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82 books match the query 'Motherhood' and 21 start with m

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MOTHERS MOTHERHOOD

READINGS IN AMERICAN HISTORY

Edited by Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden

The Ohio State University Press, 1997

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Making Down Syndrome

Motherhood and Kinship Futures in Urban Jordan

Christine Sargent

Rutgers University Press, 2026

Making Down Syndrome: Motherhood and Kinship Futures in Urban Jordan draws on ethnographic research conducted primarily in Jordan’s capital city of Amman to explore how the label and identity of Down syndrome is gaining increasing cohesiveness. Focused on the experiences of mothers, who serve as an entry point for understanding broader family dynamics and choices, the book argues that practices and ideologies of care play a central role in making Down syndrome’s embodied and political realities. They do so through the momentum of kinship futures, or futures imagined through the prism of kinship roles and relations, which shape how families organize and distribute care between and beyond kinship networks and under conditions of economic and political uncertainty. By approaching everyday life in Jordan through the lens of disability, Making Down Syndrome offers new insights into how people navigate structures of family, gender, power, inequality, and precarity, all while trying to maintain hope for and cultivate better futures.

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Mama's Gun

Black Maternal Figures and the Politics of Transgression

Marlo D. David

The Ohio State University Press, 2016

In Mama’s Gun: Black Maternal Figures and the Politics of Transgression, Marlo D. David identifies five bold, new archetypes of black motherhood for the post-civil rights generation in order to imagine new ways of thinking about pervasive maternal stereotypes of black women. Rather than avoiding “negative” images of black motherhood, such as welfare queens, teen mothers, and “baby mamas,” Mama’s Gun centralizes these dispossessed figures and renames them as the Young Mother, the Blues Mama, the Surrogate, Big Mama, and the Mothership.

Taking inspiration from African American fiction, historical accounts of black life, Afrofuturism, and black popular culture in music and on screen, David turns her attention to Sapphire’s Push, Octavia Butler’s Dawn, and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body as well as the performance art of Erykah Badu and the films of Tyler Perry. She draws out the implications of black maternal figures in these texts who balk at tradition and are far from “ideal.” David’s study shows how representations of blackness are deeply embedded in the neoliberal language of contemporary American politics and how black writers and performers resist such mainstream ideologies with their own transgressive black maternal figures.

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Mama, PhD

Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life

Evans, Elrena

Rutgers University Press, 2008

Every year, American universities publish glowing reports stating their commitment to diversity, often showing statistics of female hires as proof of success. Yet, although women make up increasing numbers of graduate students, graduate degree recipients, and even new hires, academic life remains overwhelming a man's world. The reality that the statistics fail to highlight is that the presence of women, specifically those with children, in the ranks of tenured faculty has not increased in a generation. Further, those women who do achieve tenure track placement tend to report slow advancement, income disparity, and lack of job satisfaction compared to their male colleagues.

Amid these disadvantages, what is a Mama, PhD to do? This literary anthology brings together a selection of deeply felt personal narratives by smart, interesting women who explore the continued inequality of the sexes in higher education and suggest changes that could make universities more family-friendly workplaces.

The contributors hail from a wide array of disciplines and bring with them a variety of perspectives, including those of single and adoptive parents. They address topics that range from the level of policy to practical day-to-day concerns, including caring for a child with special needs, breastfeeding on campus, negotiating viable maternity and family leave policies, job-sharing and telecommuting options, and fitting into desk/chair combinations while eight months pregnant.

Candid, provocative, and sometimes with a wry sense of humor, the thirty-five essays in this anthology speak to and offer support for any woman attempting to combine work and family, as well as anyone who is interested in improving the university's ability to live up to its reputation to be among the most progressive of American institutions.

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Masculinity, Motherhood, and Mockery

Psychoanalyzing Culture and the Iatmul Naven Rite in New Guinea

Eric Kline Silverman

University of Michigan Press, 2001

Masculinity, Motherhood, and Mockery analyzes the relationship between masculinity and motherhood in an Eastern Iatmul village along the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. It focuses on a metaphorical dialogue between two countervailing images of the body, dubbed by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin as the "moral" and the "grotesque." Eastern Iatmul men in Tambunum village idealize an image of motherhood that is nurturing, sheltering, cleansing, fertile, and chaste--in a word, moral. But men also fear an equally compelling image of motherhood that is defiling, dangerous, orificial, aggressive, and carnal--hence, grotesque. Masculinity in Tambunum is a rejoinder both subtle and strident, both muted and impassioned, to these contrary, embodied images of motherhood.
Throughout this work, Eric Silverman details the dialogics of mothering and manhood throughout Eastern Iatmul culture, including in his analysis cosmology and myth; food- and childraising; architecture and canoes; ethnophysiology and sexuality; shame and hygiene; marriage and kinship; and perhaps most significantly, a ceremonial locus classicus in anthropology: the famous Iatmul naven rite. This book provides the first sustained examination of naven since Bateson, presenting new data and interpretations that are based entirely on original, first-hand ethnographic research.
The sustained engagement with anthropological and psychoanalytic theory coupled with a refreshing examination of a famous and still-enigmatic ritual is sure to make multiple contributions to pressing debates in contemporary anthropology and social theory.
Eric Silverman is Associate Professor of Anthropology, DePauw University.

