Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life

by Daphne de Marneffe

Book Overview

As revolutionary as The Second Sex and as controversial as Backlash, this book will transform readers' thinking about the place of child rearing in women's lives. Immediately acclaimed by readers ranging from Allison Pearson to Carol Gilligan, from Daphne Merkin to Mary Matalin.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316110280
• ISBN13: 9780316110280
• Release Date: February 2005
• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Length: 401 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

wonderful book for the dedicated mother

FINALLY- a book for someone who likes to be and wants to be a MOTHER! I found this book to be a refreshing change from the barrage of books available on how to be supermom, how to balance a career and a family and everything else, or how to not let your children get in the way of your life. This isn't a self-help book or a personal account, but more on the lines of a sociology book on the current aspects of motherhood. It addresses the modern-day feminist needs to "have it all". My favorite chapters were those dealing with women's desires to stay home with or be the primary figure in their children's lives, and how they have to contend with society telling them that they are unintelligent because they do not have careers or weak because they cannot or do not want to leave their children in daycare all day. This book does NOT attack the non-traditional, modern-day mom. It DOES support the traditional family, letting women know there is nothing wrong with the desire to be a mom.

Finally a book that advances thought on mothering.....

This is the first book I have encountered that has intelligently given voice to the seemingly obvious yet currently obfuscated fact that many women desire to have children and to play a very active role in taking care of them rather than "outsourcing". While this was seen as the only route just a few generations ago, the choices available to my generation of now 30-somethings have actually made it a rather suspect choice among the upwardly mobile. Why would anyone stay at home with the kids given the choice not to? de Marneffe turns this question on its head and begins from a place that acknowledges and respects maternal desire no matter what a woman's situation may be vis-?-vis working and mothering. She does not come up with any prescriptives that maternal desire means that all women should be doing one thing or the other. Instead, she simply gives voice to that desire in a way that I experienced to be extremely cathartic as a mother of two who has clocked two years as a working mother and one year at home with the kids. This book creates the psychic space needed to consider the role we want to play as mothers while deftly avoiding getting caught in stale debates that either sentimentalize or devalue our choices. The way women think about and experience working and mothering has undergone a monumental shift from the now decades old idea that motherhood is a trap that women are pushed into. While this was once a revolutionary thought that played its role in helping to open up opportunities for women, it is overly ripe for refining. de Marneffe rightly puts her finger on the fact that our own desires, our own agency plays a driving role in our choice to mother and is therefore able to revisit old debates from a meaningful new perspective. This is not a "backlash" against feminism. It is more like the evolution of feminism. This book is the "Feminine Mystique" for the current generation of young mothers. Buy it! Read it! Discuss it with your partners and your friends.

All Mothers -To-Be and Mothers Should Read This

A extraordinarily well-written and perceptive book. DeMarneffe combines her skills as a psychologist with her heartfelt understanding of motherhood. I took it with me to Mexico, assuming that I'd never touch it on vacation, and found the book so engaging that I read the entire book in four days.Whether you're a parent at home, just contemplating motherhood, or deciding whether to return to work after your baby is born, this is an important book to have under your belt.

A new and truly radical feminist take on motherhood

Wow. I cannot thank De Marneffe enough for writing this book. I just started it, and I already feel like it has changed my life because it offers such a simple but revolutionary new perspective on motherhood. It is incredibly validating to me -- as a woman, as a mother, and as a feminist. But it certainly isn't "old-school" feminism. I think it represents the direction that feminism will take in the 21st century.Ever since I became a mother, I feel like I'm living in Babel - everyone's speaking a different language, and no one's speaking mine. This book is like a revelation, a lucid translation of all the surprising new feeelings that have surfaced in me since I had a child, but that I have been afraid or ashamed to admit to. The book represents the first discourse that I've found to look at motherhood neither as a foolish and short-sighted sell-out of a woman's individuality, nor as a perfectly selfless act of Christian martyrdom pursued solely for the sake of the children. What if motherhood , even full-time motherhood, is a self-actualizing spiritual journey and a valid form of self-expression that enhances the mother herself? I've never been able to figure out WHY I want to have children so much. De Marneffe's view of motherhood helps me understand and give a voice to my desire to mother.If you're looking for a book that covers the economic realities of dealing with work/life balance issues, this is not the book for you. But I don't think it's reasonable to think that we can tackle that much larger social issue until we've developed this individual discourse about the true meaning and value of motherhood (and of parenthood).My only criticism of the book is that I would rather see a book written about "parenting desire," not just maternal desire, because I don't think it's just women struggling with this issue. I hope that De Marneffe's next book does for fathers and paternal desire what this book does for mothers.

Feminism and Motherhood: not an oxymoron

If you are hoping for an ideological tribute to the women who leave the workplace to look after their young children, you should look elsewhere.This is an extremely compelling and forcefully written exploration of the nature and vicissitudes of maternal love. The author marshals her understanding, both clinical and personal, of feminist pyschoanalytic theory to argue that maternal desire has unique characteristics and that these are at best sentimentalized and at worst villified in social and economic institutions. She asks us to take maternal desire seriously, not as a basis for any particular "choice" in regard to parenting, but as an individual and collective good. The author's experiential engagement with the issues she raises serves to illustrate the progress of her reasoning without setting itself up as an exemplar for all women. The framework she develops creates new possibilities for reasoned discussion of social/economic justice and equality in relation to women's identity formation, children's needs and the "un-gendering" of maternal desire.