MY SEVEN MOTHERS
Making a Family in the Danish Women’s Movement
by Pernille Ipsen
Translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally
Univ. of Minnesota Press. 353 pages, $29.95
ORIGINALLY WRITTEN in Danish and published five years ago, My Seven Mothers is a memoir that’s also a historical account of events in the Danish women’s movement between 1970 and 1976. The author was raised by seven women who had formed a collective and agreed to raise one of their daughters communally. Based on ten years of interviews with the writer’s “mothers” and additional research, the timeline interweaves their personal reflections with current events in a way that captures the exuberance and intensity of the time. U.S. historians and activists will be able to trace parallels between U.S. struggles during those years and those of our Danish counterparts.
Many of us who participated in the women’s movement at the time will recognize familiar arguments and disputes, but younger scholars and historians may delight in the specificity of detail Ipsen provides. Of course, a narrative featuring eight protagonists with lovers, ex-lovers, movement comrades, and friends can get confusing, but the sweep of events that overtakes the narrative echoes the momentum of those early years in which individuality was subordinated to the needs of the movement.
The memoir opens in June 1971, with Pernille Ipsen’s birth mother deciding to attend a women’s camp on the Danish island of Femø. This time and place provide the origin story of My Seven Mothers, because in the summer of that year at that location the seven women of the title meet to enact a women-centered vision for the future. Included in that vision is the decision to raise a child together. Describing the plan as “ideological and simple,” the writer clarifies that they wanted to prove that their women’s world could raise a child. Although Ipsen’s birth on December 31, 1972, intensified her mothers’ emotional connection, she describes their bond as always based on politics first.
Unfortunately, this idealistic vision did not prevail. Ipsen discusses the pain she must have experienced at eighteen months when the mother who ironically argued most strenuously for the original co-parenting idea is the first to break the informal contract. Years later, when Ipsen confronts her about her feelings of abandonment caused by the departure, the older woman encapsulates the spirit of those early years: “That’s the sort of thing you can’t really do … and yet you do it anyway, when you are young. Maybe because you are spinning so fast.”
The last section provides a painful account of the acrimonious dissolution of the commune, whose members had spent five years together trying to function as an indispensable unit for one another. Ipsen points to her mothers’ eventual reconciliation as a product of the enduring power of feminism. Regrettably, readers aren’t given enough information about this resolution for her conclusion to be entirely satisfying. And while it pains me to point out that Martha Shelley, not Mary Shelley, wrote Come Out! for the Gay Liberation Front, errors like this are rare. My Seven Mothers is replete with lessons upon which U.S. feminists can draw. Offering immersive insights into the exuberance and heartbreak of second-wave feminism in Denmark, the book also provides a colorful contribution to European women’s history.
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Anne Charles lives in Montpelier, VT. With her partner and a friend, she co-hosts the cable-access show All Things LGBTQ.
