Motherhood

With co-authors: Debby Herbenick, Lori A Brotto, Emily A Harris, and Sara B Chadwick.
Low sexual desire in women partnered with men is typically presumed to be a problem-one that exists in women and encourages a research agenda on causation and treatment targeting women. In this paper, we present a distinct way forward for research on low sexual desire in women partnered with men that attends to a more structural explanation: heteronormativity. A heteronormative worldview assumes that relationships and structures are heterosexual, gender (usually conflated with sex) is binary and complementary, and gender roles fit within narrow bounds including nurturant labor for women. We propose the heteronormativity theory of low sexual desire in women partnered with men, arguing that heteronormative gender inequities are contributing factors. We outline four hypotheses and their predictions related to: inequitable divisions of household labor, blurring of partner and mother roles, objectification of women, and gender norms surrounding sexual initiation. We discuss some mechanisms-social, physiological, and otherwise-for the heteronormativity theory, especially related to stress, objectification, and nurturance. We close by noting some limitations of our paper and the ways that the heteronormativity theory of low sexual desire in women partnered with men provides a rigorous, generative, and empirical way forward.

Adjustment Research on child development increasingly includes data on both parents and from different cultures. However, the relative importance of fathers versus mothers for child adjustment is still under debate. The present review compares the contributions of perceived paternal and maternal acceptance to various child adjustment indicators among samples of families around the world. We reviewed 127 published studies that included child-reported paternal and maternal acceptance and developmental outcomes. Regardless of the sex of parent, children benefited from perceived parental acceptance. Fathers and mothers were often found to both predict adjustment significantly to varying degrees. Paternal acceptance tended to be related to children's problem behavior and psychopathology, whereas maternal acceptance was more likely to contribute to socioemotional development. Paternal and maternal acceptance also often jointly contributed to child adjustment through their interaction with each other and with other predictors. Moreover, the link between parental acceptance and adjustment was often moderated by child gender and
cultural context.

The paper looks at the notion of womanhood that emerged from the discourse around two laws passed in the first years of the State of Israel: the 1949 "Defense Service Law" and the 1951 "Women's Equal Rights Law." Law is conceived of as "producing" the cultural meaning of "women" as a social category and defining its relations to the state. My main argument is that in this discourse, the Jewish-Israeli woman is constructed first and foremost as a mother and a wife, and not as an individual or a citizen. The construction of a distinct category of women that emphasizes women's difference takes place within an ideological context of the self-conscious myth of gender-equality. Motherhood is defined as a public role that carries national significance. And it is via this notion of "motherhood as a national mission" that women are incorporated into the state and not through the universal characteristics of citizenship. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, coupled with the central role that the family and the military play within the Israeli culture and society are the major determinants of this specific definition of Jewish-Israeli women's citizenship.© 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd

Thisa rticle exammest he cross-generationalc ontinuityo f communityw orkperformedb y women
living and working in low-income communities and demonstrates the complex ways in which
gender, race-ethnicity, and class contribute to the social construction of mothering. The analysis
of low-income women's community work challenges definitions of mothering that are limited to
biological and legal expressions,t hus neglecting the significance of community-basedn urturing
work for geographic communities and racial-ethnic and class-based groups. The analysis
utilizes a broadened understanding of labor and contests the divisions between paid and unpaid
work traditionally used to discuss women's work. The article compares and contrasts the
experiences ofAfrican-Americana nd Latina (predommantlyP uerto Rican women) community
workers from low-income communities ui New York City and Philadelphia. The findings of the
research further demonstrate the ways that knowledge generated from the standpoint of women
from different classes and racial-ethnic backgrounds transforms our understanding of politics,
labor, and mothering.

Despite growing concerns with the situation of children exposed to domestic violence, and although women have been seen as central in the welfare of their children, limited attention has been paid to the issue of mothering in this context. This paper examines how concerns regarding abused women's mothering have been articulated in the academic literature on children's exposure to domestic violence, and argues that the dominant discourse in this area has been characterized by a deficit model of mothering. Implications of the pervasiveness of a deficit model for child welfare policies and practices are highlighted. Finally, this paper identifies key elements that should be considered in the development of a feminist perspective on mothering in the context of domestic violence, which could lead to less blaming and more supportive practices.

