Review of Stephanie Lawler's "Mothering the Self: Mothers, Daughters, Subjects" (London: Routledge, 2000)

Abstract

The complex and multi-faceted relationships that exist between female identity, mothers, daughters and (the practice and institution of) motherhood have been the subject of intense debate since the emergence of the contemporary feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Marianne Hirsch in her study The Mother/Daughter Plot (1989), for example, situates the difficulty of defining motherhood 'at the breaking point between various feminist positions: between presence and absence, speech and silence, essentialism and constructivism, materialism and psychoanalysis.' She suggests, in other words, that debates surrounding motherhood and the mother-daughter relation have been central in/to feminist theories based upon a notion of equality, where women demand social and economic parity with men, and in/to those based upon a notion of difference, where women demand recognition for their 'feminine' specificity. While some feminist theorists take Simone de Beauvoir's groundbreaking study The Second Sex (1949) as a starting point, presenting motherhood as a patriarchal construction, as a trap that severely limits women's individual freedom, a number of 1970s and 1980s theorists considered motherhood and the mother-daughter relationship more positively, as alternative sources of female identity from those constructed by patriarchy.