Download or read book Passages to Modernity written by Kathleen S. Uno and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1999-04-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary Japanese women are often presented as devoted full-time wives and mothers. At the extreme, they are stereotyped as "education mothers" (kyoiku mama), completely dedicated to the academic success of their children. Children of working mothers are pitied; day-care users, both children and mothers, are faintly disparaged for their inadequate home lives; hired babysitters are virtually unknown. Yet historical evidence reveals a strikingly different picture of Japanese motherhood and childcare at the beginning of the twentieth century. In contrast to today, child tending by non-maternal caregivers was widely accepted at all levels of Japanese society. Day-care centers flourished, and there was virtually no expectation of exclusive maternal care of children, even infants. The patterns of the formation of modern Japanese attitudes toward motherhood, childhood, child-rearing, and home life become visible as this study traces the early twentieth-century rise of Japanese day-care centers, institutions established by middle-class philanthropists and reformers to provide for the physical well-being and mental and moral development of urban lower-class preschool children. Day-care gained broad support in turn-of-the-century Japan for several reasons. For one, day-care did not clash with widely accepted norms of child care. A second factor was the perception of public and private policymakers that day-care held the promise of social and national progress through economic and moral betterment of the urban lower classes. Finally, day-care offered working mothers the opportunity to earn a better livelihood with fewer worries about their children. In spite of emerging notions that total devotion to child-rearing was a woman's highest calling, Japanese nationalism, a signal force in the genesis of the modern Japanese state, economy, and middle-class culture, fed a deep wellspring of support for day-care and fostered significant reshaping of motherhood, childhood, home life, and view of the urban lower classes. Passages to Modernity is an important and original contribution to our understanding of the institutional and ideological reach of the early twentieth-century state and the contested emergence of a striking new discourse about woman as domestic caregiver and homemaker.
Download or read book Motherhood and Modernity written by Christine Everingham and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This powerful book extends contemporary scholarly debates on mothering and modernity and is a valuable resource for teaching in women's studes and sociology.
Download or read book Modern Motherhood written by Jodi Vandenberg-Daves and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-26 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did mothers transform from parents of secondary importance in the colonies to having their multiple and complex roles connected to the well-being of the nation? In the first comprehensive history of motherhood in the United States, Jodi Vandenberg-Daves explores how tensions over the maternal role have been part and parcel of the development of American society. Modern Motherhood travels through redefinitions of motherhood over time, as mothers encountered a growing cadre of medical and psychological experts, increased their labor force participation, gained the right to vote, agitated for more resources to perform their maternal duties, and demonstrated their vast resourcefulness in providing for and nurturing their families. Navigating rigid gender role prescriptions and a crescendo of mother-blame by the middle of the twentieth century, mothers continued to innovate new ways to combine labor force participation and domestic responsibilities. By the 1960s, they were poised to challenge male expertise, in areas ranging from welfare and abortion rights to childbirth practices and the confinement of women to maternal roles. In the twenty-first century, Americans continue to struggle with maternal contradictions, as we pit an idealized role for mothers in children’s development against the social and economic realities of privatized caregiving, a paltry public policy structure, and mothers’ extensive employment outside the home. Building on decades of scholarship and spanning a wide range of topics, Vandenberg-Daves tells an inclusive tale of African American, Native American, Asian American, working class, rural, and other hitherto ignored families, exploring sources ranging from sermons, medical advice, diaries and letters to the speeches of impassioned maternal activists. Chapter topics include: inventing a new role for mothers; contradictions of moral motherhood; medicalizing the maternal body; science, expertise, and advice to mothers; uplifting and controlling mothers; modern reproduction; mothers’ resilience and adaptation; the middle-class wife and mother; mother power and mother angst; and mothers’ changing lives and continuous caregiving. While the discussion has been part of all eras of American history, the discussion of the meaning of modern motherhood is far from over.