Teenage pregnancy and motherhood are considered to be pressing social concerns and, in the majority of developed countries, are often viewed as problems in need of solutions. While a number of factors are associated with teenage motherhood, the underlying causes remain elusive. Despite a lack of consensus, policy aimed at ‘solving’ teenage motherhood is typically based on these proposed proximate correlates; addressing these, rather than the cause. Recent appraisals of this approach suggest that it may not be working effectively, if at all, and policy makers might be in need of some novel approaches. This paper discusses how policy decisions concerning reproductive timing may benefit from the perspective provided by evolutionary life-history theory, and why policy ought to take into account the hypothesis that teenage motherhood is the outcome of an adaptive response of an evolved reproductive  strategy to conditions of risk and uncertainty; that having children at an earlier age may promote lineage survival when personal future is uncertain.

The theme of this book is the right to procreate in the Israeli context. My discussion of this right includes the implementation of the right to procreate, restrictions on the right (due to societal, legal, or religious concerns), and the effect of the changing conception of the right to procreate (both substantively and in practice) on core family concepts, such as parents, father, and mother.

In the current Israeli legal and cultural sphere, two issues are at the forefront of the discussion over the right to procreate: first, the regulations governing and the conflicts surrounding surrogacy and egg donation, and second, the debate over posthumous fertilization. These issues are the focus of Assisted Reproduction in Israel.

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הספר עוסק בזכות להוֹרוּת בישראל: ביישומה (הנרחב) של הזכות באמצעי הפריה מלאכותית, במגבלות על הזכות (משיקולים חברתיים, משפטיים או דתיים) ובהשפעה שיש לשינויים בתחום ההפריה המלאכותית על מושגי יסוד בתחום המשפחה, כדוגמת ההגדרה המושגית של הורות, אב ואם.

החיבור מתמקד בשני נושאים: האחד, פונדקאות ותרומת ביציות. השני, הפריה לאחר המוות. נושאים אלו נבחנים מפרספקטיבות של החוק הישראלי, המשפט העברי וההשפעה הדו-כיוונית שיש למפגש בין השניים.

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This article focuses on parents' construction of and emotions in their everyday lives. The study brings into focus the meanings in the foreground of everyday life, while also revealing new insights into cultural beliefs and prejudices. Interviews were conducted with five nuclear and four divorced families, and each participant (N = 18) was interviewed twice. The second interview was a photo-narrative interview, for which each participant took photographs pertaining to their daily life. Content and thematic analysis were applied to the data. Three main categories of everyday life emerged from the data: family daily life, couples' daily life, and one's own daily life. The importance of and pleasure derived from one's own daily life were emphasized as the foundation of well-being for both the individual and the whole family. ARTICLE HISTORY

This article builds on an ethnographic study of a migration flow linking Ecuador and Italy. Through personal relationships built up during fieldwork, I was able to delve into the changing interactions between migrant mothers and the children they leave behind, looking also at constructions of ‘mothering at a distance’ in both their host and their home societies. For migrant women, practising transnational motherhood entails communicating frequently, sending remittances and showing a deep affective involvement. The attitudes and practices of migrant mothers suggest an ambivalent commitment: an attempt to exert control from afar over their children's daily lives, alongside a perception that any such attempt may prove inadequate; a struggle to work and save hard, alongside fears that the money sent home may be spent improperly; and a framing of migration as a necessary self-sacrifice, together with concerns about losing their grip on their children's upbringing. The article also looks at the role of some key variables—for example, the role of other family members in care arrangements; the influence of temporal and spatial distances on the evolution of intimate relationships; and the prospects for family reunion—in accounting for the impact of transnational caregiving practices. A final question arises. To what extent and in what realms—that is, in relation to the affective domain, the realm of communication or the area of material reproduction—can a transnational caregiving relationship be mutually interchangeable with a proximity-based one?

The archetypal Death Mother symbolizes women whose behaviour or feelings threaten the lives of their children. Western culture, however, believes that women evolved to love their children instinctively and selflessly, and that women who abandon, neglect, harm or kill their children are unnatural. Thus the Death Mother has no place in our cultural consciousness. This can be problematic, because it means that the Death Mother is buried deep in the shadow and surrounded with shame. 

In this article, I introduce Jungian and psychodynamic perspectives on the Death Mother, archetype and then focus on evolutionary and anthropological perspectives. My aim is to show that when the Death Mother is approached with compassionate curiosity, we can better help the mothers who are living this frightening energy, as well as those who grow up traumatized by her impact. In particular, I propose that that when we bring the Death Mother into consciousness, learn about her evolutionary roots, and humanize her, we start to dismantle the self-perpetuating cycles of shame that constellate around her archetypal energy, thereby opening the doors to meaningful change.

