Matrophobia

The term matrophobia, introduced by poet Lynn Sukenick, was further developed by feminist maternal theorist Adrienne Rich in her 1986 work Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Rich described matrophobia as occurring when women split themselves in a desire to purge themselves of their mothers' bondage, to become individuals free from the expectation of perfecting a full-time domestic housewife role:

Matrophobia is the fear not of one's mother or of motherhood but of becoming one's mother. Thousands of daughters see their mothers as having taught a compromise and self-hatred they are struggling to win free of, the one through whom the restrictions and degradations of a female existence were perforce transmitted. Easier by far to hate and reject a mother outright than to see beyond her to the forces acting upon her. But where a mother is hated to the point of matrophobia there may also be a deep underlying pull toward her, a dread that if one relaxes one's guard one will identify with her completely.

This fear of becoming one's mother and experiencing the oppressive bonds of motherhood in matrophobia pushes a daughter to deny and denigrate any part of herself that emulates her mother in any way. She makes life choices and creates standards of living that are in contrast to what her mother represented in an effort to perform “radical surgery” when she moves out for the first time. The push and pull to her mother captures the experience of matrophobia as the mother represents the victim in women, the kept feminine, the mother of martyrs. In as much the same way as a woman in a tenuous marriage may avoid a newly divorced woman, matrophobia is the fear of assimilation and over-identification with that which is most dreaded in a paradoxical push and pull.

Rich depicted matrophobia as a daughter growing up fraught with witnessing the self-sacrificing, capitulating, and self-denial of mothers as they attempt to live out the good mother ideology. These daughters attempt to extricate themselves of anything remotely close to their mother, to do everything possible to not fall into the same trap. From a sociocultural perspective, analyzing their mothers' oppression and the trap of the good mother ideology fully captures the source of matrophobia; nevertheless, matrophobia is about the experience from the position of daughters projecting themselves through and out of the motherline.