Ideologies of Motherhood

Is Baptism a Male Birthing Ritual? By Michele Stopera Freyhauf

by Feminism and Religion

Originally published on the Feminism and Religion project

Quite a number of years ago I had a conversation with one of my professors, a feminist theologian, who posed the... more Quite a number of years ago I had a conversation with one of my professors, a feminist theologian, who posed the question “Why do I need a man to purify my baby with the waters of baptism?  Is there something wrong or impure about the blood and water from a mother’s womb – my womb?”  Before you jump and shout the words Sacrament or removal of original sin, this question bears merit in exploring, especially in today’s world where women are taking a serious beating religiously, politically, and socially.  In today’s world, violations and rants are causing women to stand up and say STOP!  This is MY Body.  This outcry was provoked by chants of ethical slurs against women– Slut! Prostitute! Whore!  The cry got even louder when the issue of religion and government was raised in the fight of healthcare coverage of contraception. The cry got even louder with the enactment of the laws in Virginia and Texas (and many other states to follow suit) that forces women to undergo transvaginal ultrasounds in early stage abortions.  The mandatory insertion of a wand into a woman’s vagina (mandated by the government, mind you), is a violation and has women crying RAPE!

Academic Autonomy: Authority, Self-Confidence, and Resistance

by Sylvia Burrow

Paper appears as a chapter in the anthology Academic Motherhood in a Post Second-Wave Context

Abstract

This paper shows that a masculine model of the ideal academic constrains academic mothers'... more Abstract

This paper shows that a masculine model of the ideal academic constrains academic mothers' autonomy. My account appeals to philosophy but its implications extend to all those academic disciplines dominated by masculine ideals of status and authority that create a chilly climate for women. Pressure, reproaches, and judgements from others in academia suggest that academic mothers are not serious academics, which can undermine self-confidence and self-appreciation. I argue that self-confidence underlies self-appreciation, such as self-respect, self-worth, and self-trust; and that together, these form the grounds for autonomy. In a climate in which academic mothers are not regarded as serious academics, doubt over choices regarding child or career commitments can erode self-confidence. Self-confidence is further challenged because women's status and authority are routinely undermined in a chilly climate that values the masculine and devalues the feminine. Academic mothers face additional stereotypes assuming that mothers are less serious academics than their colleagues. And so whether academic mothers alter academic or family commitments, we are exposed to masculine assumptions that undermine autonomy. The cost to autonomy is significant since it damages the possibility of both career success and personal integrity. I suggest that resisting pressures against autonomy is part of cultivating autonomy and so through resisting masculine stereotypes and ideals, academic mothers can advance or regain their own autonomy.

The Naming of Our Mother-Lines by Cynthia Garrity-Bond

by Feminism and Religion

Originally published on the Feminism and Religion project

I am Cynthia, daughter of Pauline, daughter of Ellen, daughter of Mary. I first spoke this litany of names at a... more I am Cynthia, daughter of Pauline, daughter of Ellen, daughter of Mary. I first spoke this litany of names at a retreat given by Carol Christ.  As we entered the chapel, each woman was given a rose to place in the center of the circle after she recited her own mother line.  Simple but incredibly powerful, a beautiful reminder of our matriarchal inheritance.

The reflection of this ritual is all the more rich because today is my birthday. Especially since my mother’s death in 1990, March 9 is a day of reflection on our complicated mother-daughter relationship with all its highs and lows that marked our lives.  But what I really miss from her are the stories told around the kitchen table, starting with the uniqueness of each of our births.  With each one, the hope and expectation of both parents was for a daughter.  Not until the fourth birth did their plea to St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes (and our family’s most depended on saint), bring forth their highly anticipated girl.

Coming Home by Catherine Gorey

by Feminism and Religion

Originally published in the Feminism and Religion project

It speaks to me often when I am in the midst of interior conflict roused by change, growth, transition, disappointment... more It speaks to me often when I am in the midst of interior conflict roused by change, growth, transition, disappointment etc. Each personal encounter causes a shift in my interior landscape which in turn requires me to find my center again. Sometimes the homecoming takes longer, depending on the cause of the axis shifting.

March 15th, 2012 will mark the 3 year anniversary of my mother’s death. A day that caused me much turmoil within and a life event from which I continue to search for my center. I would never have thought that this life event would shake me to the core as it did, causing me to question everything I ever thought to have known about my mother.

Configuring maternal, preborn and infant embodiment

by Deborah Lupton

An increasing literature on the biopolitics of contemporary maternity and on risk society, individualisation and... more An increasing literature on the biopolitics of contemporary maternity and on risk society, individualisation and parenting has demonstrated the increasing emphasis that has been placed upon pregnant women and mothers to take responsibility for the health and welfare of their children. The ideal female ‘reproductive citizen’ is expected to place her children’s health and wellbeing above her own needs and desires. Here the subject positions of the ‘good mother’ and the ‘responsible citizen’ as they are produced through the discourses and practices of neoliberalism intertwine. This paper looks at the convergence of various influential discourses, images, practices and technologies in configuring maternal, preborn and infant bodies in certain ways in the context of neoliberalism. These include such factors as the growing importance of the concept of risk in relation to preborn and infant wellbeing, the extension of infant identity back into preborn bodies, the emergence of the concepts of the foetal and embryonic (and even the preconceived embryonic) citizen, the precious child and intensive parenting and the symbolic concepts of permeability, purity and danger and Self and Other as they relate to maternal, infant and preborn embodiment.

