Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)

Eleff, Leanne Ralya

Trethewey, Angela

English

The Enterprising Parent: A Critical Examination of Parenting, Consumption and Identity

About the Front Cover

Rusch-Drutz, Corinne

Performing the Good Mother: Maternal Identity, Professional Persona and Theatre Practice

Lander, Dorothy Agnes

Book Reviews 
anti-abortion moral absolutism was replaced by considerations of the complex 
realities of abortion, and increasing press space was given to a reproductive 
rights discourse. Smyth's analysis of the parliamentary debate surrounding the 
"X case" and subsequent official responses to it reveals, however, an official 
reframing of abortion as a medical issue distinct from a moral/religious issue, 
and a political failure to engage with more complex understandings of abortion. 
Within this context, the reproductive rights discourse, which gained ground 
following the 'X case," became marginalized as pro-abortion groups adopted 
the pragmatic strategy of arguing on the basis of women's needs for medical 
services as distinct from their right to make choices. 
The outcome of this reframing of abortion was evidenced in the publica- 
tion of the Protection of Human Life in Pregnancy Bill in 2002. This proposed 
legislation allowed for abortion in the case of risk to a woman's life, rather than 
risk of self-destruction. A constitutional referendum reflecting this proposed 
legislation was rejected by a majority of less than one per cent in March 2002. 
Thus, after two decades of debate, a woman's right to abortion in Ireland exists 
only in the context of a serious medical threat to her life. 
Smyth concludes that the various framings of abortion politics in Ireland 
since 1983 reflect an ongoing connection between abortion access and a politics 
of nationhood. Her reading of official responses to abortion-as a struggle to 
maintain a distinctive national identity while simultaneously meeting the 
standard of rights and compassion expected of a modern democratic nation- 
state-is original and exciting. Chapter One, which deals with the history of 
Irish abortion politics, and chapter two, which reviews feminist positions on 
abortion, are especially accessible to a general audience and could be read on a 
stand-alone basis. Overall, this work makes a valuable contribution to the 
existing body of material on abortion in Ireland and will engage readers 
interested in abortion, politics, sociology, or cultural studies. 
A Lot to Learn 
Girls, Women and Education in the 20th Century 
Helen Jefferson LenskyJ 
Toronto: Women's Press, 2005 
Reviewed by Dorothy Lander 
The appeal of this book, which author Helen Jefferson Lenskyj reveals on the 
first page of her Introduction, is its blend of biography and autobiography 
written as social history, and the opportunities it offers for comparing Lenskyj's 
mother's life and education with her own, and for comparing Australian and 
Canadian contexts of schooling and educational activism, especially anti- 
372 1 Volume 8, Numbers 1,2 
Book Reviews 
homophobic activism. I wonder why Lenskyj waited until the last sentence of 
her book to tell the reader that the title, which references Lenskyj's commit- 
ment to anti-oppression teaching, is inspired by her mother' phrase, 'We have 
a lot to learn" (165). 
Lenskyj identifies many of the feminist, historical, and auto/biographi- 
cal works that inspired her book project of retrospective adult memories and 
revisionist feminist life histories. Like Carolyn Steedman, one of the authors 
who inspired her, Helen Lensky) explores both her mother's history and her 
own through contemporary theories of the lives of working-class people. 
Lenskyj delivers on her declared task of interpreting her mother's story and her 
own story through the sociological lens of women's history and education, 
community activism, and feminist pedagogy. She does not accomplish (to my 
satisfaction) the integrative and comparative links between social contexts-for 
example, public education in early twentieth-century private schools in Sydney, 
Australia in the 1950s; parent activism in 1970s Toronto; and, the feminist 
activist community in Toronto from the 1980s to the present day. On the basis 
of the Introduction, I expected Lensky) to make strong generational compari- 
sons of mother-daughter life histories. Yet Lenskyl's chapter-by-chapter 
narratives from each of these social contexts could stand alone as exemplars of 
individual life histories and feminist pedagogy. 
