Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother [Paperback]

This groundbreaking and irreverent history of motherhood is worth a hundred advice books for any mother who’s ever been made to feel guilty or frazzled by society’s impossible expectations. Analyzing data from the psychoanalyst’s couch to the hidden history of wet nursing, psychologist Shari L. Thurer wends her way from the Stone Age to the age of Hillary Rodham Clinton, painting a vivid, often frightening picture of life for mothers and children in a time when their roles were constructed by men. Along the way, she debunks myth after myth—exposing the not-so-golden ages of Classical Greece and the Italian Renaissance, and revealing the pervasive ideal of Dr. Spock’s selfless, stay-at-home mother as the historical aberration it actually was. A work of impassioned scholarship and astonishing range, The Myths of Motherhood does nothing less than recast our conception of good mothering.Introduction

1. Mothering - The Old-Fashioned Way
What Becomes a Legend Most?
Cavemother: Old Stone Age Mom
The Divine Womb: New Stone Age Mom

2. History Begins, Herstory Ends
The Decline and Fall of the Great Mother
The Cradle in the Cradle: Sumerian Mom
Honored Tombs, Honored Wombs: Ancient Egyptian Mom
The Abyss: Phoenician Mom
A Mother Love Story: Ancient Hebrew Mom

3. The Sublime and the Ridiculous: Classical Mom
The Secret History
Sexual Politics in Ancient Greece
Where's Momma? Maternal Images
She Loved Them, She Loved Them Not: Maternal Reality

4. Sacred and Profane Callings: Medieval Mom
Madonna Fever, the Original Version
Does She Love Me?
Medieval Mixed Messages
Devil or Angel: Images of the Child
Mother Superior,l#.