Representations of Motherhood [Paperback]

For many years mothers have been viewed in terms of their impact on children rather than as people with needs, feelings, and interestssubjects 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
IntroductionDonna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan
Part I: The Acknowledgment and Appropriation of Maternal Work
Thinking Mothers/Conceiving BirthSara Ruddick
Fictions of HomeJane Lazarre
Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about MotherhoodPatricia Hill Collins
The Mothers of the Disappeared: Passion and Protest in Maternal ActionJean Bethke Elshtain
Maternity and Rememory in Toni MorrisonsBelovedMarianne Hirsch

Part II: The Paradoxical Nature of the Maternal Position
Being a Mother and Being a Psychoanalyst: Two Impossible ProfessionsJanine Chasseguet-Smirgel
The Omnipotent Mother: A Psychoanalytic Study of Fantasy and RealityJessica Benjamin
Mothering, Hate, and WinnicottElsa First
Maternal Subjectivity in the Culture of Nostalgia: Mourning and MemoryDonna Bassin
Rosalind: A Family RomanceMyra Goldberg

Part III: The Cultural Construction and Reconstruction of the Maternal Image
Images of the Maternal: An Interview with Barbara KrugerTherese Lichtenstein
The Power of Positive Diagnosis: Medical and Maternal Discourses on AmniocentesisRayna Rapp
The Maternal Voice in tlÃ7