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60 books match the query 'Mothers' and 10 start with t

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The Button Box

A Daughter's Loving Memoir of Mrs. George S. Patton

Ruth Ellen Patton Totten, Edited by James Patton Totten, Foreward by Carlo W. D'Este

University of Missouri Press, 2005

"There was never a moment in our lives that we were not reminded that our father was the finest, bravest, most gallant, and best-looking man who ever lived and that he was destined for unimaginable glory. This we took for granted. Being our father’s children was a special influence in all our lives, but the greatest, most pervasive, and most interesting influence in my life was Ma."

The Button Box is the loving memoir of Beatrice Ayer Patton (1886–1953), the wife of one of the greatest military figures in history, General George S. Patton, Jr. Written by the Pattons’ daughter, Ruth Ellen, the book covers Beatrice’s life from her youth in a wealthy New England family until her death, with an emphasis on her years of marriage to George Patton. A supportive and loving wife, Beatrice was accomplished in her own right as an equestrian, musician, lecturer, sailor, and internationally published author. Courageous and adventurous, Beatrice played a significant role in her husband’s life. Without her, General Patton might never have reached his own level of success.

Although there have been numerous books written on George S. Patton, The Button Box provides a unique perspective on the general’s complex personality as well as a rare and intimate look inside his famous American family, a glimpse of the “Old Army” that formed the cadre of the army of World War II, and a detailed description of life “between the wars” in a society not to be seen again. Most important, though, it is the story of a truly fascinating woman, told with love and a rowdy sense of humor by her daughter.

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The Faulkes Chronicle

David Huddle

Tupelo Press, 2015

A work of uncanny originality, David Huddle’s nineteenth book is the account of an extraordinary death trip taken by a charismatic and beloved woman, her husband, and an astonishing number of offspring, from infants to young adults. The Faulkes Chronicle explores how children grieve, and shows how the wit and courage of even the littlest brothers and sisters can be a source of resiliance. Familial conversation composes an intimate requiem, transforming loss into comprehension. Only one of our finest writers could manage this delicate material. The Faulkes Chronicle is a brief, autumnal novel — made of momentary details yet with an encompassing grandeur.

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The Invisible World

John Smolens

Michigan State University Press, 2017

The Invisible World portrays how a remarkable family is indelibly marred by one of the darkest conspiracy theories in American history: the gunman on the grassy knoll. Boston journalist Sam Adams suspects that his father may have been the unidentified gunman in the JFK assassination. True or not, Sam is certain that his father, the elusive John Adams, is responsible for his sister Abigail’s tortured life of drugs, prostitution, and the conviction that she is a descendant of Salem witches, as well as the strange circumstances that surround his mother’s final hours.

After Sam's mother dies and is cremated, her ashes are stolen. Believing that his father is responsible, Sam pursues the man he has not seen in years. He discovers that he is not the only one searching for his father—federal agents, a disgraced politician, a retired Boston cop, and several journalists join the chase.

“The Invisible World is more than a first-rate political thriller,” says The Boston Globe. “It’s an absorbing tale of alienation and loss, and the ramifications of a rootless, troubled family.” What Sam Adams ultimately discovers is that the shadowy realm of conspiracies conjures a world of hidden truths and intrigue in which the familiar is the most mysterious force of all.

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The Labor of Care

Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age

Valerie Francisco-Menchavez

University of Illinois Press, 2018

For generations, migration moved in one direction at a time: migrants to host countries, and money to families left behind. The Labor of Care argues that globalization has changed all that. Valerie Francisco-Menchavez spent five years alongside a group of working migrant mothers. Drawing on interviews and up-close collaboration with these women, Francisco-Menchavez looks at the sacrifices, emotional and material consequences, and recasting of roles that emerge from family separation. She pays particular attention to how technologies like Facebook, Skype, and recorded video open up transformative ways of bridging distances while still supporting traditional family dynamics. As she shows, migrants also build communities of care in their host countries. These chosen families provide an essential form of mutual support. What emerges is a fascinating portrait of today's transnational family—sundered, yet inexorably linked over the distances by timeless emotions and new forms of intimacy.

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The Mother Knot

Jane Lazarre

Duke University Press, 1997

In this compelling memoir by a writer, mother, and feminist, Jane Lazarre confronts the myth of the "good mother" with her fiercely honest and intimate portrait of early motherhood as a time of profound ambivalence and upheaval, filled with desperation as well as joy, the struggle to reclaim a sense of self, and sheer physical exhaustion. Originally published in 1976, The Mother Knot is a feminist classic, as relevant today as it was twenty years ago.

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The Motherhood Business

Consumption, Communication, and Privilege

Edited by Anne Teresa Demo, Jennifer L. Borda, and Charlotte Kroløkke

University of Alabama Press, 2015

Examining how motherhood, consumption, and privilege shape identities in contemporary culture.

