ADRIENNE RICH
21
asserts that it is himself, not the moon or the spring rains or the spirits
of the dead, who impregnates the woman; that the child she carries
and gives birth to is "his" child, who can make
him
immortal, both
mystically, by propitiating the gods with prayers and sacrifices when
he is dead, and concretely, by receiving the patrimony from him.
From this nexus of sexual possession, property ownership, and the
desire
to
transcend death, developed the institution we know: the
present-day patriarchal family with its division of roles by gender, its
emotional, physical, and material possessiveness, its ideal of monoga–
mous marriage until death (and its severe penalties for adultery by
the wife), the "illegitimacy" of a child born outside wedlock , the
economic dependency of women , the unpaid domestic services of the
wife, the obedience of women and children
to
male authority, the
imprinting and continuation of heterosexual roles, and the super–
naturalizing of the penis.
Again some combination or aspect of these values prevails,
whether in an Orthodox Jewish family where the wife mediates with
the outer world and earns a living to enable the husband
to
study
Torah; or for the upper-class European or Oriental couple , both pro–
fessionals, who employ servants for domestic work and a governess for
the children . They prevail even where women are the nominal "heads
of households ." For every mother, however much she may act the
coequal provider or so-called " matriarch" within her own family,
must deliver her children over within a few years of their birth to the
patriarchal system of education, of law, of religion, of sexual codes ;
she is, in fact,
expected
to prepare them to enter that system without
rebelliousness or "maladjustment " and to perpetuate it in their own
adult lives. Patriarchy depends on the mother to act as a conservative
influence, imprinting future adults with patriarchal values even in
those early years when the mother-child relationship might seem
most individual and private; it has also assured through ritual and
tradition that the mother shall cease , at a certain point,
to
hold the
child-in particular the son-in her orbit. Certainly it has created
images of the Mother which reinforce the conservatism of mother–
hood and convert it to an energy for the renewal ofmale power .
Of these images, and their implications for the whole spectrum
of human relations, there is much still unsaid . Women have
been
both mothers and daughters , but have written little on the subject;