Although prominent in literature on West Africa and especially Nigeria, the phenomenon of ogbanjes in Sierra Leone is little discussed. By following the story of one ogbanje, this paper unravels their significance for social life, for local epistemologies and cosmologies in Freetown. The paper discusses personhood and morality, conceptions of femininity and motherhood as well as the search for culprits. It argues that ogbanjes have to be understood as avengers who, in the name of society, penalize those deeds of women which meet with the disapproval of the community. Ogbanjes embody a breakdown of accepted social concepts as they are able to openly articulate criticism towards their parents and elders and thus serve as a way to negotiate the coming of age. The negotiations over appropriate treatment of ogbanjes highlight the interplay between different forms of belief. In addition, ogbanjes provide coping mechanisms and explanatory tools for untimely deaths. Keywords Sierra Leone, ogbanje, anthropology of magic and the occult, coming of age, family, belonging, therapy, femininity and motherhood, religion and traditional healing, uncertainty

This article draws on findings from an auto/biographical study about relationships with food to demonstrate how everyday foodways continue to be influenced by the intersectionalities of gender and class. Following Bourdieu [1984. Distinction, a social critique of the judgement of taste. London: Routledge] how ‘foodies’ use food and foodways (the production, preparation, serving and eating of food) as a material and cultural display of capital (Johnston, J., & Baumann, S. 2010. Foodies, democracy and distinction in the gourmet kitchen. London: Routledge) or even ‘culinary capital’ (Naccarato, P., & LeBesco, K. 2012. Culinary capital. London: Berg) has been demonstrated. There has been less work exploring how mothers use ‘feeding the family’ (DeVault, M. I. 1991. Feeding the family. London: University of Chicago Press) as a source of cultural capital for themselves. Three-quarters of the 75 respondents in my UK study were parents and all mothers with dependant children fed their family ‘healthy’ food as a means of performing a particular middle-class habitus. I therefore examine how mothers engaged in ‘healthy’ foodwork as a means of positioning themselves as ‘good’ mothers or ‘yummy mummies’ (Allen, K., & Osgood, J. 2009. Studies in the Maternal, 1). Indeed, despite decades of gender equality in the public sphere and neo-liberal assertions regarding individualism, ‘feeding the family’ (DeVault, 1991) continues to be a highly gendered activity, with the added pressure of now having to provide ‘healthy’ food cooked from scratch. In these accounts, convenience foods and/or ‘unhealthy’ family foodways were vilified and viewed with disgust, with an adherence to ‘healthy’ family foodways used as a means of drawing boundaries within fields of ‘organised striving’ (Martin, J. 2011. On the explanation of social action, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Savage, M., & Silva, E. B. 2013. Cultural Sociology, 7, 111–126). This article considers ‘healthy’ foodwork as a significant aspect of ‘good’ middle-class mothering, whereby ‘healthy’ family foodways become significant in the performance and display of ‘proper’ middle-class femininity that pathologises alternative family foodways and ‘other’ femininities. This serves to illuminate continuities within the intersectionalities of gender and class, with a commitment to ‘healthy’ family foodways central to ‘future oriented’ (middle classed) maternal identity.

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This article analyses the emergence of the new social type of the 'yummy mummy' by examining the constellation of narratives circulating through and around it in British culture. It contends that, whilst it has some notable precursors, the idea of the yummy mummy marks a fairly substantial cultural shift given the weight of the western Christian tradition that has overwhelmingly positioned the mother as asexual. Coming into being in part through an increasing social divide between rich and poor, this stock type most often serves to augment a white, thirtysomething position of privilege, shoring up its boundaries against the other side of the social divide (so-called 'pramfaces'). At the same time it is part of a wider fetishisation of the maternal that coexists with profoundly gendered inequalities in relation to childcare in particular. Drawing from a range of sources, and in particular autobiographical celebrity guidebooks and 'henlit' novels, the article argues that the figure of the yummy mummy functions to elide such social contexts, instead espousing a girlish, high-consuming maternal ideal as a site of hyperindividualised psychological 'maturity'. 'Successful' maternal femininity in this context is often articulated by rejecting 'environmentally-conscious' behaviour and in attempting to render what are presented as excessive eco-delusions both abject and transparent. This tendency, the article argues, is indicative of the conservative nature of the phenomenon, which is forced to belittle and disavow wider structures of social, political and ecological dependency in order for its conservative fantasy of autonomous, individualising retreatism to be maintained.

