The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood PDF Download

Author: Sharon Hays
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300076523
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Working mothers today confront not only conflicting demands on their time and energy but also conflicting ideas about how they are to behave: they must be nurturing and unselfish while engaged in child rearing but competitive and ambitious at work. As more and more women enter the workplace, it would seem reasonable for society to make mothering a simpler and more efficient task. Instead, Sharon Hays points out in this original and provocative book, an ideology of "intensive mothering" has developed that only exacerbates the tensions working mothers face. Drawing on ideas about mothering since the Middle Ages, on contemporary childrearing manuals, and on in-depth interviews with mothers from a range of social classes, Hays traces the evolution of the ideology of intensive mothering--an ideology that holds the individual mother primarily responsible for child rearing and dictates that the process is to be child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive. Hays argues that these ideas about appropriate mothering stem from a fundamental ambivalence about a system based solely on the competitive pursuit of individual interests. In attempting to deal with our deep uneasiness about self-interest, we have imposed unrealistic and unremunerated obligations and commitments on mothering, making it into an opposing force, a primary field on which this cultural ambivalence is played out.

Author: Linda Rose Ennis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781927335901
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Sharon Hays' landmark book, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, this collection will revisit Hays' concept of "intensive mothering" as a continuing, yet controversial representation of modern motherhood. In Hays' original work, she spoke of "intensive mothering" as primarily being conducted by mothers, centered on children's needs with methods informed by experts, which are labourintensive and costly simply because children are entitled to this maternal investment. While respecting the important need for connection between mother and baby that is prevalent in the teachings of Attachment Theory, this collection raises into question whether an over-investment of mothers in their children's lives is as effective a mode of parenting, as being conveyed by representations of modern motherhood. In a world where independence is encouraged, why are we still engaging in "intensive motherhood?"

Author: Sharon Hays
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195176018
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
This text explores the impact of recent welfare reform on motherhood, marriage, and work in women's lives. It also focuses on what welfare reform reveals about work and family life, and its impact on us all.

Author: Julie A. Wilson
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082237319X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
In Mothering through Precarity Julie A. Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim explore how working- and middle-class mothers negotiate the difficulties of twenty-first-century mothering through their everyday engagement with digital media. From Facebook and Pinterest to couponing, health, and parenting websites, the women Wilson and Yochim study rely upon online resources and communities for material and emotional support. Feeling responsible for their family's economic security, these women often become "mamapreneurs," running side businesses out of their homes. They also feel the need to provide for their family's happiness, making successful mothering dependent upon economic and emotional labor. Questioning these standards of motherhood, Wilson and Yochim demonstrate that mothers' work is inseparable from digital media as it provides them the means for sustaining their families through such difficulties as health scares, underfunded schools, a weakening social safety net, and job losses.

Author: Daphne de Marneffe
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501198289
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Esteemed psychologist Daphne de Marneffe examines women’s desire to care for children in an updated reissue of her “fascinating analysis that’s a welcome addition to the dialogues about motherhood” (Publishers Weekly). If a century ago it was women’s sexual desires that were unspeakable, today it is the female desire to mother that has become taboo. One hundred years of Freud and feminism have liberated women to acknowledge and explore their sexual selves, as well as their public and personal ambitions. What has remained inhibited is women’s thinking about motherhood. Maternal Desire is the first book to treat women’s desire to mother as a legitimate focus of intellectual inquiry and personal exploration. Shedding new light on old debates, Daphne de Marneffe provides an emotional road map for mothers who work and mothers who are at home. De Marneffe both explores the enjoyment and anxieties of motherhood and offers mothers in all situations valuable ways to think through their self-doubts and connect to their capacity for pleasure. Drawing on a rich tradition of writers, such as Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich, Carol Gilligan, and Susan Faludi, as well as her experience as a psychologist and mother of three, de Marneffe illuminates how we express our desire to care for children. By treating maternal desire as a central feature of women’s identity—rather than as an inconvenient or slightly embarrassing detail—we can look with fresh insight at controversial issues, such as childcare, fertility, abortion, and the role of fathers. An “absorbing look at the enormous personal pleasure that women derive from mothering….Maternal Desire is a stirring book that celebrates women’s love for their children and mothering while also supporting their interest in careers and other pursuits” (Booklist).

Author: Jodi Vandenberg-Daves
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813563801
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
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.

Author: Lorin Basden Arnold
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781772580822
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The contributing authors in this anthology address diverse topics in mothering and social media, including framing of stepmothers in online forums, mothering in the digital diaspora, the construction of the "bad mother" on Twitter, immersive gaming and parenting classes, virtual mother outlaws, alternative mothering websites, feminist parenting, and more. While the works are primarily rooted in critical and feminist perspectives, a variety of methodologies and approaches to studying mothering and social media are represented in this text, and encourage a robust and thoughtful examination of the role of interactive media in the maternal experience. Lorin Basden Arnold, Ph.D. is a family communication and gender scholar. Her recent scholarly work has primarily related to understandings and enactments of motherhood.

Author: Charlotte Faircloth
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857457594
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Following networks of mothers in London and Paris, the author profiles the narratives of women who breastfeed their children to full term, typically a period of several years, as part of an 'attachment parenting' philosophy. These mothers talk about their decision to continue breastfeeding as 'the natural thing to do': 'evolutionarily appropriate', 'scientifically best' and 'what feels right in their hearts'. Through a theoretical focus on knowledge claims and accountability, the author frames these accounts within a wider context of 'intensive parenting', arguing that parenting practices – infant feeding in particular – have become a highly moralized affair for mothers, practices which they feel are a critical aspect of their 'identity work'. The book investigates why, how and with what implications some of these mothers describe themselves as 'militant lactivists' and reflects on wider parenting culture in the UK and France. Discussing gender, feminism and activism, this study contributes to kinship and family studies by exploring how relatedness is enacted in conjunction to constructions of the self.

Author: Linda Rose Ennis
Publisher: Demeter Press
ISBN: 1926452712
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Sharon Hays’ landmark book, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, this collection will revisit Hays’ concept of “intensive mothering” as a continuing, yet controversial representation of modern motherhood. In Hays’ original work, she spoke of “intensive mothering” as primarily being conducted by mothers, centered on children’s needs with methods informed by experts, which are labourintensive and costly simply because children are entitled to this maternal investment. While respecting the important need for connection between mother and baby that is prevalent in the teachings of Attachment Theory, this collection raises into question whether an over-investment of mothers in their children’s lives is as effective a mode of parenting, as being conveyed by representations of modern motherhood. In a world where independence is encouraged, why are we still engaging in “intensive motherhood?”

Author: Cameron Lynne Macdonald
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520947819
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Shadow Mothers shines new light on an aspect of contemporary motherhood often hidden from view: the need for paid childcare by women returning to the workforce, and the complex bonds mothers forge with the "shadow mothers" they hire. Cameron Lynne Macdonald illuminates both sides of an unequal and complicated relationship. Based on in-depth interviews with professional women and childcare providers— immigrant and American-born nannies as well as European au pairs—Shadow Mothers locates the roots of individual skirmishes between mothers and their childcare providers in broader cultural and social tensions. Macdonald argues that these conflicts arise from unrealistic ideals about mothering and inflexible career paths and work schedules, as well as from the devaluation of paid care work.