Two interviews with the author of ‘Maternal Desire’

Our feminist mothers group discussed Maternal Desire: On Children, Love and the Inner Life by Daphne de Marneffe this month. And it was a fascinating discussion, enhanced by the diversity of the group that evening – intergenerational mothers were among the attendees, and so was an Iranian mother who has immigrated with her husband to Australia to undertake PhDs.

Alas, I have not finished reading this book yet and can’t express any definitive views about it. All I can say is that it is so worth the read and that it is really giving some of my views a good, hard shake (while entirely confirming others). 

Here are two interviews with Daphne de Marneffe. One with the Mothers Movement Online and one here with Salon. The interviews themselves are stimulating enough, imagine what the book is like -

There’s so much talk about the wonders of motherhood — but you don’t take the gushing at face value, do you?

There is always ambivalence, whether you choose to stay at home with your children full time or work full time or somewhere in between. People “solve” their ambivalence by idealizing a choice, or an approach to being a mother, and it becomes this rigidified, This is the way to do it; I’m better because I do it this way. I wanted to step back and critique the tendency toward polarization, with people shoring up their self-esteem by identifying with their mothering choices. The truth is, you’ve never madethe perfect choice; there are always trade-offs.

That said, you don’t view sentimentality about motherhood as some nefarious right-wing plot to keep women in their places.

I think it needs to be explained why these idealizations hold power for people. I don’t subscribe to a model where cultural images can straightforwardly impose ideas on us. It’s incredibly important to many people to feel like they’re good parents, to raise their children well, so all these sentimental images are like dreams, paths for visualizing, Oh, that’s the way to do it.

And you think there’s a lot of stuff out there about how unrewarding motherhood is that’s gone unchallenged.

Freedom and self-determination have been more closely allied with the idea that you might choose not to be a mother. I wanted to open up the idea that women do this out of desire. They don’t only do it because they’re biologically equipped to do it, or society has insisted that they do it, or that they’ve lacked birth control for most of human history. There’s something that’s self-fulfilling, that’s wanted.