Representations of Motherhood

For many years mothers have been viewed in terms of their impact on children rather than as people with needs, feelings, and interests--subjects in their own right. This book explores the maternal experience from the mother's point of view. It questions a society that has devalued and sentimentalized motherhood, presents images of generative and creative women who are also mothers, discusses the complex psychological experience of having and being a mother, and examines how representations of mothers in art, film, literature, the social and behavioral sciences, and historical writing have affected women.
Contents
Introduction Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan
Part I: The Acknowledgment and Appropriation of Maternal Work
Thinking Mothers/Conceiving Birth Sara Ruddick
Fictions of Home Jane Lazarre
Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood Patricia Hill Collins
The Mothers of the Disappeared: Passion and Protest in Maternal Action Jean Bethke Elshtain
Maternity and Rememory in Toni Morrison's Beloved Marianne Hirsch
Part II: The Paradoxical Nature of the Maternal Position
Being a Mother and Being a Psychoanalyst: Two Impossible Professions Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel
The Omnipotent Mother: A Psychoanalytic Study of Fantasy and Reality Jessica Benjamin
Mothering, Hate, and Winnicott Elsa First
Maternal Subjectivity in the Culture of Nostalgia: Mourning and Memory Donna Bassin
Rosalind: A Family Romance Myra Goldberg
Part III: The Cultural Construction and Reconstruction of the Maternal Image
Images of the Maternal: An Interview with Barbara Kruger Therese Lichtenstein
The Power of "Positive" Diagnosis: Medical and Maternal Discourses on Amniocentesis Rayna Rapp
The Maternal Voice in the Technological Universe Margaret Honey
Taking the Nature Out of Mother Adria Schwartz
Sex, Work, and Motherhood: Maternal Subjectivity in Recent Visual Culture E. Ann Kaplan
Playing and Motherhood; or, How to Get the Most Out of the Avant-Garde Susan Rubin Suleiman

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