Metro Pulse/Pulp/Motherhood & Feminism

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Women plumb their relationships with motherhood and feminism

by Jeanne McDonald

When women write about mothers and daughters, the result is usually a complex synthesis of love, guilt, and transference. But when those women are Irish, it's even more complicated, because they have not only their own stories to tell, but the stories of their mothers, who never had a voice in their own country. "Just as daughters need to leave their mothers to discover themselves," says Caledonia Kearns, editor of Motherland: Writings by Irish American Women About Mothers and Daughters (Perennial, $13), "Irish daughters left their mothers and their motherland to fend for themselves."

In Kearns' heart-wrenching stories about birth, death, politics, love, and self-discovery, it is the memoirs that speak to us most effusively. Perhaps because the authors are Irish and steeped in a fanciful history of leprechauns and fairies, their narratives seem both mystical and mythical. Once, for six years, I lived in a predominantly Irish neighborhood in Philadelphia, in a row house owned by a kind but intrepid old lady named Margaret Rodden. She emigrated from Ireland as a teenager, found employment as a maid, spent every night dancing at the Irish Ballroom on Broad Street, and slept off her excesses beneath her wealthy employer's long-skirted library table, a hiding place that also protected her from the amorous advances of the family's son. She never married, but after years of servitude, she bought the row house and supported her brother Billy, who was married to the bottle. It was to that house on Larchwood Avenue that I brought home my first baby. As we passed the downstairs apartment, the Irishwoman who lived there opened her door, peeked at the baby, and said, "Now you're a mother, you'll never be alone again."

Loneliness is a dark thread that runs throughout Kearns' collection. The great labor activist, Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, who lost four children and a husband in the yellow fever epidemic that swept through Memphis in 1867, tells how she sat with those dear, dead bodies through long nights of grief. "No one came to me," she writes. "No one could. All day long, all night long, I heard the grating of the wheels of the death cart."

In the excerpt from Chasing Grace: Reflections of a Catholic Girl, Grown Up, Martha Manning writes to her daughter: "If possible, have a child...Being a mother is the best thing I've ever done with my life...Know the grace of your own company, and I promise, you will never be alone."

Yet, sometimes daughters long for that very thing—being alone. Kearns writes: "If I were to take another name, it would be Persephone, a daughter so beloved, her mother's grief over her absence stopped the world. My engagement ring is a garnet for a reason. Like Persephone, I ate the pomegranate seed because I needed to get to a place my mother couldn't find me."

Susan Minot's story, "Wildflowers," tells how Rosie Vincent puts her eighth child to her breast and casts her daughters a wild look: "It was aimed at them and it said: There is nothing in the world compares with this. The eye was fierce. The baby stayed fast. There is nothing so thrilling as this. Nothing."

In her controversial book, What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman (Touchstone, $12), Danielle Crittenden emphatically agrees. Throughout chapters covering love, sex, marriage, aging, politics, and motherhood, she suggests that women should forget the hard-line feminist attitudes sold to their mothers and follow their own hearts, especially when it comes to choosing careers over children. For proof, she quotes Anne Taylor Fleming, author of Motherhood Deferred, who, at 38, had just left the Los Angeles Institute for Reproductive Research, where she had taken a jar of her sixty-year-old husband's sperm in hopes of creating a baby. Driving home, she said she was tempted to roll down her car window and shout, "Hey, hey, Gloria! Germaine! Kate! Tell us: How does it feel to have ended up without babies, children, flesh of your flesh?! Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf...[W]as your art worth the empty womb?"

"If there was one sacred belief of feminism," says Crittenden, "it was that biology is not destiny." However, she agrees, along with anthropologist Lionel Tiger, it is "good statistical probability." And if, she reasons, women refuse to give themselves over to their families, they cannot expect much from their families in return. "The woman...who sacrifices all domestic pleasures in her pursuit of independence may discover... that she has transcended not only what makes her feminine but also what makes her human." Undeniably, the feminist movement opened doors for women, broke glass ceilings, but Crittenden convincingly puts herself in the court of Rosie Vincent when it comes to motherhood.

"There is nothing so thrilling as this. Nothing."