Chapter 5: Beyond “Women,” “Mothers,” and “Me”: Imagination, Poetics, and Why Surpassing Social Norms Means Surpassing the Self

The focus of this volume, “The Cultural Dynamics of Women’s Lives” is one in which the topic of motherhood can be considered central. The ability to bear children is a woman’s alone, and social institutions compete with one another for control over the power associated with this childbearing potential. Using various forms of symbolic media, political groups, educational institutions, religious communities, and corporations try to regulate a woman’s thoughts, feelings, and actions through prescriptive suggestions that do not describe her life as it is, but as it should be (Valsiner, 2000). Prescriptive suggestions try to regulate everything from her occupation and social conduct, to her mating behavior. Even if a woman is not presently a mother, such institutional guiding nonetheless impinges upon her given what could occur in the future, making motherhood not only a central aspect of women’s lives from pregnancy onward, but also throughout the lifetime.