Mothering The Fatherland

During the Allied bombing of Darmstadt in 1944, some Lutheran young women saw their city's destruction as an expression of God's wrath. In 1947, a small number formed the Ecumenical (now 'Evangelical') Sisterhood of Mary, one of the first post-war Protestant religious orders. They sensed God's call on them to embrace lives of radical repentance for the sins of the German people against God and against the Jews. Under Mother Basilea, born Klara Schlink, the sisters embraced an ideology of collective national guilt for the Holocaust.

National Book Award Nominee American Library Association Notable Book An Outstanding Book in Women's History at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians From the collapse of the Kaiser's regime to the destruction of Hitler in his bunker, Germany has been studied, explicated, and psychoanalyzed time and again. Yet there have been few detailed investigations into the historical and cultural roles played by German women in modern times. This important book, which Kirkus called "original and intriguing," corrects this imbalance.

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2015 in the subject History of Germany - National Socialism, World War II, , course: National Socialist German Women ́s League Abroad, language: English, abstract: Beiträge zu Feminismus, Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus im 19./20. Jahrhundert: Vol. 9. National Socialist groups of the German Women's League Abroad existed in many European and non-European countries, such as Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, Italy, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Japan, the British Mandate of Palestine and many more. Founded in August 1933, the new overseas organization was a counterpart to the NS Women's League in Germany with the declared goal to unite all Nazi women abroad who were ready to knit, bake and mother for the German ethnic community. In 1941, the new league consisted of more than 300 local group leaders and nearly 3,000 assistants and had organized more than 35,000 meetings and gatherings. Researchers and readers who are interested in the worldwide propagation of German National Socialism can easily find various articles about the body's activity abroad. However, what is still lacking is an introductory, general summary of the organization. To fill this academic void, the book offers an overview of the founding and development of the association as well as details of its program and conceptualization. The second part of the study seeks to clearly and colorfully depict the establishment, activities and events of the German Women's League Abroad in the British Mandate of Palestine, based on documents and photos from archives in Germany and Israel.

There has never been a generation of high-flying mothers like today's who have been so noisy about mothering, so anxious to explain their ambitions to combine work and nurturing, and so agonisingly articulate into the bargain. Earlier generations just got on with it (even if struggling with 'the boredom which has no name') and future generations will certainly do it differently. Ann McFerran has interviewed a dozen women - and their mothers and their daughters - to create a frank and revealing account how today's mothers have changed mothering and parenting over the last half century. Through the lens of some of Britain's most famous working mothers, and their daughters - including Tara Fitzgerald, Lynne Franks, Sheila Hancock, Julie Myerson, Anita Roddick, Meera Syal, Rachel Whiteread - we see experiences that are horribly and wonderfully familiar to us all.

Examining a range of South Asian Anglophone diasporic fiction and poetry, this monograph opens a new dialogue between diaspora studies and gender studies. It shows how discourses of diaspora benefit from re-examining their own critical relation to concepts of the maternal and the motherland. Rather than considering maternity as a fixed or naturally given category, it challenges essentialist conceptions and explores mothering as a performative practice which actively produces discursive meaning. This innovative approach also involves an investigation of central metaphors in nationalist and diasporic rhetorics, bringing critical attention to the strategies they employ and the unique aesthetic forms they produce.

This collection is a study of African literature framed by the central, and multi-faceted, idea of 'mother' - motherland, mothertongue, motherwit, motherhood, mothering - looking at the paradoxical location of (m)other as both central and marginal. Whilst the volume stands as a sustained feminist analysis, it engages feminist theory itself by showing how issues in feminism are, in African literature, recast in different and complex ways.

This book brings together the writings of women from various walks of life–authors, artists, academics, and ordinary citizens–to present their experiences of being mothers and daughters. The complex emotional journeys detailed in the touching narratives are heartwarming and provocative. Dedicating this volume to the women who went before and the generations that are yet to come, the contributors abandon their public faces to provide humane, intimate, and compelling real-life narratives. The collection includes true stories on adoptive motherhood, step-mothering, and single-motherhood.