Psychology - Mother Power

As her young adult son’s agonizing battle with cancer stretched on, psychologist Jacqueline Hornor Plumez ’65 began to founder. She had helped so many patients over the years to cope with tragedy. Now, she needed help.

She found it in the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a human rights group formed by grieving Argentine mothers searching for children abducted by the country’s military regime. As many as 30,000 Argentines "disappeared" between 1976 and 1983. Almost 30 years later, the mothers’ activism continues.

"When I visited Buenos Aires in 1998, I met the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They were the only group who had stood up to the government, and I kept thinking about how brave they were," Plumez recalls.

A year later, she returned to Argentina to learn more. She continued to research "this whole idea of the power that maternal women have" and wrote the book Mother Power (Sourcebooks 2002).

"I was interviewing these really strong women who went through terrible times with grace and strength and who turned it into something positive," she says. "These were the kind of role models I had been searching for."
 
Mother Power was not the first time that Plumez’s experiences inspired her to write a book, but it was the most personal. Early in her career, she counseled children "who were destroyed" by the foster family and group home system. Out of that experience emerged Successful Adoption: A Guide to Finding a Child and Raising a Family (Harmony 1982, rev. 1987).

Later, when she opened a private practice and began career counseling, she wrote Divorcing a Corporation: How to Know When — and If — a Job Change Is Right for You (Villard 1986). She writes a weekly column, “The Career Doctor,” for the online newspaper Larchmont Gazette in Westchester County, N.Y. (www.thecareerdoctor.com).

And now Plumez is turning Mother Power into an off-Broadway play about mothers who are anti-war activists.

"In so many cases, in so many countries, it is mothers who have led the peace movements," she says. "Mothers in the Solomon Islands walked across the battle lines and talked the (boy) soldiers into laying down their arms. Women have led peace movements in Northern Ireland, Russia, Israel, Rwanda, Burundi, Sierra Leone ...."

In 2001, Jean Paul Plumez III succumbed to cancer at the age of 29. Jacqueline Plumez dedicated Mother Power to him.

As her work continues, she herself has become an example of the power of maternal love.