Mother Without Child

Mother Without Child PDF Author: Elaine Tuttle Hansen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520311299
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
Revealing the maternal as not a core identity but a site of profound psychic and social division, Hansen illuminates recent decades of feminist thought and explores novels by Jane Rule, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, and Fay Weldon. Unlike traditional stories of abandoned children and bad mothers, these narratives refuse to sentimentalize motherhood's losses and impasses. Hansen embraces the larger cultural story of what it means to be a mother and illuminates how motherhood is being reimagined today. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

Mother Without Child

Mother Without Child PDF Author: Elaine Tuttle Hansen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520311299
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 483

Get Book Here

Book Description
Revealing the maternal as not a core identity but a site of profound psychic and social division, Hansen illuminates recent decades of feminist thought and explores novels by Jane Rule, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, and Fay Weldon. Unlike traditional stories of abandoned children and bad mothers, these narratives refuse to sentimentalize motherhood's losses and impasses. Hansen embraces the larger cultural story of what it means to be a mother and illuminates how motherhood is being reimagined today. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

Complete Without Kids

Complete Without Kids PDF Author: Ellen L. Walker
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
ISBN: 1608320731
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
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.

Mothers Without Their Children

Mothers Without Their Children PDF Author: Charlotte Beyer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781772582215
Category : Absentee mothers
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Conceiving of and representing mothers without their children seems so paradoxical as to be almost impossible. How can we define a mother in the absence of her child? This compelling volume explores these and other questions from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, examining experiences, representations, creative manifestations, and embodiments of mothers without their children. In her 1997 book, entitled Mother Without Child: Contemporary Fiction and the Crisis of Motherhood, the critic Elaine Tuttle Hansen urged for critical and feminist engagement with what she described as 'the bord.

The Mother of All Questions

The Mother of All Questions PDF Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608467201
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
A collection of feminist essays steeped in “Solnit’s unapologetically observant and truth-speaking voice on toxic, violent masculinity” (The Los Angeles Review). In a timely and incisive follow-up to her national bestseller Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit offers sharp commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more. In characteristic style, “Solnit draw[s] anecdotes of female indignity or male aggression from history, social media, literature, popular culture, and the news . . . The main essay in the book is about the various ways that women are silenced, and Solnit focuses upon the power of storytelling—the way that who gets to speak, and about what, shapes how a society understands itself and what it expects from its members. The Mother of All Questions poses the thesis that telling women’s stories to the world will change the way that the world treats women, and it sets out to tell as many of those stories as possible” (The New Yorker). “There’s a new feminist revolution—open to people of all genders—brewing right now and Rebecca Solnit is one of its most powerful, not to mention beguiling, voices.”—Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times–bestselling author of Natural Causes “Short, incisive essays that pack a powerful punch.” —Publishers Weekly “A keen and timely commentary on gender and feminism. Solnit’s voice is calm, clear, and unapologetic; each essay balances a warm wit with confident, thoughtful analysis, resulting in a collection that is as enjoyable and accessible as it is incisive.” —Booklist

Without My Mother

Without My Mother PDF Author: Melissa Cistaro
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 1443458724
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
How Do You Forgive a Parent Who Has Failed You? One summer, Melissa Cistaro’s mother stepped into her baby-blue Dodge Dart and drove away, leaving behind Melissa and her brothers. Rarely seeing their mother as they were growing up, they blamed themselves for her leaving, turning to each other for support and seeking out often destructive ways to cope with living without their mom. Decades later, with children of her own, Melissa finds herself in Olympia, Washington, as her mother is dying. She has just days to find out what happened that summer and to confront the unthinkable fear that a “leaving gene” might be lying dormant inside of her. She knew she came from a long line of mothers who left their children. But when Melissa stumbles across a folder titled “Letters Never Sent” tucked away in her mother’s filing cabinet, she begins to feel the wreckage of her mother’s painful journey, before and after she abandoned her family. Alternating between Melissa’s tumultuous coming-of-age and her mother’s final days, Without My Mother is a haunting yet ultimately uplifting story of one woman’s quest to discover how our parents’ choices impact our own and how we can survive those choices to forge our own paths.

The Natural Mother of the Child

The Natural Mother of the Child PDF Author: Krys Malcolm Belc
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640094385
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Krys Malcolm Belc's visual memoir-in-essays explores how the experience of gestational parenthood—conceiving, birthing, and breastfeeding his son Samson—eventually clarified his gender identity. Krys Malcolm Belc has thought a lot about the interplay between parenthood and gender. As a nonbinary, transmasculine parent, giving birth to his son Samson clarified his gender identity. And yet, when his partner, Anna, adopted Samson, the legal documents listed Belc as “the natural mother of the child.” By considering how the experiences contained under the umbrella of “motherhood” don’t fully align with Belc’s own experience, The Natural Mother of the Child journeys both toward and through common perceptions of what it means to have a body and how that body can influence the perception of a family. With this visual memoir in essays, Belc has created a new kind of life record, one that engages directly with the documentation often thought to constitute a record of one’s life—childhood photos, birth certificates—and addresses his deep ambivalence about the “before” and “after” so prevalent in trans stories, which feels apart from his own experience. The Natural Mother of the Child is the story of a person moving past societal expectations to take control of his own narrative, with prose that delights in the intimate dailiness of family life and explores how much we can ever really know when we enter into parenting.

