REVIEWS

...Just what the economic and political structure of this life would be is not made clear, nor is it clear what would be the sources of physical energy it would depend on...

...Since thinking through the body gives rise to such generalizations as the following, one is...

...Besides, the pervasive treatment of feminine inspiration in literature has long been recognized as an idealization of maternity...

...Misanthropy is testimony as much to psychological as to political power...

...This is probably not the kind of treatment Rich would like, but it is nonetheless acknowledgment...

...Both views, however, are equally romantic and primitivistic...

...For it is surely clear enough by now that the confidence we rest upon our own reason and will as these have been exercised in our cumulative creation of civilization— in other words, in patriarchally governed enterprise— is a rash, ill-advised confidence...

...To think through the body" seems to entail a cavalier use of biological terminology, as in the following passage: Patriarchal man created—out of a mixture of sexual and affective frustration, blind need, physical force, ignorance, and intelligence split from its emotional grounding, a system which turned against woman her own organic nature, the source of her awe and her original powers...

...How many women fit the gender pattern that she describes in the following lines, a pattern that she sees as necessarily following from our mothercentered child-rearing: woman traditionally agrees to listen to man's opinions and keep her own to herself, lets him hog the limelight and offers herself as audience, allows herself activity only as it nurtures his projects...

...But this might be offered as proof of literature's concern for women as individuals rather than as mere reproductive agents...

...As for literature, it is true that the great love stories have tended to divorce individual desire from biological consequence...

...Rich finds that for all women the female body is "a fundamental problem: its clouded meaning, its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silences, its changes and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings...

...Many a patriarchal myth such as that of Eve or Athena speaks of birth from the father only, no doubt evidence of some sort of womb envy...

...When Rich isn't fiercely misanthropic, she is intensely sentimental, mainly in regard to women...

...But why conclude that women always wanted what we want now...

...I used to glimpse his penis dangling behind a loosely tied bathrobe...

...There is no recognition of the possibility that the mother/child dyad might be fundamental, something that Rich does take into account...

...Fathers after all are as much scapegoats and idols as are mothers (something that the next writer tends to ignore), although it remained for the 20th century to voice the feeling that Daddy is a bastard...

...She invokes Horney's name, in what is surely a distortion of Freud, speaking of his "reduction of psychological qualities to anatomical causes, and his inherently dualistic thinking, in which...

...Beyond this, however, if prehistory was not patriarchal—and Rich thinks that it was not, although as Sarah Pomeroy points out, this is impossible to prove—then no "mutilation" of female evolution could have occurred, since patriarchal history would have only existed for a mere several thousand years, hardly enough to affect the course of evolution...

...They persist, however, because they serve defensive psychological functions...

...If it is true that despotism and tyranny stem from our child-rearing arrangements, then why is it that not all cultures are despotic...

...Despite a few exceptions, men hover in the background here like unwelcome ghosts...

...In her projection of what will happen if we do or do not overthrow them, she is far less so...

...The book is breath-taking until we realize that it does not address itself sufficiently to differences in history or class...

...But the irrationalist spirit of which women have often been falsely accused is all too clearly revealed here...

...But there is no arguing with an infant...

...11 RICH RIFLES SOURCES much the way she says that men have exploited women and nature...

...Parthenogenesis, in humans, of course, could produce only females...

...But these authors are hardly lacking in egos of their own...

...Yet why assume that women did not want to be mothers when maternity meant survival of the race...

...98 But the theory of evolution holds that what survives must be adaptive, not mutilated, however unfortunate it may seem...

...but like those heroines, Rich must be seen as an ambivalent figure, who through her emotional force is both right and wrong...

...And it is an oppression that women accede to as well as men...

...There is one way of escaping our biological inheritance that she does not mention—that of developing the embryo in vitro...

...So it seems to me that Dinnerstein doesn't go far enough back in time in her treatment of the mother's influence on the infant's psychology...