In chapter one, formal education plays a relatively small part in her 
mother's life history; for example, her elementary education occupies about two 
pages and offers little by way ofpersonal stories of the experience of this "free" 
and compulsory education for children aged six to fourteen in Australia in the 
early twentieth century. By contrast, her mother's informal education is a richly 
storied account that includes growing up in poverty, early training in thrifty 
household management under her grandmother's tutelage, her working life, 
and her life as a married woman and mother. Chapters two and three focus on 
Lensb 's  formal education at Australia's ~ambala~oundat ion,  a private school 
for girls. Given Lenskyl's choice of life history as her methodology, why are so 
many of her accounts of her teachers, including headmistress Miss Fifi 
Hawthorne, drawn from secondary sources? Lensky) 'S vivid accounts of friend- 
ships with Kambala girls and sexual identity dilemmas, in which she was 
attracted to a girl in her class and subsequently to her teacher, anticipates her 
life history as an activist-educator in part two. She tells how she visited this 
teacher and her partner some 40 years later; the collapsed time frame anticipates 
her lesbian-feminist activism focused on curriculum transformation and anti- 
homophobia education from the perspective of a mother with young children 
inToronto public schools and as an instructor in women's studies at the Ontario 
Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. These earlier 
chapters illuminate both the formal and informal systems of learning one's 
station in life in the context ofone's formal education, imbricated with religion, 
gender, and sexuality, including "heterosexual hegemony" (67). I found myself 
trying to make comparative links with her mother's family history and informal 
Journal ofthe Association for Research on Mothering 1 373 
Book Reviews 
education. The influence of mother and grandmother, for example, so central 
to her mother's life history, is conspicuously absent from Lenskyj's life history. 
The tone and writing style change in part two as Lenskyj interlaces life 
history with increasingly academic discourses of feminist pedagogy, diversity, 
positionality, and anti-oppression. As a university distance education teacher, 
I also have learned to declare my "subject position" (156)-White, middle- 
class, heterosexual woman in my case-and I appreciated Lenskyj's personal 
positioning that introduces her stories of the promise and perils of confronting 
questions of difference (race, ethnicity, sexuality) in the context of teaching 
women's studies by teleconferencing. Her final reflections emphasize diversity 
issues in the present education of girls and women in Australia and Canada, 
without specific reference to her own or her mother's life histories. 
I was disappointed that Lenskyj did not take up the life history focus that 
she promised in her Introduction and integrate her mother's life history with 
her own through the theoretical lens that is prominent in part two. It occurred 
to me that an academic analysis of difference on the basis ofthe subject position 
of "mother" would have effectively integrated the experiential and theoretical 
dimensions of this book and the distinctive tones of the two parts, allowing a 
tighter weave of the mother-daughter life histories that purport to be at the 
centre of this book. 
Spirituality in the Mother Zone 
Staying Centered, Finding God 
Trudelle Thomas 
New York: Paulist Press, 2005 
Reviewed by Colleen Carpenter Cullinan 
Trudelle Thomas opens her powerful and wonderfully practical book with an 
anecdote instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever tried to balance a 
desperate and sincere desire for prayer time with the far more worldly demands 
of awiggling preschooler. As her readers will no doubt know, there are no good 
solutions to that conflict, and the frustration and resentment it engenders are 
not exactly conducive to anything approaching a joyful, peaceful, blisshlly 
transcendent worship experience. Yet as Thomas points out, despite such 
conflicts, becoming a mother leads many women to a "deeper, more passionate 
fai th (3)-just not one that can be contained in the structures of most 
Christian churches. And it is not just worship time that is often child- 
unfriendly and mother-unfriendly, Thomas argues, but more basically the 
theology and spirituality of traditional Christianity. 
374 / Volume 8, Numbers l , Z  


