Twenty-first Century Motherhood: Experience, Identity, Policy, Agency - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0231149670 ISBN 13: 9780231149679

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2010

Synopsis

A pioneer of modern motherhood studies, Andrea O'Reilly explores motherhood's current representation and practice, considering developments that were unimaginable decades ago: the Internet, interracial surrogacy, raising transchildren, male mothering, intensive mothering, queer parenting, the applications of new biotechnologies, and mothering in the post-9/11 era. Her work pulls together a range of disciplines and themes in motherhood studies. She confronts the effects of globalization, HIV/AIDS, welfare reform, politicians as mothers, third wave feminism, and the evolving motherhood movement, and she incorporates Chicana, African-American, Canadian, Muslim, queer, low-income, trans, and lesbian perspectives.

About this title

About the Author:

Andrea O'Reilly is associate professor in the School of Women's Studies at York University and the editor or coeditor of more than fourteen books on motherhood. She is the author of Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart and Rocking the Cradle: Thoughts on Motherhood, Feminism, and the Possibility of Empowered Mothering. She is also the founder and director of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, formerly the Association for Research on Mothering and the founder and editor in chief of the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, formerly the Journal of the Association for Research and Mothering.

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Introduction

Andrea O'Reilly

Over the last twenty-five years the topic of motherhood has emerged as a central and significant topic of scholarly inquiry across a wide range of academic disciplines. A cursory review reveals that hundreds of scholarly articles have been published on almost every motherhood theme imaginable. The Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering alone has examined motherhood topics as diverse as sexuality, peace, religion, public policy, literature, work, popular culture, health, carework, young mothers, motherhood and feminism, feminist mothering, mothers and sons, mothers and daughters, lesbian mothering, adoption, the motherhood movement, and mothering, race, and ethnicity, to name a few. In 2006 I coined the term motherhood studies to acknowledge and demarcate this new scholarship on motherhood as a legitimate and distinctive discipline, one grounded in the theoretical tradition of maternal theory developed by scholars such as Patricia Hill Collins, Adrienne Rich, and Sara Ruddick. Indeed, similar to the development of women's studies as an academic field in the 1970s, motherhood studies, while explicitly interdisciplinary, has emerged as an autonomous and independent scholarly discipline over the last decade.

However, the numerous edited collections on motherhood have tended to be discipline specific or thematic in focus. This is surprising, given the explicit interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary nature of motherhood studies and the exponential growth of this field over the last two decades. Seeking to address this absence, this volume intends to provide an investigation of the salient motherhood topics across various scholarly disciplines. Specifically, this comprehensive interdisciplinary volume will examine the topic of motherhood explicitly from a twenty-first century perspective, making it the first collection of its kind.

The idea for this volume arose from the tenth anniversary conference of the Association for Research on Mothering, which was held in Toronto, Canada, in October 2006. A central aim of this conference was to reflect upon the development of motherhood scholarship over the last two decades and to explore how motherhood themes and issues have changed with the advent of the twenty-first century. While many of the motherhood issues remain the same, the two hundred plus papers presented at the conference revealed not only that these issues are becoming increasingly more complex and complicated, but also that several new issues and challenges have emerged and will continue to appear as the twenty-first century unfolds. Accordingly, the aim of this volume is to study motherhood from a twenty-first-century perspective and to consider the challenges and possibilities of motherhood as the first decade of the new millennium comes to a close.

In the thirty plus years since the publication of Rich's Of Woman Born, motherhood research has focused upon the oppressive and empowering dimensions of mothering and the complex relationship between the two. Indeed, almost all contemporary scholarship on motherhood draws upon Rich's distinction "between two meanings of motherhood, one superimposed on the other: the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children; and the institution, which aims at ensuring that that potential -- and all women -- shall remain under male control" (1986:13; emphasis in original). Following the above distinction, motherhood studies may be divided into three interconnected themes or categories of inquiry: motherhood as institution, motherhood as experience, and motherhood as identity or subjectivity. Within motherhood studies the term motherhood is used to signify the patriarchal institution of motherhood, while mothering refers to women's lived experiences of childrearing as they both conform to and/or resist the patriarchal institution of motherhood and its oppressive ideology. While scholars who are concerned with the ideology or institution investigate policies, laws, ideologies, and images of patriarchal motherhood, researchers who are interested in experience examine the work women do as mothers, an area of study paved with insights derived from Sara Ruddick's concept of maternal practice. The third category, identity or subjectivity, looks at the effect that becoming a mother has on a woman's sense of self; in particular, how her sense of self is shaped by the institution of motherhood and the experience of mothering, respectively.

