'women always over-dramatise their birth stories' (part two)

"Last time on ‘Dramatic Birth Stories’, the baby had just arrived, the mother was deeply shocked, and there was a big bloody mess everywhere."

Still reeling, I watched a small squishy blob being taken away from me over to where the paediatrician was poised ready to take her first measurements. My midwife, however, had other ideas and wrestled the baby off him to return her to me post-haste for some post-natal skin-to-skin.

My first thoughts were ‘how will I get the stains out of my clothes?’

Before I really had a chance to respond to her, the blob was off again to be weighed and measured and monitored.

Meanwhile, the registrar told me that I had been torn by the forceps and would need to be stitched up.

‘Um, ok,’ I believe I might have said.

I was wheeled off to surgery, midwife in tow, while my husband waited with the baby.

The surgery started well enough. I was awake and conscious throughout, as they decided to use a local anaesthetic that went thought the same place as the epidural. My midwife bounded into the operating room. Perching herself at my shoulder, we chatted inconsequentially to pass the time. Apart from the increasingly insistent tugging, which seemed to be endless (I mean, the area we are talking about is not exactly huge), and the anaesthetist who would not shut up asking me if I was okay all the time, the first hour or so was not too bad. Let me tell you, it is quite surreal to be discussing changes to Cardiff’s main shopping centre with one person, while three other people are trying to sew up your most intimate body parts, and another person is constantly informing you of every little change they are making to your drug levels. ‘Just tell me if you’re in any pain,’ he kept saying. ‘And don’t fall asleep.’

Then the beeping started.

There was a frenzy of activity.

‘What’s going on?’ I wanted to know. The registrars ignored me, as they forcefully started pushing and pulling my abdomen. Someone got on the phone to the consultant, who turned up at some point to inspect and offer advice.

‘Uterus won’t contract,’ was the curt response from someone in the room. ‘We have to massage it to stop the bleeding.’

There may’ve been drugs in my system, but that ‘massage’ hurt.

Then I started shaking uncontrollably, my teeth practically chattering themselves out of my head. ‘Shaking,’ I managed to get out. ‘Can you stop it?’

‘I’m okay with the shaking,’ said the anaesthetist. ‘You’re not in any danger.’

‘But my teeth won’t stop chattering,’ said I, stating the obvious.

Clearly this was a winning argument, as yet another body who had entered the room started drapping inflatable warming cloths around me. I gradually felt warmer, and some of my shaking stopped. But those teeth kept right on going. I’m surprised I have any left.

Meanwhile, the registrars had stopped assaulting my stomach and were finishing their needlework. My midwife had given up on the small talk and was stroking my hair and forehead. The anaesthetist had temporarily stopped badgering me to make incessant phone-calls to the lab to try and figure out whether or not I needed a blood transfusion. After a bit of back and forth, he decided I didn’t.

Eventually, it was all over. About four hours later, I was wheeled out into the recovery room. My husband sat waiting for me, with a small bundle next to him that I couldn’t really see properly. The nurses introduced themselves to me and asked my permission to take some colostrum to feed her. I said ‘yes’ and was squeezed and prodded a little more. I watched them feed the paltry results to her, but still have little recollection of what she looked like. I seemed to have hardly any strength for anything, other than to lie on the gurney and try and focus on what was happening around me.

My midwife asked if it was okay if she went home, so she could get some sleep. Fighting sleep myself, I said it was fine.

Some time later, and my sense of time is very hazy by this point, the registrar and anaesthetist burst back into the recovery room, saying we needed to go back to theatre right away. My vital signs were erratic and I hadn’t stabilised in the way they had hoped. A purple form was shoved in my face asking if they had my permission to perform an emergency hysterectomy in order to save my life.

‘Oh,’ I said, thinking this was starting to get very serious indeed. The doctors looked worried and wanted to move quickly. I signed the form with the small amount of strength I had left.

At this point, my husband intervened. He had been told next to nothing about what was going on, partly because of the state I was in, and partly because of the speed at which things were now starting to unfold. Through it all, he had literally been left holding the baby, and was terrified about what might happen. He asked the doctors if there were any other options. Feeling the urgency of the situation, they quickly hauled him out of the room, and, so I understand, told him that unless they took me back to surgery again, as soon as possible, I could bleed to death. Bleeding from the uterus is apparently very serious, and severe injury and death can result in a matter of minutes.

