Essentialism is the idea that there are identifiable necessary properties which define objects, for example it supposes that there is some essence (usually with a bodily basis) which is what makes a woman a woman. This might be the potential to bear children, a more caring attitude, or having a female body. Things like a caring attitude are defined as bodily in that they are thought to stem from women’s childbearing capacities. Within essentialist thinking about gender the ‘natural’ or real body is understood to be the basis onto which social and cultural ideas about femininity and masculinity are imposed. There is thought to be an undeniability and authenticity to the body which are drawn on to build identity. For feminists who tend toward essentialism, the problem is that the essence of womanhood is not valued and difficult to express within a male-dominated society. American radical feminists Mary Daly and Adrienne Rich are often described as essentialists. Rich is perhaps less purely so, but then her work is perhaps more typical in that it shows a tendency toward essentialism without wholly ignoring the social.
Essentialism peeks through Rich’s attempt to see motherhood as socially constructed. In Of Woman Born Rich (1986/1976) explores motherhood as a social institution and as an embodied and emotional experience. She critically explores the unrealistic social constructions of motherhood, discussing how guilty mothers feel when they cannot measure up to social expectations that they should always love their children single-mindedly and unconditionally. Rich argues that mothering is made difficult because women struggle to control their own bodies and thus their own lives. However, there is presumed to be some natural, ‘free’ body which can be recognized as liberating and beautiful. For example, the bond between mothers and children, whilst ‘overlaid by social and traditional circumstances’ is seen as ‘always there from the first gaze between the mother and the infant at the breast’ (Rich, 1986/1976: 32). For Rich the problem is that ‘natural’ bodily processes, including childbirth and rearing, are managed and/or dictated by men instead of women. The implication is that there is some core womanliness within the embodied experience of women, which can be freed from patriarchal distortions so that women can reconnect with it and move from passive suffering ‘to a new active being’ (Rich, 1986/1976: 129).With less male meddling women might come to see childbirth, and other embodied experiences they have as women, ‘as one way of knowing and coming to terms with our bodies, of discovering our physical and psychic resources’ (Rich, 1986/1976: 157). This assumes that there is some essence that can be discovered.
Most feminist writers, including Rich, are never wholly essentialist, appreciating that femininity is to some degree a social production (Fuss, 1989). However, Rich struggles to escape notions of a female body sending ‘invisible messages of an urgency and restlessness which indeed cannot be appeased’ (1986/1976: 284). Such an approach to the body is
problematic for many feminists, and perhaps especially for sociologists who argue that bodies are socially constructed.