This article contrasts the theories of ego formation put forward in Jacques Lacan’s ‘The Mirror Stage’ and Donald Winnicott’s ‘The Mirror Role of the Mother,’ and discusses their methodological implications for the field of American studies. While Lacan theorises subjectivity as irreparably split and (self-)alienated, Winnicott offers an optimistic version of a self which is sustained in its going-on-being by a nourishing maternal presence. These disparate conceptualisations of the human being produce two powerful frames through which to approach culture. Yet, while Lacan is widely recognised in the American studies scholarship, Winnicott remains virtually unknown. This article aims to enhance the visibility of the British author by outlining the productivity of his ideas for any cultural or literary analysis. By stressing the foundational significance of the primary bond Winnicott’s theory intervenes in the recent critiques of neoliberal capitalism which remain halted in a Lacanian-like melancholic mode, masked by a cultural command of perpetual enjoyment. The Winnicottian perspective challenges Lacan’s fixation on the unattainable objects of desire, reiterated by the neoliberal myth of self-perfection through consumption, and offers an alternative pattern of human sociality, based on relational, self-reflexive moderation.

This study combined demographic and insti- tutional explanations of women’s employment, describing and explaining the degree to which mothers in industrialized societies are less likely to be employed than women without children. A large number of cross-sectional surveys were pooled, covering 18 Organisa- tion for Economic Co-Operation and Develop- ment countries, 192,484 observations, and 305 country-years between 1975 and 1999. These data were merged with measures of institutional context and analyzed with multilevel logistic regression. The results indicate that, over time, women were increasingly likely to combine motherhood and employment in many, but not all, countries. Both mothers and women with- out children were more likely to be employed in societies with a large service sector and low unemployment. The employment of women without children was generally unaffected by family policies. Mothers were more likely to be employed in societies with extensive reconcilia- tion policies and limited family allowances.

This article traces Nene Hatun’s popularity and legacy for women’s image in Turkey. The rediscovery of Nene Hatun and the political construction of her public image during the rule of the Democratic Party (DP), as an icon of anticommunist Turkish mothers, not only maps out the gendered effects of intensified anticommunist policies in Turkey in the period under consideration but also showcases the immediate consequences of the growing conservative discourses and gender anxieties on the public images and roles of women. Exemplified by Nene Hatun’s sudden popularity, the 1950s witnessed a change in the references to motherhood in the discourses of politicians and other public figures. Framing the family roles of women as a question of security, such discourses referred to mothers as the protectors of family values against communist threats, which assigned further domestic duties to women in Turkey, already living in a strongly patriarchal society.

This essay seeks to unsettle feminist philosophy through an encounter with Aboriginal artist Tracey Moffatt, whose perspectives on intergenerational relationships between (older) white women and (younger) Indigenous women are shaped by her experiences as the Aboriginal child of a white foster mother growing up in Brisbane, Australia during the 1960s. Moffatt's short experimental film Night Cries provides an important glimpse into the violent intersections of gender, race, and power in intimate life and, in so doing, invites us to see how colonial and neocolonial policies are carried out through women's domestic labor. Seeing cross-generational and cross-racial intimacy through Moffatt's lens, I suggest, helps us to unsettle both feminist theories of motherhood and feminist practices of mentoring.

Since the advent of digital and mobile communication technologies, scholars have been investigating how these technologies are changing experiences of migration and mobility. In the field of gender and migration, researchers have shown how the experience of migration can change maternal practices, and alter understandings of ‘good motherhood’. These ‘digital migrant’ and ‘migrant motherhood’ literatures have intersected in studies of technologically mediated transnational mothering, in the context of mother–child separation. In contrast, this study focuses on migrant mothers in Australia who are co-located with their children. Drawing on interviews with migrant mothers from a range of migrant communities in Sydney and Melbourne, this article explores how the use of online migrant maternal communities helps women to navigate motherhood in a migrant context. Specifically, it draws attention to the ways migrant mothers use the affordances of social media to work through their complex and ambivalent feelings about their migrant maternal identities and practices, and about co-ethnic social networks. The paper foregrounds the role of the imagination and relationships in shaping migrant identities and experiences and proposes the ‘migrant maternal imaginary’ as a valuable concept for understanding migrant motherhood.