The Motherhood Business is a piercing collection of ten original essays that reveal the rhetoric of the motherhood industry. Focusing on the consumer life of mothers and the emerging entrepreneurship associated with motherhood, the collection considers how different forms of privilege (class, race, and nationality) inform discourses about mothering, consumption, mobility, and leisure.

The Motherhood Business follows the harried mother’s path into the anxious maelstrom of intelligent toys, healthy foods and meals, and educational choices. It also traces how some enterprising mothers leverage cultural capital and rhetorical vision to create thriving baby- and child-based businesses of their own, as evidenced by the rise of mommy bloggers and “mompreneurs”over the last decade.

Starting with the rapidly expanding global fertility market, The Motherhood Business explores the intersection of motherhood, consumption, and privilege in the context of fertility tourism, international adoption, and transnational surrogacy. The synergy between motherhood and the marketplace demonstrated across the essays affirms the stronghold of “intensive mothering ideology” in decisions over what mothers buy and how they brand their businesses even as that ideology evolves. Across diverse contexts, the volume also identifies how different forms or privilege shape how mothers construct their identities through their consumption and entrepreneurship.

Although social observers have long commented on the link between motherhood and consumerism, little has been written within the field of rhetoric. Penetrating and interdisciplinary, The Motherhood Business illuminates how consumer culture not only shapes contemporary motherhood but also changes in response to mothers who constitute a driving force of the economy.

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The Motherlode

Why Most US Mothers Will Find Themselves Financially Supporting Their Children

Jennifer L. Glass

Russell Sage Foundation, 2026

Despite cultural scripts that continue to view fathers as the primary breadwinners in their families, there has been a striking escalation of mothers’ assumption of that role. Over the last twenty years, the rate at which mothers become the primary breadwinner has increased by almost 50 percent and an astonishing 70 percent of American mothers can expect to become the primary earner for their household for at least a year before their first child turns eighteen. In The Motherlode, sociologist Jennifer L. Glass traces the rise of mothers as the primary financial providers for their children, investigates the causes of this increase, and evaluates the consequences of this shift for mothers and families.

Glass finds the swift increase of fiscal responsibility for children by their mothers is occurring in households of all racial backgrounds and across the educational spectrum. This increase is not due to more divorces or relationship breakups. In fact, the most rapid growth in mothers’ financial responsibility for the household has come from married mothers, not single mothers, and about half of contemporary mom-breadwinners have spouses or romantic partners living in the home. Nor is it due to a narrowing of the gender pay gap or mothers’ ability to out-earn their partners—the bulk of breadwinning mothers see large financial losses or are better off financially but still living in poverty when they become the primary earner. Instead, this rise is due to broader, long-term changes in the economy, which have led to less job security and wage stagnation for all workers.

The increase of mothers’ financial obligations to their children has occurred at the same time that nonfinancial responsibilities for children has increased—more time is dedicated to identifying, evaluating, and obtaining goods and services for children, including healthcare and schooling. There has not been a corresponding increase in support for mothers by their employers, the government, or fathers. This leaves mothers with greater burdens of both financial support and nonmonetary care for their children, which increases the number of children that are vulnerable to dependency on their mothers’ earnings and intermittent poverty. While this rise in maternal breadwinning is unlikely to decline anytime soon, Glass suggests policies that could provide mothers with more support, such as enacting labor protections for care occupations dominated by women and federal paid family and medical leave and providing federally funded, wraparound, non-means-tested systems of childcare.

The Motherlode is an illuminating and in-depth examination of the surprisingly pervasive phenomenon of maternal breadwinning in American society.

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The Wendys

Allison Benis White

Four Way Books, 2020

“Because it is easier to miss a stranger / with your mother’s name,” Allison Benis White instead writes about five women named Wendy as a way into the complex grief that still lingers after the death of a sixth Wendy, the author’s long-absent mother. A series of epistolary poems addressed to Wendy O. Williams becomes an occasion for the speaker to eulogize as well as reflect on the singer’s life and eventual suicide: “What kind of love is death, I’m asking?” In the section devoted to Wendy Torrance, the fictional wife from The Shining who was bludgeoned by her husband, the speaker muses on the inadequacy of language to resolve or even contain grief in the wake of trauma: “A book is a coffin. Hoarsely. A white sheet draped over the cage of being.” Ultimately, The Wendys is a book of silences and space in which tenderness and violence exist in exquisite tension. “If to speak is to die,” White writes in “Ignis Fatuus,” “I will whisper.”

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This Country of Mothers

Julianna Baggott

Southern Illinois University Press, 2001

A mosaic of memories, the poems of This Country of Mothers recollect Julianna Baggott’s experiences as both mother and daughter. With wit, compassion, aggression, and anxiety, Baggott examines her maternal history. She recalls moments of creation and destruction in her life, times of elation and of desperation that mold her as both a woman and a poet. This affecting study of motherhood is framed in issues of Catholicism and of poetry itself, challenging and espousing the roles of both. Throughout her poems, Baggott’s personal experiences embrace universal themes to birth poems in a language and style that is both powerfully feminine and accessibly human.

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