In our A Change of World documentary about the role of poetry in second-wave feminism, the poet Sharon Olds recalls the response to submitting motherhood poems in the 1970s: “The editor would say, if you wish to write about your children may we suggest the Ladies Home Journal. In the Victorian era, poetry about mothers became popular-but largely portrayed mothers one-dimensionally as self-sacrificing “angels of the house.” Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Diana O’Hehir in their preface to the anthology Mother Songs. Instead, mothers of appeared in earlier poems as “mythic mothers, mother goddesses, and nurturing muses,” write Sandra M. Poets who are also mothers use their work to attack the sexist assumptions that motherhood is not an appropriate (or appropriately sublime) subject for poetry and that talk of motherhood should remain in a compartmentalized, domestic sphere.īefore the 1970s, very few realistic poems about motherhood were published. Poems that represented the real, lived experiences of mothers remained hard to find until the 1970s, the time of the second-wave feminist movement.
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