The Academy of American Poets is talking about motherhood and the heritage of feminism in “Going for Motherlode: on Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born” by Miranda Field. From the essay:

Adrienne Rich’s manifesto—almost three decades old and never out of print—looks long and hard into the chasm separating women’s actual (or at least potential) link to maternity, and the "theories, ideals, archetypes, descriptions" patriarchal culture substitutes for this real relationship. All of us—mothers and non-mothers—are born of women, therefore all have a connection to motherhood "more fundamental than tribalism or nationalism," Rich says. But patriarchal culture "has created images of the archetypal Mother which reinforce the conservatism of motherhood and convert it to an energy for the renewal of male power." Art rarely touches the institution of motherhood critically, in full consciousness, and, Rich insists, it must—lest we forget how much of our lived experience is "not of our creation."

At times I’ve felt as grateful toward Rich’s book as a bone marrow recipient might feel toward a donor, but how have I honored this indebtedness? My own poems might be accused of side-stepping the work of women’s poetry as Rich defines it in Of Woman Born. "Rape and its aftermath. . . marriage as economic dependence . . .the theft of childbirth from women . . . laws regulating contraception and abortion . . .the absence of social benefits for mothers," these are among the core social issues Rich believes art must evoke. Crucial matters, close to my heart, and to my ballot-casting and prose-writing hand, but not confronted head on in my poems. Though my life is fed by my political consciousness—by feminism in particular—it informs my poems only in oblique or submerged ways. Feminism—the feminism of Rich’s generation—is my intellectual mother. But she might not approve of all I do (particularly in my poems). Is this a feminist/post-feminist divide?

Miranda Field raises an important question in this passage. What do we, mothers of this generation, “owe” the mothers of previous generations? Anything? Everything? Something in between? As someone who has been accused of having an obsession with history, I can say that I often look to the past to know where to go in the future. But what, really, is my relationship with those mothers? Adrienne Rich, Betty Friedan and my own mother – feminist thinker in her own right – do I honor them? Or am I still trying too hard to “do it better” and “not make the same mistakes” that I can’t clearly see what they did right?