The Maternal Experience
The Maternal Experience

Author: Margo Lowy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-29

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1000282457

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The Maternal Experience explores the powerful and dynamic nature of maternal ambivalence and disrupts the conventional narrative of the mother’s lived experience by arguing that encounters with feelings of hatred are both universal and have the capacity to stimulate and enrich her maternal love. The book draws on the author’s personal mothering experiences, those of other women, and examples from film to inspire new introspection about the everyday maternal experience. Lowy takes a psychosocial approach to weave thinking from selected psychoanalytic and contemporary accounts together with personal stories to explore how maternal ambivalence operates, and how mothering is sourced in psychic struggles between loving and hating feelings in an atmosphere that is rife with social and personal expectations and prohibitions. By reworking the experience of maternal ambivalence, the book secures an understanding of the mother’s feelings of hatred as a catalyst for her love and allows these maligned and taboo emotions to be named and reframed into acceptable and transformative feelings. Brought alive by examples from film and first-hand experience, this book is fascinating reading for academics and students of psychology, maternal and women’s studies, and sociology, as well as practitioners in the fields of psychology, social work, medicine and counselling.

Maternal Bodies
Maternal Bodies

Author: Nora Doyle

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2018-03-19

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1469637200

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In the second half of the eighteenth century, motherhood came to be viewed as women's most important social role, and the figure of the good mother was celebrated as a moral force in American society. Nora Doyle shows that depictions of motherhood in American culture began to define the ideal mother by her emotional and spiritual roles rather than by her physical work as a mother. As a result of this new vision, lower-class women and non-white women came to be excluded from the identity of the good mother because American culture defined them in terms of their physical labor. However, Doyle also shows that childbearing women contradicted the ideal of the disembodied mother in their personal accounts and instead perceived motherhood as fundamentally defined by the work of their bodies. Enslaved women were keenly aware that their reproductive bodies carried a literal price, while middle-class and elite white women dwelled on the physical sensations of childbearing and childrearing. Thus motherhood in this period was marked by tension between the lived experience of the maternal body and the increasingly ethereal vision of the ideal mother that permeated American print culture.

Birth Settings in America
Birth Settings in America

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2020-05-01

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0309669820

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The delivery of high quality and equitable care for both mothers and newborns is complex and requires efforts across many sectors. The United States spends more on childbirth than any other country in the world, yet outcomes are worse than other high-resource countries, and even worse for Black and Native American women. There are a variety of factors that influence childbirth, including social determinants such as income, educational levels, access to care, financing, transportation, structural racism and geographic variability in birth settings. It is important to reevaluate the United States' approach to maternal and newborn care through the lens of these factors across multiple disciplines. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice reviews and evaluates maternal and newborn care in the United States, the epidemiology of social and clinical risks in pregnancy and childbirth, birth settings research, and access to and choice of birth settings.

Torn in Two
Torn in Two

Author: Rozsika Parker

Publisher: Virago Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9781844081714

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Can the coexistence of love and hate actually stimulate and sharpen a mother's awareness of what is going on between her and her child? Reversing the conventional psychoanalytic approach, in which maternal ambivalence has been chiefly understood from the point of view of the child, this book gives precedence to the mother's perspective. Rozsika Parker draws on interviews with mothers, clinical material from her practice as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and a range of literary and popular sources, to create a powerful exploration of maternal ambivalence in a culture painfully and profoundly uneasy at its very existence. Original and accessible, with new readings of the work of Klein, Winnicoot, Bowlby and others, Torn in Two will enrich and change our thinking about mothering.

Little Black Breastfeeding Book
Little Black Breastfeeding Book

Author: Jacqueline Lois

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation

Published: 2012-05-02

Total Pages: 54

ISBN-13: 1469172879

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The Little Black Breastfeeding Book is a small reference book that arms women with the emotional tools they will need to nurse their babies through the first year of life. The title is a bit of a play on words as it is small in size and it is black in cover, but it also is directed toward black women as it shares the authors story as a black woman who has breastfed her children and who would like to see more black women do the same. The book in interactive fashion asks a series of questions that a midwife might use to assess readiness to breastfeed. The author intentionally hopes to create a dialogue in small groups of women that will garner support for nursing their babies and delaying weaning. The author sees breastfeeding as an extension of the bond formed between mother and baby during pregnancy. Clearly, prematurity; little or no breastfeeding, early weaning and early and frequent separations between mothers and babies are seen as related plagues on the community and perhaps more importantly as damaging to the health and well-being of the mother. The book also takes a departure from most how-to books targeted for women during pregnancy and uses an interactive format to list what she believes are the most common reasons why mothers fail to nurse their infants and what she believes are the keys to a successful maternal experience of breastfeeding. There will certainly be some controversy as she challenges commonly held beliefs about sleeping with your infant and advice on weaning and the importance of resolving spiritual and emotional issues in parenting. Some may also find the focus on intellectual and emotional issues a welcome departure from many baby books you may receive at your baby shower. The book lists the more common reasons black women dont breastfeed their infants as well as listing what she believes will allow women to succeed at nursing. In a clever way she invites the reader to look inward and to answer those same questions for herself.

