Afterword The Politics of Motherhood

Abstract

The abbess-mothers of Kent, the queen-mothers of Wessex and Mercia, and the fictional mothers of Beowulf clarify the goals of maternal practice both in Anglo-Saxon England and in the late-twentieth-century United States. Desires of mothers for their children—for medical care, safety, education, self-determination—speak across the gulf of a thousand years and illuminate our own society, where schoolyard shootings, lack of health insurance, inequitable school systems, and drug-related violence challenge maternal performers. Judith Butler, Sara Ruddick, and Luce Irigaray provided the theoretical basis for much of the vocabulary in the introduction of this study; that vocabulary will illuminate the actions not just of Wealhþeow and Mildrið, I hope, but also of all maternal performers, men and women, biological mothers and not, who endeavor to protect, nurture, and teach children in any culture. Irigaray’s search for mother-daughter couples is not simply an exercise appropriate to mythology, history, and literature but a reminder of the continuing patrilineal focus of our own culture, in which children are automatically given the last names of their fathers at birth.