ABSTRACT
THE DIFFICULTIES OF theorizing mothering in an individualist ideological context are well illustrated by the turn of the century debate between Gilman and Key. And these difficulties persist in contemporary feminist theory given the continued hegemony of individualism in U.S. society and culture. Like Gilman and Key, contemporary feminist theorists have faced the challenge of analyzing mothers' situations and experiences and theorizing the significance of mothering in women's lives without recuperating essential motherhood. This means that contemporary feminist theorists have encountered some version of the dilemma of difference and the paradoxes it produces, regardless of how they approach the issue of mothering. Accounts of the resurgence, or "the second wave," of the women's movement in the United States in the 1960s often emphasize its multiple origins and the different kinds of feminism that developed at this time, but a focus on the issue of mothering leads to a different account of this period of feminism. Historians have traced the origins of
contemporary feminism to the representatives of the women's rights movement that persisted in the twentieth century, such as the National Women's Party (Rupp and Taylor 1987), and to the civil rights movement (Evans 1979), the student left and the anti-Vietnam War movement (Evans 1979; Echols 1989). Historians of ideas, philosophers, and political theorists have identified forms of feminist theory ranging from liberal, Marxist, and Marxist-socialist feminisms to radical, cultural, psychoanalytic, and existential feminisms and have stressed how different these forms of feminism are from each other (Elshtam 1981; Jaggar 1983; Donovan 1985; Tong 1989).