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Medicalized Motherhood

Perspectives from the Lives of African-American and Jewish Women

Jacquelyn S. Litt

Rutgers University Press, 1999

The 1946 publication of Dr. Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care signaled the pervasive influence of expert 'medicalized motherhood' in mid-twentieth-century America. Throughout the previous two decades, pediatricians and women's magazines alike advised mothers of the importance of physicians' guidance for the everyday care of their children, and Spock's book popularized this advice, particularly among white, middle-class women.

When Jacquelyn S. Litt interviewed African-American and Jewish women who raised their children in the 1930s and 1940s, she found that these women responded to experts' advice in ways uniquely shaped by their ethnicity, race, and class. For middle-class African-American and Jewish women, medicalization took place in ethnically/racially segregated networks and functioned as a collectively held strategy for social advance as much as a set of technical practices for raising healthy children. For poor, single African-American mothers, everyday networks offered limited access to medical institutions or mainstream norms. Medical discourse was largely controlled by white women and men, which left these women disempowered in medical institutions and marginal to dominant definitions of acceptable mothering.

Litt's book is enriched with many narratives from the mothers themselves. Both the women's voices and her acute sociological research bring to light how medicalized motherhood, while not the single cause of difference and inequality among the women, was a site where they were produced.

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Metabolics

Poems

Jessica E. Johnson

Acre Books, 2023

In this debut poetry collection, a single speaker tries to control her body and negotiate her time with digital devices, all the while navigating identities, impulses, and relationships that are often in tension.

Metabolics, a book-length poem, borrows the movements of metabolic pathways to consider how nature accomplishes both balance and deep transformation. In visual figures and prose blocks that bridge the divide between poetry and nonfiction, Jessica E. Johnson employs scientific idioms to construct an allegory about a family in the Pacific Northwest. The region becomes a character in its own right, with cedars, moss, and heavy cloud knitting the mother, father, boy, and girl into their setting.

This far-reaching volume also serves as a study of the ecologies of contemporary parenting, with adults and children affected by “feeds” both on screen and off as their bodies metabolize food, the environment, and excess feelings such as rage. From climate change to kombucha to smartphones and curated produce, the smallest details of daily life in “Plasticland” catalyze a larger examination of selfhood: “Despite so many attempts to resolve this tension, sometimes you are you and also sometimes mother just as light can be both particle and wave.”

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Mettlework

A Mining Daughter on Making Home

Jessica E. Johnson

Acre Books, 2024

A memoir of Johnson’s unusual upbringing during the 1970s and ’80s, interwoven with the story of her transition to parenthood in post-recession Portland, Oregon.

In the weeks after her first child is born, Jessica E. Johnson receives an email from her mother that contains artifacts of the author’s early childhood: scans of Polaroids and letters her mother wrote in mountain west mining camps and ghost towns—places without running water, companions, or help. Awash in love and restlessness, Johnson begins to see how the bedrock images of her isolated upbringing have stayed with her, even when she believed she was removing herself from their logic.

As she copes with the swirling pressures of parenting, teaching at an urban community college, and a partnership shaped by chronic illness, Johnson starts digging through her mother’s keepsakes and the histories of the places her family passed through, uncovering the linked misogyny and disconnection that characterized her childhood world—a world with uncomfortable echoes in the present and even in the act of writing itself. The resulting journey encompasses Johnson’s early memories, the story of the earth told in the language of geology, bits of vivid correspondence, a mothering manual from the early twentieth century, and the daily challenges of personal and collective care in a lonesome-crowded Pacific wonderland. Mettlework traces intergenerational failures of homemaking, traveling toward presence and relationship amid the remains of extractive industry and unsustainable notions of family.

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Modern Motherhood

An American History

Vandenberg-Daves, Jodi

Rutgers University Press, 2014

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.

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Mom

The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America

Rebecca Jo Plant

University of Chicago Press, 2010

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.

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Mother-Work

Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930

Molly Ladd-Taylor

University of Illinois Press, 1994

Early in the twentieth century, maternal and child welfare evolved from a private family responsibility into a matter of national policy. Molly Ladd-Taylor explores both the private and public aspects of child-rearing, using the relationship between them to cast new light on the histories of motherhood, the welfare state, and women's activism in the United States.

Ladd-Taylor argues that mother-work, "women's unpaid work of reproduction and caregiving," motivated women's public activism and "maternalist" ideology. Mothering experiences led women to become active in the development of public health, education, and welfare services. In turn, the advent of these services altered mothering in many ways, including the reduction of the infant mortality rate.

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Motherhood in Bondage

Foreword by Margaret Marsh

Margaret Sanger

The Ohio State University Press, 2000

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) was a leading figure in the American birth control movement. Trained as a nurse, she moved to New York City to work among the poor. Having witnessed firsthand the travails of mothers in the city's poorest neighborhoods, she felt the need to provide them with information on reproduction and contraception. She abandoned her nursing career and devoted the rest of her life to disseminating information on women's reproduction and contraception, publishing books and articles and founding birth control clinics.

