2004 Mothers Day Campaign:
Mothers - The Real Story
Reading List
The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, 2004. In the idealized myth, mothers and babies spend their days discovering the wonders of life, reading, playing and laughing. In real life, however, it's a different story. Using ample humor, Douglas and Smith College philosophy professor Michaels, "mothers with an attitude problem," blow the lid off "new momism," "a set of ideals ... that seem on the surface to celebrate motherhood, but which in reality promulgate standards of perfection that are beyond [a mother's] reach." The authors examine the past 30 years of television, radio, movies, magazines and advertising to show that the bar has been increasingly raised for "the standards of good motherhood."
Read an excerpt
Susan Douglas' Book Tour Schedule
Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life : Or How I Learned to Love the House, the Man, the Child by Faulkner Fox, 2004. In Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life, her provocative, brutally honest, and often hilarious memoir of motherhood, Faulkner explores the causes of her unhappiness, as well as the societal and cultural forces that American mothers have to contend with.
Faulkner Fox's Book Tour Schedule
Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-Changed World by Peggy Orenstein, 2001. Orenstein offers insight into the lives of women who have grown up with an unprecedented sense of possibilities yet battling traditional expectations. Interviews with hundreds of women show how women navigate the opportunities and constraints of their personal and professional lives and come up with unique models for a fulfilling life.
The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Our Lives and Why We Never Talk about It by Susan Maushart, 2000. Maushart investigates the personal, psychological and practical conflicts women commonly experience when they enter the realm of motherhood.
Mothers & More FORUM interview with Maushart
Mother Shock: Loving Every (Other) Minute of It by Andrea J. Buchanan, 2003. Buchanan details the unimaginably difficult and unbelievably rewarding process of becoming a mother. Spanning the first three years of her daughter's life, these amusing ruminations on mothering will strike a chord with every new mother.
Mother Shock website
A Potent Spell: Mother Love and the Power of Fear by Janna Malamud Smith, 2003. Using references that include classic literature, historic sources, recent academic research and personal interviews, the author demonstrates a strong link between cultural ideologies that limit women’s social and political power and the manipulation of mothers’ sense of emotional attachment to their children. Smith, a psychologist, accurately and eloquently describes the invisible, mental work that places a constant burden of responsibility on contemporary mothers.
The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz, 2000 (second edition). Coontz, a work-family researcher, dispels cultural myths about the norms of "ideal" family life.
Click here to go to the full Mothers & More reading list.
|
