Download or read book Woman Defined Motherhood written by Jane Price Knowles and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-04 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finally, here is an enlightening and empowering book that defines motherhood from a feminist perspective and then explores the implications of that definition. Feminist authors examine some of women’s full, rich, and varied thoughts and experiences about motherhood. In contrast to the too often accepted male notions of what constitutes a “good’mother or a “normal” family, this important book presents a comprehensive and balanced view of motherhood--as women have observed and experienced it. The major issues surrounding motherhood today are closely examined--the pervasive problem of mother-blaming and mother-hating and solutions to overcome it; ageism, sexism, and motherhood; relationships between mothers and daughters; relationships between stepmothers and stepchildren; motherhood and sex roles within the family; adoption; infertility; and childlessness. Special insight is also provided into the concerns of women who are mothers--lesbians, women of color, mothers of biracial children, and adoptive mothers of children from different cultures. Woman-Defined Motherhood is must reading for women, including both mothers and daughters, for therapists and other professionals supporting women, and for anyone interested in mothering.
Download or read book Introducing Women s Studies written by Victoria Robinson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1997-07-01 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new edition of the bestselling Introducing Women's Studies provides the reader with an up- to-date beginner text that covers major debates in women's studies in a comprehensive and accessible way. Fully revised and expanded, with new chapters on social policy, science and technology, and feminist research methodologies, this book explores the major subject areas of women's studies. Each chapter, written by an expert in the particular subject area, provides a clear overview of the main issues and debates, as well as suggestions for further reading. Chapters focus on the following subjects: turning the tide in women's studies; feminist theory; sexuality, power, and feminism; women, violence, and male power; representations of women in contemporary popular culture; women, writing, and language; women, marriage, and family relationships; motherhood and women's lives; women and reproduction; women and health; women at work; women, history, and protest; women and education; feminist research methodology; feminism and social policy; and women's studies, science, and technology.
Download or read book Of Woman Born Motherhood as Experience and Institution written by Adrienne Rich and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The pathbreaking investigation into motherhood and womanhood from an influential and enduring feminist voice, now for a new generation. In Of Woman Born, originally published in 1976, influential poet and feminist Adrienne Rich examines the patriarchic systems and political institutions that define motherhood. Exploring her own experience—as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother—she finds the act of mothering to be both determined by and distinct from the institution of motherhood as it is imposed on all women everywhere. A “powerful blend of research, theory, and self-reflection” (Sandra M. Gilbert, Paris Review), Of Woman Born revolutionized how women thought about motherhood and their own liberation. With a stirring new foreword from National Book Critics Circle Award–winning writer Eula Biss, the book resounds with as much wisdom and insight today as when it was first written.
Download or read book Motherhood written by Jane Price Knowles and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1990 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finally, here is an enlightening and empowering book that defines motherhood from a feminist perspective and then explores the implications of that definition. Feminist authors examine some of women's full, rich, and varied thoughts and experiences about motherhood. In contrast to the too often accepted male notions of what constitutes a “good’mother or a “normal” family, this important book presents a comprehensive and balanced view of motherhood--as women have observed and experienced it. The major issues surrounding motherhood today are closely examined--the pervasive problem of mother-blaming and mother-hating and solutions to overcome it; ageism, sexism, and motherhood; relationships between mothers and daughters; relationships between stepmothers and stepchildren; motherhood and sex roles within the family; adoption; infertility; and childlessness. Special insight is also provided into the concerns of women who are mothers--lesbians, women of color, mothers of biracial children, and adoptive mothers of children from different cultures. Woman-Defined Motherhood is must reading for women, including both mothers and daughters, for therapists and other professionals supporting women, and for anyone interested in mothering.
Download or read book Motherhood written by Sheila Heti and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of How Should a Person Be? (“one of the most talked-about books of the year”—Time Magazine) and the New York Times Bestseller Women in Clothes comes a daring novel about whether to have children. In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with the candor, originality, and humor that have won Heti international acclaim and made How Should A Person Be? required reading for a generation. In her late thirties, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti’s intimate and urgent novel considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forbearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking guidance from philosophy, her body, mysticism, and chance, she discovers her answer much closer to home. Motherhood is a courageous, keenly felt, and starkly original novel that will surely spark lively conversations about womanhood, parenthood, and about how—and for whom—to live.
