Poet Adrienne Rich, in Of Woman Born, chose the topic of motherhood "because it was a crucial, still relatively unexplored, area for feminist theory."… She thoroughly documents the powerlessness of women in a patriarchal culture and vividly depicts its results. Aware that literature on pre-patriarchal cultures is scarce, Rich offers her analysis of its importance along with her vividly depicted experience of motherhood, an experience potentially desirable, but destroyed by the institutions in patriarchal culture. This combination of historical material and personal experience makes starkly clear that we have lost, in taking women's freedom from them, much that our culture sorely needs. (p. 206)

Rich has written with precision of the plight of women in a patriarchy; with the assurance and power of the freed woman, she offers women the strategy and vision necessary to collectively build a world "truly ours." (p. 207)

Laura E. Casari, "Woman Freed," in Prairie...