WASHING BLOOD

RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS
This issue of Feminist Studies was conceived out of the curiosity and needs of this moment: the choices, the resistances. To combine feminism and motherhood! we say, leaping into the future. But this did not turn out to be a practical issue of the journal. Nothing here about child care, about parenting, about fathers, nothing about the choice not to parent, about the family as a unit. Somehow the questions raised here did not take on a problemsolving or strategy-laden dimension but rather concern the mothers, mothering, motherhood. As we found them inside us. No feminist theory of motherhood? Well, we will start to invent one. We start with our hands on our pulses.

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Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Washing Blood:
Introduction to this Issue

Anita Barrows
The Chart

Mary Oppen
Breath of Life

Carol H. Poston
Childbirth in Literature

Marcia Fram
Black and white photograph,
from the series Single Mother

Poems by Florence Dacey, Arlene Stone, Daisy Aldan,
Jan Clausen, Kate Ellis, Sharon Olds, Roberta Morris,
Judith McCombs, Penelope Scambly Schott,
Karen Ellas-Button, Frances Jaffer

Sandra M. Gilbert
Horror's Twin: Mary Shelley's
Monstrous Eve

Mary Beth Edelson
Photo collage and drawing,
from the series Returns/Demeter and Persephone

Faye Moskowitz
A Leak in the Heart

Alicia Ostriker
from The Mother/Child Papers

Marcia Fram
Black and white photograph,
from the series Single Mother

Janet C. Bogdan
Care or Cure? Childbirth Practices
in Nineteenth-Century America