By highlighting these tensions, How to Make an American Quilt comments on both the paradox of female identity and the status of contemporary motherhood. How do we privilege mothers as the source of all women and as a source of identity for women without suggesting that all women should be mothers or that; all that women can be is mothers? In the movie, Finn searches for a meaningful rite of passage into female adulthood, but she resists marriage, motherhood, and her own mother. What Finn discovers on her quest are matrilineage and social matriarchy as celebrations of women's love for women, not motherhood