Maternalism Reconsidered
Maternalism Reconsidered

Author: Marian van der Klein

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 0857454668

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Beginning in the late 19th century, competing ideas about motherhood had a profound impact on the development and implementation of social welfare policies. Calls for programmes aimed at assisting and directing mothers emanated from all quarters of the globe, advanced by states and voluntary organizations, liberals and conservatives, feminists and anti-feminists - a phenomenon that scholars have since termed 'maternalism'. This volume reassesses maternalism by providing critical reflections on prior usages of the concept, and by expanding its meaning to encompass geographical areas, political regimes and cultural concerns that scholars have rarely addressed. From Argentina, Brazil and Mexico City to France, Italy, the Netherlands, the Soviet Ukraine, the United States and Canada, these case studies offer fresh theoretical and historical perspectives within a transnational and comparative framework. As a whole, the volume demonstrates how maternalist ideologies have been employed by state actors, reformers and poor clients, with myriad political and social ramifications.

Mom
Mom

Author: Rebecca Jo Plant

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-03-15

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0226670236

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In the early twentieth century, Americans often waxed lyrical about “Mother Love,” signaling a conception of motherhood as an all-encompassing identity, rooted in self-sacrifice and infused with social and political meaning. By the 1940s, the idealization of motherhood had waned, and the nation’s mothers found themselves blamed for a host of societal and psychological ills. In Mom, Rebecca Jo Plant traces this important shift by exploring the evolution of maternalist politics, changing perceptions of the mother-child bond, and the rise of new approaches to childbirth pain and suffering. Plant argues that the assault on sentimental motherhood came from numerous quarters. Male critics who railed against female moral authority, psychological experts who hoped to expand their influence, and women who strove to be more than wives and mothers—all for their own distinct reasons—sought to discredit the longstanding maternal ideal. By showing how motherhood ultimately came to be redefined as a more private and partial component of female identity, Plant illuminates a major reorientation in American civic, social, and familial life that still reverberates today.

The Gold Star Mother Pilgrimages of the 1930s
The Gold Star Mother Pilgrimages of the 1930s

Author: John W. Graham

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2015-03-14

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 078649199X

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During the first World War, a flag with a gold star identified families who had lost soldiers. Grieving women were "Gold Star" mothers and widows. Between 1930 and 1933, the United States government took 6,654 Gold Star pilgrims to visit their sons' and husbands' graves in American cemeteries in Belgium, England, and France. Veteran Army officers acted as tour guides, helping women come to terms with their losses as they sought solace and closure. The government meticulously planned and paid for everything from transportation and lodging to menus, tips, sightseeing, and interpreters. Flowered wreaths, flags, and camp chairs were provided at the cemeteries, and official photographers captured each woman standing at her loved one's grave. This work covers the Gold Star pilgrimages from their launch to the present day, beginning with an introduction to the war and wartime burial. Subsequent topics include the legislative struggle and evolution of the pilgrimage bill; personal pilgrimages, including that of the parents of poet Joyce Kilmer; the role of the Quartermaster Corps; the segregation controversy; a close examination of the first group to travel, Party A of May 1930; and the results of the pilgrimage experience as described by participants, observers, organizers, and scholars, researched through diaries, letters, scrapbooks, interviews, and newspaper accounts.

Hearings
Hearings

Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Military Affairs

Publisher:

Published: 1929

Total Pages: 1004

ISBN-13:

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Commemorations
Commemorations

Author: John R. Gillis

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0691186650

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Memory is as central to modern politics as politics is central to modern memory. We are so accustomed to living in a forest of monuments, to having the past represented to us through museums, historic sites, and public sculpture, that we easily lose sight of the recent origins and diverse meanings of these uniquely modern phenomena. In this volume, leading historians, anthropologists, and ethnographers explore the relationship between collective memory and national identity in diverse cultures throughout history. Placing commemorations in their historical settings, the contributors disclose the contested nature of these monuments by showing how groups and individuals struggle to shape the past to their own ends. The volume is introduced by John Gillis's broad overview of the development of public memory in relation to the history of the nation-state. Other contributions address the usefulness of identity as a cross-cultural concept (Richard Handler), the connection between identity, heritage, and history (David Lowenthal), national memory in early modern England (David Cressy), commemoration in Cleveland (John Bodnar), the museum and the politics of social control in modern Iraq (Eric Davis), invented tradition and collective memory in Israel (Yael Zerubavel), black emancipation and the civil war monument (Kirk Savage), memory and naming in the Great War (Thomas Laqueur), American commemoration of World War I (Kurt Piehler), art, commerce, and the production of memory in France after World War I (Daniel Sherman), historic preservation in twentieth-century Germany (Rudy Koshar), the struggle over French identity in the early twentieth century (Herman Lebovics), and the commemoration of concentration camps in the new Germany (Claudia Koonz).