Motherhood Quote by Adrienne Rich

"The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown"

Adrienne Rich, Poet

About this Quote

Rich turns labor politics inside out by treating motherhood as a workplace with no shop floor, no time clock, and crucially, no co-workers. The opening contrast is deliberate: the worker has the classic tools of collective power unionizing, striking, walking out. The mother, by design, does not. She is spatially isolated ("divided from each other in homes") and morally immobilized ("tied to their children by compassionate bonds"). That phrase matters: Rich refuses the cheap provocation that mothers are simply oppressed by sentimentality. Compassion is real, even noble, and it is also a mechanism that keeps the system running smoothly.

The subtext is that domestic life in modern capitalism privatizes not just care but dissent. If you can't gather, can't bargain, can't withhold your labor without harming someone you love, resistance mutates. Rich's "wildcat strikes" is a devastating metaphor: unauthorized, unorganized work stoppages become psychosomatic. The body and mind revolt when the social conditions make open revolt impossible. Breakdown reads as personal failure in a culture that loves to individualize women's pain; Rich reframes it as a political symptom, a misrecognized form of collective grievance.

Contextually, this is second-wave feminism at its sharpest, when the movement was insisting that "the personal is political" wasn't a slogan but an analytic tool. Rich isn't romanticizing collapse; she's indicting the architecture that makes collapse the only available exit.

Quote Details

Topic	Mother
Source	Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) — passage discussing mothers' isolation and the limits on mothers' collective action.
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About the Author

Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929 - March 27, 2012) was a Poet from USA.

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