ABSTRACT
Adrienne Rich, in her 1976 book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution , presented a provocative attack on motherhood and the family in its current patriarchal form. She explained in the foreword that she was not against either motherhood or the family under nonpatriarchal conditions, nor was she calling for a mass system of state-controlled child care. She then stated:
Mass child-care in patriarchy has had but two purposes: to introduce large numbers of women into the labor force, in a developing economy or during a war, and to indoctrinate future citizens. It has never been conceived as a means of releasing the energies of women into the mainstream of culture, or of changing the stereotypic gender images of both women and men. (p. 14)
