I don't usually write about anything that matters. I'm not very eloquent, and oftentimes things don't come out as I would like or as I mean. However, sometimes I try anyway. And I'll no doubt delete this later at some point. The Writing Centaur had its lulls yesterday, and I started reading
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution by Adrienne Rich. While it was written quite some time ago (if you consider the 70s "quite some time ago"), a good deal of it still holds true, regardless of small, or even drastic, change. Having had a child before, and having literally signed her away, I take an interest in the idea of motherhood as well as the kind of "ownership" seen in relation to women and children. The following is an excerpt from
Of Woman Born:
A crucial moment in human consciousness, then, arrives when man discovers that it is he himself, not the moon or the spring rains or the spirits of the dead, who impregnates the woman; that the child she carries and gives birth to is his child, who can make him immortal, both mystically, by propitiating the gods with prayers and sacrifices when he is dead, and concretely, by receiving the patrimony from him. At this crossroads, sexual possession, property ownership, and the desire to transcend death, developed the institution we know: the present-day patriarchal family with its supernaturalizing of the penis, its division of labor by gender, its emotional, physical, and material possessiveness, its idea of monogamous marriage until death (and its severe penalties for adultery by the wife), the "illegitimacy" of a child born outside wedlock, the economic dependency of women, and children to male authority, the imprinting and continuation of heterosexual roles.*
One of the first times I really thought about the degree to which possession and ownership come into play in regards to women and children was after Jason raped me. I was in the bathroom, and when I was washing my hands, he stood behind me, leaning on the door frame, and he said, "If you have a kid, name him Jason." As if he could take just one more thing from me. He laid claim to parts of me he wasn’t even certain existed. I was disgusted. He had a gun pointed at me, and I lit a cigarette and told him I would have his abortion if necessary, that I wasn't the motherly type--which, even in its small attempt at reclamation, acknowledged a connection between motherhood and ownership. Sometimes bravado backfires. But it does well enough for reminding me that things are taken from women--things we were never even taught to protect. After all, what use would it be for a woman to know that some anger is righteous and holy; that control of your mind and your body is a right--no person or book can take it away simply by saying it's so; that it's easy to focus on how much better things are for women now than in the past, losing sight of the importance of comparing how women are treated now with how they rightfully deserve to be treated, in any time, by any other human being.
No, we're taught that anger is out of order and destructive; that our bodies are pure or sinful, but either way, shameful. We're told women are equal, but still every two and a half minutes, someone is sexually assaulted in America. My friend Evan refers to the abuse of women has "a deep kind of hate." It is, and abuse does not only come in the form of physical harm. It's there when the choices of women are removed or trivialized, when women have more children than they want or can provide for in order to satisfy others' expectations, and when pregnancy is prized and thought of as a woman's "function." This is readily apparent to anyone who has been pregnant. Suddenly, everyone wants to talk to you, to give you advice on how best to indoctrinate your children with those same ideas that isolate women, forcing them to divine for themselves how best to fit into a world where creativity is not an asset and a joy, but a burden to be overcome in favor of what is more “rational” or “appropriate.”
I worry sometimes because the child I had (who is not the product of rape, but much earlier) is being raised by other people. I trust them, or I wouldn't have signed the papers, but I can’t help wondering what she is taught. Will she understand these things? Or will she be forced to learn them on her own, like many women, finding out that despite the touted “equality” in this country, they still don’t fit in without a child or without submission to ideas which they were never given the tools necessary to challenge.
*Rich, Adrienne.
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1976. 61.