Since the turn of the millennium a new theme in motherhood has emerged that I have termed agency. Motherhood scholarship, whether its concern is mothering as institution, experience, or identity, has tended to focus on how motherhood is detrimental to women because of its construction as a patriarchal entity within the said three areas. For example, scholars interested in experience argue that the gender inequities of patriarchal motherhood cause the work of mothering to be both isolating and exhausting for women, while those concerned with ideology call attention to the guilt and depression that is experienced by mothers who fail to live up to the impossible standards of patriarchal motherhood that our popular culture inundates them with. In contrast, little has been written on the possibility or potentiality of mothering as identified by Rich more than thirty years ago. This point is not lost on Fiona Green, who writes, "still largely missing from the increasing dialogue and publication around motherhood is a discussion of Rich's monumental contention that even when restrained by patriarchy, motherhood can be a site of empowerment and political activism" (2004:31). More recently, however, agency has emerged as a prevailing theme in motherhood scholarship. Specifically, the rise of a vibrant and vast motherhood movement in the United States over the last decade has paved the way for more meaningful exploration into the emancipatory potential of motherhood in the twenty-first century.

As the first to organize and examine motherhood research under these four constitutive themes, this volume will consider the impact of this new century on how motherhood is practiced and represented as experience, identity, policy, and agency. For the purpose of this volume, the more specific theme of policy will be used over the more general concept institution. Over the last two decades, most of the research on motherhood as institution has looked at how such is conveyed and maintained through ideology; less attention has been paid to how the institution of motherhood is, in the same way, enacted and enforced through policy, whether governmental, health, work, or educational. Thus, with the advent of the twenty-first century, a more policy-based perspective on the institution of motherhood is both judicious and essential.

The papers selected for the volume cover a wide range of disciplines and consider many diverse motherhood themes, including globalization, raising trans children, HIV/AIDS, the new reproductive technologies, queer parenting, the motherhood memoir, mothering and work, welfare reform, intensive mothering, mothers and/in politics, the influence of the Internet, third-wave feminism, and the motherhood movement. While all of the papers explicitly and directly address a motherhood concern central to the twenty-first century, the volume does not purport to fully represent twenty-first-century motherhood; instead, it offers a snapshot of the motherhood issues that have engaged scholars over the last decade. It should be noted that while this collection presents various regional, cultural, and racial perspectives -- including Chicana, African American, Kenyan, Swedish, Canadian, American, Muslim, queer, low-income, trans, and lesbian -- it remains largely North American in its perspective, as is the case with most motherhood research.

Overall, my aim in creating this volume has been to identify the salient themes of this new and exciting discipline of motherhood studies, and to investigate how these themes -- experience, identity, policy, and agency -- shape and are shaped by the new millennium. More specifically, the volume considers how the social, scientific, and technological developments of the last ten to twenty years, some of which were unimaginable even a decade ago -- mothers and/on the Internet, interracial surrogacy, raising trans children, men mothering, intensive mothering, queer parenting, species-altering applications of new biotechnologies, androgenesis, the motherhood movement, mothering post-9/11, and the AIDS crisis -- have forever altered the meaning and experience of motherhood for women and the societies in which they live.

The volume invites dialogue and debate on these important issues so that we, as mothers and as a culture, are able to fully comprehend and respond appropriately to such momentous changes. While in some instances these developments have been beneficial, in others they have been harmful; in any case, each set of outcomes requires new understandings of the experience and identity of mothering, and calls for new and innovative approaches to maternal agency and motherhood policy. While the changes examined here cannot be undone, it is my hope that this volume will enable us to better appreciate and respond to these developments by situating maternal experience, identity, policy, and agency in an explicitly twenty-first-century context.

Experience

In her ground-breaking book Maternal Thinking (1989), Sara Ruddick, the first motherhood scholar to theorize the experience of mothering as opposed to the institution of motherhood, argues that mothering is a practice. "Practices," explains Ruddick, "are collective human activities distinguished by the aims that identity them and by the consequent demands made on practitioners committed to those aims" (1989:13--14). To engage in maternal practice, Ruddick continues, is "to ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0231149670
• ISBN 13: 9780231149679
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 408
• Editor: O'Reilly Andrea