Women Writing Childbirth

Women Writing Childbirth PDF

Author: Tess Cosslett

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780719043246

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In this work, the author's detailed readings of birth stories - both literary and medical - reveal deeply embedded assumptions about how women are viewed and view ourselves. The current debates about natural childbirth as advocated by Sheila Kitzinger, Grantly Read Dick and others, are examined alongside key literary works by writers such as Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Fay Weldon and Toni Morrison.

This Giving Birth

This Giving Birth PDF

Author: Julie Ann Tharp

Publisher: Popular Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 9780879728083

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Compelling essays which underline the central place pregnancy and childbirth hold in women's writing. Embracing three centuries of prose and poetry, the anthology traces the evolution of American maternity literature, exploring the difficulties mothers faced as they struggled to transform themselves from objects into maternal subjects. Women as diverse as Anne Bradstreet, Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, Kate Chopin, Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich all labored to reclaim the birthing process by giving voice to experiences and emotions long devalued by a patriarchal culture. Their voices resonate throughout this collection.

The Good Shufu

The Good Shufu PDF

Author: Tracy Slater

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2015-06-30

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1101634847

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The brave, wry, irresistible journey of a fiercely independent American woman who finds everything she ever wanted in the most unexpected place. Shufu: in Japanese it means “housewife,” and it’s the last thing Tracy Slater ever thought she’d call herself. A writer and academic, Tracy carefully constructed a life she loved in her hometown of Boston. But everything is upended when she falls head over heels for the most unlikely mate: a Japanese salary-man based in Osaka, who barely speaks her language. Deciding to give fate a chance, Tracy builds a life and marriage in Japan, a country both fascinating and profoundly alienating, where she can read neither the language nor the simplest social cues. There, she finds herself dependent on her husband to order her food, answer the phone, and give her money. When she begins to learn Japanese, she discovers the language is inextricably connected with nuanced cultural dynamics that would take a lifetime to absorb. Finally, when Tracy longs for a child, she ends up trying to grow her family with a Petri dish and an army of doctors with whom she can barely communicate. And yet, despite the challenges, Tracy is sustained by her husband’s quiet love, and being with him feels more like “home” than anything ever has. Steadily and surely, she fills her life in Japan with meaningful connections, a loving marriage, and wonder at her adopted country, a place that will never feel natural or easy, but which provides endless opportunities for growth, insight, and sometimes humor. A memoir of travel and romance, The Good Shufu is a celebration of the life least expected: messy, overwhelming, and deeply enriching in its complications.

Writing Childbirth

Writing Childbirth PDF

Author: Kim Hensley Owens

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2015-06-24

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 0809334062

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Women seeking to express concerns about childbirth or to challenge institutionalized medicine by writing online birth plans or birth stories exercise rhetorical agency in undeniably feminist ways. In Writing Childbirth: Women’s Rhetorical Agency in Labor and Online, author Kim Hensley Owens explores how women create and use everyday rhetorics in planning for, experiencing, and writing about childbirth. Drawing on medical texts, popular advice books, and online birth plans and birth stories, as well as the results of a childbirth writing survey, Owens considers how women’s agency in childbirth is sanctioned, and how it is not. She examines how women’s rhetorical choices in writing interact with institutionalized medicine and societal norms. Writing Childbirth reveals the contradictory messages women receive about childbirth, their conflicting expectations about it, and how writing and technology contribute to and reconcile these messages and expectations. Demonstrating the value of extending rhetorical investigations of health and medicine beyond patient-physician interactions and the discourse of physicians, Writing Childbirth offers fresh insight into feminist rhetorical agency and technology and expands our understanding of the rhetorics of health and medicine.