Download or read book The Conflict written by Elisabeth Badinter and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the pathbreaking tradition of Backlash and The Time Bind, The Conflict, a #1 European bestseller, identifies a surprising setback to women's freedom: progressive modern motherhood Elisabeth Badinter has for decades been in the vanguard of the European fight for women's equality. Now, in an explosive new book, she points her finger at a most unlikely force undermining the status of women: liberal motherhood, in thrall to all that is "natural." Attachment parenting, co-sleeping, baby-wearing, and especially breast-feeding—these hallmarks of contemporary motherhood have succeeded in tethering women to the home and family to an extent not seen since the 1950s. Badinter argues that the taboos now surrounding epidurals, formula, disposable diapers, cribs—and anything that distracts a mother's attention from her offspring—have turned childrearing into a singularly regressive force. In sharp, engaging prose, Badinter names a reactionary shift that is intensely felt but has not been clearly articulated until now, a shift that America has pioneered. She reserves special ire for the orthodoxy of the La Leche League—an offshoot of conservative Evangelicalism—showing how on-demand breastfeeding, with all its limitations, curtails women's choices. Moreover, the pressure to provide children with 24/7 availability and empathy has produced a generation of overwhelmed and guilt-laden mothers—one cause of the West's alarming decline in birthrate. A bestseller in Europe, The Conflict is a scathing indictment of a stealthy zealotry that cheats women of their full potential.
Download or read book Making Modern Mothers written by Heather Paxson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-02-12 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Greece, women speak of mothering as "within the nature" of a woman. But this durable association of motherhood with femininity exists in tension with the highest incidence of abortion and one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe. In this setting, how do women think of themselves as proper individuals, mothers, and Greek citizens? In this anthropological study of reproductive politics and ethics in Athens, Greece, Heather Paxson tracks the effects of increasing consumerism and imported biomedical family planning methods, showing how women's "nature" is being transformed to meet crosscutting claims of the contemporary world. Locating profound ambivalence in people's ethical evaluations of gender and fertility control, Paxson offers a far-reaching analysis of conflicting assumptions about what it takes to be a good mother and a good woman in modern Greece, where assertions of cultural tradition unfold against a backdrop of European Union integration, economic struggle, and national demographic anxiety over a falling birth rate.
Download or read book Mom written by Rebecca Jo Plant and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early twentieth century, Americans often waxed lyrical about “Mother Love,” signaling a conception of motherhood as an all-encompassing identity, rooted in self-sacrifice and infused with social and political meaning. By the 1940s, the idealization of motherhood had waned, and the nation’s mothers found themselves blamed for a host of societal and psychological ills. In Mom, Rebecca Jo Plant traces this important shift by exploring the evolution of maternalist politics, changing perceptions of the mother-child bond, and the rise of new approaches to childbirth pain and suffering. Plant argues that the assault on sentimental motherhood came from numerous quarters. Male critics who railed against female moral authority, psychological experts who hoped to expand their influence, and women who strove to be more than wives and mothers—all for their own distinct reasons—sought to discredit the longstanding maternal ideal. By showing how motherhood ultimately came to be redefined as a more private and partial component of female identity, Plant illuminates a major reorientation in American civic, social, and familial life that still reverberates today.
Download or read book What Gender is Motherhood written by Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Oyěwùmí extends her path-breaking thesis that in Yorùbá society, construction of gender is a colonial development since the culture exhibited no gender divisions in its original form. Taking seriously indigenous modes and categories of knowledge, she applies her finding of a non-gendered ontology to the social institutions of Ifá, motherhood, marriage, family and naming practices. Oyěwùmí insists that contemporary assertions of male dominance must be understood, in part, as the work of local intellectuals who took marching orders from Euro/American mentors and colleagues. In exposing the depth of the coloniality of power, Oyěwùmí challenges us to look at the worlds we inhabit, anew.
