Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution was published by W.W. Norton in 1976. It is Rich’s major work of prose — a feminist analysis that distinguishes between two things commonly conflated under the word “motherhood”: the lived experience of bearing and raising children (bodily, emotional, potentially creative) and the social institution that appropriates that experience for patriarchal purposes (controlling women’s bodies, confining them to domestic labor, using the ideology of “natural motherhood” to prevent their participation in public life).
Rich writes from personal experience — she was a mother of three sons by the time she was thirty, having married young and in conformity with 1950s expectations — and from historical research into the treatment of mothers across cultures and periods. She examines the medicalization of childbirth, the isolation of the nuclear family, the violence that erupts when women are trapped in domestic roles that deny their full humanity, and the possibility of motherhood transformed by feminist consciousness.
The book was controversial from its publication: some feminists criticized it for being insufficiently radical (it does not reject motherhood entirely), while conservatives attacked it as anti-family. Its lasting significance is its insistence that motherhood can be discussed critically — that loving one’s children and criticizing the institution that exploits maternal love are not contradictory positions.
Collecting Of Woman Born
First edition (W.W. Norton, New York, 1976): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $50–$150
- Very good: $20–$50