Debating the "Man Child": Understanding the Politics of Motherhood through Debates in the US Lesbian Community, 1970–1990

Abstract:During the 1970s and 1980s, lesbians engaged in a debate over motherhood as a source of women's oppression. Although fundamentally a fight between lesbians, these discussions addressed a crucial question in most women's lives: could women combine caregiving with political and community engagement? Because they have more control over reproduction than most women, lesbians make an excellent case study for feminist debates about the place of caregiving in women's lives. Focused on creating women-only communities, lesbian separatists argued that lesbians should not raise sons, and perhaps not mother at all, because the labor involved limited their ability to devote themselves to the community. Lesbian mothers countered that mothering, and particularly the mothering of sons, furthered the feminist revolution by disrupting unhealthy sex roles and forms of masculinity.