From Ongoing Silence to Popular Writers’ Matrophobia

Abstract

As feminism moved through the 1980s and 1990s, white feminism shifted its focus to beginning to live with the successes of white second wave feminism. As a result, while the daughterly focus remained, little attention was given to motherhood and mothering. However, in the late 1990s, and especially after 2000, there was an explosion of both academic feminist and popular writing on contemporary maternity. Analyzing the academic work, which also initiated a rediscovery of Adrienne Rich, and the popular writing requires understanding the historical and rhetorical contexts of post-1970s second wave feminism that preceded both kinds of writing. More specifically, it is important to reread key rhetorical exigencies that kept 1980s and 1990s feminists primarily silent on maternity, prior to the explosion of academic and popular interest in contemporary maternity.

Even though the focus of this book is on conflicts in feminist theory, rather than on the extensive erosion visited by Reaganomics on the hopes and accomplishments of 1970s U.S. feminism, no discussion of either feminism or feminist theory in the 1980s can begin without at least acknowledging the hostility of the larger political, economic, and cultural climate which we have had to endure. (Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller 1)

Even feminists are often reluctant to admit that many women’s lives revolve around their children … they fear that if women are seen to be mothers first, the very real gains that women have made in the workplace could be jeopardized. (Ann Crittenden 7)