From Motherhood to the symbolic Order of the Mother. Feminist Routes starting from “The Undecidable Imprint”

Abstract

One of the issues that most occupied feminist reflection, beginning in the Seventies, is the relation with “the Mother”.
Motherhood was the subject of feminist interest also before the twentieth century: the first-wave feminism has often dealt with it. It identified maternity, as a kind of ‘biological destiny’ of the female gender, and in all that follows (care work, in the first place), a burden in the lives of women and an obstacle for achieving equality with respect to the male gender. Motherhood has been represented in this way for almost two centuries. At the end of the eighteenth century, Mary Wollstonecraft’s texts, dwells on laborious care activity that women put in place in private contexts (Wollstonecraft, 1792); in the nineteenth century, the works of Harriet Taylot and Stuart Mill, describe the invisible burden of caring for children whose mothers are burdened (Mill & Taylor, 1869); in the early decades of the twentieth century, Marxist feminist Aleksandra Kollontaj proposes a significant dismantling of maternal care, by women, through her socialization (that is to say through the entrusting of the children to public facilities) (Kollontaj, 1977).

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