KEYWORDS: Migration, motherhood, Facebook, social media, coethnicity, Australia

Based on in-depth interviews with twenty-three Israeli mothers, this article seeks to contribute to an ongoing inquiry into women’s subjective experiences of mothering by addressing an understudied maternal emotive and cognitive stance: regretting motherhood. The literature teaches us that within a pronatal monopoly, threatening women that they will inevitably regret not having children acts as powerful reproducer of the ideology of motherhood. Simultaneously, motherhood is constructed as a mythical nexus that lies outside and beyond the human terrain of regret, and therefore a desire to undo the maternal experience is conceived as an object of disbelief. By incorporating regret into maternal experiences, the purpose of the article is twofold: The first is to distinguish regret over motherhood from other conflictual and ambivalent maternal emotions. Whereas participants’ expressions of regretting motherhood were not bereft of ambivalence, and thus were not necessarily exceptional or anomalous, they foreground a different emotive and cognitive stance toward motherhood. The second purpose is to situate regret over motherhood in the sociopolitical arena. It has been suggested that the “power of backward thinking” might be used to reflect on the systems of power governing maternal feelings in two ways: first, through a categorical distinction in the target of regret between object (the children) and experience (maternity), which utilizes the cultural structure of mother love; second, by opposing the very essentialist presumption of a fixed female identity that naturally befits mothering or progressively adapts to it and evaluates it as a worthwhile experience.

In May 1995, a 33 year-old woman named Alison Hargreaves made her name by becoming the first woman (and second person) to make an unaided solo ascent of the world’s highest mountain, Everest. She was constructed as an exemplar of the highest order, a national heroine to be proud of, and in the vein of a series of British female heroes who punctuate the typically masculine narrative of national achievement. By August she was dead, the victim of a violent storm on the upper reaches of the peak they call the Savage Mountain, K2. The focus of vitriolic media attention, Hargreaves was stripped of her heroic status and condemned for the irresponsibility of leaving her two small children motherless and so opened a national debate on ‘motherhood, ambition and risk’. This paper explores that debate. In so doing it probes the meaning of heroism, as both a culturally mediated idea of extra-ordinary actions, and as part of a wider politics of recognition and representation that calls on us to consider the role of public communication.

In the three decade long civil war between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government terrible atrocities were committed on the minority Tamil community by both the parties involved. This period of Tamil nationalism saw constructions of Tamil nation which were grounded on the construction of an ideal "Tamil Woman." The period also witnessed a variety of cultural responses, including those by women poets. This paper broadly tries to elucidate how poetry was used to act as a witness to the experiences of the Tamil women during the Sri Lankan Civil War and how they responded to the Tamil nation making process. This paper will argue that the witnessing of war is "gendered" as can be evidenced in the critical reading of poetry written by Tamil women in Sri Lanka. Specifically the paper will look at how the figure of the mother has been used in this gendered witnessing. Different kinds of motherhoods were mobilized in Sri Lanka through the course of the war, namely the valiant mother who encourages her children to die for the country, the suffering mother and the mother who resists power for the sake of her children. One of the key constructs of women in Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka was of the figure of the "Veerathayar"the brave mother, who is the reproducer of the nation. In the context of a war fought over competing nationalisms, the figure of Veerathayar was constructed through reimaginations of the mythic characters from the old legends and classics. A much more radical positioning of the mother figure was seen in the 1980s with the construct of "social motherhood." Even though social motherhood appealed to the naturalized and essentialized construction of women as mothers, it also revealed the transgressions of the Sri Lankan State and the LTTE which otherwise valorized the nurturance role of mothers. Set against this context, the paper will examine how the figure of the "mother" has been used by Tamil women in their poetry to write their experience of the conflict. This is done through a critical reading of their poetry by giving attention to the ways through which they have used the construct of mother to subvert the dominant notions of being an ideal "Tamil Woman" as perpetuated by Tamil nationalism.

Early exposure to environmental chemicals is associated with multiple health problems, including neurological and reproductive disorders. In response to this problem, the environmental health movement has emerged as a leading authority on strategies of self-protection, or what we call " precautionary consumption. " In this paper, we use discourse analysis to examine two decades of environmental health reports and advice from a key organization in the United States: the Environmental Working Group (EWG). During this period, the discourse of environmental health used by this organization presents babies as contaminated before birth, and mothers as vectors of chemical risk. This discourse locates risk within three primary sources: first, inadequate regulation of environmental chemicals; second, maternal environments of the body and home; and finally, maternal desires for food and beauty. We argue that EWG strategically mobilizes existing medical and scientific discourses surrounding maternal bodies to build greater support for chemical regulation. Key to this discursive construction is a differential attribution of blame and responsibility, where blame for pollution is assigned to regulatory failure, yet responsibility for mediating children's exposure is assigned to individual mothers. This social construction of pollution as a mother's problem is not only gendered but also classed and racialized, and warrants greater attention in feminist research. Our analysis also contributes to scholarship on the maternal-fetal conflict by tracing the ambiguous place of maternal self-care within constructions of child well-being, and advances research on the regulation of women's bodies and actions throughout their reproductive lives.

