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The Title of the book under review is a play on Freud's (1933) famous and infamous question, “What do women want?” asked in a tone, I have always imagined, of mild exasperation. The title of the book has a respectful tone—giving weight and authority to what mothers want.
The title of my review is a wordplay on Winnicott's (1960) famous dictum, “There's no such thing as a baby” (p. 39). He meant that, owing to its fragility, the baby's “ego” requires the presence of another for its secure existence. Today we know more than ever about both the astonishing inborn and autonomous capabilities of infants and about the inseparability of everyone from each other. Taking license with Winnicott's statement and recognizing that the fragility of a mother's ego cannot be likened to that of a baby's, we can use his comment as a springboard to think more about the entwinement of a mother's psychology with her interpersonal environment. As we focus on the mother, and try to understand her “subjectivity,” her motives, feelings, desires, and needs, we can say that she too exists and operates, is embedded in, an interpersonal and cultural web. Hence, there is no such thing as a mother.
But I also mean to express my resistance, my protest against universalizing, reifying, idealizing, generalizing Motherhood or Mothers. What is a mother? (a) A mother is a person who has given birth to a child, who may or may not be in her care;. and/or (b) a mother is a female person who has primary legal and practical responsibility for a child or children. (Another definition of mother— not the one used here—is: someone who takes care of another person in a loving and nurturing way.) Other than that, little can be said that applies to all mothers. Mothers are unique individuals. Each woman, although her body may have the generic childproducing capacity, is a person, not a category.
Cultural definitions and expectations vary widely and are constantly