In Motherhood in Bondage, first published in 1928, Sanger reproduced letters written to her from women and sometimes men from all over the country, in both urban and rural areas, who were seeking advice on reproductive matters and marital relations, but mostly imploring her to help them find ways to avoid more pregnancies. The letters are grouped by theme into sixteen chapters, and Sanger wrote an introduction to each chapter. With clear relevance to the current post-Roe moment, these pleas to Sanger for advice on avoiding unwanted pregnancy dramatically detail the desperation for reproductive agency when birth control was unknown, withheld, or otherwise inaccessible.

In her foreword for this edition, Margaret Marsh describes the controversies surrounding these letters and places them in their historical context.

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Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome

Edited by Lauren Hackworth Petersen and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell

University of Texas Press, 2012

Motherhood played a central role in ancient Greece and Rome, despite the virtual absence of female participation in the public spheres of life. Mothers could wield enormous influence as the reproductive bodies of society and, in many cases, of culture. Yet motherhood and acts of mothering have received relatively little focused and sustained attention by modern scholars, who have concentrated almost exclusively on analyzing depictions of ancient women more generally.

In this volume, experts from across the humanities present a wealth of evidence from legal, literary, and medical texts, as well as art, architecture, ritual, and material culture, to reveal the multilayered dimensions of motherhood in both Greece and Rome and to confront the fact that not all mothers and acts of mothering can be easily categorized. The authors consider a variety of mothers—from the mythical to the real, from empress to prostitute, and from citizen to foreigner—to expose both the mundane and the ideologically charged lives of mothers in the Classical world. Some essays focus on motherhood as a largely private (emotional, intimate) experience, while others explore the ramifications of public, oftentimes politicized, displays of motherhood. This state-of-the art look at mothers and mothering in the ancient world also takes on a contemporary relevance as the authors join current debates on motherhood and suggest links between the lives of ancient mothers and the diverse, often conflicting roles of women in modern Western society.

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Mothering by Degrees

Single Mothers and the Pursuit of Postsecondary Education

Duquaine-Watson, Jillian M.

Rutgers University Press, 2017

Winner of the 2018 AERA Division J Outstanding Publication Award

In Mothering by Degrees, Jillian Duquaine-Watson shows how single mothers pursuing college degrees must navigate a difficult course as they attempt to reconcile their identities as single moms, college students, and in many cases, employees. They also negotiate a balance between what they think a good mother should be, and what society is telling them, and how that affects their choices to go to college, and whether to stay in college or not.

The first book length study to focus on the lives and experiences of single mothers who are college students, Mothering by Degrees points out how these women are influenced by dominant American ideologies of motherhood, and the institutional parameters of the schools they attend, and argues for increased attention to the specific ways in which the choices, challenges, and opportunities available to mothers are shaped within their specific environments, as well as the ways in which mothers help shape those environments...

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Mothering from the Field

The Impact of Motherhood on Site-Based Research

Edited by Bahiyyah Miallah Muhammad and Mélanie-Angela Neuilly

Rutgers University Press, 2019

The heated national conversation about gender equality and women in the workforce is something that women in academia have been concerned with and writing about for at least a decade. Overall, the conversation has focused on identifying how women in general and mothers in particular fair in the academy as a whole, as well as offering tips on how to maximize success. Aside from a long-standing field-specific debate in anthropology, rare are the volumes focusing on the particulars of motherhood’s impacts on how scientific research is conducted, particularly when it comes to field research.

Mothering from the Field offers both a mosaic of perspectives from current women scientists’ experiences of conducting field research across a variety of sub-disciplines while raising children, and an analytical framework to understand how we can redefine methodological and theoretical contributions based on mothers’ experiences in order not just to promote healthier, more inclusive, nurturing, and supportive environments in physical, life, and social sciences, but also to revolutionize how we conceptualize research.

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Mothering in the Time of Coronavirus

Amy Lutz, Sujung (Crystal) Lee, and Baurzhan Bokayev

University of Massachusetts Press, 2025

When stay-at-home orders during the COVID-19 pandemic erased the division between home and school, many parents in the United States were suddenly expected to become their children’s teachers. Despite this new arrangement, older gender norms largely remained in place, and these extra child rearing responsibilities fell disproportionately on mothers. Mothering in the Time of Coronavirus explores how they juggled working, supervising at-home learning, and protecting their children’s emotional and physical health during the outbreak.

Focusing on both remote and essential workers in central New York, Amy Lutz, Sujung (Crystal) Lee, and Baurzhan Bokayev argue that the pandemic transformed an already intensive style of contemporary American child rearing, in which mothers are expected to be constantly available to meet their children’s needs even when they are working outside the home, into extremely intensive mothering. The authors investigate the consequences of this shift, and how it is influenced by issues such as class and race. They also bring attention to how and why current public policies are not conducive to the de-intensification of motherhood. Locating their study within larger intersections of gender, family, and education, they contend that to fully appreciate the broader social consequences of COVID-19, we must understand the experiences of mothers.

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