A Lot to Learn: Girls, Women and Education in the 20th Century

Contributor Notes

Cullinan, Colleen Carpenter

Book Reviews 
education. The influence of mother and grandmother, for example, so central 
to her mother's life history, is conspicuously absent from Lenskyj's life history. 
The tone and writing style change in part two as Lenskyj interlaces life 
history with increasingly academic discourses of feminist pedagogy, diversity, 
positionality, and anti-oppression. As a university distance education teacher, 
I also have learned to declare my "subject position" (156)-White, middle- 
class, heterosexual woman in my case-and I appreciated Lenskyj's personal 
positioning that introduces her stories of the promise and perils of confronting 
questions of difference (race, ethnicity, sexuality) in the context of teaching 
women's studies by teleconferencing. Her final reflections emphasize diversity 
issues in the present education of girls and women in Australia and Canada, 
without specific reference to her own or her mother's life histories. 
I was disappointed that Lenskyj did not take up the life history focus that 
she promised in her Introduction and integrate her mother's life history with 
her own through the theoretical lens that is prominent in part two. It occurred 
to me that an academic analysis of difference on the basis ofthe subject position 
of "mother" would have effectively integrated the experiential and theoretical 
dimensions of this book and the distinctive tones of the two parts, allowing a 
tighter weave of the mother-daughter life histories that purport to be at the 
centre of this book. 
Spirituality in the Mother Zone 
Staying Centered, Finding God 
Trudelle Thomas 
New York: Paulist Press, 2005 
Reviewed by Colleen Carpenter Cullinan 
Trudelle Thomas opens her powerful and wonderfully practical book with an 
anecdote instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever tried to balance a 
desperate and sincere desire for prayer time with the far more worldly demands 
of awiggling preschooler. As her readers will no doubt know, there are no good 
solutions to that conflict, and the frustration and resentment it engenders are 
not exactly conducive to anything approaching a joyful, peaceful, blisshlly 
transcendent worship experience. Yet as Thomas points out, despite such 
conflicts, becoming a mother leads many women to a "deeper, more passionate 
fai th (3)-just not one that can be contained in the structures of most 
Christian churches. And it is not just worship time that is often child- 
unfriendly and mother-unfriendly, Thomas argues, but more basically the 
theology and spirituality of traditional Christianity. 
374 / Volume 8, Numbers l , Z  
Book Reviews 
Luckily for Thomas, she was introduced early in her mothering to the 
writings of Elizabeth Johnson, a Catholic feminist theologian whose magiste- 
rial She Who Is: The Mystery $God in Feminist TheologicalDiscourse is a brilliant 
corrective to patriarchal understandings of Christian faith that are almost 
entirely inaccessible to "the tired mother who craves spiritual food but must 
squeeze reading time between packing lunches and late night runs to the 
convenience store for milk" (4). Johnson's book enabled Thomas to see the 
connections between her faith and her mothering, between the bodies and 
bloodiness that had suddenly become an everyday reality for her, when the 
Body and Blood of Christ that had nourished her for so long suddenly seemed 
painfully out ofreach. With the help ofJohnson's insights and thewise and kind 
presence of Sister Miriam, an elderly nun (and the mentor we all dream of), 
Thomas struggled through the enormous changes in faith and practice that 
accompany the major life crisis called matrescence, or becoming a mother for 
the first time (27). Her reflections on that difficult and amazingjourney are the 
heart of her book. 
Thomas's book is divided into three sections: "Beginnings," which deals 
with the crisis of matrescence and the dangers women face navigating this 
major life change; "Clashes," which looks at the conflicts between (patriarchal) 
social expectations and the lived reality of mothers and children; and "Imagin- 
ing a Different Future," in which Thomas both envisions a new environment 
in which to raise children and helps it come into being through reflections on 
new (female) images of God, spiritual practices that make sense for mothers 
and children instead of celibate males in community, and her hopes for child- 
and mother-friendly churches. Each section is rooted in her own experience, 
deeply practical in terms of what other mothers and mothers-to-be can take 
away for their own lives, and filled with spiritual wisdom. Finally, the bibliog- 
raphy at the end is an absolute treasure trove for both mothers and scholars 
interested in the connections between women's spirituality and mothers' lived 
experience. 
Spirituality is a relatively new field of study in the academy; it is neither the 
study of religion nor the study of theology, and its methods and subject matter 
do not line up easily with its nearest scholarly relatives. Thomas's central 
academic contribution here is the precise and beautiful way she has integrated 
the often social-scientific study of motherhood today with cutting-edge 
theological work on God-language, gender (human and divine), ecclesiology, 
ethics, and liturgy. I highly recommend her work for women's studies courses, 
women and religion classes, courses in contemporary spirituality-and church- 
based women's book groups. Spiritualiq in the Mother Zone would also make 
an outstanding gift for any mother, church-going or not, who is struggling to 
connect the day-to-day busy-ness of her life with something she identifies as 
Meaning, Mystery, or Spiritual Truth. It  is invaluable both as reassurance to 
mothers who feel alone in their struggles, and as a rich theological reflection on 
mothers, motherhood, and the bodiliness of human living. 
Journal ofthe Associationfor Research on Mothering 1 375 


Spirituality in the Mother Zone: Staying Centered, Finding God

Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering Summer/Winter 2006, Vol 8, No 1/2, 416 pages

Fisher-Wirth, Ann

Blesser: (Fr.) To Wound, to Hurt; 
to Offend, to Injure; to Wring, 
to Shock, to Gall 
If t o  wound is t o  bless they are blessed, 
Trinket and Celeste, these two drunk, aging floozies- 
one needs makeup to look aging and the other, 
the desperate courage of aging to play a floozy- 
they are blessed as they kneel there with the gallon 
jug of Tokay, the crystal wine decanter, and their 
loss-induced vision of the Mary. Oh  I know 
it's false etymology but think about it: doesn't what 
brings you to your knees @-punched, or makes you 
sit on the toilet as your lover lies sleeping 
and scratch bright welts along your thighs 
with the paring knife, the fingernail scissors, 
or drops you fetal to the forest floor because you've 
run so far away from home, sobbing mother, father, 
help me-doesn't the day you stand in the empty house 
of the family you destroyed, sent your children 
like dandelion seedpods spinning off into the golden 
canyons of grief far beyond their small as yet imaginings- 
doesn't even this somehow bless them, bless you? 
Hard to speak of, even now. You will pray the kind 
earth to swallow you. 
Ah, but the god doesn't care. 
Trinket turns to the Virgin when the bright one 
spurns her. As for you- 
that long-ago April you kindled like leaf fire. 
Journal ofthe Association for Research on Mothering 1 347 
Mount Pleasant Cemetay, Toronto. Photo: Joe Paczuski 
348 / Volume 8, Numbers l,2 


Blesser. (Fr) To Wound, To Hurt; to Offend, to Injure; to Wring, to Shock, to Gall

Verbian, Channa

White Birth Mothers of Black/White Biracial Children: Addressing Racialized Discourses in Feminist and Multicultural Literature

Gosselin, Cheryl

Maternal Commitments to the Nation: Maternalist Groups at Work in Quebec: 194501960