Mother?

Once upon a time, maternity seemed to be a biological fact fixed both literally and symbolically within the private, affective sphere. Now we debate the meaning and practice of motherhood and mothering in many public spaces. A survey of newspapers, bookstores, and academic conference programs yields catchy titles, all ending in question marks: "Whose Child is This?" Mothers without Custody: How Could a Mother Do Such a Thing? "Will the Real Mother Please Stand Up?" What is said by and about mothers—full-time mothers, surrogate mothers, teenage mothers, adoptive mothers, mothers who live in poverty, mothers with briefcases—is increasingly complicated and divisive. Language is stretched to describe the bewildering fragmentation of a time in which one child may have a genetic mother, a gestational mother, and a custodial mother, each of whom is a different person.^[1]

Although it seems clear that new, unprecedented pressures have recently called into question the meaning of mother, this assumption nonetheless simplifies the history of the term. Motherhood has meant many different things in the past, just as it means (and will no doubt continue to mean) different things in different cultures and subcultures today. Looking no further back than the late nineteenth century and no farther afield than England, we see that mother was already a slippery word with a complicated history. Like characters in Desert of the Heart, Jane Rule's novel about language and motherhood, I often find myself reaching for the dictionary and arguing about the implications that lie just beneath the surface of the lexicographer's formal efforts to capture meaning. As always, that monument of late-nineteenth-century

industry and scholarship, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), affords a complex and fascinating perspective on the historical semantics of mother in which the present crisis—both discursive and practical—is embedded.

The OED defined mother around 1908, under the editorship of Henry Bradley.^[2] The first sense of mother sb.1 grounds the concept in what until recently could hardly be seen as anything but its natural meaning, denoting a gendered, bodily, and relational identity: "a female parent, a woman who has given birth to a child." The second sense expands the referential field to "things more or less personified": "with reference either to a metaphorical giving birth, to the protecting care exercised by a mother, or to the affectionate reverence due to a mother." This second definition reminds us that long before surrogacy as we know it, the word mother was frequently extended from its essential link with childbearing women. But this metaphorical usage is still grounded either in the process of giving birth, at least symbolically, or in mothers' presumed function ("protecting") and status ("reverence due") in English-speaking culture. The third sense reconnects mother to a gendered identity: "a woman who exercises control like that of a mother, or who is looked up to as a mother." Like the second sense, this one disengages the word from any necessary connection to actual childbirth but firmly reattaches it to femaleness and again confirms that motherhood is a matter of a particular, clearly understood function—"control" over whatever is mothered—and high status ("looked up to"). In contrast to the insistence on the defining obviousness of the elevated position of the mother in senses two and three, a fourth and last sense indicates that mother can be "a term of address for an elderly woman of the lower class." The citations that support this sense reveal that from at least the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries in England, mother sometimes connoted the opposite of what it was normally supposed to mean: not high status, but a devaluation in two critical measures of a woman's worth—age and class.

Bradley and his staff also found an even more devalued sense of the word mother, one so fundamentally at odds with their educated, middle-class, late-Victorian understanding that they classified it as another lexical item altogether: mother sb.2 , meaning "dregs, scum." According to the OED, this mother was associated with alchemy and used especially in the sixteenth century to refer to the scum of oils and subsequently to the dregs of fermenting liquids. An extensive note preced-

ing the definition explains that etymologists have long puzzled over this usage. Some have argued that the term is actually derived from Dutch modder, meaning mud or mire; the OED editor insists that there is no evidence for this view, however, and that mother sb.2 is really an application of sb.1 . Throwing up lexicographic hands at a debasement of the word mother that an English gentleman and scholar would be hard-pressed to comprehend, the editor concludes his lengthy discussion by noting that "the transition of sense is difficult to explain."^[3]

Today we might be less surprised by this semantic phenomenon. In the wake of extensive late-twentieth-century feminist debates about the nature, function, and status of motherhood, it is no longer hard to offer reasons why the concept of mother, so idealized by the dominant middle-class rhetoric of the recent past, can also carry this barely concealed trace of derogation, disgust, and dirtiness. If there is consensus to be found in these debates, it is that conventional sentiments about motherhood inadequately describe and serve to mystify the actual circumstances of most women who mother, even as they may also sublimate the fear and resentment of men who cannot be mothers, or of the always unsatisfied inner child. It is commonly recognized, in some circles at least, that the position of the mother in our culture and our language is riddled with its history of psychic and social contradictions. Motherhood offers women a site of both power and oppression, self-esteem and self-sacrifice, reverence and debasement.

At the same time, it is striking that other problematic and charged aspects of the concept of mother reflected in the OED 's definition are at best made visible rather than explained or resolved by the diversity of recent feminist thought. For instance, the slippery and imprecisely overlapping equation of mothering and childbirth, or mothering and women, has been taxed but not exhausted by feminist debates about essentialism and exclusion. Many influential theorists still either root their arguments in a maternal (gestating, delivering, or lactating) body or insist that childbirth cannot simply be ignored as a gender-specific and probably gender-constructing experience. Others wish to see mothering as a more metaphorical act, a social position, available to any and all who choose to do maternal work, but this argument has been no less troublesome. Not only does it leave open to dispute the question of whether men can mother, but it continues to link feminine powers and capacities to child care and family roles, no matter how socially

fashioned the position of mother is understood to be. So, too, the divides between women over their relationship to metaphorical mothering as well as biological mothering remain real and vexed, such as those between women who choose to mother and women who do not (or cannot), or between women who adopt and women who give birth.

What is taken for granted, both in the OED 's definition and in many recent feminist struggles to interrogate and revise nineteenth-century notions of motherhood, is the relational aspect of the concept mother . Implicitly, in the OED and all subsequent formal definitions I have found, mother in the primary sense of the word is someone, maybe a woman or maybe not, who gives birth to a child or seeks protection and control of a child or is affectionately reverenced and looked up to by a child. The force of those prepositions is felt in feminist arguments as well. According to Sara Ruddick, an innovative and influential feminist philosopher who has sought to redefine and revalue mothering, "to be a 'mother' is to take upon oneself the responsibility of child care, making its work a regular and substantial part of one's working life"; "the concept of 'mother' depends on that of 'child.'"^[4] By throwing mother into quotation marks, feminist thinking challenges us to reconstrue our assumptions about maternity in many ways, but Ruddick's formulation, like most others, reiterates the fundamental relationship to the "child" (a position that may be interrogated as well, but seldom is).

Certainly, we cannot and should not ignore the relational component of motherhood. Yet this component merits and rewards closer scrutiny. Both mother and child are problematic terms to conceptualize, not least of all because they are relational words, marking partial, quasi-temporary identities. This semantic feature reflects precisely the experiential and political problems that beset us as mothers, as children, and as citizens.

I begin here with questions of lexicography and semantics because definitions often usefully describe and focus attention on complicated problems. As I go on to discuss the importance of listening carefully to the stories we tell about mothers, this premise underlies my arguments: language is a conventional system and what we say always bears the burden of where we have been, what we have done, and what we believe. At the same time, language can function in a prescriptive as well as descriptive way; as others have argued, women have been harmed by cultural, legal, medical, and psychological discourses about moth-

erhood. My purpose in this study, then, is not be to replace the old definitions of motherhood with a new one, but to turn attention to what I take to be the most inadequately explored aspect of mother as concept and identity: its relational features. This project needs to be situated, first, in the context that perhaps most deeply informs my thinking, the prolific and still growing feminist critique of motherhood that has evolved over the past three decades.