Lesbian Mothers

ess to a kind of supportive community that straight women, especially divorced women, cannot experience. But mostly she thinks of coming out in terms of comfort, a sense of being in touch with her “real self.”

She was less excited, but the thing about my mother was that she could understand how I could love a woman. What she found difficult was how the world was going to look on that. … She just made a big point out of how unhappy I was going to be because the world doesn’t accept that.

yle” and sense of oneself would reveal the extent of one’s success in battle with the patriarchy.

Our culture is centrally concerned with the individual and the formation of identity as a solitary quest;

regularize their status, as a direct response to stigma, I do contend that motherhood indirectly enables women (whether lesbian or heterosexual) to claim a specific location in the gender system.

On the one hand, insofar as lesbianism and motherhood seem to be culturally (if not biologically) incompatible, they transcend or challenge the ordinary organization of gender in American culture, which conflates “woman” and “mother” and defines lesbians as neither

how they, in fact, negotiate their identities in collaboration with or in opposition to prevailing cultural expectations.

To some extent, feminist scholars now working to overturn the excesses of the earlier preoccupation with universal female subordination, principally represented by new critical writings by women of color, have made a similar error. These authors have attempted to extricate themselves from the hegemony of a single view of “woman” (what Gloria Anzaldúa has infelicitously called “whitefeminism”), highlighting the importance of cultural and historical variability in the shaping of women’s experience and definition of themselv

stories often shape, rather than simply reflect, human conduct.”