ABSTRACT
AT THE CENTER of essential motherhood is the claim that what it means to be a woman is fundamentally a function of female embodiment. From this perspective, the fact that women play a specific role in the physical reproduction of the species means that to be a woman is to fulfill this role. The ideological elaboration of this claim further argues that, not only are women meant to become pregnant and give birth, but also that women are meant to do the work of child rearing. Women are expected not only to want to become pregnant and give birth but also to have a certain bond with or connection to the children to whom they give birth, perhaps as a function of experiencing pregnancy and childbirth or of a maternal instinct that all women possess. On either basis they are expected to love their children unconditionally, empathize completely with their children, meet their children's needs selflessly, and be completely fulfilled and satisfied by the experience of child rearing. I have argued that difference feminism, in its valorizing approach to theorizing women's difference, risks recuperating significant elements of essential motherhood. My reading of Elshtain's argument for family reconstructive feminism shows that her version
of difference feminism does not avoid the recuperation of essential motherhood by avoiding the issues of maternal embodiment and the material aspects of the work of mothering. This conclusion about the importance of addressing the material aspects of mothering is also supported by my analysis of Gilman's and Key's debate about mothering. Key's difference-based challenge to individualism is like Elshtain's in recuperating elements of essential motherhood by theorizing women's difference in terms of mothering while also psychologizing and dematerializing mothering. On the other hand, feminist identitybased challenges to sexism and male dominance such as Gilman's do not necessarily avoid renaturalizing mothering in terms of female embodiment or failing to theorize the varied significance of mothering in women's lives. Such analyses may also represent mothering as not requiring the exercise of subjectivity, even as they argue for women's individualist subjectivity. Having considered these accounts of mothering, I conclude that, despite the risks of difference, such as problematizing women's (individualist) subjectivity and recuperating elements of essential motherhood, feminist analyses of mothering must confront as directly as possible the issues of maternal embodiment and the material aspects of mothering.