This all happened out of my earshot, of course. When they came back, he was wiping away tears. I didn’t have any time to say anything to him before I was wheeled off again. This time, they told me en route to the operating room, I would be put under a general anaesthetic.

‘I’m scared,’ I said.

‘Why?’ they asked.

‘I’m scared I won’t wake up.’

‘Don’t worry. A lot of people feel like that when they go under,’ they replied. I think this was meant to be comforting.

They put the mask over my face, and then pulled it away again. ‘Nothing’s happening,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry, it will,’ they said, putting it back on.

Before everything fell away, I heard that the consultant was now there, and they were discussing various options to staunch the bleeding.

Obviously, I did wake up again.

By this time, it was mid-morning the next day. Sun was streaming in the window of the birthing room. My husband was asleep in a chair by my bed. I felt a lot better than I had for a little while, although there were a lot of wires coming out of my arms and it hurt to move. I looked around this brave new world, and saw a little bundle with a large angry bruise on her cheek and cuts on her forehead. She was asleep.

It had been nearly twelve hours since I gave birth to her, and I had not held her properly once.

During the morning, both the registrar and anaesthetist from the night before came in to check on me. Not only was I now packed full of stuff to stop me bleeding, but I had had three blood transfusions. ‘But don’t worry,’ the anaesthetist said. ‘This doesn’t mean that the same thing will happen again if you have more children.’ Aside from the fact that the thought of having more children was not really uppermost in my mind at that point, I took from this that my uterus was still intact, if not exactly ready, willing and able.

We stayed in hospital for six more days, but I’ll end my story there.

I’ve tried to relate what happened to me - or as much as I can remember, at least - in as unadorned away as I can, lest I be accused of being ‘overly dramatic’. Even now, it still makes me feel very emotional to think about how serious things got very quickly.

All stories are a series of events that have been selected and put together in a certain way to create a certain effect. Until the last few months, narrating my story has been like a kind of therapy for me: I am incredibly grateful to the people who have listened to it, particularly the first time I told it. Telling it dislodged a lot of painful stuff, and certainly help me work through what, I’m sorry to say, was a very traumatic experience.

Contrary to my new acquaintance’s opinion that women competitively over-dramatise their birth stories to - I dunno - make themselves seem tougher, I think many women tell their stories in order to effect a kind of ‘talking cure’ to help them process the profound things that have happened to them.

As one of the hospital midwives said to me, as I bawled again after briefly telling yet another doctor what had happened to me, ‘it’s the ones who bottle it up that you have to watch.’

'women always over-dramatise their birth stories' (part one)

I was with a group of mothers recently and the subject of birth stories came up.

Not in the compulsive way it did in the early weeks after giving birth, when it felt like you had to talk about what had happened in order to process what a profoundly transformative - and, in some cases, traumatic - experience it was. For me, at least, that need has been well and truly met and I no longer feel like it is the first thing I have to know about another mother. Rather, it came up in the context of what some members of the group didn’t really want to talk about. Killing the moment to share a very personal experience and develop some sense of solidarity before it even began, one of the mothers said, ‘Oh no, not birth stories, they’re always so overly-dramatic.’

Another agreed, ‘Yeah, it’s like everyone always tries to outdo each other. Their experience is always worse than anyone else’s.’

In what was, perhaps, a gentle reproof, someone else pointed out that women might dramatise this experience because for many it is the most dramatic thing that has ever happened to them.

The moment passed as we agreed - or failed to disagree - not to share.

I couldn’t help but feel, however, that an opportunity had been missed. In some respects, birth stories are a female equivalent of war stories, and who would dare suggest to a returned serviceperson that the heat of battle is not dramatic? Having said that, I am also aware that the two women who were dismissive of birth stories were also newly pregnant for the second time, and may not have wanted to be reminded about what could potentially lay in wait for them in a few months’ time. There’s no denying that a bit of denial can sometimes get you through.

I’m aware that I’ve skirted around my own birth experience in my blog thus far. But with this criticism in mind, now is perhaps the moment. I will try to be as un-dramatic as possible, lest anyone feel that I am starting ‘BirthWars: an online competition to decide who is the toughest mother out there!’

It all began benignly enough on a sunny Tuesday afternoon.