The Maternal in Creative Work
The Maternal in Creative Work

Author: Elena Marchevska

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-12-11

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1351209825

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The Maternal in Creative Work examines the interrelation between art, creativity and maternal experience, inviting international artists, theorists and cultural workers to discuss their approaches to the central feminist question of the relation between maternity, generation and creativity. This edited collection explores various modes and forms of art practice which look at mothers as subjects and as artists of the maternal experience, and how the creative practice is used to accept, negotiate, resist or challenge traditional conceptions of mothering. The book brings together some of the major projects of maternal art from the last two decades and opens up new ways of conceptualizing motherhood as a creative and communicative practice. Chapters include intergenerational discussion of art practices in the 20th and 21st centuries, representations of breastfeeding and infertility in creative projects, the notion of the ‘unfit mother’ and childlessness, together with the experiences of women and men that take on maternal identities through many forms of kinship and social mothering. The Maternal in Creative Work will be essential reading for interdisciplinary students and scholars in cultural studies, gender studies and art theory and will have wider appeal to audiences interested in maternity, childcare, creativity and psychoanalysis.

Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity
Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity

Author: Alison Stone

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-03-01

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1136593519

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In this book, Alison Stone develops a feminist approach to maternal subjectivity. Stone argues that in the West the self has often been understood in opposition to the maternal body, so that one must separate oneself from the mother and maternal care-givers on whom one depended in childhood to become a self or, in modernity, an autonomous subject. These assumptions make it difficult to be a mother and a subject, an autonomous creator of meaning. Insofar as mothers nonetheless strive to regain their subjectivity when their motherhood seems to have compromised it, theirs cannot be the usual kind of subjectivity premised on separation from the maternal body. Mothers are subjects of a new kind, who generate meanings and acquire agency from their position of re-immersion in the realm of maternal body relations, of bodily intimacy and dependency. Thus Stone interprets maternal subjectivity as a specific form of subjectivity that is continuous with the maternal body. Stone analyzes this form of subjectivity in terms of how the mother typically reproduces with her child her history of bodily relations with her own mother, leading to a distinctive maternal and cyclical form of lived time.

Fatness and the Maternal Body
Fatness and the Maternal Body

Author: Maya Unnithan-Kumar

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2011-07-01

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0857451235

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Obesity is a rising global health problem. On the one hand a clearly defined medical condition, it is at the same time a corporeal state embedded in the social and cultural perception of fatness, body shape and size. Focusing specifically on the maternal body, contributors to the volume examine how the language and notions of obesity connect with, or stand apart from, wider societal values and moralities to do with the body, fatness, reproduction and what is considered ‘natural’. A focus on fatness in the context of human reproduction and motherhood offers instructive insights into the global circulation and authority of biomedical facts on fatness (as ‘risky’ anti-fit, for example). As with other social and cultural studies critical of health policy discourse, this volume challenges the spontaneous connection being made in scientific and popular understanding between fatness and ill health.

An Arts Therapeutic Approach to Maternal Holding
An Arts Therapeutic Approach to Maternal Holding

Author: Ariel Moy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-08-08

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1000414639

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Little research has explored the everyday, simple and long-term experience of maternal holding, particularly after the first year of a child’s life. The research that has been undertaken commonly examines holding through the lens of attachment with a focus on the impact of holding upon the child. Employing an arts-based collaborative inquiry approach, participants’ stories of holding, as well as the author’s own, convey the significant maternal experiences of holding their children over individual arts therapeutic sessions. Optimal moments of holding included strange, powerful and meaningful experiences of expansion into self-in-relationship. Attention is drawn to the ways in which holding can alert us to the current state of mother/child relationships; how we understand, story and structure those relationships; and the ways in which we can attend to holding in order to develop deeply satisfying experiences of a mother/child ‘us’. An Arts Therapeutic Approach to Maternal Holding aims to draw attention to the intersubjective qualities of the mother/child relationship, explore why holding matters, and offer suggestions for therapeutic practice. This book is essential reading for therapeutic practitioners and those in allied health fields who work with mothers and children.