Gore, Ariel

A well-known author and cultural critic, Ariel Gore has spent much of her adult life challenging American stereotypes of the good mother and urging other mothers to do the same. After founding the award-winning magazine Hip Mama in 1993 as a project during her senior year of college, Gore garnered a loyal following of women interested in alternative parenting.

She went on to create the Website, http://www.hipmama.com, and has written, edited, and contributed to numerous books on mothering. Articulating theories that are derived primarily from her own experiences as a single mother, Gore urges mothers to follow their intuition rather than advice manuals, to forgo faulty notions of perfect mothering, and to take the time to nurture both the mother as well as nonmother parts of themselves. Standing in sharp contrast to the parenting advice offered by “experts,” Gore's work engages with both the personal and political dimensions of motherhood.

Gore's maternal identity is, undoubtedly, central to her work. For example, in her first book, The Mother Trip: Hip Mama's Guide to Staying Sane in the Chaos of Motherhood and The Hip Mama Survival Guide, she explores the early years of her maternal self, sharing experiences relating to her pregnancy, the birth of her daughter, and the first decade of her daughter's life. In Whatever, Mom: Hip Mama's Guide to Raising a Teenager, Gore describes the challenges and joys she encountered during her daughter's adolescence.

While motherhood is clearly at the heart of her writing, it is equally apparent that she does not define herself solely as a mother. Indeed, part of the appeal of Gore's work stems from her candid descriptions of those struggles she faces as she attempts to balance her mothering self with other parts of her identity: author, daughter, lover, friend, student, woman, human. Attention to this type of juggling act is certainly not uncommon in advice books aimed at mothers. Yet what distinguishes Gore's work is her move away from a romantic, idealized vision of motherhood and toward a more pragmatic, nuanced representation of maternal identity, experience, and emotion. For example, Gore acknowledges not only the funny and wonderful moments that stem from her [Page 462]relationship with her daughter, she also thoroughly describes the recurrent stress, heartache, and exhaustion that are part of that relationship. She describes her mothering successes and her mistakes, the good days as well as the bad ones, the moments when she revels in her role as a mother and those moments when she desperately longs to escape from the constraints of motherhood. Eschewing mandates from so-called parenting experts, Gore advises mothers to trust themselves and their intuition as they find their own path on the journey that is motherhood.

This is not to suggest that Gore believes mothers can or should attempt this journey on their own. On the contrary, a central tenet of her work is the belief that mothers can and should rely not only on their own tuition and experiential knowledge, but also on the wisdom of other mothers, including those in their kin networks and communities (defined broadly to include both immediate social milieus as well as Internet-based and other forms of communities). Indeed, Gore posits that mothers are happiest and healthiest when they are surrounded by a community of supportive “mamas” who help nurture and sustain them in all aspects of their lives. It is within such a community, Gore's work suggests, that mothers are best able to come together across racial, class, cultural, and other boundaries in order to share wisdom with one another, value their unique gifts, share resources, meet their own needs and those of their children, and become fully self-actualized. In this respect, Gore's work is decidedly political, challenging mainstream notions of the self-sacrificing mother in favor of a type of motherhood that is connected, supported, and valued in all of its complicated, wonderful, messy incarnations.

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