Download or read book Modern Motherhood and Women s Dual Identities written by Petra Bueskens and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-28 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do women in contemporary western societies experience contradiction between their autonomous and maternal selves? What are the origins of this contradiction and the associated ‘double shift’ that result in widespread calls to either ‘lean in’ or ‘opt out’? How are some mothers subverting these contradictions and finding meaningful ways of reconciling their autonomous and maternal selves? In Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities, Petra Bueskens argues that western modernisation consigned women to the home and released them from it in historically unprecedented, yet interconnected, ways. Her ground-breaking formulation is that western women are free as ‘individuals’ and constrained as mothers, with the twist that it is the former that produces the latter. Bueskens’ theoretical contribution consists of the identification and analysis of modern women’s duality, drawing on political philosophy, feminist theory and sociology tracking the changing nature of discourses of women, freedom and motherhood across three centuries. While the current literature points to the pervasiveness of contradiction and double-shifts for mothers, very little attention has been paid to how (some) women are subverting contradiction and ‘rewriting the sexual contract’. Bridging this gap, Bueskens’ interviews ten ‘revolving mothers’ to reveal how periodic absence, exceeding the standard work-day, disrupts the default position assigned to mothers in the home, and in turn disrupts the gendered dynamics of household work. A provocative and original work, Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities will appeal to graduate students and researchers interested in fields such as Women and Gender Studies, Sociology of Motherhood and Social and Political Theory.
Download or read book Going it Alone written by Martina Klett-Davies and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are lone mothers 'going it alone' in late modernity? In this fascinating work, Martina Klett-Davies examines how women negotiate lone motherhood in Britain and Germany. She draws on interviews with 70 unmarried lone mothers living on state benefits in inner city areas to examine the complexity and diversity of their lives, the ways in which they try to manage choices and constraints, and how they position themselves as carers, dependants or as paid workers. Going it Alone? assesses the extent to which individualization can explain the experience of state-dependent lone mothers, further develops the concept and provides a better understanding of lone mothers. Suggestions with regard to paid employment, education and state benefits are provided as well as policy recommendations for increasing the options available to lone mothers.
Download or read book Shattered written by Rebecca Asher and published by Vintage Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Today women outperform men at school and university. They make a success of their early careers and enter into relationships on their own terms. But once they have children, their illusions of equality are swiftly shattered. Shattered exposes the - often invisible - inequalities perpetuated by the state, employers, the parenting industry, and even ourselves. Drawing on the experiences of mothers and fathers both in the UK and around the world, and examining everything from work practices to relationship dynamics and beyond, Rebecca Asher sets out a manifesto for a new model of family life."--Book jacket.
Download or read book Torn written by Samantha Parent Walravens and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Torn is an anthology of essays that captures the voices of a generation of women caught in the crossfire of kids, career, and family life. In a series of 48 heartfelt and often laugh-out-loud essays, the book exposes the dirty truths of motherhood and the inevitable crises of that life brings: battles with cancer, lost jobs, broken marriages, unplanned pregnancies, the heartbreak of infertility, and lots of “bad mommy” moments. As these stories illustrate, there is no perfect mother, nor is there a perfect balance when it comes to kids and a successful career.
