Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)

MacCallum-Whitcomb, Susan

Susan MacCallum-Whitcomb 
Long And Difficult Labour 
The Emergence Of American 
Maternity Poetry 
On November 7, 1995, I was giving birth to my last child, a daughter 
named Sophie Constance. Exactly six months later, I was being escorted out of 
the White House. Well, that's a bit of an understatement: actually I was being 
"sweptn out of the White House, with my daughter-in-arms, by a squadron of 
walkie-take-wielding secret service agents, not because I'd been hurling 
threats or planting bombs but because the infant I carried had the audacity to 
cry a little too loud and a little too long during a standard White House tour. 
I offer this anecdote only because the incident reminded me that even in 
an age when "familyvaluesn are everywhere extolled, real-live mothers and their 
screaming, squirming children are not everywhere accepted. What struck me 
at the time was the absurdity of the whole thing. Upstairs, Bill Clinton was 
singing the praises of "Soccer Moms* (and doing God-knows what else); 
Hiary was writing "It takes a village to raise a child." Meanwhile, downstairs, 
Sophie and I were being told to shut up or get out. 
I have no doubt that on that spring day in Washington D.C., we were an 
annoying pair. I hadn't expected that either my daughter's "barbaric yawp" 
rn i t rnan ,  1959: 68) or my own noisy attempt to console her would be 
applauded. But neither had I expected that we'd be treated like CO- conspirators 
in some diabolical plot to bring down the American government, as dangerous 
subversives who had to be silenced as quickly and completely as possible. 
But that is exactlywhat happened. Having been unceremoniously dumped 
outside, Sophie and I made the further mistake of sitting on the White House 
lawn to catch our breath and were promptly chased away. At this point, visions 
ofVirginia Woolf and the Oxbridge Beadle began dancing in my head. Woolf, 
of course, would have gathered up her dignity (luckily she wouldn't have had 
to worry about a baby and a diaper bag) and trotted off to the Library of 
Journal ofthe Associati0nf.r Research on Mothering 1 19 
Congress to try her luck there. I didn't even consider it. I could already imagine 
the reception we'd find ... especially if we tried to gain access to the poetry 
stacks: after all, it is a place which has never been known forwelcomingwomen 
with children--whether in the flesh or on paper. 
American poetry has long upheld a distinctly male model of experience. 
Interpreting literally the national dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
happiness, it has celebrated the wholly unencumbered individual; and from 
Walt Whitman to the Beats and beyond, it has lionized those poets who could 
act as the living embodiment of the ideal. An unfortunate consequence of this 
has been the &rginalization of those poets who proved to be either unwilling 
or unable to conform to such a rigid standard. For American women in general, 
the insistence on a male model, grounded by definition in alien experiences, has 
made thewritingofpoetryverydificult. For American mothers, women bound 
by an even wider range of physical and cultural imperatives, the task has been 
more difficult still. 
Some, like America's first poet, Anne Bradstreet, succeeded as poets 
despite great odds. That she, and other colonial women, like Ann Eliza 
Bleecker and Judith Sargent Murray, could write poems at all while raising 
children in a rough, new land, was a rare and remarkable feat. But that rough 
new land did offer them one advantage over their literary descendants: they 
were able to live in the relative freedom of the literary frontier in an age before 
the boundary lines for poetry had been completely mapped. Thus the "rambling 
brat[sIn they brought to term (Bradstreet, 1981: 177) could be sent out into the 
world rather than being relegated to a magazine and gift book ghetto. 
After the American Revolution, however, this situation changed because 
with the founding of the new nation came the call for a national literature. The 
criteria for poetry and the range of subjects considered appropriate became 
strictly codified, and the criteria for the "true" American poet became codified 
as well. Simply put, the paths ofthe literary parents diverged: fathers were able, 
indeed encouraged, to take the road "less travelled by" (Frost, 1962: 72) while 
mothers were sent home to knit booties and gossip amongst themselves. 
As evidence of this, we need only look at the simultaneous development of 
two separate bodies of work: the literature of the American Renaissance, 
written by men, and what Mary Ryan (1982) has called "the liturgy of the cult 
of domesticity," a "ritual incantation recited by a vast congregation composed 
mostly ofwomen" (17,143). This meant that women and, more specifically, 
mothers, could still write: indeed some wrote voluminously. But if they wished 
to publish, the range of tones and subjects available to them was relatively 
narrow. Furthermore, as women speaking to women, they could only achieve 
only popular success. Serious critical consideration was reserved for men 
speaking to men. 
If women held out any hope of being regarded as poets as opposed to 