Download or read book Interrogating Motherhood written by Lynda R. Ross and published by Athabasca University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-30 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has been four decades since the publication of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born but her analysis of maternity and the archetypal Mother remains a powerful critique, as relevant today as it was at the time of writing. It was Rich who first defined the term “motherhood” as referent to a patriarchal institution that was male-defined, male controlled, and oppressive to women. To empower women, Rich proposed the use of the word “mothering”: a word intended to be female-defined. It is between these two ideas—that of a patriarchal history and a feminist future—that the introductory text, Interrogating Motherhood, begins. Ross explores the topic of mothering from the perspective of Western society and encourages students and readers to identify and critique the historical, social, and political contexts in which mothers are understood. By examining popular culture, employment, public policy, poverty, “other” mothers, and mental health, Interrogating Motherhood describes the fluid and shifting nature of the practice of mothering and the complex realities that define contemporary women’s lives.
Download or read book From Motherhood to Mothering written by Andrea O'Reilly and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years since the publication of Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born, the topic of motherhood has emerged as a central issue in feminist scholarship. Arguably still the best feminist book on mothering and motherhood, Of Woman Born is not only a wide-ranging, far-reaching meditation on the meaning and experience of motherhood that draws from the disciplines of anthropology, feminist theory, psychology, and literature, but it also narrates Rich's personal reflections on her experiences of mothering. Andrea O'Reilly gathers feminist scholars from diverse disciplines such as literature, women's studies, law, sociology, anthropology, creative writing, and critical theory and examines how Of Woman Born has informed and influenced the way feminist scholarship "thinks and talks" about motherhood. The contributors explore the many ways in which Rich provides the analytical tools to study and report upon the meaning and experience of motherhood.
Download or read book Complete Without Kids written by Ellen L. Walker and published by Greenleaf Book Group. This book was released on 2011 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the rewards and challenges childfree adults face living in a world that celebrates traditional families, offering advice on how to cope with the pressure of friends and family to have children, taking advantage of leisure time, and financial considerations.
Download or read book Redefining Motherhood written by Sharon Abbey and published by Women's Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women have, through choice and circumstance, changed what it means to be a mother today. No longer is there one clear and correct prescribed definition. As economic, social, cultural and political conditions evolve, women are revolutionizing concepts of mothering in a way unrecognizable short decades ago. In this unique collection, twenty-three women, teaching at colleges and universities throughout Canada, explore how traditional views of motherhood have been influenced by changing social and cultural conditions. Their essays unravel patriarchal constructions of motherhood and re-present new definitions drawn from women's lived experiences.
Download or read book Maternal Bodies written by Nora Doyle and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-03-19 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the second half of the eighteenth century, motherhood came to be viewed as women's most important social role, and the figure of the good mother was celebrated as a moral force in American society. Nora Doyle shows that depictions of motherhood in American culture began to define the ideal mother by her emotional and spiritual roles rather than by her physical work as a mother. As a result of this new vision, lower-class women and non-white women came to be excluded from the identity of the good mother because American culture defined them in terms of their physical labor. However, Doyle also shows that childbearing women contradicted the ideal of the disembodied mother in their personal accounts and instead perceived motherhood as fundamentally defined by the work of their bodies. Enslaved women were keenly aware that their reproductive bodies carried a literal price, while middle-class and elite white women dwelled on the physical sensations of childbearing and childrearing. Thus motherhood in this period was marked by tension between the lived experience of the maternal body and the increasingly ethereal vision of the ideal mother that permeated American print culture.
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 What Our Mothers Didn t Tell Us written by Danielle Crittenden and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-08-25 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Talk to women under forty today, and you will hear that in spite of the fact that they have achieved goals previous generations of women could only dream of, they nonetheless feel more confused and insecure than ever. What has gone wrong? What can be done to set it right? These are the questions Danielle Crittenden answers in What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us. She examines the foremost issues in women's lives -- sex, marriage, motherhood, work, aging, and politics -- and argues that a generation of women has been misled: taught to blame men and pursue independence at all costs. Happiness is obtainable, Crittenden says, but only if women will free their minds from outdated feminist attitudes. By drawing on her own experience and a decade of research and analysis of modern female life, Crittenden passionately and engagingly tackles the myths that keep women from realizing the happiness they deserve. And she introduces a new way of thinking about society's problems that may, at long last, help women achieve the lives they desire.