Download or read book Modern Mom Probs written by Tara Clark and published by Post Hill Press. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Mom Probs: A Survival Guide for 21st Century Mothers is a guide for modern mothers trying to navigate the daily joys and worries they face. It sheds light on the experiences modern moms eat, sleep, and breathe…and obsess about. Using checklists, graphs, and smart, funny advice, this must-have book revels in the messiness and beauty of modern motherhood. Tara Clark, creator of the popular Instagram account “Modern Mom Probs,” started the conversation for moms looking for an online village. In this book, she continues the conversation with funny, easy-to-digest information, including advice from medical professionals. Inside, she’ll tackle how to: • Manage screen time without a meltdown • Navigate playground geopolitics • Overcome information overload • Teach your children about inclusivity • Find mom friends and keep them
Download or read book To Have and to Hold written by Molly Millwood, PhD and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A clinical psychologist’s exploration of the modern dilemmas women face in the wake of new motherhood When Molly Millwood became a mother, she was fully prepared for what she would gain: an adorable baby boy; hard-won mothering skills; and a messy, chaotic, beautiful life. But what she did not expect was what she would lose: aspects of her identity, a baseline level of happiness, a general sense of wellbeing. And though she had the benefit of a supportive husband during this transition, she also at times resented the fact that the disruption to his life seemed to pale in comparison to hers. As a clinical psychologist, Molly knew her experience was a normal response to a life-changing event. But without the advantage of such a perspective, many of the patients she treated in her private practice grappled with self-doubt, guilt, and fear, and suffered the dual pain of not only the struggle to adjust but also the overwhelming shame for struggling at all. In To Have and to Hold, Molly explores the complex terrain of new motherhood, illuminating the ways it affects women psychologically, emotionally, physically, and professionally—as well as how it impacts their partnership. Along with the arrival of a bundle of joy come thorny issues such as self-worth, control, autonomy, and dependency. And for most new mothers, these issues are experienced within the context of an intimate relationship, adding another layer of tension, conflict, and confusion to an already challenging time. As Molly examines the inextricable link between women’s well-being as new mothers and the well-being of their relationships, she offers guidance to help readers reclaim their identities, overcome their guilt and shame, and repair their relationships. A blend of personal narrative, scientific research, and stories from Molly’s clinical practice, To Have and to Hold provides a much-needed lifeline to new mothers everywhere.
Download or read book Uncertain Honor written by Jennifer Johnson-Hanks and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2006-01-02 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering an intimate look at the lives of African women trying to reconcile motherhood with new professional roles, the author argues that Beti women delay motherhood as part of a broader attempt to assert a modern form of honor only recently made possible by formal education, Catholicism, and economic change.
Download or read book Surveillance of Modern Motherhood written by Helen Simmons and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-06-18 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the reflections and experiences of mothers of children aged 0-3 years that have attended universal parenting courses. Simmons considers the factors that motivated mothers to attend a universal parenting course and explore the wider experiences of early modern motherhood in the UK. She investigates participants' perceptions of benefits of attending a parenting course, different forms of parenting advice accessed by mothers, and how this provides an insight into the wider constructs and experiences of modern motherhood. Ultimately, the book considers, through a feminist post-structuralist lens, the social and cultural pressures within modern motherhood in relation to different levels of surveillance, and produces new knowledge for practice within the early years and health sectors in relation to the support currently offered to new mothers. It will be of interest to students and scholars across the sociology of education, gender studies, and childhood studies.
Download or read book Mothering Modernity written by Marylu Hill and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the transformative relationship between Victorian mothers and their modern daughters in the works of six early British modernists (E. M. Forster, Dorothy Richardson, D.H. Lawrence, May Sinclair, Radclyffe Hall, and Virginia Woolf). The emphasis upon a female hero is a significant and largely unremarked similarity in some of the most significant works of these authors. In these novels, the female hero, in order to attain her full potential as an agent of social and artistic changes, must undergo a maturation process that leads from the father's world of language and public action to a new appreciation of the mother's unrecognized, alternative virtues. Exploring the emergence of the young, modern woman as the hero in the works of these formative authors, Hill traces the gendered development of notions of modernity and the negotiation of new forms of mother-daughter relationship at the birth of modernity and modernist art, providing a more richly nuanced understand of the issue of gender in modernism.
Download or read book I Was a Really Good Mom Before I Had Kids written by Trisha Ashworth and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I don't know how she does it! is an oft-heard refrain about mothers today. Funnily enough, most moms agree they have no idea how they get it done, or whether they even want the job. Trisha Ashworth and Amy Nobile spoke to mothers of every stripe--working, stay-at-home, part-time--and found a surprisingly similar trend in their interviews. After enthusing about her lucky life for twenty minutes, a mother would then break down and admit that her child's first word was "Shrek." As one mom put it, "Am I happy? The word that describes me best is challenged." Fresh from the front lines of modern motherhood comes a book that uncovers the guilty secrets of moms today . . . in their own words. I Was a Really Good Mom Before I Had Kids diagnoses the craziness and offers real solutions, so that mothers can step out of the madness and learn to love motherhood as much as they love their kids.
