22
PARTISAN REVIEW
the vast majority of literary and visual images of motherhood come
to us filtered through a collective or individual male consciousness. As
soon as a woman knows that a child is growing in her womb, she falls
under the power of a tangle of theories, ideals, archetypes, descrip–
tions of her new existence , almost none of which have come from
other women (though other women may transmit them) and all of
which have floated invisibly about her since she first perceived herself
to be female and therefore potentially a mother . We need to know
what, out of all that welter of image-making and thought-spinning ,
is worth salvaging,
if
only to understand better an idea so crucial in
history, a condition which has been wrested from the mothers them–
selves to buttress the power of the fathers .
Outside of the mother 's brief power over the child-subject to
patriarchal interference-women have experienced power in two
forms, both of them negative . The first is men 's power over us–
whether physical, economic, or institutional-along with the spec–
tacle of their bloody struggles for power over other men, their implicit
sacrifice of human relationships and emotional values in the quest for
dominance . Like other dominated people, we have learned to manip–
ulate and seduce , or to internalize men's will and make it ours, and
men have sometimes characterized this as "power" in
us;
but it is
nothing more than the child's or courtesan's "power" to wheedle
and the dependent's "power" to disguise her feelings-even from
herself-in order to obtain favors or, literally, to survive .
The possibility of "power" for women has historically been
befogged by obscurantism, sentimentality, and mystification . When
the Grimke sisters began to speak before antislavery societies in the
1830s, they were breaking with a convention that forbade women to
appear on public platforms . "A Pastoral Letter from the Congrega–
tional Church" was issued against them, saying:
The appropriate duties and influence ofwomen are clearly stated
in the New Testament . Those duties and that influence are un–
obtrusive and private, but
the sources of mighty power.
When
the mild, dependent softening influences upon the sternness of
man's opinion is fully exercised , the society feels the effect of it
in a thousand forms .
The power ofwoman is her dependence,
flowing from the consciousness of that weakness which God has
