Motherhood in Patriarchy: Animosity Toward Mothers in Politics and Feminist Theory - Proposals for Change

Motherhood in Patriarchy pioneers the argument that the current Western understanding of motherhood is a patriarchal one based on a long historical tradition of subjection and institutionalization. It makes an important contribution to women's studies on reproduction, motherhood, and welfare politics. The book breaches a taboo within feminist political theory and offers a fundamentally divergent understanding of the concepts of nature, culture, and body, as well as the idea of mothers as a political force. The approach is inter-disciplinary, encompassing the fields of matriarchal studies, feminist political theory and philosophy, critique of reason, history, and psychoanalysis. The book proceeds from the historical fact that the Greek political concept was violently imposed on the existing matriarchal social structures, which were organized around female clans, and eventually replaced the older matriarchal structures. Motherhood in Patriarchy demonstrates that new technologies, as well as the dominant economic and political structures, are all parts of the attempt of patriarchy to eliminate the creative capacity of the world, of life and nature, to replace it with supposedly better forms of life and forms of nature. Contents include: Patriarchal Motherhood * Mothers in Feminist Political Theory and Philosophy * Matriarchy as Maternal Order * Historic Transformations of Birth and Motherhood * On the Historical Development of the Concepts of Nature, Body, Time, and the Individual * Mothers in Psychoanalysis * Developments of Reproductive Technology and Feminist Criticism * Feminist Strategies to Oppose the Animosity towards Mothers * The Matriarchal Order