Representations of Motherhood - Paperback

by Donna Bassin (Author), Meryle Mahrer Kaplan (Editor), Margaret Honey (Editor)

Offering new perspectives on motherhood, distinguished contributors from a variety of fields look at the conflicting positions on motherhood within the feminist movement; draw on psychoanalysis to grapple with mothers' profoundly ambivalent feelings toward their children; discuss how advances in medicine influence the meaning of motherhood; and examine how representations of mothers in art, film, literature, the social and behavioral sciences, and historical writing have affected women. "The significant contribution of this collection of essays is its repeated re-presentation of the mother as a fully bodied, real, complex person, a subject in her own right, both liberated and oppressed by the demands of birthing and rearing children."-Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Cross Currents

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Offering new perspectives on motherhood, distinguished contributors from a variety of fields focus on the importance of seeing the mother as a subject, a person in her own right, by looking at the complex issue of how motherhood is represented. Contributors seek to understand the impact of culturally constructed images of motherhood in art, film, literature, and the social and behavioral sciences; they dignify the craft of motherhood, viewing maternal work as an experience grounded in social and political realities; and they probe conscious and unconscious maternal experience. From their several perspectives, contributors view the maternal subject as one who can give voice to her own experience and both appropriate and resist representations of motherhood.