[Mixed] motives—to enlarge "feminist theory" and to express a personal experience of a fateful kind—account for the title of Adrienne Rich's book [Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution]. Motherhood as experience appears in autobiographical episodes interspersed through much longer reflections attempting to analyze motherhood as a social institution. It is impossible to discuss either the autobiography or the analysis without raising the problem of partisan writing.

The autobiography is retold by a convinced feminist, reinterpreting her past in the light of her present convictions. All autobiographies construct a myth of explanation; some are more complex than others; some authors are conscious of the limitations of their myths (as Yeats was in discussing his "masks"). Though Rich is conscious that she has not always interpreted her life as she now does, her present myth is not offered as provisional; instead, the current interpretation of events of the past forty years, from childhood to liberation, is offered as the definitive one. (p. 263)

It is not surprising that a woman who, at this stage in her life, represents her father as seducer, cruel controller, intellectual critic of her first poetic attempts, and angered despot, should find herself protesting the control that a society which she regards as male-dominated, and therefore cruel, exerts over women. It is not suggested in these pages that a woman with a different sort of upbringing—or a woman with the same upbringing who interpreted it differently—might have arrived at different political or cultural feelings. (p. 264)

Rich interprets history as a phylogenetic analogue to her own ontogenetic myth. Once there were "prepatriarchal" periods of human culture which "shared certain kinds of woman-centered beliefs and woman-centered social organization."… In "prepatriarchal" times, while men hunted, "women became the civilizers, the inventors of agriculture, of community, some maintain of language itself." Then, in the feminist version of the Fall, society extirpated the worship of the Mother-Goddess in her various forms, instituted monotheism, and devised the patriarchal family…. To the patriarchal system, represented by "rapism and the warrior mentality," "the death-culture of quantification, abstractions, and the will-to-power," Rich opposes the "maternal" or "nurturant" spirit, now oppressed and confined in institutionalized motherhood.

Both of these myths—the personal narrative and the historical reconstruction—refuse full existential reality to men…. It is disheartening to see any of our ruling ideologies … able to seduce a poetic mind, able to make a poet choose (in [Octavio] Paz's terms) "the rhetoric of violence." In Rich, the rhetoric of violence is accompanied by a rhetoric of sentimentality, as though, in having chosen to ally herself with a female principle in opposition to a putative male one, she has adopted a language of uncritical deliquescence…. To find language better than that of greeting-card verse to express the sentiments of love is the poet's task: the rest of us are not equal to it. In lapsing so often into cliché in this volume, Rich has failed her own feelings.

And yet, for all the impatience it provokes, the book has a certain cumulative force, not so much on account of its theorizing as because of its undeniable feelings and its unarguable social facts. Some of these are frequent in feminist publications …; others, mostly dealing with motherhood, are less familiar. As Rich remarks, there is remarkably little written at all about motherhood. Most of what exists, in documentary and in narrative, has been written by male doctors, psychologists, sociologists, or anthropologists. The scanty testimony of females is still being unearthed…. The reason for the dearth of information and analysis, of course, is that motherhood is profoundly uninteresting to men…. Men do not read books on motherhood. They will not read this one.

This is a great pity…. [But oddly] enough, Rich did not, at least when she was a young mother, see her children as a subject which could engage the female imagination…. (pp. 264-66)

Rich's vocabulary of selfhood is troubling in its assumtions: "Institutionalized motherhood demands of women maternal 'instinct' rather than intelligence, selflessness rather than self-realization, relation to others rather than the creation of self." Rich is here speaking of the ideals held up to mothers by society, and her disjunctions imply that she endorses her set of opposing terms—intelligence, self-realization, the creation of self. But how is the self realized and created except by relations to others; and why is a "selfless" realization not so self-actualizing as a "selfish" one? Even the notion of "selflessness" is, as we know, a suspect one. The relation of altruism to self-interest, the relation of "instinct" to "intelligence," are questions begged in such quick summaries. Elsewhere, Rich endorses a concept of "intelligence" which would include something she calls, rather melodramatically, "thinking through the body."…

Rich's concept—that an inclusive consciousness is to be preferred to a disembodied or repressed one—is one endorsed in every century anew, and found too painful by most inhabitants of every century except for the greatest artists. But Rich's language ignores the honorable history of this idea, and espouses inclusiveness as a "new form of thinking" to be practiced by women, who will thereby free themselves from the death-culture of abstraction and quantification. Why not tell women to imitate Keats or Shakespeare? There are models for such "thinking through the body"; that they are men does not vitiate their usefulness. (pp. 266-67)

Rich avoids a confrontation with the differences, even in modern America, between ethnic and economic groups in their perception of the difficulties and satisfactions of motherhood…. In criticizing, implicitly or explicitly, women who do not share her views…. Rich seems to attribute stupidity, bad faith, or self-delusion to all women not yet radical. There are no doubt real elements of historical and social evil which contribute to the oppression of women…. On the other hand, the puritanical regrouping of women without men, the new theology of male evil, the prejudices of radical feminism, the rewriting of history do not offer a solution to the problems they confront.

Too often the argument here collects only the evidence which seems attractive. The wish is the father to the deed. (pp. 267-68)

Rich says of The First Sex by Elizabeth Gould Davis that though it is "at times inaccurate, biased, unprofessional—all these charges do not really dismiss it … [Davis tries] to prime the imagination of women living today to conceive of other modes of existence." The same might be said of Rich's own book….

Its value lies in reminding us that different conceptions of motherhood are possible; that motherhood is not necessarily congenial in the same way to every woman; that the "failures" of mothers in past generations were often socially caused … that "an indifference and fatalism toward the diseases of women … persists to this day in the male gynecological and surgical professions"; that birth itself "is neither a disease nor a surgical operation"; that a woman should be able to choose her own style of giving birth; that men may for a long time, as the roles of parenthood change, "need a kind of compensatory education in the things about which their education as males has left them illiterate"; that "the cathexis between mother and daughter is the great unwritten story." But it would have been preferable if the whole book had been as cogent as these remarks. (p. 270)