Misconceptions by Naomi Wolf

Image by Nicole Hill of A Little Sussy

"Becoming a mother requires a kind of supreme focus, a profound discipline, and even a kind of warrior spirit.  Yet our culture prefers to give women doggerel: it often suggests that motherhood is something effortless.  It calls motherhood "natural," as if the powerful attachment women have to their babies erases the agency they must show in carrying birthing, and caring for children."   Page 4

"Many women I spoke to learned with surprise that new mothers are not born but, through great effort, made.  Bonding fiercely with your baby is of course natural, but good day-to-day mothering, as few seem publicly to acknowledge, is no more "natural" than is any painstaking, exhaustive, difficult work that is both biologically driven and deeply willed...Giving birth is natural - but "becoming a mother" in its deepest sense is not exclusively natural.  It is a far greater work of stoicism, discipline, patience, and will than the ideology of "motherhood" allows for."   Page 6

"I believe the myth about the ease and naturalness of mothering - the ideal of the effortlessly ever-giving mother - is propped up, polished, and promoted as a way to keep women from thinking clearly and negotiating forcefully about what they need from their partners and from society at large in order to mother well, without having to sacrifice themselves in the process."   Page 7 

"Many cultures explicitly pair the potency of fertility with an awareness of loss.  Our own grandmothers and great-grandmothers recognized that pregnancy and birth had a foreground that was joyful and miraculous, and a background with strokes of what was dark and traumatic.  Although few women in the West actually die in childbirth today, we deny the many symbolic deaths a contemporary pregnant woman undergoes: from the end of her solitary selfhood, to the loss of her prematernal shape, to the eclipse of her psychologically carefree identity, to the transformation of her marriage, to the decline in her status as a professional or worker."   Page 7

"It was one thing to experience a loss of self in prefeminist culture that at least assigned a positive status to motherhood itself; it is very different to lose a part of one's very sense of self to motherhood in world that often seems to have little time, patience, or appreciation for motherhood or parenting. "  Page 8 

"Real mother love is more impressive than the fantasy of it.  The actual, specific, fierce maternal love that grows in the wake of that immense psychic and physical tremor that is pregnancy and birth should inspire awe, not sentiment.  I wrote this book to explore the genuine miracle, not the Hallmark card..."  Page 9