Dr. Andrea O' Reilly is internationally recognized as the founder of Motherhood Studies (2006) and its subfield Maternal Theory (2007), and creator of the concept of Matricentric Feminism, a feminism for and about mothers (2016) and Matricritics, a literary theory and practice for a reading of mother-focused texts (2021). With this collection O' Reilly continues the conversation on the meaning and nature of motherhood initiated by Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born close to fifty years ago. In In (M)other Words, O' Reilly shares 25 of her chapters and articles published between 2009-2024 to examine the oppressive and empowering dimensions of mothering and to explore motherhood as institution, experience, subjectivity, and empowerment. The collection considers the central themes and theories of motherhood studies including normative motherhood, feminist mothering, maternal regret, matricentric pedagogy, young mothers, academic motherhood, matricentric feminism, matricritics, motherhood and feminism, the motherhood memoir, the twenty-first-century motherhood movement, mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, pandemic mothering, and the motherline.
This collection explores the concept of the Missing Mother from two inter-related standpoints: the mother as absent in society and the mother as absent in a woman's selfhood. The first perspective considers why and how the mother/mothering is disregarded, discounted, or dismissed in art, literature, culture, policy, and law while the second perspective explores why and how a woman has marginalized, lost, forgotten, forfeited, or abandoned her individual maternal identity. Whether it is society that erases the maternal or a woman who forsakes it, the aim of this collection is to consider the why, how, what, who, and where of the mechanics of missing mother in both society and self. This collection considers reasons for this disavowal and disappearance of the maternal and shows how mothers can and do resist to recover and reclaim the maternal in society and self. Overall, this collection seeks to uncover and reveal the mother so marginalized and maligned in and by patriarchal culture and to show how women may find the missing mother in society and self and achieve empowerment in doing so.
Today's schools are meant to be all things to all people, but can they be? Schools are responsible for socialization, skills development and knowledge acquisition which take place within an institution serving disparate student populations. Unfortunately, school success is not experienced by all students, especially those for whom chaotic home lives are overwhelming. Schools should provide an important safe haven for students, offering advocacy and wraparound care. Fictionalized to protect the identities of those involved, the narratives between these pages shine a spotlight on the vulnerability of youth, and in particular, young people living in heart-breaking circumstances. Upholding the work that takes place in schools and embracing those support systems which are shared between school and community is crucial to enacting lasting and positive change. Drawn from the life experiences of a career educator, this collection seeks to highlight a broad range of needs while also reinforcing the way forward through school-community partnerships.
Matricentric feminism seeks to make motherhood the business of feminism by positioning mothers' needs and concerns as the starting point for a theory and politic on and for the empowerment of women as mothers. Based on the conviction that mothering is a verb, it understands that becoming and being a mother is not limited to biological mothers or cisgender women but rather to anyone who does the work of mothering as a central part of their life. The Mother Wave, the first-ever book on the topic, compellingly explores how mothers need a matricentric mode of feminism organized from and for their particular identity and work as mothers, and because mothers remain disempowered despite sixty years of feminism. The anthology makes visible the power of matricentric feminism as it is theorized, enacted, and represented to realize and achieve the subversive potential of mothers and their contributions to feminist theory and activism. Contributors share the impact and influence of matricentric feminism on families and children, culture, art/literature, education, public policy, social media, and workplace practices through personal reflections, scholarly essays, memoir, creative non-fiction
Written by a Queer woman of North African and Middle Eastern descent, Human(e) takes a radically non-pathology-based approach to grief and loss. In this intimate and reflective auto-ethnographic book, Bensoussan asserts that grief is a biological imperative; a life-sustaining necessity that is vital to our survival. Human(e) explores how our species has been living with, and metabolizing loss, well before there were licensed professionals and accredited institutions. Bensoussan examines the inadequacy of the idea that grief is normal, as grief goes well beyond the Western-colonial binary of normal and abnormal. Grief is human, and to grieve is to be human. Rachelle seamlessly and beautifully weaves together her vast professional expertise on grief with her own personal lived experiences of loss. Human(e) is a must read for anyone learning to live without.
Give and Take: Motherhood and Creative Practice explores the diverse ways contemporary artists navigate the unique tensions of motherhood in all its varied stages. Becoming a mother is a life-changing event that can give mothers greater perspective, drive, and inspiration for making art. But motherhood also takes time and energy from pursuing creative work. This fundamental challenge, this give and take, is explored through this book as it forefronts the art and lives of dancers, playwrights, musicians, visual artists, and creative writers. The book contains thirty-three first person narratives from practicing artists along with written analyses that place these artists' essays within the broader context of arts writing and scholarship about motherhood. The concluding section of the book includes overarching thoughts about how artist mothers can move forward despite structural inequality and cultural bias and includes a resource guide for practical support.
Care(ful) Relationships between Mothers and the Caregivers They Hire offers an interdisciplinary and international approach to the complex issues of carework, primarily focusing on childcare. The diverse collection of authors center their examinations of care by interrogating how class, race, and gender interplay to create inequity and potential. The work shared in Care(ful) Relationships draws from various disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, media studies, literary and dramatic analysis, history, and women's studies while also addressing carework as it is depicted in ages past and contemporary culture. The collection not only seeks to challenge misconceptions and inequity but also examine how the unique personal relationships that form in the labor of care can yield prosocial change.