I was a week ‘overdue’. During my midwife’s visit that morning we had discussed options for induction, including whether or not to induce or let nature take its course. As she got up to leave, I felt an unusual heavy sensation in my lower abdomen. I told her and she smiled and said ‘Oh good’.

I was starting to get seriously bored waiting around for the baby to put in an appearance. I had even started a 1000-piece puzzle of a Worcestershire half-timbered cottage to help pass the time. After my midwife had left, I returned to the puzzle and was congratulating myself on having got all the edge pieces in place, when, at about 2pm, I felt something give. Wondering what it was, I went to the bathroom, in what I can only say was the nick of time. Within seconds of getting there, there was a positively diluvian outpouring that went absolutely everywhere. ‘Guess I won’t be finishing the puzzle, then,’ I thought to myself as I started mopping it up.

Feeling excited and more than a little damp, I phoned my midwife and told her the news. ‘Oh good,’ she said, and instructed me to call her again when the contractions became stronger and more regular. I then phoned my husband, who was also excited and jumped in a taxi to come straight home.

There we were, braced for action, waiting for those contractions to get stronger. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

‘That was one!’ I cried, trying to feel like the ripple of discomfort I had just experienced was actually starting to test me. ‘How long has that been since the last one?’

‘Mmm, a while,’ said my husband, ‘maybe 20 minutes.’

‘Oh,’ I said, disappointed. It wasn’t going to be one of those quick labours, then.

The afternoon passed fairly uneventfully. We made sure my bag was packed and got out the combs, hot water bottle and swiss ball. And, anti-climatically, nothing much happened. It was almost Beckettian.

By bedtime, the contractions were a little stronger - like moderate periods pains - but still not particularly unbearable. By 2am, they were getting stronger and reasonably regular, although their regularity was probably at least as much a product of my wanting them to be regular than their actual intensity. My husband kept dozing off in the middle of doing acupressure on my lower back. I kept having to prod him awake, but, to be honest, felt that I could handle this level of pain by myself. ‘Hmmm, maybe this labour thing is not so bad after all,’ I thought to myself sleepily. As the pain from the contractions marginally increased, I turned over in bed to try and get more comfortable.

And then they stopped all together.

Disappointed, I too must’ve nodded off, because next thing I knew it was 6am.

Wondering what on earth was going on, I called my midwife. Almost accusingly, she told me that she had been up most of the night watching trashy late night TV, ready at a moment’s notice to make a dash to the hospital. ‘Sorry,’ I apologised. ‘I just didn’t want to wake you up, when nothing much was happening.’

She then asked me if I’d like to go the hospital.

‘Yes,’ I said, with relief, thinking that once we got there, something had to happen.

Wrapped in a towel in case there were any more leaks, me, my husband and the hospital bag arrived at the hospital. I think even the taxi driver was disappointed that it wasn’t an adrenalin-packed race to get there.

On arrival, we sat in the waiting room, while someone cleaned up one of the birthing rooms for us. Sipping my tea, I had visions of blood-soaked walls, and had to remind myself that I was actually in labour.

My midwife explained to me that eighteen hours was as long as the hospital was comfortable letting labour continue once a woman’s waters had broken, in case of infection. By 9am that morning, I had nearly met the deadline at only one centimetre dilated. I had barely even broken a sweat. It was time to induce.

‘OK,’ I thought. ‘Now we’re getting somewhere.’

I was hooked up to a syntocinon drip, which stimulates contractions, and my midwife increased the doses at 15-minute intervals. ‘This is not so bad’, I thought, propped up on my pillows. When the dosage hit maximum, however, I was definitely starting to feel it. ‘Now!’ I cried to my husband when the frequent and strong contractions came so he could get his thumbs into position. For a while, I managed to cope with the now-quite-decided pain with acupressure and determination. When an exam by the registrar found that I was still only one centimetre dilated I burst into tears, not from the pain so much, but from the frustration. All that work and I was getting nowhere.

My midwife started making cryptic remarks that I interpreted to mean she thought I needed to soldier on. Still in the grip of profound contractions, I looked at her like she was insane. She then said that she’d leave my husband and I alone to discuss it. Once she’d left the room, he told me that she had in fact meant that I should have an epidural. ‘Oh,’ I said, feeling like a dunce. ‘OK.’