...Sometimes she sounds unfortunately close to a romantic pulp-novel heroine, but her painful yearnings are directed toward her mother rather than toward any man: Emerging from the fear, exhaustion, and alienation of my first childbirth, I could not admit even to myself that I wanted my mother, let alone tell her how much I wanted her...

...At first, the reader feels a good deal of excitement as Dinnerstein proceeds step by step to her conclusions...

...Rich proves that the practice of reading out the meaning of the universe through contemplation of the self has not entirely disappeared...

...In her treatment of motherhood as institution, an institution controlled by patriarchy, of course, men are always villains and women always victims...

...III WHILE Rich projects psychology onto culture, Dinnerstein reduces all of culture to psychology...

...Male rule has grown out of bio-technological conditions which we are just now, as a species, surmounting, and out of the psychological impulses that inevitably develop under those conditions...

...Granted that much of what she has to say about the medical profession's coldness, impersonality, and reduction of the patient to an object is true, the same complaints could be and have been made by male patients as well as by women...

...Yet never once is there appreciation of that fact...

...In place of polarization, Dinnerstein posits a kind of egalitarian future free of war (it would automatically disappear once changes in childrearing were instituted) in which both sexes will hold part-time jobs and spend the rest of their time convincing infants that they are equally magical...

...And what of economic differentiations within our own culture...

...Part of me longed to offer him for her blessing...

...The great irony in both Rich's and Dinnerstein's books is that it is only because of advanced medical and industrial technology that women can now speak of control of their own bodies, of freedom from unwanted childbearing and/or lactation, of child-rearing by fathers as well as mothers...

...Too much of the author's analysis, provocative as it sounds at first, is couched in terms of such Victorian stereotypes...

...Then, too, there is almost total disregard of biology...

...Most men have been no more in control of the rate of female reproduction than were most women...

...This is to ignore one of Freud's most important statements: all human individuals, as a result of their bisexual disposition and of cross-inheritance, combine in themselves both masculine and feminine characteristics, so that pure masculinity and femininity remain theoretical constructions of uncertain content...

...After all, 101 the gentle Arapesh and the warlike Mundugamor were both mother-reared...

...Yet this is the one measure—assuming that one could construct the necessary support system to effect it—which might insure that mother and father would achieve a rough equality in the neonatal life of the infant...

...If women are oppressed, thinks Dinnerstein, it is because oppression is mixed in with mother's milk of the bottle as well as the breast variety...

...Dinnerstein's main point is that by changing our child-rearing practices, by having fathers as well as mothers care for infants, we will solve not only our sexual but also our ecological and metaphysical problems...

...Yet for all its problems, the book reveals considerable courage in dealing with motherhood 100 at a time when motherhood itself is being questioned as a legitimate pursuit...

...One is uncomfortable also with her ignoring of culture...

...but that baby was also a gauntlet flung down: my son...

...Dinnerstein does not consider the possibility that men would use their new power to institute even more patriarchal control or the fact that most women might resent being deprived of the power they have traditionally held as mothers...

...What was presented as speculation in earlier pages, namely, the possibility of matriarchy in prehistory, has become fact in the preceding passage, presented in the text with no qualification...

...Removing the object of a need or doubling the object does not remove the need...

...In large measure, this is a book written in expiation of guilt over the mother by a woman who has felt the power of the father more intensely than most women...

...we can only try, at last, to take it into female hands...

...The work explores a great range of feeling that the experience of motherhood gives birth to...

...In "bodily thinking," the wish seems to be mother to the fact...

...The kind of female, nurturant support Dinnerstein is talking about here is primarily an outgrowth of 19th-century industrialization and the consequent emphasis on the home and the woman in it who was supposed to provide a refuge from the outside world...

...This is the leap that few readers will be prepared to take...

...But this is something that the author does not take into account...

...One should bear in mind that humanism of the former type was historically available only to a small minority of men and has only recently become part of our unofficial bill of rights...

...Now the term "imprinting" as it is used by ethologists—if Rich is redefining it, she should tell us in what way—refers to a phase of development of precise duration in which there is readiness for certain kinds of behavior in such subhuman creatures as geese...

