Motherhood, Mothers, Mothering: A Multidimensional Perspective

The question of matriarchate as female dominance, remains unresolved. While non materialist anthropologists dismissed it outright, socialist scholars accepted it as a stage in social evolution. If matrifocal clans or collective mothering oncet provided power and assistance for raising a human infant, can one recreate it? How does one reclaim the awesome power of procreation invested in women? The feminist dilemma is how to retrieve motherhood as a source of liberation, not by eliminating it as an obstacle but by redefining appropriate terms and conditions and a social structure that can make motherhood a conceivably creative experience, merging as it does the boundaries between child and mother, mediating as it can between nature and history, between the universal and the particular. [Text of the Navdurga Memorial Lecture. Asiatic Society. February 8, 2006.]