poetesses-in other words if they wanted to distance themselves from what 
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1987) blithely described as the "d-d mob of 
20 1 Volume l ,  Number l 
The Emergence ofAmerican Maternity Poetty 
scribbling women" (304)vitwas necessary for them to free themselves from as 
many stereotypical female responsibilities as possible. Historically, this meant 
that American women were forced to make a choice. They could forgo chiid- 
bearing to dedicate themselves to their art, and, in doing so, risk being 
dismissed as aberrations, or they could have children, settle into a domestic 
routine, and give up their poetic aspirations. 
Some women, like the nineteenth century poet Lucretia Davidson, con- 
sciously chose the first option. According to her mother, Davidson felt that 
she "could not do justice to husband or children, while her whole soul was 
absorbed in literary pursuits; she was not willing to resign them for any man, 
therefore, she had formed the resolution to lead a single life" (qtd. in Walker, 
1982: 75). Early in this century, Sara Teasdale made a similar choice when 
she aborted a fetus because, in the words of Elaine Showalter, she was "unable 
to imagine maternity and poetic creativity as other than antagonistic roles" 
(1991: 110). 
Others, like Alice Williams Brotherton, made a different decision. "I 
thought to win me a name," Brotherton wrote, that would "ring in the ear of 
the world-/ [But] How can I work with small pink fists / About my fingers 
curled? (1898: 76). Feeling unequal to the challenge, Brotherton bade "adieu 
to name and to fame" (1898: 76). 
We  will never know the number of literary mothers who felt compelled to 
be silent for the sake oftheir children. But there must have been many, for when 
Amy Lowellwrote "The Sisters" in 1955, the ability of anywoman to combine 
motherhood with a literary career still seemed "miraculousn (459). Lowell, 
however, did feel that women were potentially "double-bearing, / With 
matrices in body and in brain" (459), and in her lifetime this belief was 
beginning to be put into practice through the creation of an alternative model 
for poetry based on female experience: one which not only allowed for the 
possibility of motherhood, but recognized it as asset rather than an artistic 
liability. 
I t  is, of course, no coincidence that this new model, based on the belief 
that "Nature endowed the Complete Woman with a faculty for expressing 
herself through all her functions" (Loy 1982: 270), grew up simultaneously 
with the struggle for women's rights and, more specifically, reproductive 
choice. Just as it is easier to celebrate pregnancy when no social stigma is 
attached to it, and to celebrate child-rearing when economic hardship is not 
a pressing concern, it is easier to celebrate motherhood in general when you 
have the freedom to decide whether or not you'll have children in the first 
place. 
But obstacles remained for those women who choose to be both mothers 
and poets. And they remain today. After all, literary mothers continue to deal 
with the relentless reality ofbringing up children. Pre-revolutionary poet, Ann 
Eliza Bleecker lamented that "... Amidst domestic cares to rhyme / I find no 
pleasure, and1 find no time" (qtd. in Cowell, 1981: 5). But issues ofoccupation 
Journal ofthe Assoriationfor Research on Mothering 1 21 
and interruption still jeopardize the productivity of literary mothers, as con- 
temporary pieces like Alice Walker's 'Now That the Book is Finished," Susan 
Griffin's "This Is the Story of the Day in the Life of a Woman Trying" and 
Marilyn Nelson Waniek's "Levitation with Baby" make abundantly dear. 
Moreover, the "carping tongue" which Anne Bradstreet complained of (1981: 
7) has never really been silenced. Women poets must still contend with the 
admonishment of their peers, both the men who believe that Women artists 
fail / Because they have babies" (MacDonald, 1993: 189) and the women who 
believe that "motherhood is the sinister invention / of patriarchy" (Ostriker, 
1980: 46) 
Nevertheless, in this century-and especially in theyears after World War 
Two-America's literary mothers have, in increasing numbers, managed to be 
"double-bearing" (Lowell, 1955: 459). Women like Louise Bogan, Gwendolyn 
Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Sandra McPherson, 
Alicia Ostriker, Sylvia Plath, Muriel Rukeyser, and Adrienne Rich-to name 
only a few-have been able not only to produce poetry but to use their poetry 
to reflect and validate maternal experience. 
Taken collectively, America's literary mothers have regained confidence in 
their creative powers, both poetic and reproductive. Indeed, power itself has 
become a central theme for many of them. Some recast themselves in powerfil 
roles. Moving beyond maternal stereotypes, they describe themselves as 
providers or protectors. In doing so, they not only reverse traditional expecta- 
tions of the passive, dependent mother; they also succeed in reducing the 
importance of the father by effectively usurping the positions from which his 
authority is typically derived. 
But a number of them go hrther still. Rather than dealing with generic 
fathers, women like Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds challenge, with varying 
