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I lived on a farm where animals—horses, cows, sheep, pigs, dogs, cats—foaled, calved, gave birth to piglets, puppies, kittens; chicken, ducks, geese and turkeys laid eggs and brooded them until their young hatched. The summers and autumns of my childhood were filled with these events, which we followed with great curiosity and interest. Daily talk centered around fertility and procreation. There was also constant talk about women's deliveries and pregnancies. My mother gave birth to twins, and this was also for me an impressive and magnificent event [p. 128].
This is a small volume out of Finland, a country whose mythology is ruled by powerful and sometimes malevolent mother figures, and whose society provides at least nine months' maternity leave, beginning one month before birth. It is a volume about daughters and their relationship to their mothers, and in it, in her passion and simple writing, Reenkola seeks to remind us of what has been repressed in phallocentric psychoanalytic theory.
The thrust of this work is that a woman's sense of her inner space, her pleasure in it, and her knowledge of its creativity have been obscured by past theory, and that women themselves (including women analysts), aware of their fecundity and specialness but very protective of it, have tended to obscure or veil this core aspect of themselves—