“When feelings run deep, as they do about mothers and motherhood, the temptation to make extreme statements is high… Motherhood is a raw, tender point of identity, and its relationship to other aspects of ourselves – our other aspirations, our need to work, our need for solitude – almost inevitably involves a tension. It is hard to sit with that tension, which is one reason discussions of motherhood tend toward a split view of the world.
Where we side depends on what we see as the most essential threat. For those working for gender equality over the past forty years, an enduring concern has been that women will be marched back home, restricting the exercise of their talents and their full participation in political and economic life. Efforts to mobilize public opinion against that regressive alternative have at times oversimplified women’s desire to mother and assigned it to a generally backward-looking, sentimental view of women’s place. When taken to the extreme, the argument suggests that women’s care for their children, the time spent as well as the emotions aroused, is foisted on them by purely external economic and ideological forces. Locating the sources of the desire to mother “out there” may temporarily banish the conflict, but ultimately it backfires, alienating women who feel it does not take into account, or help them to attain, their own valued maternal goals.
For those who identify most strongly with their role as mother, the greatest threat has been that caring for children and the honorable motivations behind it will be minimized and misunderstood, becoming one more source of women’s devaluation. Such women feel they suffer not at the hands of traditionalist ideology but rather from the general social devaluation of caregiving, a devaluation with economic and psychological effects. At times, proponents of this position insist on the essential differences between the sexes and the sanctity of conservative-defined “family values”. Such views end up alienating both women who question such prescriptive generalizations and those who feel their own sense of self or their aspirations are not reflected by them.
Most of us feel ill at ease at either pole of this debate, because though the poles represent opposing position, they both flatten the complexity of mothers’ own desires. ”
From Maternal Desire by Daphne de Marneffe. And I am really enjoying reading this book.
Such a great quote! Thank you for sharing it.
I may have to read her book now.
Wow. Just, wow.
Off to order my own copy….
Sounds like something I should read, eight years into mothering as I now am and still confused about how to combine that with my feminism, my need to work and my need to be alone!
I trashpicked this book and started reading it almost by accident; despite the fact that I write about parenting, I hadn’t heard of it before. And I couldn’t put it down once I started. It is just so smart and sensitively written, and its insights aren’t just limited to motherhood–I ended up quoting it pretty extensively on my book about fatherhood.
[…] 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 […]
[…] then you can’t entirely blame feminists like Badinter for being nervous about any ambitions to elevate motherhood either. They haven’t seen much good come out of the institution of motherhood for women […]
The real beneficiaries of the gender feminists activities across the last three decades have been…men!
An increasingly number find that the traditional expectation for them to be married by the age of 30 (a concept going back to Jane Austen’s time) has been magically removed, as society turns it’s back from both marriage and the idea of settling-down, in even a long-term relationship.
So now we find many more men able to enjoy the high life, unencumbered by having to work to pay for the family house…able to purchase that new car, that new Apple laptop/iPhone…able to chase down that job in any city, any country, without having to think ‘what about the children?’
And its remarkable how easily they adapt to this world, leaving society with the now prevalent nightmare scenario of over-30’s women who have dedicated the early part of their working lives to fostering a career, finding out suddenly that there just ain’t enough men who will settle down, who will make decent partners/husbands/fathers…because they are too busy being eternal boys.
And so it will be left for women to exclusively bring up children, returning us in a fashion to the traditions of the past. But for many women it will lead to a life of poverty and injustice, because even the old model of the woman as mother and the father as breadwinner goes out-of-the-window, replaced by woman as mother, and man as, well, aging colt.
Now that’s some ‘revolution’. In the end the concerns of some fathers groups will dissipate, as fewer and fewer actually show any interest in the subject in any case, having been effectively ‘let off the leash’ for ever.
[…] that I found most poignant was her description of maternal desire and the way in which that can call into question some of the assumptions you held as a feminist before motherhood. Like, am I fighting to be able to return to the workplace or am I really now fighting to be at […]
[…] think this reframing of motherhood goes a long way towards explaining why mothers might feel feminism has failed them. It is also why Toni Morrison’s quote, on this list of mine, has been such a favourite with […]
[…] Maternal Desire by Daphne de Marneffe. This one is recommended by blue milk. […]
[…] still reading Daphne de Marneffe’s Maternal Desire and her writing was fresh in my mind when I read Twisty’s post. De Marneffe really perturbed me when she […]
[…] Take this piece by blue milk: But then you can’t entirely blame feminists like Badinter for being nervous about any ambitions to elevate motherhood either. They haven’t seen much good come out of the institution of motherhood for women – […]
[…] then you can’t entirely blame feminists like Badinter for being nervous about any ambitions to elevate motherhood either. They haven’t seen much good come out of the institution of motherhood for women […]