Matroreform

Claiming Motherhood Power

More specifically, Wong-Wylie defines the transformative maternal practice of matroreform as “an act, desire, and process of claiming motherhood power.” She asserts matroreform as a more appropriate term because it involves “a progressive movement to mothering that attempts to institute new mothering rules and practices apart from one's motherline.” In essence, Wong-Wylie suggests that matroreform is a “cognitive, affective, behavioral, and spiritual reformation of mothering from within, including removal and elimination of obstacles to self-determination and self-agency.”

In her article on matroreform, Wong-Wylie illustrates how she engages in the active practice and empowering process in her own mothering to create a meaningful motherline for herself and her daughters by engaging in reflective understandings and narratives of her life experiences, despite a previously invisible motherline of her Chinese foremothers due to the cultural dissonance she experienced as a young Chinese Canadian girl living in Montreal. Wong-Wylie shares personal stories that are reflected in photographic images.

A series of seven photos and emergent narratives outline issues in mothering, racial tensions, bicultural identity, and belonging, while deploying the practice of matroreform. By attending to and sharing her maternal narratives as the mother of daughters, and linking those narratives to reflections and understandings of her relationship as a daughter with her own mother, Wong-Wylie actively works to forge a strong bond with her daughters and create a new feminist motherline. Furthermore, she “empowers herself and her daughters by living her life with authority, agency, and autonomy.”

Motherline Studies

Matroreform was identified as a central process inherent in Fiona Joy Green's longitudinal and inter-generational study of feminist motherlines, conducted in Canada. Through this research, “Matroreform: Feminist Mothers and Their Daughters Creating Feminist Motherlines” (2008), Green confirmed matroreform as a process that “is not only reforming and reaffirming [but also] a feminist act of voicing up and out of invisibility and silence.” In her article, Greene explores how a small group of feminist mothers and their daughters dismantle the patriarchal script and revise or reform their own stories of motherhood and daughterhood. She advances that feminist daughters with feminist mothers can perpetuate an enduring feminist motherline. Through the active practice and empowering process of matroreform, daughters and mothers are reforming and reaffirming feminist motherwork.

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