Mother of Invention: How Our Mothers Influenced Us as Feminist Acadamics and Activists

Activists

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Mother of invention : how our mothers influenced us as feminist academics and activists / Vanessa Reimer and Sarah Sahagian, editors.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-927335-17-8

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada.

Mother of Invention

How Our Mothers Influenced Us

as Feminist Academics and Activists

edited by

VANESSA REIMER AND SARAH SAHAGIAN

DEMETER PRESS, BRADFORD, ONTARIO

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction:

The Invention of Our Book

Vanessa Reimer and Sarah Sahagian

the alarm

Tracy Royce

Chapter One

Impressions of my Mother:

On Willfulness and Passionate Scholarship

Rachel O’Neill

Chapter Two

Feminism as Practice:

Valuing a Feminist Motherline in the Age of Neoliberalism

Melinda Vandenbeld Giles

Chapter Three

Tell Them You’re a Mexican, and Other Motherly Advice

Karleen Pendleton Jiménez

Chapter Four

The Bungalow Mystery: Me, My Mother, and Nancy Drew

Donna Sharkey

Chapter Five

Mothering, Paid Work and Activism:

Complementary Dimensions of a Common Vocation

Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich

Chapter Six

It’s about 1000 Miles from Oaxaca, Mexico to San Antonio, Texas and About 2000 Miles from California to Indiana

Angelica Duran

Chapter Seven

A Life Not Lost

Allison Weir

Chapter Eight

A Matrilineal Narrative: My Chinese Mother and I

Evelyn Chan

Chapter Nine

M/Aligning Mother:

Queering & Feminist-ing Matroreform

Joani Mortenson

Chapter Ten

Carrying Generational Baggage: How Crises of Physical and

Mental Health Shaped Me as a Feminist Psychologist

Diana Milillo

Chapter Eleven

The Dish Ran Away with the Spoon:

The Unexpected and Enduring Promise

of My Mother’s Kitchen Teachings

Deborah Schnitzer

Chapter Twelve

Matriarchal Mothering of a First-Generation Feminist Academic

Phyllisa Smith Deroze

Chapter Thirteen

I Love You, Mom: One Daughter’s Journey Toward Appreciating Her Mother with the Assistance of Maternal Theory

Sarah Sahagian

Chapter Fourteen

A (Christian) Feminist’s Thoughts on Religious Mothering,

Sexual Purity, and Pat Robertson

Vanessa Reimer

Chapter Fifteen

Lentils in the Ashes:

Excavating the Fragments of Ancestral Feminism

Janice Okoomian

Chapter Sixteen

Happy Birthday Mom!

Gary Lee Pelletier

Contributor Notes

Acknowledgements

It is often said that it takes a village to raise a child. In our experience, it also takes a village to publish a book. We would like to thank everyone who made this collection possible. First, we must thank our contributors for trusting us with your thoughts and experiences. Your beautiful words teach us something new every time we read them. It was our great privilege to work with each and every one of you.

Next, we must thank our insightful and wonderfully thorough reviewers May Friedman, Fiona Green and Jane Tolmie. Your notes were central to the development of this anthology.

Thank you to our friends at MIRCI, who helped provide the support we needed to edit the first academic collection of our careers.

We thank Demeter Press for believing in this project and giving us the opportunity to pursue it. We are grateful and humbled that this book has found a home with a press that has published so many brilliant feminist theorists.

Of course, this book would not have been possible at all without the guidance and support of the indomitable Andrea O’Reilly. Andrea, you inspire us every day, as a feminist, as an academic, and as a mother. Your strength and dedication to the project of motherhood studies is invaluable to your students, to your readers, and to the world.

Finally, thank you to our mothers for their love and nurturing. You may not have intended to raise the feminist daughters we became, and yet shaping our feminist identities is one of the greatest gifts you ever gave us.

Introduction

The Invention of Our Book

VANESSA REIMER AND SARAH SAHAGIAN

A folder lies open beside me as I start to write, spilling out references and quotations, all relevant probably, but none of which can help me begin. This is the core of my book, and I enter it as a woman who, born between her mother’s legs, has time after time and in different ways tried to return to her mother, to repossess her and be repossessed by her.