Labor Day

Labor Day PDF

Author: Eleanor Henderson

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2014-04-15

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0374711453

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Thirty acclaimed writers share their personal birth stories—the extraordinary, the ordinary, the terrifying, the sublime, the profane It's an elemental, almost animalistic urge—the expectant mother's hunger for birth narratives. Bookstores are filled with month-by-month pregnancy manuals, but the shelves are virtually empty of artful, entertaining, unvarnished accounts of labor and delivery—the stories that new mothers need most. Here is a book that transcends the limits of how-to guides and honors the act of childbirth in the twenty-first century. Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon have gathered true birth stories by women who have made self-expression their business, including Cheryl Strayed, Julia Glass, Lauren Groff, Dani Shapiro, and many other luminaries. In Labor Day, you'll read about women determined to give birth naturally and others begging for epidurals; women who pushed for hours and women whose labors were over practically before they'd started; women giving birth to twins and to ten-pound babies. These women give birth in the hospital, at home, in bathtubs, and, yes, even in the car. Some revel in labor, some fear labor, some feel defeated by labor, some are fulfilled by it—and all are amazed by it. You will laugh, weep, squirm, perhaps groan in recognition, and undoubtedly gasp with surprise. And then you'll call every mother or mother-to-be that you know and say "You MUST read Labor Day." Contributors: Nuar Alsadir Amy Brill Susan Burton Sarah Shun-lien Bynum Lan Samantha Chang Phoebe Damrosch Claire Dederer Jennifer Gilmore Julia Glass Arielle Greenberg Lauren Groff Eleanor Henderson Cristina Henriquez Amy Herzog Ann Hood Sarah Jefferis Heidi Julavits Mary Beth Keane Marie Myung-Ok Lee Edan Lepucki Heidi Pitlor Joanna Rakoff Jane Roper Danzy Senna Dani Shapiro Anna Solomon Cheryl Strayed Sarah A. Strickley Rachel Jamison Webster Gina Zucker

Like a Mother

Like a Mother PDF

Author: Angela Garbes

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2018-05-29

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0062662961

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A candid, feminist, and personal deep dive into the science and culture of pregnancy and motherhood Like most first-time mothers, Angela Garbes was filled with questions when she became pregnant. What exactly is a placenta and how does it function? How does a body go into labor? Why is breast best? Is wine totally off-limits? But as she soon discovered, it’s not easy to find satisfying answers. Your obstetrician will cautiously quote statistics; online sources will scare you with conflicting and often inaccurate data; and even the most trusted books will offer information with a heavy dose of judgment. To educate herself, the food and culture writer embarked on an intensive journey of exploration, diving into the scientific mysteries and cultural attitudes that surround motherhood to find answers to questions that had only previously been given in the form of advice about what women ought to do—rather than allowing them the freedom to choose the right path for themselves. In Like a Mother, Garbes offers a rigorously researched and compelling look at the physiology, biology, and psychology of pregnancy and motherhood, informed by in-depth reportage and personal experience. With the curiosity of a journalist, the perspective of a feminist, and the intimacy and urgency of a mother, she explores the emerging science behind the pressing questions women have about everything from miscarriage to complicated labors to postpartum changes. The result is a visceral, full-frontal look at what’s really happening during those nine life-altering months, and why women deserve access to better care, support, and information. Infused with humor and born out of awe, appreciation, and understanding of the female body and its strength, Like a Mother debunks common myths and dated assumptions, offering guidance and camaraderie to women navigating one of the biggest and most profound changes in their lives.

Writing Childbirth

Writing Childbirth PDF

Author: Kim Hensley Owens

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2015-06-24

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0809334054

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Drawing on medical texts, popular advice books, and online birth plans and birth stories, as well as the results of a childbirth writing survey, Owens considers how women's agency in childbirth is sanctioned, and how it is not. She examines how women's rhetorical choices in writing interact with institutionalized medicine and societal norms. Writing Childbirth reveals the contradictory messages women receive about childbirth, their conflicting expectations about it, and how writing and technology contribute to and reconcile these messages and expectations.