Download or read book Beyond Motherhood written by Jeanne Safer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1996-02 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women from all over the country share their experiences and offer insights into what it is like not having children, and describe what factors helped shape their decision to remain childless.
Download or read book A Life s Work written by Rachel Cusk and published by Picador. This book was released on 2015-02-17 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Multi-award-winning author Rachel Cusk’s honest memoir that captures the life-changing wonders of motherhood. Selected by The New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years “Funny and smart and refreshingly akin to a war diary—sort of Apocalypse Baby Now . . . A Life’s Work is wholly original and unabashedly true.” —The New York Times Book Review A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother is Rachel Cusk’s funny, moving, brutally honest account of her early experiences of motherhood. When it was published it 2001, it divided critics and readers. One famous columnist wrote a piece demanding that Cusk’s children be taken into care, saying she was unfit to look after them, and Oprah Winfrey invited her on the show to defend herself. An education in babies, books, breast-feeding, toddler groups, broken nights, bad advice and never being alone, it is a landmark work, which has provoked acclaim and outrage in equal measure.
Download or read book The Family of Woman written by Maureen Sullivan and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-09-06 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amidst the shrill and discordant notes struck in debates over the make-up—or breakdown—of the American family, the family keeps evolving. This book offers a close and clear-eyed look into a form this change has taken most recently, the lesbian coparent family. Based on intensive interviews and extensive firsthand observation, The Family of Woman chronicles the experience of thirty-four families headed by lesbian mothers whose children were conceived by means of donor insemination.With its intimate perspective on the interior dynamics of these families and its penetrating view of their public lives, the book provides rare insight into the workings of emerging family forms and their significance for our understanding of "family"—and our culture itself.
Download or read book And Now We Have Everything written by Meaghan O'Connell and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected as One of the Best Books of the Year by: National Public Radio, Esquire, Bustle, Refinery29, Thrillist, Electric Literature, Powell's, Autostraddle, BookRiot, Women.com "Smart, funny, and true in all the best ways, this book made me ache with recognition." -- Cheryl Strayed A raw, funny, and fiercely honest account of becoming a mother before feeling like a grown up. When Meaghan O'Connell got accidentally pregnant in her twenties and decided to keep the baby, she realized that the book she needed -- a brutally honest, agenda-free reckoning with the emotional and existential impact of motherhood -- didn't exist. So she decided to write it herself. And Now We Have Everything is O'Connell's exploration of the cataclysmic, impossible-to-prepare-for experience of becoming a mother. With her dark humor and hair-trigger B.S. detector, O'Connell addresses the pervasive imposter syndrome that comes with unplanned pregnancy, the fantasies of a "natural" birth experience that erode maternal self-esteem, post-partum body and sex issues, and the fascinating strangeness of stepping into a new, not-yet-comfortable identity. Channeling fears and anxieties that are still taboo and often unspoken, And Now We Have Everything is an unflinchingly frank, funny, and visceral motherhood story for our times, about having a baby and staying, for better or worse, exactly yourself.
Download or read book Matricentric Feminism written by Andrea O'Reilly and published by Demeter Press. This book was released on 2016-10-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book argues that the category of mother is distinct from the category of woman, and that many of the problems mothers face—social, economic, political, cultural, psychological, and so forth—are specific to women’s role and identity as mothers. Indeed, mothers are oppressed under patriarchy as women and as mothers. Consequently, mothers need a feminism of their own, one that positions mothers’ concerns as the starting point for a theory and politic of empowerment. O’Reilly terms this new mode of feminism matricentic feminism and the book explores how it is represented and experienced in theory, activism, and practice. The chapter on maternal theory examines the central theoretical concepts of maternal scholarship while the chapter on activism considers the twenty-first century motherhood movement. Feminist mothering is likewise examined as the specific practice of matricentric feminism and this chapter discusses various theories and strategies on and for maternal empowerment. Matricentric feminism is also examined in relation to the larger field of academic feminism; here O’Reilly persuasively shows how matricentric feminism has been marginalized in academic feminism and considers the reasons for such exclusion and how such may be challenged and changed.