Extreme parenting and Time magazine

by Deborah Lupton

A commentary published on an online discussion site on the infamous Time magazine cover of 21 May 2012 featuring a woman breastfeeding her 3 year old son.

Robbed by Monica A. Coleman

by Feminism and Religion

Originally published on the Feminism and Religion project

Life is robbery.”

I re-read this Alfred North Whitehead quotation to my students in the last weeks as we... more Life is robbery.”

I re-read this Alfred North Whitehead quotation to my students in the last weeks as we read through Adventures of Ideas. We were taking a welcome break from the philosophically demanding Process and Reality.

I explained that this is one of Whitehead’s more frequently cited sentences because he succinctly and poetically describes his position that life entails loss, and you can’t go back and get what you lose.

I said the same thing to one of my girlfriends as we chatted in my kitchen a couple of weeks ago. I was cooking and catching up with a friend I had not seen in nearly twenty years. As we chronicled our lives from the intervening decades, my friend said: “I have a religious question.”

In moments like these, I curse the fact that even my closest friends think that I have some special kind of knowledge as a minister and professional theologian. I took a deep breath because that phrase usually precedes some difficult, heart-wrenching question that has no satisfying answer.

Fat Women: the Role of the Mother-Daughter Relationship Revisited

by Maya Maor

Maor, M. (2012). Fat Women: The Role of Mother-Daughter Relationships Revisited. Women's Studies International Forum. 35 (2): 97–108.

You dont train for a marathon by sitting on the couch: Performances of pregnancy 'fitnes' and 'good' motherhood in Melbourne, Australia

by Meredith Nash

This article explores informants' negotiations around the performance of pregnancy “fitness” and “good” mothering... more This article explores informants' negotiations around the performance of pregnancy “fitness” and “good” mothering through exercise. Although exercise has been discussed as a way to “empower” middle-class women, I suggest that this position is problematic in its co-optation of the language of “feminism” and also in its lived experience. For my pregnant informants, “liberation” through exercise was clearly contradictory. In this article, I argue that pregnant women are encouraged to embody a “fit” pregnancy. Findings suggest that there is no time in a woman's life when she is “free” to be inactive; she must constantly engage in a high-level of physical activity to maintain an appropriately feminine body and to prove her “self” “publicly” as capable.

'The best thing for the baby': mothers' concepts and experiences related to promoting their infants' health and development

by Deborah Lupton

Blurring the boundaries: breastfeeding and maternal subjectivity

by Deborah Lupton

‘You feel so responsible’: Australian mothers’ concepts and experiences related to promoting the health and development of their young children.

by Deborah Lupton

In Zoller, H. and Dutta, M. (2008) (eds), Emerging Perspectives in Health Communication: Meaning, Culture, and Power. New York: Routledge, pp. 113—128.

Migration and the accentuated ambivalence of motherhood: the role of ICTs in Filipino transnational families

by Mirca Madianou

Published in Global Networks (2012), Online First, March 14 2012, DOI: 10.1111/j.1471-0374.2012.00352.x

This article is concerned with the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on Filipina... more This article is concerned with the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on Filipina transnational mothers’ experience of motherhood, their practices of mothering and, ultimately, their identities as mothers. Drawing on ethnographic research with Filipina migrants in the UK as part of a wider study of Filipino transnational families, this article observes that, despite the digital divide and other structural inequalities, new communication technologies, such as the internet and mobile phones, allow for an empowered experience of distant mothering. Apart from a change in the practice and intensity of mothering at a distance, ICTs also have consequences for women's maternal identities and the ways in which they negotiate their ambivalence towards work and family life. In this sense, digital media can also be seen as solutions (even though difficult ones) to the cultural contradictions of migration and motherhood and the ‘accentuated ambivalence’ they engender. This, in turn, has consequences for the whole experience of migration, sometimes even affecting decisions about settlement and return.

Promoting an Anthropology of Infants: Some Personal Reflections

by Alma Gottlieb

Gottlieb, Alma. "Promoting an Anthropology of Infants: Some Personal Reflections."

Published in: AnthopoChildren, v. 1 (#1), 2012

Abstract: As is the case with the vast majority of cultural anthropologists, I began my field research working with... more Abstract: As is the case with the vast majority of cultural anthropologists, I began my field research working with adults. Becoming a mother changed my life – not just my family life
(of course), but also my career. Being pregnant, undergoing childbirth, and embarking on the awesome project of raising a child also raised for me countless questions – practical and
emotional to be sure, but also intellectual. Along with the gift of a child came a second gift, the gift of becoming an anthropologist of motherhood – and, more generally, of parenthood,
of caretaking, and of the object of all that affection and work, children themselves. In this essay, I look back on the difference that parenthood made in reshaping my scholarly
perspective on social life, and in reshaping my teaching career in the academy as a mentor and a professor. I conclude by reflecting on the pleasures and challenges of forging an
anthropological study of that tiniest and most sociologically invisible of human groups, infants.

