OF WOMAN BORN

The pathbreaking investigation into motherhood and womanhood from an influential and enduring feminist voice, now for a new generation.

"In order for all women to have real choices all along the line," Adrienne Rich writes, "we need fully to understand the power and powerlessness embodied in motherhood in patriarchal culture." In Of Woman Born, originally published in 1976, influential poet and feminist Adrienne Rich examines the patriarchic systems and political institutions that define motherhood. Exploring her own experience - as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother - she finds the act of mothering to be both determined by and distinct from the institution of motherhood as it is imposed on all women everywhere. A "powerful blend of research, theory, and self-reflection" (Sandra M. Gilbert, Paris Review), Of Woman Born revolutionized how women thought about motherhood and their own liberation. With a stirring new foreword from National Book Critics Circle Awardwinning writer Eula Biss, the book resounds with as much wisdom and insight today as when it was first written. Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) was an award-winning poet, influential essayist, radical feminist, and major public intellectual of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry, including the National Book Awardwinning Diving into the Wreck, and more than a half-dozen of prose. Eula Biss is the author of three acclaimed books, including On Immunity. She lives in Illinois.