—Adrienne Rich (218)

THUS BEGINS Adrienne Rich’s chapter Motherhood and Daughterhood in her seminal text Of Woman Born (1976). Here she comments on the deeply emotional and political journey that she embarked on while writing her book as she learned to relate to her mother in a new way, outside the narrow discursive framework which the dominant patriarchal institution of motherhood prescribes. As we now write the introduction for this anthology, we wonder if Rich realized how many similar matrilineal journeys she would inspire when she initially wrote these words nearly four decades ago. After all, Mother of Invention did start off as a journey—literally. If York University were not a commuter school, and if we had not opted to live so far away from campus, this book may never have been conceived, let alone written. One spring day following our Feminist Research Methods class in 2011, we were on the subway ride home together chatting away about our upcoming dissertation projects when one of us said to the other, I think all feminist academics I know seem to go into academia in part because of experiences with their mothers.

Now, of course this was a gross generalization, an impossibly large hyperbole, and yet it was a statement that felt true to our experiences. We could both cite how our mothers had inspired our feminist consciousnesses, whether or not they were trying to raise feminist daughters. We could also both attest to the ways in which feminist maternal theory helped to drastically transform the ways we had come to understand, relate to, and communicate about our mothers, in contrast to the blame and judgment that mothers are otherwise subjected to for anything that goes awry in their children’s lives. While we know it cannot possibly be true that feminist consciousness is always inspired by a mother figure, as there is no monolithic feminist experience, this connection was certainly true to our own experiences, and we couldn’t help but wonder how many other feminists might say the same. Thus began our journey with Mother of Invention.

NAMING OUR BOOK

One often hears people remark that necessity is the mother of invention. This can be a convoluted observation—however, after editing this book, we have come to understand it in a new light. While mothers certainly have agency, they are also constrained by the ideological and material conditions that inform and restrict their choices. At the same time, the necessity to mother within a society that frequently devalues the maternal role elicits a plethora of pragmatic and creative parenting styles from a broad spectrum of women (and men) with a wealth of diverse experiences. This sense of creativity and innovation is a necessary component of any mother’s work, and we have begun to understand how so many variations in maternal practice can still inspire feminist consciousness in the children who are nurtured and sustained by them. This realization has also allowed us to think more deeply about the ways in which we know our mothers, and has inspired us to identify with and affirm the work that our mothers have performed, especially when it falls beyond the narrow paradigm of what good mothering should look like. And so the title of this book aims to communicate the two key goals that we hope to achieve herein: to explore the many-varied ways that feminist and non-feminist mothers alike inspire feminist consciousness in their children simply by performing the necessity of motherwork, and to invent new feminist motherlines as an antidote to our culture’s dominant discourses of matrophobia and mother-blame.

WHAT IT MEANS TO MOTHER

During our time in York University’s Women’s Studies Ph.D. program, we have both had the opportunity to take Andrea O’Reilly’s groundbreaking course on maternal theory. Therein we were privileged enough to engage with the writings of feminist scholars who helped us grow to see motherhood not only as a subject that demands investigation and critical understanding, but also as a patriarchal institution that demands reform. Here Rich has been particularly influential. It may be an understatement to suggest that Of Woman Born introduced a discursive juggernaut of sorts—not only by inspiring the development of maternal theory and motherhood studies as feminist academic disciplines, but also by raising new and critical questions about what we believe to know about mothers in contemporary Western culture. Here she explains that "I try to distinguish between two meanings of motherhood, one superimposed on the other: the potential relationship of any woman to her power of reproduction and to children; and the institution, which aims at ensuring that potential—and all women—shall remain under male control (13). Furthermore, in defining motherhood as a patriarchal institution, Rich contends that Under patriarchy, female possibility has been literally massacred on the site of motherhood" (13).

Sarah Ruddick’s similarly influential text Maternal Thinking (1995) further challenges the patriarchal definitions of motherhood by constructing mothering as work which involves theory and practice (xi) rather than being an essentialist role that is tied to female biology. To that end, anyone can perform the work of mothering, regardless of gender. As she explains, to be involved in the practice of mothering is to take upon oneself the responsibility of child care, making its work a regular and substantial part of one’s working life (17). This work materializes in three key demands—preservation, growth, and acceptability (19-21). Of course these demands can often take a heavy personal toll on those who are expected to perform motherwork, as Fiona Joy Green explores in the Encyclopedia of Motherhood. She explains how under current ideals and expectations (347) of patriarchal motherhood, this work of mothering becomes particularly demanding. She goes on to explain how mothers are expected to find true fulfillment in mothering, to happily sacrifice their own needs and wants for the good of their children, and to find mothering more important than paid employment (347). This patriarchal ideal is particularly insidious because it can be so difficult to reject, and this is where Andrea O’Reilly’s text Feminist Mothering (2008) is particularly crucial. She explains that:

