An adequate analysis of experiences and situations specific to women, especially mothering, requires consideration of women's difference. A focus on women's difference, however, jeopardizes feminism's claims of women's equal individualist subjectivity, and risks recuperating the inequality and oppression of women, especially the view that all women should be mothers, want to be mothers, and are most happy being mothers.
This book considers how thinkers including de Beauvoir, Kristeva, Chodorow and Rich struggle to negotiate this dilemma of difference in analyzing mothering, encompassing the paradoxes concerning embodiment, gender and representation they encounter. Patrice DiQuinzio shows that mothering has been and will continue to be an intractable problem for feminist theory, and argues for a reconceptualization of feminist theory itself, and suggests the political usefulness of an explicitly paradoxical politics of mothering.

Patrice DiQuinzio is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Women's Studies at Muhlenberg College. Her work on mothering and feminist theory has appeared n Hypatia and Women and Politics.

Introduction Mothering and Feminism 1 Feminism and Individualism 2 Mothering and the Emergence of Feminism 3 Mothering and Difference Feminism 4 The Body as Situation 5 Maternal Thinking 6 Embodiment and Discourse 7 Mothering and Psychoanalysis 8 Mothering and Women's Experience Conclusion The Impossibility of Motherhood