Regretting Motherhood

Regretting Motherhood PDF Author: Orna Donath
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
ISBN: 1623171385
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
A provocative and deeply important study of women’s lives, women’s choices—and an ‘unspoken taboo’—that questions the societal pressures forcing women into motherhood Women who opt not to be mothers are frequently warned that they will regret their decision later in life, yet we rarely talk about the possibility that the opposite might also be true—that women who have children might regret it. Drawing on years of research interviewing women from a variety of socioeconomic, educational, and professional backgrounds, sociologist Orna Donath treats regret as a feminist issue: as regret marks the road not taken, we need to consider whether alternative paths for women currently are blocked off. She asks that we pay attention to what is forbidden by rules governing motherhood, time, and emotion, including the cultural assumption that motherhood is a “natural” role for women—for the sake of all women, not just those who regret becoming mothers. If we are disturbed by the idea that a woman might regret becoming a mother, Donath says, our response should not be to silence and shame these women; rather, we need to ask honest and difficult questions about how society pushes women into motherhood and why those who reconsider it are still seen as a danger to the status quo. Groundbreaking, thoughtful, and provocative, this is an especially needed book in our current political climate, as women's reproductive rights continue to be at the forefront of national debates.

God and Jetfire

God and Jetfire PDF Author: Amy Seek
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374713820
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
A searching, eloquent memoir about the joys and hardships of open adoption God and Jetfire is a mother's account of her decision to surrender her son in an open adoption and of their relationship over the twelve years that follow. Facing an unplanned pregnancy at twenty-two, Amy Seek and her ex-boyfriend begin an exhaustive search for a family to raise their child. They sift through hundreds of "Dear Birth Mother" letters, craft an extensive questionnaire, and interview numerous potential couples. Despite the immutability of the surrender, it does little to diminish Seek's newfound feelings of motherhood. Once an ambitious architecture student, she struggles to reconcile her sadness with the hope that she's done the best for her son, a struggle complicated by her continued, active presence in his life. For decades, closed adoptions were commonplace. Now, new laws are guaranteeing adoptees' access to birth records, and open adoption is on the rise. God and Jetfire is the rare memoir that explores the intricate dynamics and exceptional commitment of an open-adoption relationship from the perspective of a birth mother searching for her place within it. Written with literary poise and distinction, God and Jetfire is a story of a life divided between grief and gratitude, regret and joy. It is an elegy for a lost motherhood, a celebration of a family gained, and an apology to a beloved son.

Motherless Mothers

Motherless Mothers PDF Author: Hope Edelman
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061978949
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 626

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Book Description
"Edelman illuminates the transformative power of understanding mother loss [and] offers essential wisdom." — Library Journal When Hope Edelman, author of the New York Times bestseller Motherless Daughters, became a parent, she found herself revisiting the loss of her mother in ways she had never anticipated. Now the mother of two young girls, Edelman set out to learn how the loss of a mother to death or abandonment can affect the ways women raise their own children. In Motherless Mothers, Edelman uses her own story as a prism to reveal the unique anxieties and desires that these women experience as they raise their children without the help of a living maternal guide. In an impeccably researched, luminously written book enriched by the voices of the mothers themselves—and filled with practical insight and advice from experienced professionals—she examines their parenting choices, their triumphs, and their fears, and offers motherless mothers the guidance and support they want and need.

Mother without their children

Mother without their children PDF Author: Charlotte Beyer
Publisher: Demeter Press
ISBN: 1772582190
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Conceiving of and representing mothers without their children seems so paradoxical as to be almost impossible. How can we define a mother in the absence of her child? This compelling volume explores these and other questions from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, examining experiences, representations, creative manifestations, and embodiments of mothers without their children. In her 1997 book, entitled Mother Without Child: Contemporary Fiction and the Crisis of Motherhood, the critic Elaine Tuttle Hansen urged for critical and feminist engagement with what she described as ‘the borders of motherhood and the women who really live there, neither fully inside nor fully outside some recognizable “family unit”, and often exiles from their children’. This book extends and expands this important enquiry, looking at maternal experience and mothering on the borders of motherhood in different historical and cultural contexts, thereby opening up the way in which we imagine and represent mothers without their children to reassessment and revision, and encouraging further dialogue about what it might mean to mother on the borders of motherhood.