Feeling relieved that I didn’t have to tough it out, the anaesthetist and a range of other bods that I can’t really remember came in to sort out the epidural. ‘Oh’, she said, trying to insert the gigantic needle between my vertebra, ‘that’s odd.‘ For the record, these are words that you don’t want to hear when you’re in this kind of situation. This was quickly followed by ‘the needle doesn’t seem to go in very far’, which is number two on my list of things you don’t want to hear in this kind of situation. After some back and forth, she decided that the answer was that I simply must have the spinal column of a young east Asian woman (really) and that was that. With all this carry-on, I was thinking to myself that it would be just my luck that the epidural wouldn’t work, and I’d have to tough it out anyway.

Fortunately, I was wrong (again) and the drugs did work. Within half an hour or so, the contractions subsided to a dull roar. I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening, relaxing in my pillows eating sandwiches and listening to jazz. Labour? Ha!

About dinner-time, when my midwife said that I shouldn’t eat any more food, the registrar announced that I was now ten centimetres dilated, and that the baby would probably be born that night. They’d be taking bets on the side for early the next morning, but, with a bit of luck and a following wind, she’d be there by midnight.

Enough of this lounging around like I was on holiday: it was now time to push. My midwife reduced the amount of drugs going in, so I could feel enough to push. Bracing myself against her and husband, a foot on each hip, I bore down with all the strength I could muster. After a few pushes, my midwife said she had seen the baby’s head - the so-called ‘miwife’s peep’ - and my feelings of excitement returned. Not long now. Or so I thought at the time.

An hour and a half of pushing later, my baby was still proving elusive.

From what I understand - and my recollection of some of these events is becoming hazy - she stopped moving and her heart-rate became erratic. The registrars - all of whom looked about 12 - trooped back in: it was time to bring in the heavy artillery. Forceps, with the possibility of an emergency casearean if they didn’t work.

‘Um, OK,’ I said.

An episiotomy incision was duly made. The tongs were produced.

I pushed. The registrar pulled.

And then there was a baby.

Feeling profoundly shocked and violated beyond my capacity to describe it, I remember thinking, ‘what the f*** have I done?’

It was then that things started to go wrong.

Catch the next thrilling installment in ‘birth story: part two’.

sugar and spice and all things nice

This week, at an indoor playground, I heard the following exchange between two mothers of daughters:

Mother A: I was so glad when I found out I was having a girl. I was like ‘I can plait her hair’ and dress her up in pretty dresses!

Mother B: Oooh, I love the pink tutu skirt she is wearing today!

After my feelings of nausea had passed, I reflected on what I had thought about when I first found out that I was having a girl. It made me conclude that these women and I were very different indeed.

When the radiologist told us that she was ‘99.9% sure’ that we were having a girl, I have to confess that my first reaction was something approaching dread. I hasten to add that was not because I wanted a boy - in the few times that I had imagined myself with a baby in the past, she had always been a girl - but because I suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility: it would be me who had to teach her how to be a girl and a woman. Again, I hasten to add that this does not mean that I would’ve washed my hands of a boy once he’d passed babyhood, but that I would be her first feminine role model. In my brief moment of dread, I thought about periods, and sex education; I thought about dating and, even worse, not dating (sexual preference to be determined); I thought about body issues, dieting and eating disorders; I thought about the gendered policing of public spaces, unequal pay, and glass ceilings; I thought about overt and covert sexism, and the spectre of sexual assault.

I did not think about pigtails and pinafores.

That may seem surprising given that I kicked off this blog railing against the renaissance of pink baby clothes for girls. But this was a moment or two of quiet dread while I was still pregnant, not the last word on my feelings about mothering a daughter. I think this is perhaps why the passage from Adrienne Rich’s book on the courage of women quoted in my previous post resonated so much with me. It does take courage to be a woman, one who takes her life in her own hands in spite off the things that I listed above, and swims against the current. And it will be me, big chicken that I am, that has to role model this kind of courage for my daughter.

Like I said, a big responsibility. And it gave me new insight into why parents can be so over-protective of their daughters.

But this conversation was not primarily the reason for this post, merely a way in.

Recently, a friend asked me if there were things that were good about having a girl from a feminist point-of-view (as opposed to all the annoying stuff like the pink clothes). She is the mother of a young son and is touched by the warmth and affection between her son and his father, which goes to show that masculine toughness, dominance and suppressed emotion (i.e. how to survive as a male in patriarchy) is learned behaviour.

