Cultural memory, feminism and motherhood.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Stephens, Julie
• Date: 22 March 2005

Like immigrants moving from country to city, many women have emigrated from the cultures of our mothers to that of our fathers. But what of the language and love of that old mother culture, imperfect as it was, have we been able to keep and share with men? What have we left behind? Does what we have feel right? On what basis do we tell? Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work. (1)

Remembering the culture of our mothers and retelling our versions of their lives has long been a feminist preoccupation. From the feminist narratives of the 1970s to the recent boom in the field of women's life-writing and memoir, personal memories of mothers have taken on a public or collective significance. Feminism itself has been portrayed as a 'mother who did not give enough'. (2) What counts as memory in this context, and what is forgotten, has a decidedly political character. Reflecting on her earliest feminist encounters, Anne Roiphe writes that in respect to our mothers 'we ground them up in our long conversations and spat them out'. (3) Such recollections--along with memories of mothers as depressed, angry or misguided--are commonplace. If, however, the content of what is recalled, forgotten or suppressed is, as Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith argue, 'intricately bound up with issues of power and hegemony', (4) we might ask just what is revealed by this type of feminist cultural memory? I will argue that there has been an active forgetting of the 'nurturing' mother in feminist recall, and that this is of profound cultural significance.

Complex political stakes and meanings are bound up with what a culture remembers and forgets. One form of cultural memory is politically overt, with clear targets. Take the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, for instance. They mobilized maternal memories to expose the killing, torture and disappearance of their children during the Argentine military dictatorship in 1977. And, when the Argentine economy collapsed a quarter of a decade later, these memories were explicitly reworked, this time to confront the economic violence caused by neo-liberal policy makers. (5) Another form of cultural memory, however, is less overt and permeates everyday life as a manifestation of widespread social and economic change. This form is evident in Anglo-American expressions of feminist cultural memory where an 'active forgetting' can be seen to strengthen neo-liberalism, particularly in respect to how 'work' and 'care' is currently understood.

Gender and Cultural Memory

The idea of memory as a cultural, rather than an individual, faculty gained currency in the English-speaking social sciences through the work of Paul Connerton in How Societies Remember. (6) While there is a long history of intellectual interest in memory, recently there has been a proliferation of memory research. (7) Cultural memory has been defined as the juncture of the individual and the social where, according to Hirsch and Smith, individuals and groups recall a shared past on the basis of common beliefs, conventions and experiences. (8) In her influential book Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic and the Politics of Remembering, Marita Sturken makes two observations crucial to my analysis of feminist cultural memory. First, that memory and forgetting are co-constitutive processes, each essential to the other's existence and, secondly, that memory is a narrative, a form of interpretation, not a replica. (9) Sturken suggests that we should not ask whether a memory is true, but what its retelling reveals about how the past affects the present. (10) In respect to the ways feminists have recollected their mothers, the point therefore is not the reliability of the memories (were their mothers really that bad?) but what the transmission of these memories may indicate about how feminism and motherhood are currently defined.

The fact that women are often the designated keepers of family memories complicates the relationship between gender and cultural memory. Feminist practices have consistently involved the 'retrieval' of women's memories in the form of stories, cultural productions and personal testimony. It is perhaps fitting, then, that Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, was also seen as 'the mother of history'. (11) However, according to Hirsch and Smith, memory studies and feminist studies have developed on parallel but separate tracks. (12) In their view, there have been few sustained efforts to theorize memory from the perspective of feminism. (13) Questioning what a specifically feminist cultural memory might look like may enable these tracks to intersect.

It goes without saying that there are many ways of reading feminist maternal memories. There is a whole literature on mother-daughter relationships from psychoanalytic and literary perspectives (although the emphasis seems to be more on the daughter's than the mother's standpoint). (14) Nevertheless, the concept of cultural memory provides a rich theoretical framework for an exploration of the convergence of public and private, individual and social, particularly at a time when struggles for indigenous and minority rights are progressively cast in terms of cultural memory and its exclusions. In fact motherhood itself can be seen as representing this merging of the social and the individual. As Jane Smiley remarks: 'Motherhood is the most public of private conditions'. (15)

Matrophobia

Every woman's feminism is a love letter to her mother. (16)

In a diary recounting her early feminist activism, Marianne Hirsch discusses details of her 1970s consciousness-raising group and its endless preoccupation with two topics that never lost their appeal: sex and the group's own mothers. Of the eight participants, two were women with children, yet this fact never became a topic of conversation nor a cause for solidarity in the consciousness-raising group. Remarkably, it appears that in the unremitting discussion about 'mothers', the fact that two real mothers were actually present in the room was ignored. Hirsch writes: 'Our mothers [became] the emblems of a womanhood we need[ed] to reject, and the children of our two sisters' lives do not make us anymore sympathetic to the maternal project'. (17) The fear of 'becoming like our mothers' was so pronounced, Hirsch continues, that a 'maternal divide' opened up with simply no ground in between. This desire for self-definition, in opposition to one's mother, is not surprising. Others have drawn attention to the way the rejection of 'their mother's values, viewpoints and voices' enabled feminists to find themselves. (18) What women needed in the early stages of feminist consciousness was not mothers or motherhood, but as Hirsch puts it, to be free to give birth to ourselves. (19) During the same period, Life Magazine made a similarly influential pronouncement: 'It doesn't make...