Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

by Adrienne Rich

Overview

Adrienne Rich's influential and landmark investigation concerns both the experience and the institution of motherhood.

The experience is her own—as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother—but it is an experience determined by the institution, imposed on all women everywhere. She draws on personal materials, history, research, and literature to create a document of universal importance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393348101
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/03/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	772 KB

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.

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