...man, on the contrary, is "a creature often vicious and always faulty...

...BOTH Rich and Dinnerstein (as in the preceding passage) praise female nurturance and bewail the male ego, as if men had never nurtured women and children through their labor (obviously different types of nurture are possible), and as if male flattery and gifts had never been used to cater to female egos...

...At the same time that she attacks women's forced participation in motherhood, Rich laments that the subjective experience of motherhood has been tampered with also...

...But even that artificial container would bear a resemblance to the womb of which the child would be deprived—and who knows if some racial memory wouldn't cause resentment toward women for that deprivation...

...Following her point to its logical conclusion, one might say that the liberation movement itself is yet another patriarchal device designed to keep women in the place that men want them...

...part of me wanted to hold him up as a badge of victory in our tragic unnecessary rivalry as women...

...It may well be that changing our arrangements after the infant's birth is already too late...

...Because we are all motherreared, because the mother or a female substitute was the source of all nurturance as well as all deprivation when we were infants, the sexes grow up seeing women as both scapegoats and idols, as creatures who are quasi-human...

...But many an individual or culture has managed to surmount the oral and even anal phases to fall into the slough of despond of the genital stage...

...I do not deny that women should now have the right to be as narcissistic as men...

...I can understand the figure of exploiting nature and raping the earth—but carrying it to the solar system seems a bit much...

...I wanted her to mother me again, to hold my baby in her arms as she had once held me...

...According to the author, what this allows us to do, and women as well as men are thankful for it, is to project humanness, even omnipotence onto the male, in a division of emotional labor...

...In the former regard, it is much like misogyny...

...Rich finds Freud "terribly limited both by his culture and his gender...

...Of our life in utero and the infant's experience of birth through the vaginal canal, there is barely a mention...

...One wonders also how men would share in child-rearing under these conditions, a suggestion that Rich makes in other contexts...

...Her treatment of psychology is primarily focused on the oral stage, for that is what she sees as crucial in the formation of our sexual attitudes...

...furthermore, it would have all the genetic disadvantages contingent on extreme inbreeding...

...Its power lies in conveying the intensity of the great Greek heroines, a Phaedra or even more so a Medea...

...I am sure that Rich would not like to be so treated, but what her work reveals better than any clinical study is her bifurcation of the father as well as her bondage to him...

...One finds the answer to the question less in culture than in early childhood experience: My father's tense, narrow body did not seize my imagination, though authority and control ran through it like electric filaments...

...On the other hand, Dinnerstein may also stop too soon...

...One wonders too what kind of strenuous intellectual achievement might be possible for either parent in such an arrangement...

...The control over women's bodies that the author attributes to men, at least in kinship relationships, is in large part illusory...

...A similar distortion occurs in her use of the term "imprinting": The woman awaiting her period, or the onset of labor, the woman lying on a table undergoing abortion or pushing her baby out, the woman inserting a diaphragm or swallowing her daily pill, is doing these things under the influence of centuries of imprinting...

...Since Rich feels that women are the more humane sex, why doesn't she credit them with altruism...

...For centuries, thinkers had interpreted the macrocosm in terms of the microcosm...

...As the means of reproduction without which cities and colonies could not expand, without which a family would die out and its prosperity pass into the hands of 99 strangers, she has found herself at the center of purposes, not hers, which she has often incorporated and made into her own...

...In her most recent book, Adrienne Rich speaks of women's "'maternal' or `nurturant' spirit" as opposed to "rapism and the warrior mentality" of men...

...Who does this sound like if not one of the feminists' favorite whipping boys, Rousseau, who writes that woman's reign is "a reign of gentleness, tact, and kindness...

...In The Modern Temper, a book that still holds up remarkably well, Joseph Wood Krutch speaks of two types of humanism, one concerned with individual self-development, the other with the perpetuation of the race...

...feminine and masculine, passivity and activity, are seen as polar opposites...

...Women as well as men, she feels, have wanted our present gender arrangements...

...Of course, this is not a view limited to women...