Mothers of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) typically report lower overall family functioning and worse mental health. Neighborhood conditions are found to positively influence family functioning and mental health in the general population. Employing a process-person-context model, this study extends these literatures to examine whether various neighborhood conditions – both positive and negative – affect mothers’ mental health and the overall functioning of families with a child with an ASD. Simultaneous equation path analysis of a nationally representative sample of children in the US finds neighborhood support to be positively and significantly associated with mothers’ mental health and the overall functioning of families with a child with an ASD. However, neighborhood amenities and neighborhood deficiencies were not significantly associated with either mothers’ mental health or family functioning. Neighborhood support can play a vital role in improved subjective quality of life for mothers with a child on the autism spectrum.

The story of motherhood in popular culture has never been a simple one. Cross-cut by race, class, and sexuality (and, importantly, marital status), interwoven with changing psychological and biological theories and fantasies, tied up with nation-building and citizenship claims, images of motherhood remain both template and signpost upon which we project our desires for kinship and care and our most vexed understandings of womanhood and femininity. This essay examines fictional motherhood in an era of real-life Octomoms and presidential candidates. We argue that a new type of mother has emerged—particularly on TV—that presents a radical departure. From the suburban mom/drug dealer of Showtime's outré series Weeds to the vapid 1960s wife of Mad Men, aberrant mothers abound in contemporary culture. But, unlike aberrant mothers of earlier eras, these mothers are by and large heroines, unapologetically non-normative in their maternal functioning. The parenting is cursory at best and often downright neglectful, behavior that has typically resulted in sure death for Hollywood mothers of earlier eras. We examine these images as a challenge to normative familialism and rigid gender ideologies.

This article explores journalistic representations of mothers during the horrific ‘Remedia Affair’, a 2003 tragedy in which dozens of Jewish Israeli babies fell sick and five died after being fed defective infant formula. The affair, a significant event in Israel’s collective memory, was narrativized as a ‘media scandal’ with multiple discourses of guilt, blame and victimhood. Analysis of the linguistic and visual coverage of Jewish Israeli mothers in six newspapers shows how mothers were reconstructed as guilty for the loss of the babies’ lives and well-being. In addition, the mothers were called to ‘come back’ to breastfeeding, an act that could have saved their children. Overall, this coverage reaffirmed the traditional social norms of the ‘ideal Jewish mother’ who sacrifices herself for her baby and is objectified as ‘food’, norms that were not commonly practiced by most Jewish Israeli families at the time.

Feminists have long argued that women who offend are judged by who they are, not what they do, with idealised images of femininity and motherhood used as measures of culpability. The ability to meet the expectations of motherhood and femininity are particularly difficult for women who experience a crisis pregnancy, as evident in cases where women have been convicted of concealment of birth. The offence prohibits the secret disposal of the dead body of a child, to conceal knowledge of its birth. Traditionally used to prosecute women suspected of killing their newborn children, analysis of court transcripts suggests the offence is also used to punish women who fail to meet expectations of motherhood. This paper analyses three contemporary cases in light of the historical origins of the offence, illustrating the legacy of prejudice against ‘deviant’ mothers. Finally, it questions the continued existence of this archaic offence.

Looking at how young Swiss adults anticipate their future families, we find a pronounced discourse of disapproval of any form of commodified childcare. Interviewees in their mid- twenties insist that children should be cared for at home and by their parents. This paper discusses these empirical findings in the light of recent debates on the commodification of care. On the one hand, the idealised notion of the home as a safe haven for children might reinforce existing inequalities in the gendered division of care work by confining women to the home and excluding them from paid labour; on the other hand, the aversion to commodified care can be read as a challenge to the neoliberal model of a universal adult worker which disregards care obligations. In this respect, the discourse of disapproval of commodified care might signify a tentative step towards a new ethic of care.

Background
Birth cultures have been transforming in recent years mainly affecting birth care and its socio-political contexts. This situation has affected the feeling of well-being in women at the time of giving birth.

Aim
For this reason, our objective was to analyse the social meaning that women ascribe to home births in the Chilean context.