I use the term feminist mothering to refer to an oppositional discourse of motherhood, one that is constructed as a negation of patriarchal motherhood. A feminist practice/theory of mothering, therefore, functions as a counternarrative of motherhood: it seeks to interrupt the master narrative of motherhood to imagine and implement a view of mothering that is empowering to women. Feminist mothering is thus determined more by what it is not (i.e., patriarchal motherhood) rather than by what it is. (3)

What is important about this definition of feminist mothering is its guiding framework of inclusivity. O’Reilly argues that it is not necessary to limit our understanding of feminist mothering to those who embrace the term wholeheartedly—rather it is important to consider the experiences of mothers who may not call themselves feminists but who do, nonetheless, challenge patriarchal motherhood in their practice of empowered mothering (3). As such, this understanding of feminist mothering does not require a mother to identify as feminist in order for her experiences to be worthy of study by feminist scholars, or by anyone else who is committed to the process of anti-patriarchal transformation. This revelation is particularly important for Mother of Invention, because even though all of the chapters herein are written by self-identified feminists, the mothers whom they write of do not necessarily gather under the feminist name or support the movement’s goals and values. Nonetheless, all of these mothers managed to inspire feminist consciousness in their children in some way.

To that end, while it is debatable to what extent the matrilineal narratives in this book reflect the values of feminist mothering, the evidence of empowered mothering all throughout is intricate as it is acute. O’Reilly explains in her text Rocking the Cradle (2006) how counter-narratives to patriarchal mothering "are concerned with imagining and implementing a view of mothering that is empowering to women as opposed to oppressive as it is with the patriarchal institution of motherhood (45). Such transgressive modes of mothering have been referred to not only as feminist, but also as empowered, authentic, radical, and gynocentric (45). Whichever of these labels one may choose to adapt, this theory and practice of mothering recognizes that both mothers and children benefit when the mother lives her life and practices mothering from a position of agency, authority, authenticity and autonomy, and it allows mothering to be a political site wherein mother can affect social change through the socialization of children, in terms of challenging traditional patterns of gender acculturation through feminist child rearing" (45). It is therefore clear that mothering has the potential to transform the world into a more equitable and just place when its practice negates patriarchal ideals. However, feminist scholars have also taught us that sexism is not the only oppressive framework that constrains maternal practice, which is why the concept of intersectionality is also critical for understanding the many facets of empowered and feminist mothering.

REMEMBERING CONTEXT AND INTERSECTIONALITY

When discussing a mother’s actions in raising her children, it is important to consider how opportunities for resistance within the maternal role are always contextual. Amy Middleton accordingly contends that Mothers who are living in difficult social, financial and relational circumstances are at a disadvantage in achieving states of authenticity and authority (80). As such, it is not enough to study cases where mothers’ quests to engage in empowered or feminist mothering are incredibly obvious and successful—it is also necessary to appreciate the societal structures that can affect and shape lived experiences, making certain paths of resistance less accessible to some mothers.

Kimberle Crenshaw pioneered the term intersectionality in the late 1980s. She contends that The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite—that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences (1242), and it can therefore be difficult for all women to organize under any singular identity category, such as that of mother. For Crenshaw, many aspects of one’s identity, such as gender, economic class, sexuality, and race come together to influence how people perceive themselves, as well as how others in society perceive them. Ultimately, Crenshaw points to a pressing need to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed (1245). Editing this book has made us realize how essential it is to take into account the importance of intersectionality when considering any matrilineal narrative. As such, Mother of Invention seeks to explore the many-varied ways that such identity markers intersect and shape maternal practice—an endeavor that can be fostered and supported through creating and sharing new, authentic knowledges about mothering from the diverse standpoints of feminists who have been mothered.

Green’s concept of feminist motherlines provides a useful place to begin this task. She explains that a feminist motherline acknowledges the many struggles that accompany the embodied experiences and knowledge/s of feminist mothering, and that there is a need to continue sharing and recording feminist motherline stories to ensure that the difficult, yet rewarding work of feminist mothering remains a communal and political endeavour (2008: 174). In this regard, a feminist motherline can be understood as a new way of knowing and communicating about mothers—one that is rooted in a place of authenticity and negation of dominant patriarchal motherhood myths. We will now address the motherhood myths that largely mediate how we understand and communicate about our mothers, as well as the potential for inventing feminist motherlines through the critical practice of life writing.