Résumé : Comme pour la majorité des anthropologues culturels, devenir mère a changé ma vie – pas seulement ma vie de famille (bien sûr) –, mais aussi ma carrière. Être enceinte,
donner la vie et se lancer dans le projet fou d‘élever un enfant a fait surgir en moi d‘innombrables questions – d‘ordre pratique et émotionnel bien sûr, mais également d‘ordre intellectuel. Le cadeau que représente un enfant s‘est accompagné d‘un autre, celui de devenir une anthropologue de la maternité – et, plus globalement, de la parentalité, de la prise en charge, et de l‘objet de toute cette affection et ce travail, les enfants eux-mêmes. Dans cet article, je me penche sur ce que la parentalité a changé dans ma perspective de recherche sur la vie sociale et dans ma carrière d‘enseignante à l‘Université en tant que mentor/maître de stage et professeur. Je conclus avec quelques réflexions sur les plaisirs et les défis que représente la construction d‘une étude anthropologique des êtres les plus petits et sociologiquement presque invisibles, les enfants.Mots-clefs : Anthropologie de la petite e

Mother Delivers Experiment: Poetry of Motherhood: Plath, Derricotte, Zucker, and Holbrook

by Leah Souffrant

Feminist ethics, mothering, and caring

by Christine James

Published in Kinesis, 22, 1995, (2): 2-16.

Dissertation: Dickens, Disgust and the Mother: The 'Autobiographical' Novels

by Shale Preston

'TIRELESSLY WORKING TO DISPENSE HER OWN WISDOM': INDUSTRIALIZATION, 'SCIENTIFIC MOTHERHOOD' AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF CHILDBEARING AND INFANT CAREGIVING

by Tracey Dowdeswell

The ideology of scientific motherhood that arose in the late nineteenth century rationalized mothering for Canadian... more The ideology of scientific motherhood that arose in the late nineteenth century rationalized mothering for Canadian women, limited breastfeeding, and put knowledge regarding infant care in the hands of physicians, scientists, and formula companies. Scientific motherhood was a widespread cultural movement that sought to reproduce the conditions of industrialization and regulate the modes of women's labour inside the 'factory home', and is closely associated with urbanization, industrialization, and regimentation. The ideologies and practices of scientific motherhood set up a false dichotomy between women's knowledge regarding childbearing and infant caregiving as being 'natural', whereas male physicians, scientists, and corporations established their own authority over 'scientific' knowledge, and sought to teach mothers that women's ways of knowing were unskilled, unscientific, and inferior.
This essay will explore the history of Mennonite mothers in Canada to elucidate their practices of childbearing, breastfeeding, and infant caregiving, and their relationship with and resistance to the intercession of physicians, corporations, and the dominant ideology of scientific motherhood. Scientific motherhood first impacted white, urbanized middle-class Canadian women, and came later to rural and immigrant women. Like many rural women, Mennonite mothers made use of community midwives, many of whom had received a high degree of medical training in Europe, as bearers and transmitters of cultural knowledge regarding childbearing and infant caregiving. Mennonite women held on to traditional cultural practices - such as home births, trained community midwifes, and breastfeeding - longer than urbanized mothers, even as these practices were gradually folded into the medicalized paradigm of a hospital birth assisted by a physician and a professional nurse under his direction, and a regimen of prescribed infant formula. For Mennonite mothers, this process was facilitated by increasing industrialization, urbanization and the gradual fading of traditional rural living spaces, as well as Mennonite women's reticence regarding such intimate functions as childbirth and breastfeeding. Cultural influences from 'scientific mothers' were likely facilitated by the domestic service Mennonite women performed in upper- and middle-class homes in the mid twentieth century, which practices they brought back to their communities when they assumed their own role as mothers. As with all mothers, this shift was also facilitated by improvements in antisepsis and medical techniques that reduced high maternal and infant death rates, as well as broader cultural assumptions regarding the progressive and beneficial nature of science and medicine. Yet, if scientific motherhood came late to Mennonite mothers, so did the resurgent interest in natural, humanistic forms of childbirth and caregiving come early, and some Mennonite mothers have been leaders in this recent cultural shift.

The Paradoxical Perception of Midwifery in American Culture By Stacia Guzzo

by Feminism and Religion

Found at website of Feminism and Religion
Authored by Stacia Guzzo

This past Sunday night, midwife Robin Lim was named CNN Hero of the Year at a formal award ceremony in Los Angeles,... more This past Sunday night, midwife Robin Lim was named CNN Hero of the Year at a formal award ceremony in Los Angeles, California. The award, which was given after eleven weeks of public voting on CNN.com, came with $250,000 to support Lim’s quest to provide quality prenatal, labor, birth, and postpartum care for the poor and underserved in Indonesia.  She accepted the award amidst a standing ovation, and closed her words of acceptance by simply saying: “Every mother counts. And health care is a human right.” (Read on)

Contemplating maternity in an era of choice: explorations into discourses of reproduction

by Sara Hayden