Discover a comprehensive guide to motherhood with "The Mothercraft Manual." From prenatal care to parenting advice, this invaluable resource covers all aspects of raising a child. Gain insights into nurturing, child development, and maintaining a healthy balance as a mother.
Recent revelations of child abuse have highlighted the need for understanding the historical background to current attitudes towards child health and welfare. In the Name of the Child explores a variety of professional, social, political and cultural constructions of the child in the decades around the First World War. It describes how medical and welfare initiatives in the name of the child were shaped and how changes in medical and welfare provisions were closely allied to political and ideological interests.
In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, motherhood in Canada, as elsewhere in the western world, became contested terrain. Male medical practitioners vied with midwives, and midwives with nurses, while reform-minded middle-class women joined with the eugenically minded state officials in efforts to control the quantity and quality of the population. As reproduction gained in importance as a political as well as a religious issue, motherhood became the centre of debate over public health and welfare policies and formed the cornerstone of feminist and anti-feminist, as well as nationalist and pacifist ideologies. Originally published in 1990, Delivering Motherhood (now with a new preface by Katherine Arnup) is the first comprehensive study on the history of this complex development in Canada, where control over the different stages of reproduction, from conception, to delivery, to childcare, shifted from the central figure of the mother to experts and professionals. The contributions range from the treatment of single mothers in Montreal in the Depression to La Leche League in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. This book will be an essential read for students and researchers of women’s studies, feminist studies, women’s history, and sociology.
The period between World War I and World War II was an important time in the history of gender relations, and of American fatherhood. Revealing the surprising extent to which some of yesterday's fathers were involved with their children, The Modernization of Fatherhood recounts how fatherhood was reshaped during the Machine Age into the configuration we know today. LaRossa explains that during the interwar period the image of the father as economic provider, pal, and male role model, all in one, became institutionalized. Using personal letters and popular magazine and newspaper sources, he explores how the social and economic conditions of the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression—a period of technical innovation as well as economic hardship—fused these expectations into a cultural ideal. With chapters on the U.S. Children's Bureau, the fathercraft movement, the magazine industry and the development of Parent's Magazine, and the creation of Father's Day, this book is a major addition to the growing literature on masculinity and fatherhood.