Not of Woman Born

Not of Woman Born PDF

Author: Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-03-15

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1501740490

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"Not of woman born, the Fortunate, the Unborn"—the terms designating those born by Caesarean section in medieval and Renaissance Europe were mysterious and ambiguous. Examining representations of Caesarean birth in legend and art and tracing its history in medical writing, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski addresses the web of religious, ethical, and cultural questions concerning abdominal delivery in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Not of Woman Born increases our understanding of the history of the medical profession, of medical iconography, and of ideas surrounding "unnatural" childbirth. Blumenfeld-Kosinski compares texts and visual images in order to trace the evolution of Caesarean birth as it was perceived by the main actors involved—pregnant women, medical practitioners, and artistic or literary interpreters. Bringing together medical treatises and texts as well as hitherto unexplored primary sources such as manuscript illuminations, she provides a fresh perspective on attitudes toward pregnancy and birth in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; the meaning and consequences of medieval medicine for women as both patients and practitioners, and the professionalization of medicine. She discusses writings on Caesarean birth from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when Church Councils ordered midwives to perform the operation if a mother died during childbirth in order that the child might be baptized; to the fourteenth century, when the first medical text, Bernard of Gordon's Lilium medicinae, mentioned the operation; up to the gradual replacement of midwives by male surgeons in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Not of Woman Born offers the first close analysis of Frarnois Rousset's 1581 treatise on the operation as an example of sixteenth-century medical discourse. It also considers the ambiguous nature of Caesarean birth, drawing on accounts of such miraculous examples as the birth of the Antichrist. An appendix reviews the complex etymological history of the term "Caesarean section." Richly interdisciplinary, Not of Woman Born will enliven discussions of the controversial issues surrounding Caesarean delivery today. Medical, social, and cultural historians interested in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, historians, literary scholars, midwives, obstetricians, nurses, and others concerned with women's history will want to read it.

Maternal Impressions

Maternal Impressions PDF

Author: Cristina Mazzoni

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780801440359

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In an unusual combination of reflection, autobiography, theory, and criticism, Cristina Mazzoni looks at childbirth and early maternity from the perspective of an academic mother with three young children. Mazzoni draws upon examples ranging from contemporary advice manuals and novels to the work of turn-of-the-century Italian scientists and women writers, as well as fairy tales, religious texts, psychoanalytic accounts, and feminist theory. Throughout her investigations of the various forces that shape cultural views of pregnancy and childbirth, Mazzoni strives to imagine and deploy maternity as a concept and a reality capable of challenging conventional representations of subjectivity. The questions she addresses dwell on relationship and interdependence, the inseparability of the personal and the political, and the connections and interactions between bodies and power. Maternal Impressions is far more than a book of literary criticism and theory. It reveals the multiple bonds and continuities between the contradictory ways in which pregnancy and childbirth were represented a century ago and the manner in which they still haunt feminist experience today. In her conclusion, Mazzoni points toward a possible ethics of maternity.

And Now We Have Everything

And Now We Have Everything PDF

Author: Meaghan O'Connell

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2018-04-10

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0316393835

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Selected as One of the Best Books of the Year by: National Public Radio, Esquire, Bustle, Refinery29, Thrillist, Electric Literature, Powell's, Autostraddle, BookRiot, Women.com "Smart, funny, and true in all the best ways, this book made me ache with recognition." -- Cheryl Strayed A raw, funny, and fiercely honest account of becoming a mother before feeling like a grown up. When Meaghan O'Connell got accidentally pregnant in her twenties and decided to keep the baby, she realized that the book she needed -- a brutally honest, agenda-free reckoning with the emotional and existential impact of motherhood -- didn't exist. So she decided to write it herself. And Now We Have Everything is O'Connell's exploration of the cataclysmic, impossible-to-prepare-for experience of becoming a mother. With her dark humor and hair-trigger B.S. detector, O'Connell addresses the pervasive imposter syndrome that comes with unplanned pregnancy, the fantasies of a "natural" birth experience that erode maternal self-esteem, post-partum body and sex issues, and the fascinating strangeness of stepping into a new, not-yet-comfortable identity. Channeling fears and anxieties that are still taboo and often unspoken, And Now We Have Everything is an unflinchingly frank, funny, and visceral motherhood story for our times, about having a baby and staying, for better or worse, exactly yourself.