Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

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W. W. Norton & Company, 1995 M04 17 - 352 pages

Adrienne Rich's influential and landmark investigation concerns both the experience and the institution of motherhood.

The experience is her own—as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother—but it is an experience determined by the institution, imposed on all women everywhere. She draws on personal materials, history, research, and literature to create a document of universal importance.

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Contents

Foreword
Anger and Tenderness
The Sacred Calling
The Kingdom of the Fathers
The Primacy of the Mother
The Domestication of Motherhood
Hands of Flesh Hands of Iron VII Alienated Labor
Mother and Son Woman and
Motherhood and Daughterhood
The Heart of Maternal Darkness
Afterword
Notes
Index
Copyright

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About the author (1995)

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) was an award-winning poet, influential essayist, radical feminist, and major public intellectual of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry, including the National Book Award–winning Diving into the Wreck, and more than a half-dozen of prose.

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