I struggled with the form of her question for a while, as I found it difficult to separate my daughter’s ‘being-a-girl-ness’ from her own lovely personality. Then I thought I would re-frame the question slightly - hey, it’s my blog and I have the power - to ask ‘what can my daughter enjoy about being a girl before the cultural norms of femininity really take hold?’

Thought about this way, I found it much easier to think of the positive things:

• her body is a source of endless wonder and fun to her, not a source of insecurity and self-hatred
• she finds joy in what she can do and learn, not in what she looks like
• her desire for independence means she wants to try new things for herself and she wants to do it NOW rather than wait for everyone else to have a turn
• her outbursts of anger are considered healthy and normal reactions to her frustrations with the world around her
• she receives encouragement and praise from others (not just her parents) when she learns things
• her boldness and fearlessness in discovering the world around her and how she can interact with it
• her perseverance in trying new things means she will not give up until she has mastered them
• her fascination with other girls without feeling any competition with them, nor being judged by them (for the sake of completeness, she is equally fascinated by boys too)

I should note that both my friend’s and my positive things are also, in a sense, negative. They invert stereotypical ideas about masculinity and femininity and show that they are internalised cultural norms that are learned. It doesn’t mean that either of us is off the hook in terms of having to navigate the sharp rocks of gender construction and policing in the future. This will become increasingly tricky through later childhood - children are notoriously strong policers of gender around the ages of 7-8 - and adolescence, when peers, teachers, advertisers and wider society have an increasing say in determining what kind of man and woman our children will become.

For now, however, I am glad that I don’t have a doll for a daughter, and that she is under little compulsion to conform to the cultural imperative of ‘sugar and spice and all things nice’.

Equally, however, I don’t want to her disdain the positive aspects of conventionally feminine behaviour: being in touch with her emotions, being kind and loving, and showing nurturing behaviour towards others. For now, she is all these things too, and I hope we can maintain that balance for as long as possible.

Because, after all, who really wants to be made up of ‘slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails’?

review: Of Woman Born

They don’t write ‘em like this anymore.

I’m back from my holiday, during which I got the odd quizzical look for immersing myself in feminist poet Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (first published in 1976) as my holiday reading material. Instead of dragon tattoos and vampire brides, I read about matriarchal goddess societies, the limits of pyschoanalysis and its focus on the mother-child relationship, and the domestication of motherhood.

The first two topics - the nostalgia for lost matriarchies, in particular - made the book seem quite dated and reminded me of the more cringey side of second-wave feminism. Rich traces the feminist literature published on matriarchies, and I can see the ideological point of them: if patriarchy is historical, it is not simply ‘the natural order of things’; if it has an identifiable beginning, then it can also have an ending. But I find the backward-looking too, well, backward-looking. Do we need the sanction of some mythical past to try and change what is occurring now? To be fair, Rich seems to distance herself from these debates too, but she does engage with them at length.

I was nearly about to give up at the point where she started discussing speculum parties, but two things made me persevere: 1) the urgency of the task and hope for a better future promised by the feminist revolution that informs Rich’s writing and provides the context for her own experiences (which she narrates alongside facts, figures, research, and examples from literature in a self-styled ‘odd-fangled’ approach), and 2) the clear-eyed critique of the ways in which patriarchy has confined women (no pun intended) primarily through their biological capacity to be mothers (whether they are in fact mothers or not).

The version of the book that I read was the tenth-anniversary edition released in 1986 containing a new introduction. In it, Rich reflects on how far women had come, and how much there is still to do, as well as the limits of her earlier analysis (primarily in relation to race and class). Although she draws on her own experience, she makes the important point that telling stories is not enough, saying that the ‘personal is political’ has been overlaid with ‘New-Age blur of the personal-for-its-own sake’ (ii) shifting the focus back onto the individual and her choices rather than remaining on the collective and the political context in which she finds herself.