Method
We conducted thirty semi-structured interviews with women living in diverse regions ranging from northern to southern Chile, which we carried out from a theoretical-methodological perspective of phenomenology and situated knowledge. Qualitative thematic analysis was used to analyse the information collected in the field work.

Findings
A qualitative thematic analysis produced the following main theme: 1) Home birth journeys. Two sub-categories: 1.1) Making the decision to give birth at home, 1.2) Giving birth: (re)birth. And four sub-categories also emerged: 1.1.1) Why do I need to give birth at home? 1.1.2) The people around me don’t support me; 1.2.1) Shifting emotions during home birth, 1.2.2) I (don’t) want to be alone.

Conclusion
We concluded that home births involve an intense and diverse range of satisfactions and tensions, the latter basically owing to the sociocultural resistance surrounding women. For this reason, they experienced home birth as an act of protest and highly valued the presence of midwives and their partners.

Vietnamese immigrant families in the Czech Republic often recruit Czech women to look after their children. Seen in the context of the dominant scholarship, this is quite a unique case in the fi eld of care work where the employers are immigrants, while the employees are women of the host country. Drawing upon fi fteen in-depth interviews with Czech nannies, this article analyses the motivations to become a nanny in a Vietnamese family. It employs the perspective of the life course in order to understand what changes in women's biographies lie behind these decisions. The author focuses on the transitions in nannies' life cycles at the crossroads of three aspects of their biographies: the family caregiving role, position in the labour market and the welfare state, and the meaning of paid caregiving. By looking at how women experience and attach meaning to transitions and phases in their life, which lead them to take a gendered job as a nanny, the author sheds light on the dynamics of the complex processes (taking place in families, the labour market , or the welfare state) that constitute these changes. This article—through the analysis of the motivations to become nannies—illuminates the broader issues of how gendered biographies are shaped under particular socio-economic and historical conditions, as well as by particular cultural expectations of caregiving.

This article offers a critical discourse analysis of the Israeli television series In Treatment. The series unfolds the therapy sessions of a 40-year-old single female attorney with
her therapist. The main objective of the study was to identify the scripted tactics or narrative strategies that establish and maintain singlehood. The findings indicate that the therapeutic discourse plays a central role in the construction and interpretation of single women’s subjectivities, prompting a narrative that encourages the ‘discarding’ of singlehood as well as therapeutic work slanted towards a more familial and maternally oriented subjectivity. This narrative unfolds through two dominant scripted tactics: the symbolic annihilation of singlehood and the construction of feminine identity hierarchies (what the authors term ‘hierarchies of happy endings’). Moreover, it is also prompted by the discursive alliance between the therapeutic discourse and the postfeminist discourse. Consequently, long-term singlehood is portrayed as an unnatural and pathological life script characterized by its lack and deficiency. Furthermore, as opposed to childless singlehood, single motherhood by choice emerges as a preferred and desirable life option. The category of single motherhood is endowed with new forms of legitimacy, reinforcing new-old patriarchal and postfeminist conceptions of women’s reproductive potential and what is considered to be women’s primary life purpose.

The delay of childbearing is one of the most prominent transformations of contemporary fertility and reproductive patterns. This article provides a novel approach to understanding why women are postponing motherhood and having children later in life. Drawing on 24 life story interviews with women from Santiago de Chile, I argue that the transition to motherhood is shaped by a moral economy in which women postpone childbearing to enable becoming 'good' mothers. In a context in which social fertility is being redefined by neoliberalism, intensive mothering, and lone motherhood, I find that women delay childbearing until after achieving professional and financial milestones that allow them to fulfil the normative conditions for having children. These findings suggest that women postpone the transition to motherhood not because they reject childbearing and traditional gender roles, but rather because they aspire to become 'good' mothers in a context characterised by institutional precariousness, relational insecurity, and increasing demands on mothering. Through these findings, I challenge prevalent interpretations of why women are having children later in life, extend accounts of the gendered norms of social fertility, and contest the nature of autonomy driving change in women's lives.

This article explores the relationship between discourse and experiences of ill health. Drawing on narratives, it shows how a mother who is experiencing difficulties with breastfeeding embodies sentiments of shame over what she perceives as a failure to perform motherhood. The notions of interdiscursivity and the historical body are employed to ground the individual's experience in discursive practices, and to propose that shame is a sentiment that arises in deviations from the biopolitical ideologies that are produced and reproduced through those practices. Expressing shame becomes a resource for assuming responsibility for failed motherhood; and, at the same time, it appears to obstruct recovery to smoothly functioning breastfeeding.

