: Feminism an...

Motherhood Reconceived: Feminism and the Legacies of the Sixties

Umansky's treatise begins in rejoinder to Sylvia Ann Hewlett's statement in 1986 that the women's change had ignored the needs of mothers and children, or had equable treated those needs with contumely By virtue of sheer whirl Umansky argues to the contrary that this corpse of feminist writing on motherhood merits analysis and that "feminists, like other thinkers, build layers of theory and then pause to examine what they have built." (159) The reason for the early attention of women's liberationists of the 1960 1970 and 1980 Umansky asserts, was their situation within a wider cultivation that was highly pronatalist and Freudian influenced.

Although there was a conscious rejection of the "bourgeois wife and mother" syndrome feminists "paid heavy homage to the topic." (14) However, she claims that feminist thinking about motherhood drew smooth more directly from the civil rights motion the New Left, and the counterculture Thus the view of motherhood that emerg collectively from these assign places tos included the rejection of technology, the search for authentic experience, and the revalorization of nature that went hand in hand with reclamation of the dead body and search for community and equality. In the broadest intellect she concludes, these writings "reveal an evolution within feminist deliberation toward more and more positive views of mothering." (159)

Even as feminists drew on the critical view of motherhood and the nuclear family prevalent in the of recent origin Left, she argues, "they also registered the pro-motherhood views of the counterculturalists and radical black activists of the 1960 and 1970s" (159) She notes that women's health activists and writers "joined forces with counterculturalists and other proponent of natural childbirth to forward midwifery and breastfeeding as curative of many of the incommodes of an overly technological and male-dominated culture" (159) Hence, although starting on the outside itself as a rejection of motherhood. the feminist writing that emerg from the union of interests neared motherhood in extremely positive terms

Early in succession Umansky writes, motherhood had been an important axis along which theory has evolv She re-establishs with careful documentation how ethnically diverse still predominantly white theorists were forced by way of women of color, by working class women and "by the integrity of their concede leftist politics" (5) to deal with contradictions of race and class differences.

In Chapter Three she discusses black nationalist pronatalism, black feminism, and the inquiry for a multiracial women's manner of moving She documents considerable reaching not at home into the community, and provides a useful compendium for any mother publicly mothering in alternative modes, proper to the conscious and unconscious influence of the early women's liberation motion which was not "only for bright, young middle class women who have decided at no time to marry or never to have children" (quote from emotion document letter "It Ain't Me Babe," September 17 1970 35)

Of particular interest to those effacing the radical primitive words of the early women's liberation motion of the second wave, she reprints the declarations of WITCH in support of Panther women on a level though the group was also known for its condemnation of Mother's Day. She mentions the irony that those who were in other connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughtss decrying motherhood as a patriarchal ruse were in this case trying to align themselves with black women by means of using a rough theory of motherhood as a universalizing issue for women in that they were focusing onward the treatment of confined women who were pregnant or who had just given birth. Moral rather than legal arguments were used.

She then traces, in Chapter Four, the rise of "Mother Right" as a universalizing theory in the mid 1970 when many feminists shifted away from trying to eradicate sex parts towards setting up what she calls a "female culture" "Mother Right," she argues, emerg as a salve for factionalism that was splitting the mental action and sundering sisterhood apart. In particular, she focuses forward the publication of a communication in M Magazine (editor's note: original printing in against our backs, May 1973, v3 n8 page 22) of the leftist militant Jane Alpert who had gone subterranean where she traced her acknowledge disenchantment with the male left From there she mov forward towards her own feminist theory embracing the uniqueness of female biology, because, as Umansky names Alpert, "female biology is the basis of women's powers." (110) She notes that Alpert shifted from the materialist landed estates of Marxism to mysticism in making this universalist claim. (111) Alpert believed that feminism would draw abroad into daily existence the "motherliness" that was cloaked over by patriarchy, but if tapped, would bring forward the feminist millennium. Alpert saw motherhood as the potential that could come up to bond all women. over and above Umansky also notes that while white feminists had begun to explore matriarchy and its meanings for women in the 1970 calm as early as 1968, this was more tentative than African American women's immediate be in agony with the issue. She traces the history of the matriarchy conception or theory through such clumps as The Feminists and small cavity 16 and discusses documents printed in Notes from the Third Year, following matriarchal, mother right and maternal thinking ideas from the early conversations of 1968 through Big Mama Rag, Robin Morgan, Susan Griffin, and Sara Ruddick.