Constructing The M Other

Constructing the (M)other is a collection of personal narratives about motherhood in the context of a society in which disability holds a stigmatized position. From multiple vantage points, these autoethnographies reveal how ableist beliefs about disability are institutionally upheld and reified. Collectively they seek to call attention to a patriarchal surveillance of mothering, challenge the trope of the good mother, and dismantle the constructed hierarchy of acceptable children. The stories contained in this volume are counter-narratives of resistance--they are the devices through which mothers push back. Rejecting notions of the otherness of their children, in these essays, mothers negotiate their identities and claim access to the category of normative motherhood. Readers are likely to experience dissonance, have their assumptions about disability challenged, and find their parameters of normalcy transformed.

Theologian Erin S. Lane overturns dominant narratives about motherhood and inspires women to write their own stories. Is it possible to do something more meaningful than mothering? As a young Catholic girl who grew up in the American Midwest on white bread and Jesus, Erin S. Lane was given two options for a life well-lived: Mother or Mother Superior. She could marry a man and mother her own children, or she could marry God, so to speak, and mother the world’s children. Both were good outcomes for someone else’s life. Neither would fit the shape of hers. Interweaving Lane’s story with those of other women—including singles and couples, stepparents and foster parents, the infertile and the ambivalent—Someone Other Than a Mother challenges the social scripts that put moms on an impossible pedestal and shame childless women and nontraditional families for not measuring up. You may have heard these lines before: • “Motherhood is the toughest job.” This script diminishes the work of non-moms and pressures moms to make parenting their full-time gig. • “It’ll be different with your own.” This script underestimates the love of nonbiological kin and pushes unfair expectations onto nuclear families. • “Family is the greatest legacy.” This script turns children into the ultimate sign of a woman’s worth and discounts the quieter ways we leave our mark. With candor and verve, Someone Other Than a Mother tears up the shaming social scripts that are bad for moms and non-moms alike and rewrites the story of a life well-lived, one in which purpose is bigger than body parts, identity is fuller than offspring, and legacy is so much more than DNA.

What makes a good mother? Are some women just born naturally maternal, or do mothers discover that part of themselves once they have a child? Now a renowned expert on the subject–and herself a mother of three–addresses the unspoken worries and fears that accompany motherhood and shares the reassuring message that every mother learns “on the job.” Dr. Valerie Davis Raskin has worked with more than four hundred mothers in twenty years of clinical practice and has discovered that mothering is just as developmental as childhood. Dr. Raskin identifies the nine challenges facing mothers from their child’s infancy to young adulthood, pivotal moments that put mothers to the test time and again–and yet from which they can emerge truly rewarded. • IDENTITY: How to gain confidence during those overwhelming first months after you’ve given birth or adopted, but don’t yet “feel” like a mother. • UNLOVING MOMENTS: Every mother’s secret guilt–learn to accept those not-so-precious moments when you don’t like the child you love so dearly. • HONORING THE FATHER: Tips for helping Dad stop feeling like a third wheel and bond with his child (and receive attention from you!). • SEPARATION: How to maintain a positive outlook on your child’s milestones, from the first day of preschool to packing him off to sleepaway camp. • SETTING LIMITS: How to put your foot down, even when your child kicks, screams, or cries. • IMPERFECT INSTITUTIONS: How to cope when your child does not have the best teacher or the most inspiring coach, or faces a less than fair grading system. • REVISED DREAMS: Your cute five-year-old in a pink tutu has no rhythm. Your nine-year-old cannot catch a ball. Learn to modify your dreams for your child–and follow your child’s dreams instead. • ADVERSITY: You can’t keep your child in a plastic bubble, but you can take a deep breath, relax, and be there for her when life gets tough. • SAYING GOODBYE: Discover the joys of loving your adult child while not living under the same roof. This wonderfully anecdotal, engaging, and accessible book is nothing less than an essential training manual for mothers of all ages. The bottom line: Just because motherhood is sometimes difficult, confusing, intense, sleepless, and frustrating, doesn’t mean mothers aren’t doing it right!

For more than a century, American communities erected monuments to western pioneers. Although many of these statues receive little attention today, the images they depict—sturdy white men, saintly mothers, and wholesome pioneer families—enshrine prevailing notions of American exceptionalism, race relations, and gender identity. Pioneer Mother Monuments is the first book to delve into the long and complex history of remembering, forgetting, and rediscovering pioneer monuments. In this book, historian Cynthia Culver Prescott combines visual analysis with a close reading of primary-source documents. Examining some two hundred monuments erected in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present, Prescott begins her survey by focusing on the earliest pioneer statues, which celebrated the strong white men who settled—and conquered—the West. By the 1930s, she explains, when gender roles began shifting, new monuments came forth to honor the Pioneer Mother. The angelic woman in a sunbonnet, armed with a rifle or a Bible as she carried civilization forward—an iconic figure—resonated particularly with Mormon audiences. While interest in these traditional monuments began to wane in the postwar period, according to Prescott, a new wave of pioneer monuments emerged in smaller communities during the late twentieth century. Inspired by rural nostalgia, these statues helped promote heritage tourism. In recent years, Americans have engaged in heated debates about Confederate Civil War monuments and their implicit racism. Should these statues be removed or reinterpreted? Far less attention, however, has been paid to pioneer monuments, which, Prescott argues, also enshrine white cultural superiority—as well as gender stereotypes. Only a few western communities have reexamined these values and erected statues with more inclusive imagery. Blending western history, visual culture, and memory studies, Prescott’s pathbreaking analysis is enhanced by a rich selection of color and black-and-white photographs depicting the statues along with detailed maps that chronologically chart the emergence of pioneer monuments.

Easy-to-read text with full-color illustrations present a collection of perennial Mother Goose favorites.

A collection of feminist essays steeped in “Solnit’s unapologetically observant and truth-speaking voice on toxic, violent masculinity” (The Los Angeles Review). In a timely and incisive follow-up to her national bestseller Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit offers sharp commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more. In characteristic style, “Solnit draw[s] anecdotes of female indignity or male aggression from history, social media, literature, popular culture, and the news . . . The main essay in the book is about the various ways that women are silenced, and Solnit focuses upon the power of storytelling—the way that who gets to speak, and about what, shapes how a society understands itself and what it expects from its members. The Mother of All Questions poses the thesis that telling women’s stories to the world will change the way that the world treats women, and it sets out to tell as many of those stories as possible” (The New Yorker). “There’s a new feminist revolution—open to people of all genders—brewing right now and Rebecca Solnit is one of its most powerful, not to mention beguiling, voices.”—Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times–bestselling author of Natural Causes “Short, incisive essays that pack a powerful punch.” —Publishers Weekly “A keen and timely commentary on gender and feminism. Solnit’s voice is calm, clear, and unapologetic; each essay balances a warm wit with confident, thoughtful analysis, resulting in a collection that is as enjoyable and accessible as it is incisive.” —Booklist