FROM MOTHERHOOD MYTHS TO FEMINIST MOTHERLINES

Feminist scholars know these motherhood myths, and the far-reaching implications of their prevalence, all too well. As Paula Caplan contends, these myths demarcate good mothers as those who are nurturing, selfless, and sacrificial; their maternal knowledge is innate, and they perpetually enact these ideals without fail (594). It is thereby unsurprising that the majority of mothers—who, by virtue of being full human beings, are doomed to fall short of these impossible standards—are consequently measured by their inadequate and flawed mothering behaviours, which are thereby constructed as evidence that mothers themselves must be wholly bad. And so, as Rich so eloquently states it, Under the institution of motherhood, the mother is the first to blame if theory proves unworkable in practice, or if anything whatsoever goes wrong (222). It would therefore seem that these myths of good and bad mothering practices provide the dominant framework for our culture’s maternal narratives, and they consequently perpetuate a culture where our ways of understanding and communicating about mothers are rooted in discourses of mother blame.

Caplan explains how she first became attuned to the prevalence of mother blaming while working at a family clinic in the 1980s. She observes how it seemed that there was nothing that a mother could do that was right, and it was particularly interesting and painful to me because I was a mother (592). Her interest continued to develop throughout her academic research where she found that mothers were blamed for virtually every kind of psychological and emotional problem that patients brought to their therapists (593). Molly Ladd-Taylor also explores this issue, explaining that practices of mother-worship are always bound up with those of mother-blame (661)—in other words, the higher the standards that exist for good mothers, the more likely that women who fall short of these ideals will be judged and scrutinized. As such, while stay-at-home wives and mothers were seemingly glorified throughout the 1950s—an era when the white, middle-class, heterosexual nuclear family was supposedly at its peak—discourses of mother-blame were also particularly rampant (663). She explains that, while bad working mothers were indicted for neglecting their children, good stay-at-home mothers were also accused of smothering their children. To that end, the myths of motherhood construct the intimate, life-long mother-child bond to be psychopathological in the cases of both daughters and sons (Caplan 594; Dooley and Fedele 358), ultimately demarcating the maternal relationship as something that we must devalue and break away from in order to grow into stable and healthy individuals.

It would thereby seem that even good mothers are destined to fail their children in some way, and the impact that these discourses of mother blame have on mothers themselves—the perpetual feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and fear—has been acutely expressed by maternal theorists. Rich reflects on these internalized anxieties in Of Woman Born as she also strives to identify with her own mother:

Soon I would begin to understand the full weight and burden of maternal guilt, that daily, nightly, hourly, Am I doing what is right? Am I doing enough? Am I doing too much? The institution of motherhood finds all mothers more or less guilty of having failed their children; and my mother, in particular, had been expected to help create, according to my father’s plan, a perfect daughter. (223)

She goes on to capture how, in the particular case of daughters, this foreboding inevitability of maternal failure also translates into discourses of matrophobia—which is not the fear of motherhood, but the fear of becoming one’s mother (235). She explains that:

Matrophobia can be see as a womanly splitting of the self, in the desire to become purged once and for all of our mothers’ bondage, to become individuated and free. The mother stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr. Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mothers’; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery. (236)

On the whole, patriarchal motherhood myths compel us to speak, write, and understand our mothers—in essence, to know them—through their supposed failures and imperfections. Rather than recognize and challenge our culture’s dominant motherhood myths, we are also encouraged to hold our mothers individually responsible for failing to perform patriarchal ideals. In turn, daughters in particular seek to dis-identify from their mothers for fear of also embodying this inexplicable sense of deficiency, as well as the anxiety, blame and judgment that accompanies it. As Caplan observes, You’ll often hear women say, ‘My greatest fear is that I will be like my mother.’ What I find that these women usually mean if you explore that statement is, ‘I don’t want to be treated the way she has been treated. I don’t want to be demeaned and undervalued the way she is’ (595).

And so the question arises as to how this situation can be rectified: How do we construct new and authentic feminist motherlines which validate the critical importance of motherwork and affirm the value of mothers themselves? Following the tradition of Adrienne Rich, feminist maternal theorists have taken up this monumental task by engaging in honest, critical discussions about the diverse, messy, and complex realities of mothering. For instance, Susan Maushart call on mothers to remove the mask of motherhood that many women don in order to gain social acceptance by perpetuating motherhood myths, and to speak authentically about all of their experiences—including those rooted in anger, frustration, and dissatisfaction with the maternal role (460-461). Similarly, Patricia Hill Collins works to