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Motherline

Motherline is a term that was first used by Naomi Lowinsky, a Jungian psychologist, to describe the process of reclaiming aspects of the feminine self that have been lost, forgotten, or repressed. It is a central organizing principle in the psyche of women, involving a surge of feeling of the oneness of body and soul that goes beyond words to provide a sense of both mortality and immortality.

As women come to understand their life stories as part of the motherline, they become grounded in their own feminine nature and reclaim carnal knowledge of their own bodies and blood mysteries. The motherline provides a life-cycle perspective as well as knowledge of ancestors who shared the same struggles in different historical times. Lowkinsky points out that finding one's motherline takes a lifetime and is an idiosyncratic and often chaotic process.

Relearning the Mother Tongue

Stories from the motherline are spoken in what Ursula Le Guin describes as the mother tongue, a conversational and relational discourse in contrast to an exclusive, authoritative, or patriarchal privileged one. It is rooted in an oral tradition of lore that is often trivialized as old wives' tales or gossip. Speaking in the mother tongue involves a looking backward to our mothers and forward to our daughters to see older and younger selves. It requires listening to the physical, psychological, and historical stories of our mothers' and grandmothers' life cycles as well as paying attention to their lived experiences.

Contemporary poets and writers of fiction such as Amy Tan, Alice Munroe, Carol Shields, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood, Tillie Olsen, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison are reclaiming the mother tongue to reconnect with cultural and personal roots that link generations of women together and flesh out what it means to be human. Susan Koppelman and Cori Howard identify reoccurring themes in these stories: resisting patriarchal constraints; dealing with multiple oppressions; quest for identity; traditions and rituals; private and public contradictions; life-cycle events, the reflective pause; unconventional or disgraceful mothers, ambition; anxiety; guilt; and redemption. These complex and tangled stories move beyond sentimentality and go to a deeper level.

Primordial Mirror

The motherline has been called a primordial mirror with which to envision the full sense of female development and archetypical images of women's wisdom. As Ursula Le Guin points out, by imitating the life condition of men, women surrender a very strong position of their own. The motherline opens up this space by creating a powerful shift in a patriarchal worldview. In some cases, the “mirror” has been covered and obscured with a cultural veil of silence, fear, and ambivalence, or it has been shattered by blame, misjudgment, or shame created by daughters. By honoring physical reproductive capacities as well as dramatic bodily changes, women can reflect at their inner self as well as their own immortality. As well, the idea of the mother-line provides women the opportunities to examine the influence of foremothers in order to confront obscured areas of themselves that are unknown, repressed, or projected onto their mothers. Mother-line stories can reflect generations of suffering and grief. According to the concept of the motherline, acknowledging envy, rage, competitiveness, and sensuality allows natural energy to flow freely and intergenerational rifts to be resolved.

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