degrees ofdirectness, the fathers ofAmerican poetry. These women subvert the 
phallocentric national model by taking the words ofits primary promoters, men 
such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, and applying them to 
maternal experience. In the process, they prove that mothers are not just 
capable of writing poetry, they are as well qualified to write it as the icons of 
American literature. 
The literary mothers who adhere to this new female model view them- 
selves as neither romanticized Madonnas nor as martyrs to tradition. Yet 
neither can they be dismissed as penis-envying male-wannabes. In the opening 
stanzas ofSharon Old's poem, "Language ofthe Brag," for instance, the speaker 
desires "some epic use" for her "excellent bodyn (1980: 44). She stands by the 
sandlot and watches the boys play. Bucl lnd  it's a big but--she does not stuff 
her hair up under her hat, don ajock strap andjoin the game. Rather than trying 
to fit herself into a masculine paradigm, the adult Olds embraces an equally 
valid, and, if anything, more authentic, female one. She defiantly celebrates 
maternity, revelling in her new-found power and demanding that it be 
recognized: 
22 1 Volume l, Number I 
The Emergence ofAmerican Maternity P o e q  
I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman, 
M e n  Ginsberg, I have done this thing, 
I and other women, this exceptional 
act with the exceptional heroic body, 
this giving birth, this glistening verb . . . (1980: 45) 
Here Olds suggests that males exploit their physicality because they are 
searching for a substitute for female fecundity-they are motivated, ifyou will, 
by womb envy. Alma Luz Vianueva states this belief still more explicitly in 
Witches' Blood," when she theorizes that 
Men have killed, 
made war, 
for blood to flow as naturally, 
as a woman's 
once a month- 
men have roamed the earth to find 
the patience of pregnancy 
the joy of birth. (1980: 384) 
The confidence that comes from this belief allows literary mothers to write 
in the "Language of the Bragn and put their "proud American boast / right here 
with the others" (Olds, 1980: 45). 
The codifiers of the national literature long underestimated the power of 
the maternal voice. Canon-makers like Ralph Waldo Emerson felt that 
mothers lacked the necessary tools, for they could not use the "spermatic, 
prophesying, man-making words" which were supposedly the hallmark of 
American poetry (Emerson, qtd. in Leverenz, 1986: 39). That "childless, lonely 
old grubber," Walt Whitman (Ginsberg, 1993: 29), concurred when he 
distinguished between those who could "perceive" and "tell" and those who 
could "conceive children and bring them up well" (420). But America's 
"double-bearing" (Lowell, 1955: 459) maternity poets, women whose work is 
notable for its emotional force and formal ingenuity, have repeatedly proven 
them wrong. 
References 
Bradstreet, Anne. 1981. The Complete Work e n n e  Bradstreet. Eds. Joseph R. 
McElrath, Jr. and Allan P. Robb. Boston: Twayne. 
Brotherton, Alice W i a m s .  1898. Woman and Artist." In Mother-Song and 
Child-Song. Ed. Charlotte Brewster Jordan. New York Stokes, 1898. 
Cowell, Pattie, ed. 1981. Women Poets in Pre-Revolutionary America, 1650- 
1775:An Anthology. Troy: Whitson. 
Frost, Robert. 1962. "The Road Not Taken." In his Selected Poems ofRobert 
Journal ofthe Association for Research on Mothering 1 23 
Frost, 71-72. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 
Ginsberg, Men .  1993. 'A Supermarket in California." In "HowP and Other 
Poems, 29-30. San Francisco: City Lights. 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 1987. In TheLetters, 1853-1856. Eds.Thomas Woodson 
et al. Colurnbus, Ohio: State University Press. 
Leverenz, David. 1986. T h e  Politics of Emerson's Man-Making Words." 
PMLR 101: 38-56. 
Lowell, Amy. 1955. T h e  Sisters." In The Complete Poetical Works ofAmy 
Lowell, 459-61. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 
Loy, Mina. 1982. The Last Lunar Baedeker. Ed. Roger L. Conover. Highlands 
N.C: Jargon. 
MacDonald, Cynthia. 1993. "Instruction from Bly." In No More Masks!:An 
Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets. Ed. Florence 
Howe, 188-90. New York: Harper Perennial. 
Olds, Sharon. 1980. Satan Says. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 
Ostriker, Alicia. 1980. "Propaganda Poem: Maybe for Some Young Mamas." 
In The Mother/Child Papers, 42-47. Santa Monica: Momentum. 
Ryan, Mary P. 1982. The Empire of the Mother: American Writing about 
Domesticity, 1830-1860. New York: Institute for Research in History. 
Showalter, Elaine. 1991. Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American 
Women's Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 
Villanueva, Alma Luz. 1993. Witches' Blood." In No More Masks!: An 
Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets. Ed. Florence 
Howe, 384. New York: Harper Perennial. 
Walker, Cheryl. 1982. The Nightingale's Burden: Women Poets andAmerican 
Culture Before 1900. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 
Woolf, Virginia. 1932. A Room ofone's Own. Toronto: McClelland and 
Stewart. 
Whitman, Walt. 1959. Complete PoetyandSelectedProse. Ed. James E. Miller 
Jr. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 
24 1 Volume l ,  Number l 