Through critique of concordance, we argue that popular U.S. newspaper articles about attachment parenting perpetuate the ideology of combative mothering, where mothers are in continuous competition with one another over parenting choices. Specifically, article writers construct a new, singular metaphorical mommy war between pro-attachment parenting and anti-attachment parenting proponents by prepackaging attachment parenting and its debate, advocating for attachment parenting through instinct and science, and rejecting attachment parenting because of harm to children, relationships, and mothers. A minority of articles, however, avoided reifying this pro-/anti-attachment parenting mommy war by exploring the complexities of parenting beyond prepackaged philosophies. We explore the implications of this new mommy war on ideologies of motherhood and the politics of choice.

This paper explores the tension between post-feminist discourses of freedom and the everyday negotiation of feminised identities in private and public spaces, for mothers residing in a marginalised locale in urban south Wales, UK. Applying the lens of gender to examine and foreground the place of ‘choice’ in mothers' lives, the paper works with visual and narrative accounts of the negotiation of acceptable motherhood. The paper argues that despite a pervasive rhetoric of agency and equality, the practice and performance of motherhood continues to operate within asymmetrical gendered and classed spaces inside the confines of respectable femininity. Challenging the concept of new motherhood, where women are led to believe that they can maintain the status of breadwinner, domestic goddess and primary care giver, the paper theorises agency as operating within the impossibility of unachievable ideals.

The authors problematize essentialized notions of motherhood both ideologically and through criminalized women’s accounts of correctional programming discourses that engage these notions as a way to foster “motherhood as praxis.” Using data from interviews conducted with former female prisoners, we analyze how substance using mothers invoke the concept of a “good” mother by negotiating its meaning through techniques of self-surveillance and the surveillance of other  criminalized mothers. Women use this renegotiated identity as inspiration to move away from activities in conflict with motherhood, such as using drugs and/or alcohol. Correctional authorities in drug rehabilitation programs encourage women to use motherhood as an “anchor” upon which to stop using and the women appeal to this identity to responsibilize their actions. Dichotomizing conceptualizations of a selfless, nurturing, and chaste mother with an addict identity is in fact a precarious rehabilitation tactic. We hypothesize that women who feel they cannot live up to the idealized notion of motherhood might use drugs to cope with feelings of inadequacy, a point that requires further research. Using a framework where motherhood is the key to recovery  not only reinforces the addict identity should a woman relapse, it necessarily indicates failure as a mother.

Women who once communicated themselves as permanently childless/childfree by choice but then became mothers must negotiate a drastic shift in childbearing identity. To study this identity work, the present study adopts performative face theory, a critical interpersonal and family communication theory that places Goffman's theory of face in conversation with Butler's theory of performativity. In this theorization, negotiations of face sediment oppositional identities through the reiterative power of discursive and bodily acts. Critical-qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with mothers who once told others they never wanted to have children demonstrates how the facework strategies of voice and silence allow women to perform the " sincerely childfree " face and then the " good (future) mother " face. These negotiations of face are enabled and constrained by relations of power that define identity categories. Although these negotiations of face are often relationally harmonious, they also reify power/knowledge about motherhood as intensive and positive.

Mothers of today have available to them an unprecedented quantity and variety of information concerning the process of conceiving, bearing, birthing and raising a child. Yet it is only a little more than half a century ago that mothers were firmly convinced of the authority of maternal instinct. From experiential knowledge shared verbally amongst female relatives and friends, to a profusion of 'expert' information accessible virtually and instantaneously, the ways women learn about mothering have shifted dramatically over the past 70 years. Drawing upon oral history interviews and historical child-rearing material, this article will illuminate shifts in the source, content and transmission of advice to Australian mothers since 1945.

Household work literature has highlighted the importance of mothers to their daughters’ accounts of their household work practice, arguing that women can both aim to emulate and avoid particular practices in their own household work. This paper further explores this topic, drawing on a small-scale qualitative study to explore the self-narratives that two generations of mothers construct around the theme of household work. It looks particularly at how accounts of household work practices are incorporated into broader stories of growing up and taking responsibility, and the relevance of discourses of individualisation, and the notion of reflexive biographies to these explanations. This article also draws on theories of connectedness to show how self-narratives around the theme of household work reflect different forms of relationality, and to argue that a concept of relational selves is useful for making sense of these narratives.