Remaking Motherhood

Remaking Motherhood PDF

Author: Anita Shreve

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13:

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This study proposes that the children of working mothers are enriched rather than deprived and enjoy greater independence and a fuller sense of life's options.

The Political Uses of Motherhood in America

The Political Uses of Motherhood in America PDF

Author: Cynthia Stavrianos

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-11-13

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 1317679180

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As various contemporary groups use the language of motherhood to advance their political causes, maternal rhetoric has become very visible in the American political discourse of late. Yet while it has long been recognized that women have invoked their political status as mothers to organize and authorize their political action in the past, scholars have only just begun to examine the recent reemergence of this frame. This book describes the wide variety of political causes that mothers are organizing to address, and analyses whether ideologically conservative organizations are disproportionately represented among groups using motherhood to mobilize women. Stavrianos examines the use of maternal discourses in closer detail through a comparative case study of five groups using motherhood as their primary frame for collective political action: Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Million Mom March, Mothers Against Illegal Aliens, Mainstreet Moms Organize or Bust, and Mothers in Charge. Scholars interested in women and politics, interest group politics, social movements, political behavior, women’s studies, motherhood studies, and framing strategies will find this book noteworthy, as it adds to a growing body of literature exploring the use of motherhood as an emerging political frame, and to the interdisciplinary discussion of contemporary discourses of motherhood.

Motherhood

Motherhood PDF

Author: Anne Manne

Publisher: Allen & Unwin

Published: 2005-09

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 1741158931

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Covers the debates over early institutional childcare, the problems of reconciling work and family life, the crisis of fertility, and the impact of the new capitalism on the changing landscape of childhood.

Equal Parenthood and Social Policy

Equal Parenthood and Social Policy PDF

Author: Linda Haas

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 1992-07-01

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1438405308

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Sweden is the only society in the world that has as an official goal the equal participation of fathers and mothers in childcare. Equal Parenthood and Social Policy analyzes the government program which best symbolizes this commitment to equal parenthood—parental leave. With return to one's original job being assured, a Swedish couple has twelve months to divide between them so that one parent can stay home to care for their new offspring. While a few other countries, mostly in Scandinavia, have paid parental leave available to fathers, Sweden's program is the oldest and most generous, as well as the one most closely committed to realizing complete equality between men and women in every sphere of social life. In analyzing this unique social program, Haas describes the social, political, and economic circumstances which led Sweden to take such a revolutionary stance on the issue of shared parenthood. Haas also discusses the extent to which Swedish fathers take advantage of their right to parental leave, barriers to fathers' participation, and fathers' experiences while on leave, along with the effects that leavetaking has on mothers' and fathers' later labor market involvement and participation in childcare. This study of the Swedish program raises important questions about future prospects for equal parenthood in Sweden and other industrial societies, and, more significantly, about the potential effectiveness of social policy for bringing about the end of such a cultural universal as women's responsibility for infants.

Remaking Chinese Cinema

Remaking Chinese Cinema PDF

Author: Yiman Wang

Publisher: Hong Kong University Press

Published: 2013-11-01

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 9888139169

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From melodrama to Cantonese opera, from silents to 3D animated film, Remaking Chinese Cinema traces cross-Pacific film remaking over the last eight decades. Through the refractive prism of Hollywood, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, Yiman Wang revolutionizes our understanding of Chinese cinema as national cinema. Against the diffusion model of national cinema spreading from a central point—Shanghai in the Chinese case—she argues for a multilocal process of co-constitution and reconstitution. In this spirit, Wang analyzes how southern Chinese cinema (huanan dianying) morphed into Hong Kong cinema through transregional and trans-national interactions that also produced a vision of Chinese cinema. Among the book’s highlights are a rereading of The Goddess—one of the best-known silent Chinese films in the West—from the perspective of its wartime Mandarin-Cantonese remake; the excavation of a hybrid genre (the Western costume Cantonese opera film) inspired by Hollywood’s fantasy films of the 1930s and produced in Hong Kong well into the mid-twentieth century; and a rumination on Hollywood’s remake of Hong Kong’s Infernal Affairs and the wholesale incorporation of “Chinese elements” in Kung Fu Panda 2. Positing a structural analogy between the utopic vision, the national cinema, and the location-specific collective subject position, the author traces their shared urge to infinitesimally approach, but never fully and finitely reach, a projected goal. This energy precipitates the ongoing processes of cross-Pacific film remaking, which constitute a crucial site for imagining and enacting (without absolving) issues of national and regional border politics. These issues unfold in relation to global formations such as colonialism, Cold War ideology, and postcolonial, postsocialist globalization. As such, Remaking Chinese Cinema contributes to the ongoing debate on (trans-)national cinema from the unique perspective of century-long border-crossing film remaking.

What's a Mother/Father to Do?

What's a Mother/Father to Do? PDF

Author: Maurice A. Fetty

Publisher: CSS Publishing

Published: 2001-12-06

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 0788018787

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Raising a family today is like negotiating a minefield -- parents often face seemingly insurmountable odds in counteracting the insidious influences of peer pressure and the popular culture. Fetty examines how to cope with the stress of modern life by drawing on the inspirational wisdom of the scriptures.