English

Long and Difficult Labour: The Emergence of American Maternity Poetry

Roethler, Jacque

Jacque Roethler 
Sleep 
Night 
And once again, she 
With a force of will puzzling in one so small 
Wd not sleep. 
Her father, 
In one of his snits again, 
Complaining about 
His truck, his job, the weather, 
But mostly about the children, 
Volunteers to put her to sleep 
And I know there will be trouble. 
Why does he begrudge the time spent with his children? 
The moments spent with his fiiends 
With his lathe 
Wtth his instruments 
Wtth the television 
Join in a trickle 
Which finally carries him away on its floodtide 
But the moments with the children 
He spends like a miser 
With bad grace. 
It begins 
She lying uneasily in his arms 
With him pulling his lip 
Drumming fingers 
Blaming her brother 
Reciting to me a litany of the things conspiring to keep her awake 
Omitting his own nervous energy 
Which surrounds her like a palpable noise. 
Journal ofthe Association for Research on Mothen'ng 1 109 
I think this is unfair 
For certainly this tendency to sleeplessness comes from him 
Late nights in the workshop 
Starting the drill press at midnight 
With heartstopping noise 
Lacquering something at two a.m. 
Filling the house with such an acrid and invasive smell 
That it wakes us upstairs. 
And finally ends with his roaring at her 
"Go to sleep Goddamit!" 
I swoop down and carry her off with me to the waterbed 
Angry, yet pleased: 
The responsibility lies with me again 
But nobody else does it right. 
Her tiny body looks even smaller in the big bed 
Like a single perfect pearl 
Lying against the velvet 
In the jeweler's shop. 
And she, 
There in that sea ofwarmth 
My breathing comfortably near 
And, comfortably far, 
The sounds of her father clattering around in the shop 
Contemplating, no doubt, 
Some odor, 
Wood putty, mineral spirits, paint thinner 
With which to assail our sleep later, 
Sleeps. 
110 1 Volume 1, Number 1 


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