Throughout the book, Rich does not retreat into the safety of sentimentalism about women. Indeed, she closes the book with a chapter on mothers and violence - not as the victims of violence (although they too often are), but as perpetrators. She concludes that ‘theories of female power and female ascendency must reckon fully with the ambiguities of our being, and with the continuum of our consciousness, the potentialities for both creative and destructive energies in each of us’. She expands the point ten years later to add: ‘Oppression is not the mother of virtue; oppression can warp, undermine, turn us into haters of ourselves. But it can also turn us into realists, who neither hate ourselves nor assume we are merely innocent and unaccountable victims’. (xxvii)

Elsewhere, she discusses the by-now familiar topics - although less so when she was writing (it is I who am working backwards) - of women’s work and the alienation of the labour and birth process. But, again, her arguments tread a slightly different path to more recent writers: she focuses on how historically midwives were both marginalised and their knowledge plundered without credit, at least as much as the effects of the split in obstetric care on modern mothers. Particularly chilling was her account of the results of the new obstetric care: before the importance of antiseptics were known, women giving birth in city hospitals attended by doctors who had treated all manner of patients and/or been dissecting corpses were at high risk of contracting - and dying from - puerperal fever. From the start of the eighteenth century till the end of the nineteenth, this fever was epidemic: according to Rich, in one year in one particular city, every single mother labouring in a hospital died. Other fun facts involve the father and son team who developed the forceps - an innovation for difficult labours in which the mother would otherwise have most likely died in agony, along with the baby. The duo kept them a secret from other practitioners for many years to maximise their fame and profit, while women who could have benefitted from their use died in the thousands. When the secret was finally out, forceps became a routine intervention used to speed up otherwise normal births. In the hands of the patriarchs, it seems, devices that initially help women can also be used to hurt them. The submerged feminist history of obstetrics puts the still ongoing midwife-doctor tensions into perspective: there is still a power relation there despite the increase in female doctors and the (much smaller) number of male midwives and birth attendants.

Moving from history to relationships, Rich then devotes a chapter each to the mother-son and mother-daughter relationship. As the mother of three sons herself, she has much to draw on in the former as she reflects on what it means to effectively ‘work for the army’. Historically, this could mean literally raising sons who would grow up to be cannon fodder or, in a more modern sense, raising sons to be patriarchs. Rich’s aim, of course, is not to do either. Instead, she makes a wish for her sons, in what I think is one of the most powerful passages in the book:

that they should have the courage of women. I mean by this something very concrete and precise: the courage I have seen in women, who, in their public and private lives, both in the interior world of their dreaming, thinking and creating, and the outer world of patriarchy, are taking greater and greater risks, both psychic and physical, in the evolution of a new vision. Sometimes this involves tiny acts of immense courage; sometimes public acts which can cost a woman her job or her life; often it involves moments, or long periods, of thinking the unthinkable, being labelled or feeling crazy; always a loss of traditional securities. Every woman who takes her life in her hands does so knowing that she must expect enormous pain, inflicted from both within and without. I would like my sons not to shrink from this pain, not to settle for the old male defenses, including that of a fatalistic self-hatred. And I would wish them not to do this for me, or for other women, but for themselves, and for the sake of life on the planet Earth. (214-15)

Powerful stuff.

I am not the mother of a son, but I think that this wish also extends to daughters. While she talks of the courage of women in general, she is more expressly talking about the ones ‘who take their lives in their hands’, and surely this kind of woman is made rather than born too.

In the next chapter, she writes as a daughter, rather than as the mother of one. In it, Rich traces the similarities, ambivalences and fears that inflect this relationship, and, in turn, play their part in the ‘tragic, unnecessary rivalry‘ of women. (223) She describes the relationship between mother and daughter as ‘the great, unwritten story’ (225) in which the materials are there for ‘the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement’ (226). In attempting to write about it, Rich declares that ‘the nurture of daughters in patriarchy calls for a strong sense of self-nurture in the mother’. (245) Instead of limiting herself to individual responsibility, however, she adds:

‘‘You can be anything you want to be” is a half-truth, whatever a woman’s class or economic advantages ... “you can be anything you want to be” if you are prepared to fight, to create priorities for yourself against the grain of cultural expectation, to persist in the fact of misogynist hostility. (248)

The embattled language may seem a little romanticised to twenty-first-century ears, but the sentiment is not. Despite numerous advances for women - gains made by second-wave feminists like Rich - there are still many constraints and barriers that women must face: not least of which is how not to become a second-class citizen and a scapegoat for all manner of social ills once you become a mother.