Of Woman Born

"One of the reasons I put Adrienne Rich first is that I am aware that so many of the contemporary debates about motherhood are issues raised in Of Woman Born, a kind of memoir and history of motherhood. Adrienne Rich had three sons back in the 1950s and early 60s, and she describes her transformation from the young poet who won the Yale Younger Poets prize and launched on a career, was recognised by many important poets, into the mother of three boys, whom she had in rapid succession. She describes her feelings in a very frank way – her ambivalent feelings about her sons; her love for her sons; the difficulty of raising three small boys and writing poetry. She touches on so many of the issues that women go on debating today, and it seems sad to me that a lot of the young mommy bloggers don’t even know about her. They ought to know about it. You know, people prate about how important motherhood is, but they treat mothers like shit. That is a huge hypocrisy in our culture. The other huge hypocrisy involves men making laws about women’s uteruses. I was sitting in the hospital after giving birth to my daughter, and I remember turning on the TV and seeing a Catholic priest and right-wing politician discussing abortion and how it should be outlawed, and I slung a cut-glass ashtray into the screen, I was so angry. How can people who have never gone through the process of birth try to legislate for those who have? Exactly. And after you’ve gone through a birth – in my case an emergency Caesarean, because my cervix wouldn’t dilate – I thought: who are these assholes, telling us what we can and can’t do with our uteruses?! They don’t even have a uterus. The rage that I felt – I found that my feminism was greatly enhanced. Even now, I’m a grandmother of four, and being with those children absolutely makes me feel fierce about changing the world. That is beginning to change, I think. I was in Copenhagen to speak on International Women’s Day on March 8th, and I had an enormous audience there! You know, women in Denmark have crèches, have a year’s maternity leave, but they perceive that women are being held back. Officially, the excuse is the mothering. In a country like that, where you have childcare and maternity leave – even there you have the perception that the revolution is unfinished. It does make it much clearer to you what women are up against, absolutely. I also found when I got to Italy on my last trip, the women in Italy were up in arms about Berlusconi because he seems to mock all their aspirations. Women in Italy are in a much worse situation than women in Denmark. There is much to be done in Italy, but once again, women are on the march, and Berlusconi, we might say, by being such an asshole, is a boon to feminism. It has become clear to Italian women that they are being mocked and derided. He has prostitutes to his villa and laughs about it. You might say that he is helping Italian feminism with his behaviour."