A central aim of motherhood studies is to examine and theorize normative motherhood. Where does it come from? What are its defining features and demands? How does it work as a regulatory discourse and practice across differences of age, class, race, ability, sexuality, and region? What is the impact of normative motherhood on women's lives? What does an intersectional analysis of normative motherhood reveal? How is normative motherhood reflected and enacted in public policy, workplace practices, family arrangements and so on? How is normative motherhood represented and resisted in literature, art, photography, and film? How do or may women resist normative motherhood? This collection explores these questions of normative motherhood under three interrelated topics: Regulations, Representations, and Reclamations.
Donna McCart Sharkey and Arleen Pare , sisters and writers, have co-edited an anthology Don' t Tell: Family Secrets, about what may be hidden in families. For each individual, even in the same family, what is secret and what is not, may be different. In Don' t Tell: Family Secrets, fifty-nine writers tell their stories in either prose or poetry, of their own family secrets. So often, mothers bear the burden, stand over time as the keepers of these secrets, trying to keep families intact. Spanning continents, cultures, wars, belief systems, and the private lives of families, the secrets in this book range from over one hundred years ago to the present and include stories – some serious, others quirky, some resolved, and still others that remain a mystery.
"An Artist and a Mother is a book of visual artworks and essays that speak to the diverse ways artists balance creative life with the demands of mothering. It includes thirty seven essays describing the work of thirty-nine international artists and an art collective, as well as a resource guide with books, journals, magazines, organizations, and other resources. This book seeks to highlight the growing body of artist mothers who are making visually and conceptually interesting artwork not just despite their status as mothers, but often because of the inspiration and challenges that come with motherhood."--
How can Enid move forward when her marriage, as well as the world she has known, simultaneously fall apart? In the midst of the COVID 19 pandemic, Enid Alger Kimble, protagonist of Bromwich's first novel, Not Your Penance, seeks to reconcile with her past, and finds, through ruin, rebirth. Having returned to Canada and to work as a lawyer, Enid leaves her surgeon husband, Dr. Arthur Kimble. Trying to find healing and a purpose beyond the roles of wife and mother about which she has felt so ambivalent, Enid travels physically and metaphorically through the ruins of her marriage, the ruins of Classical Greece in the Aegean, and finally the remnants of her own prairie childhood. Enid undertakes a long overdue homecoming to accept the Blackfoot Nation's offer of COVID 19 vaccinations, as she journeys into single parenting her five children. As far flung and diverse as the first novel in the series is claustrophobic and tense, Ruin offers fresh perspectives on law, midlife, mothering and divorce. It is a windswept, hope-filled story of reconciliation and redemption through the COVID 19 pandemic, midlife, law, and divorce
"Women are having children later in life, out of choice and also aided by improved reproductive technologies. Women are also more educated than at any other time in history, with the last generation seeing women's professional careers not as unusual, but as the norm for university educated women. This generation of tertiary educated mothers has grown up with a clear articulation of feminism, although shifts in the intra-household gendered division of labour have been more limited than hoped for. These mothers represent a generational shift in modern times and constitute a significant new demographic that cannot be ignored. For high achieving university educated women with vocational positions of authority and respect, the emotional and psychological shift entailed in dealing with the myriad demands of a child and often mundane aspects of motherhood can be overwhelming. These women are used to managing complex and highly technical issues in the workplace, yet none of these skills prepare them for motherhood which requires patience, a need to let go of control and for some a staggering conflict of personal identities and roles. Coming to terms with this new identity requires a rethinking of who they are as an individual in a society which offers few role models who have come forward being honest on the personal side of their struggle. The media does not often reflect their experience or reality as a mother, and in many cases, they have demonized them for "wanting it all" and being selfish. Society does not recognize the stresses and anxiety faced by this high achieving demographic of women. A great deal of productivity is lost from the workforce from the skills and expertise of these high women who are grappling with unfair burdens, discrimination and societal judgments, and most of all their internal identity crises. This is a major issue and needs to be considered by policy makers, academics, employers and mother's themselves who have little space to analyze their context and share their experience in a feminist economic and personal political framework. This book is a collection of auto-ethnography narratives that provide personal stories and struggles from professional, tertiary educated women who are termed "late mothers." The narratives illustrate their on-the-ground lived experiences and the impact motherhood has on them and those around them, as well as within the workplace and wider society. The mothers in this book include Indigenous women, LGBTIQA+, women with disabilities and those mothering children with disabilities, (im)migrant and expatriate women."--
Today, more and more grandmothers around the world are taking on varied responsibilities and many roles, sometimes concurrently. Consequently, grandmothers continue to play, as in the past, an influential role not only in the lives of their grandchildren, but also in our communities and in society more broadly.
Explores the intersections of welfare, gender and mothering work in the context this political reality. The book looks at austerity and the policies of neoliberal governments that work to deprive some mothers of their welfare, and also explores how motherhood is socially constructed in various social locations and places around the world.
Feminist Parenting: Perspectives from Africa and Beyond asks and considers: What is feminist parenting? Is it something for all parents? What does it mean to be a feminist parent in practice? The collection aims to fill a gap on feminist parenting in the existing literature by bringing timely post-Western perspectives.
This interdisciplinary volume opens an innovative space for critical discussion, and production of new imaginaries within, feminist scholarship, analysis and feminist politics, about what is and has been meant by, involved in, required of, and what it means to be, a "wife."
Spawning Generations is a collection of stories by queerspawn (people with LGBTQ+ parents) spanning six decades, three continents, and five countries. Curated by queerspawn, this anthology is about carving out a space for queerspawn to tell their own stories.
Examines the meaning and practice of mothering/motherhood from a multitude of maternal perspectives. Each chapter provides background and context, examines the challenges and possibilities of mothering/motherhood for each group of mothers and considers directions for future research.
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