Flak Magazine: Review of Misconceptions, 11-20-01

These are strange, conflicted times for motherhood. So much of the culture war of recent decades has been waged on the female body that the word itself has taken on the invisible weight of our collective fears and expectations. Sorting through all this cultural baggage is a daunting task. But "Misconceptions," Naomi Wolf's account of her own, surprisingly suspenseful, "journey to motherhood" bristles with raw insight.

Here is Wolf, five months along, recounting a day of exercise in the pool:

Out through the sliding glass windows, past the instructor's feet, I could see the hard wintry world of commerce and ambition, politics and debate, that I used to inhabit before I slipped into this luxurious water-world of pregnancy ... That was what I wanted, I realized with a biting nostalgia, as I became more and more the servant of my developing child: the world of reason, individuality and selfishness. I wanted to climb up and out, to rejoin the clash and parry of the world occupied by, owned by, men.

This is no "Chicken Soup for the Pregnant Woman's Soul."

Honesty is Wolf's great asset, and a recurring strength of this book. Wolf has made a career of playing feminist-provocateur (remember "The Beauty Myth"?) and that training pays off here — she never flinches from her observations. As her pregnancy progresses, Wolf is startled to find some of her most deeply held beliefs reshaped along with her body. She writes of abortion, "It was as the pro-choice slogan asserted, 'my body.' But did I own this baby the way I owned my possessions, my hair, and my fingernails?"

Wolf is especially sensitive to this push-pull of contemporary choices. She interweaves the experiences of other expectant women with those of her own; like the author, they are young, accomplished and self-assured. Like her, they seem unprepared for the toll pregnancy will take on their relationships and professional goals. "The women," Wolf writes, "... looked at the conflicting expectations of motherhood and the workplace, of their feminism and marriages, and thought: Nothing I do is enough. The men, too, were tired — they worked all day and came home to have a baby thrust at them. They looked at their fathers' lives and saw that expectations upon their own lives had doubled, and thought: Nothing I do is enough."

Such observations will no doubt resonate with Wolf's readers. She is blessed with a novelist's eye and ear, and her narratives have the compelling tug of good storytelling. Occasionally a striking image surfaces, as when Wolf imagines an acquaintance, who is contemplating selective abortion of one of her three fetuses, "standing by a pool, a lance in hand, waiting to spear one sentient fish from the three, as they moved in still water." At those moments, "Misconceptions" reads like a first-rate memoir — at least, it certainly had the makings of one. But, as in her previous books, Wolf has larger ambitions.

"This book will explore the hidden truths behind giving birth in America today," she writes in the preface. "I intend to show how the experience of becoming a mother, as miraculous and fulfilling as it is, is also undersupported, sentimentalized, and even manipulated at women's expense."

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with "Misconceptions." Wolf insists on using her story as the backbone of a political exposé. Even worse, she is a closet ideologue; no incident, no matter how trivial or personal, fails to incite a rant against the abuses of American "culture" on the hapless pregnant woman. She writes about some cloying pregnancy books, "These books' frequent suggestion that women take the initiative to nurture themselves seemed terribly poignant to me; women had to nurture themselves ... because we lived in a culture that was not bothering to nurture us in substantial ways as we went to childbed." Yet after giving birth by C-section, Wolf promptly sends her supportive mother back home, chalking this up to "internalized Western cultural expectation."

In her criticism of the West's "ideology of motherhood," Wolf repeatedly invokes non-Western and pre-industrial societies as cultural ideals. The irony of this position is lost on her: that in a country like India, or Pakistan, motherhood is an obligation, rather than a choice; that the high status of mothers is inseparable from the low status of women in general. This is not to imply we have nothing to learn from other societies, or that a critique of "American culture" — whatever that may be — is not legitimate. But Wolf glosses over some of the harsher realities of Third World motherhood, like the widespread practice of aborting female fetuses, while simultaneously letting "our culture" take the blame for her mistakes.

The bitterness of these passages crashes the measured, introspective mood Wolf works so hard to establish, and the ripple effect undermines some otherwise sound arguments. The meat of the book, Wolf's negative appraisal of high-tech, hospital-based birth, is largely successful. But despite legitimate grievances — the humiliating doctor-patient relationship, the cruel and sometimes unnecessary medical interventions, the prevailing atmosphere of indifference and fidelity to the bottom line — Wolf's relentless demonization of obstetricians and hospitals seems suspect. The alternative of midwifery gets an enthusiastic thumbs up from Wolf; but what are we to make of the fact that, after switching to a midwife practice following her first, hair-raising Cesarean, her second child is delivered the same way?

In any case, it's hardly front-page news. Wolf acknowledges Jessica Mitford's landmark "The American Way of Birth" throughout, and the politics of epidurals and C-sections have been a part of public discussion for some time now. The burden on contemporary working mothers is discussed in devastating detail in Ann Crittenden's recent book, "The Price of Motherhood," to say nothing of an average hour of Oprah. Ultimately, it turns out that a good many of the "hidden truths" Wolf promises have long since been revealed. Meanwhile, currents bubbling just under the surface, like lesbian motherhood or the burgeoning "Childfree" movement don't register at all. At times, "Misconceptions" seems strangely behind the social curve, as if Wolf had determined to make her case no matter how much the context for her arguments had changed.

One of the drawbacks of seeing motherhood only through the prism of Wolf's experience is the limited political potential of a book like this; nothing seems to demonstrate this fact more forcefully than the call for a murkily defined "Motherhood Feminism" which ends "Misconceptions." It feels tacked on to satisfy the inevitable questions such polemics pose. Reading it, I couldn't help wishing that Wolf would abandon politics and channel her considerable powers of observation into the probing, self-aware journalism that is clearly her strength. Yet so much of the joy and sweat and mystery of giving birth inhabits "Misconceptions" that it would be unfair to dismiss it entirely. It remains a valuable, albeit frustrating, book.

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