...Dinnerstein, though admitting her indebtedness, finds that he, among others, doesn't go farenough: The account I offer here attempts, then, to resolve the contradictions between the Freudian and the Gestalt vision of societal processes (it amends and extends both these visions, moreover, to embrace the implications of Darwinism now supported by archaeological data, concerning human evolution...

...Few feminists with the exception of Shulamith Firestone are willing to go that far...

...What Rich now wants is procreation through the mother only, advocating that women have the choice of reproducing through natural means, artificial insemination, or parthenogenesis...

...Life for Rich is like a 19th-century melodrama...

...Nor does she consider the potentially incestuous consequences of fathers raising daughters...

...Until comparatively recently, historians were interested not in economic or social history but in contribution history, that is, the history of great achievements...

...She asks why motherhood has been ignored in history and literature, her implication being that patriarchal selfishness has dictated the neglect...

...Since Rich describes her own husband, at least in the early part of their marriage, as "sensitive and affectionate" and speaks of passionately loving their three sons, one wonders where all the hostility toward men came from...

...Male doctors are mutilators and destroyers as opposed to the always tender midwives—no Ilse Kochs here...

...Most men were no more participants in history in this sense than women were...

...This sounds uncomfortably close to the wife-murdering Comte de Germande in Sade's Justine, who speaks of woman as a "creature sick three quarters of her life...

...While Rich places utopia in the gynocentric past, Dinnerstein places it in the future, feeling that the myth of matriarchy represents a psychological fantasy rather than an actual reality...

...And when Rich dismisses contemporary civilization as "the death-culture of abstraction" and "quantification," she offers unconscious support to Freud's statement in The Future of an Illusion: "The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men, it confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and compels them to carry out instinctual sublimations of which women are little capable...

...The arrangements are outdated and cause pain...

...Norman O. Brown, whom Dinnerstein draws on heavily, shares it...

...Here is one example: "We have been perceived for too many centuries as pure Nature, exploited and raped like the earth and the solar system...

...But despite this oversimplification, in one respect at least her book is extremely important, for it counters most convincingly the conspiratorial theory of history: the male rule of the world is not a conspiracy imposed by bad, physically strong and mobile, men on good, physically weak and burdened, women...

...Rich urges women "to think through the body," that is, to fuse intellect with feeling, a mode not unknown to Donne, to name merely one male practitioner...

...In a sense, female evolution was mutilated, and we have no way now of imagining what its development hitherto might have been...

...Though she promises to answer the question, she never satisfactorily allays one's fears that if we were reared by fathers equally with mothers, we would have a great ambivalence toward both sexes instead of just one, arguing merely that we would be forced to grow up and give up our dependencies...

...But there are other possibilities that one should at least mention...

...If Rich is right, and women are at the mercy of "imprinting," then why assume that now for the first time in history women are free from those controls that Rich says have determined them...

...Yet in her hands, thinking through the body becomes a tool of irrationality, precisely what women have been accused of for centuries...

...tempted to suggest that Rich try thinking through the mind instead: "For one thing, in the original matriarchal clan all females, of whatever age, were called 'mothers'—even little girls...

...In her depiction of the persistence of our gender roles, she is often highly persuasive...

...And I use it in a bitterly qualified spirit, a spirit of the weariest and wariest possible hope...

...What is clear is that Dinnerstein like Rich rejects technology as a defect of patriarchal thinking: The term "progress" rings ugly in our present situation...

...Yet, in an example of the "doublethink" that she accuses males of engaging in, Rich blames men for not sharing their instruments with the midwives: The female hands of flesh that had delivered millions of children and soothed the labor of millions of mothers were denied the possibility of working with the tools later developed to facilitate the practice of obstetrics in difficult labor...

...What one misses in her book is any sense of the psychological power that women have exerted even in the most patriarchal societies (perhaps more there than elsewhere...

...Granted that Dinnerstein feels that what makes us human is our ability to surmount biology, she ignores the likelihood that our bondage to our mothers stems not so much from the fact that they have reared us as the fact that they have borne us...