Woman-Defined Motherhood

Woman-Defined Motherhood PDF Author: Jane Price Knowles
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317765710
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
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.

Woman-Defined Motherhood

Woman-Defined Motherhood PDF Author: Jane Price Knowles
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317765710
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Motherhood

Motherhood PDF Author: Jane Price Knowles
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN:
Category : Mother and child
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
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.

Introducing Women's Studies

Introducing Women's Studies PDF Author: Victoria Robinson
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814774939
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
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.

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution PDF Author: Adrienne Rich
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039386734X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
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.

Motherhood

Motherhood PDF Author: Sheila Heti
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1627790780
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
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.

Interrogating Motherhood

Interrogating Motherhood PDF Author: Lynda R. Ross
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
ISBN: 1771991437
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
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.

From Motherhood to Mothering

From Motherhood to Mothering PDF Author: Andrea O'Reilly
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791484130
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
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.

Maternal Bodies

Maternal Bodies PDF Author: Nora Doyle
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469637200
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
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.

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.

Redefining Motherhood

Redefining Motherhood PDF Author: Sharon Abbey
Publisher: Women's Press
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
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.