Perfect Madness

Perfect Madness PDF

Author: Judith Warner

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2006-02-07

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1440620164

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A lively and provocative look at the modern culture of motherhood and at the social, economic, and political forces that shaped current ideas about parenting What is wrong with this picture? That's the question Judith Warner asks in this national bestseller after taking a good, hard look at the world of modern parenting--at anxious women at work and at home and in bed with unhappy husbands. When Warner had her first child, she was living in Paris, where parents routinely left their children home, with state-subsidized nannies, to join friends in the evening for dinner or to go on dates with their husbands. When she returned to the States, she was stunned by the cultural differences she found toward how people think about effective parenting--in particular, assumptions about motherhood. None of the mothers she met seemed happy; instead, they worried about the possibility of not having the perfect child, panicking as each developmental benchmark approached. Combining close readings of mainstream magazines, TV shows, and pop culture with a thorough command of dominant ideas in recent psychological, social, and economic theory, Perfect Madness addresses our cultural assumptions, and examines the forces that have shaped them. Working in the tradition of classics like Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism, and with an awareness of a readership that turned recent hits like The Bitch in the House and Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It into bestsellers, Warner offers a context in which to understand parenting culture and the way we live, as well as ways of imagining alternatives--actual concrete changes--that might better our lives.

Ordinary Insanity

Ordinary Insanity PDF

Author: Sarah Menkedick

Publisher: Pantheon

Published: 2020-04-07

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 1524747785

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A groundbreaking exposé and diagnosis of the silent epidemic of fear afflicting new mothers, and a candid, feminist deep dive into the culture, science, history, and psychology of contemporary motherhood Anxiety among mothers is a growing but largely unrecognized crisis. In the transition to mother­hood and the years that follow, countless women suffer from overwhelming feelings of fear, grief, and obsession that do not fit neatly within the outmoded category of “postpartum depression.” These women soon discover that there is precious little support or time for their care, even as expectations about what mothers should do and be continue to rise. Many struggle to distinguish normal worry from crippling madness in a culture in which their anxiety is often ignored, normalized, or, most dangerously, seen as taboo. Drawing on extensive research, numerous interviews, and the raw particulars of her own experience with anxiety, writer and mother Sarah Menkedick gives us a comprehensive examination of the biology, psychology, history, and societal conditions surrounding the crushing and life-limiting fear that has become the norm for so many. Woven into the stories of women’s lives is an examination of the factors—such as the changing structure of the maternal brain, the ethically problematic ways risk is construed during pregnancy, and the marginalization of motherhood as an identity—that explore how motherhood came to be an experience so dominated by anxiety, and how mothers might reclaim it. Writing with profound empathy, visceral honesty, and deep understanding, Menkedick makes clear how critically we need to expand our awareness of, compassion for, and care for women’s lives.

Mothering While Black

Mothering While Black PDF

Author: Dawn Marie Dow

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2019-03-05

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0520300327

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Mothering While Black examines the complex lives of the African American middle class—in particular, black mothers and the strategies they use to raise their children to maintain class status while simultaneously defining and protecting their children’s “authentically black” identities. Sociologist Dawn Marie Dow shows how the frameworks typically used to research middle-class families focus on white mothers’ experiences, inadequately capturing the experiences of African American middle- and upper-middle-class mothers. These limitations become apparent when Dow considers how these mothers apply different parenting strategies for black boys and for black girls, and how they navigate different expectations about breadwinning and childrearing from the African American community. At the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, work, family, and culture, Mothering While Black sheds light on the exclusion of African American middle-class mothers from the dominant cultural experience of middle-class motherhood. In doing so, it reveals the painful truth of the decisions that black mothers must make to ensure the safety, well-being, and future prospects of their children.

Lives Together/Worlds Apart

Lives Together/Worlds Apart PDF

Author: Suzanna Danuta Walters

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0520915038

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In the 1940s film Now, Voyager, Bette Davis plays a daughter struggling against her mother's stifling repression. Nearly fifty years later, in the Hollywood saga Postcards from the Edge, Shirley MacLaine, as a neglectful and bossy mother, inflicts untold psychological pain on her daughter, played by Meryl Streep. These dramas of conflict and the ambivalent struggle for separation have been central to popular images of mothers and daughters in the last half-century in the U.S. Walters boldly challenges these dichotomies and proposes an innovative and multilayered understanding of the cultural construction of the mother/daughter relationship. In a discussion of popular media ranging from themes of maternal martyrdom to maternal malevolence, Walters shows that since World War II, mainstream culture has generally represented the mother/daughter relationship as one of never-ending conflict and thus promoted an "ideology of separation" as necessary to the daughter's emancipation and maturity. This ideological move is placed in a social context of the anti-woman backlash of the early post-war period and the renewed anti-feminism of the Reagan and Bush years. Walters uses exceptions to mainstream imagery-films such as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, television shows like "Maude," novels like The Joy Luck Club-to offer evidence of alternative traditions and paradigms. Timely and vividly argued, Lives Together/Worlds Apart makes a brilliant contribution to discussions of popular culture and feminism.