Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

by Adrienne Rich, Eula Biss (Introduction)

Overview

The pathbreaking investigation into motherhood and womanhood from an influential and enduring feminist voice, now for a new generation.

In Of Woman Born, originally published in 1976, influential poet and feminist Adrienne Rich examines the patriarchic systems and political institutions that define motherhood. Exploring her own experience—as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother—she finds the act of mothering to be both determined by and distinct from the institution of motherhood as it is imposed on all women everywhere. A “powerful blend of research, theory, and self-reflection” (Sandra M. Gilbert, Paris Review), Of Woman Born revolutionized how women thought about motherhood and their own liberation. With a stirring new foreword from National Book Critics Circle Award–winning writer Eula Biss, the book resounds with as much wisdom and insight today as when it was first written.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393541427
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/27/2021
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) was an award-winning poet, influential essayist, radical feminist, and major public intellectual of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry, including the National Book Award–winning Diving into the Wreck, and more than a half-dozen of prose.

Eula Biss is the author of three acclaimed books, including On Immunity. She lives in Illinois.

Table of Contents

Of Institution Born Eula Biss xi

Reading Of Woman Born in 2020 Dani McClain xxi

Introduction: 1986 xxvii

Foreword lix

I Anger and Tenderness 1

II The "Sacred Calling" 24

III The Kingdom of the Fathers 41

IV The Primacy of the Mother 73

V The Domestication of Motherhood 101

VI Hands of Flesh, Hands of Iron 120

VII Alienated Labor 152

VIII Mother and Son, Woman and Man 186

IX Motherhood and Daughterhood 221

X Violence: The Heart of Maternal Darkness 264

Afterword 293

Notes 299

Credits 317

Index 321