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

Turnbull, Lorna A.

English

How does the Law Recognize Work?

Editorial Masthead

Westfall, Rachel

Book Reviews 
professions in Canada and recognizes that "reproduction was (and is) in part 
socially constructed and that it tells us much about the culture in which it 
occurred" (7). She seeks to analyze "the structure of medicine rather than the 
motivation of individual physicians" (10), and to identify and elucidate the ways 
in which "medical practitioners examined issues, saw problems, and described 
what they did" (10). Through incisive analysis, Mitchinson records the history 
of childbirth in Canada. 
Mitchinson situates women and obstetric practice in historical context 
and describes how women in childbirth were treated by physicians. Her data 
includes document analysis and interviews with women who gave birth and 
the physicians who practiced in the first half of the twentieth century. 
Although Mitchinson recognizes that the women and their physicians were 
unequal in power, she reminds the reader that women were not without 
agency. Women regularly did not comply with the medical view that prenatal 
visits were necessary, and often they sought information from experts other 
than their physicians. Mitchinson attributes women's resourcefulness to the 
exigencies of their responsibilities. Moreover, as physicians were subject to 
legal and normative constraints, neither were they completely autonomous. 
Yet it was women's organizations, Mitchinson tells us, that favoured 
medicalized childbirth as it represented safety in the face of high maternal 
mortality during the first forty years of the twentieth century. Awed by 
modern medicine rather than individual physicians, women sought the rela- 
tive safety offered by modern obstetrics. 
Giving Birth in Canada is accessible and thoroughly researched. In linking 
childbirth as experience with the medical profession as institution, Mitchinson's 
historical account provides fertile ground for what C. W. Mills calls the socio- 
logical imagination, a place where biography and history meet. 
Nursing Mother, Working Mother: 
The Essential Guide for Breastfeeding and 
Staying Close to Your Baby After You Return to 
Work 
Gale Pryor 
Boston: Harvard Common Press, 1997 
Reviewed by Rachel Westfall 
Nursing Mother, Working Mother reminds readers that breastfeeding is the 
healthiest, simplest, and most economical way to nourish a baby. In Western 
societies, many women take time off from their careers to give birth, and must 
soon find a balance between mothering and work. Through confession and 
Journal ofthe Association for Research on Mothering 203 
Book Reviews 
conversation, Gale Pryor-herself a working mother--makes a case for con- 
tinuing to breastfeed after returning to work. She describes the health benefits 
ofbreast milk and identifies its unique qualities, but the underlying message of 
this book is that breastfeeding reinforces the bond between mother and child 
after a hard day's work. This is in keeping with the "attachment parenting" 
philosophy that permeates the book. Pryor advocates baby-wearing and co- 
sleeping, two key elements of attachment parenting. She explains how to carry 
a baby in a sling and describes the benefits ofco-sleeping, although she neglects 
to give guidelines for safe CO-sleeping. 
Pryor presents breastfeeding and attachment parenting as tools for main- 
taining a secure relationship between mother and baby when they must be 
separated for hours each day. As she notes, mothers always have worked. In 
many other cultures, small children accompany their mothers as they work. 
What is unusual in our culture is that "we must be separated from our children 
while we work" (13). She describes the workplace with which she is most 
familiar-the world of business-and discusses the problems women face 
when trying to reconcile their pre-existing identities as professionals with their 
new identities as mothers. Pryor offers many practical solutions, such as visiting 
the office before returning to work to find a suitable place to pump breast milk. 
She briefly and inadequately describes manual expression of breast milk. She 
gives excellent advice, however, on how to use manual and automatic breast 
pumps, and how to store and handle breast milk 
Other tips in this book are as diverse as guidelines for choosing a daytime 
care provider for your child, and how to stop a let-down with your forearms to 
avoid having a wet shirt. The book offers the lay advice of one mother speaking 
to another. As is typical of lay advice, Pryor rarely ventures outside her own 
sphere of experience. In passing, she suggests the possibility of bringing one's 
baby to work, or having a care provider bring one's baby to work to be nursed. 
By no means comprehensive, this book speaks clearly and empathetically 
to the reader and empowers the working mother to maintain a breastfeeding 
relationship with her baby. Nursing Mother, Working Mother is a fine addition 
to the reading list of any new mother hoping to balance mothering and a 
professional or business career. 
A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother 
Rachel Cusk 
New York: Picador, 2002 
Reviewed by Jane Satterfield 
When she became a mother, prize-winning British novelist Rachel Cusk 
turned to nonfiction as an appropriate vehicle for cultural analysis. I nA  Life's 
Work, Cusk describes "the drama ofwhich childbirth is only the opening scene." 
204 / Volume 6, Number 1 


Nursing Mother, Working Mother: The Essential Guide for Breastfeeding and Staying Close to Your Baby After You Return to Work

Miller, Michelle Hughes

Witnessing Good Mothering: Experts and Expertise in Family Law Decisions

Davidson, Deborah

Book Reviews 
mockery of Daphne Merkin's contention that marriage is "the only practicable 
game in town for most of us." The Fat Lady, aka Natalie Kusz, is the foil to all - 
women who revel in their sexual capital. By virtue of her girth, she exists outside 
the economy of desire and, as such, is written out of the game. Her girth 
forecloses the kinds of choices and intimate connections available to so many 
ofHanauer7s other contributors. On the other hand, the fat lady can sing, as the 
title indicates: she is no longer just an object, a fat body taking up too much 
space, in other people's realities. Her writing voice, her very subjecthood, is a 
vital force. Indeed, despite an emotionally-deprived poverty-stricken chid- 
hood in Alaska, and the vicissitudes of very young teen-motherhood, she is 
economically self-sufficient and professionally successful, as her inclusion in 
this collection indicates. 
One of the limitations of this collection is the absence of lesbian voices, 
despite the fact that lesbians are increasingly invested in the family-making 
enterprise. In Vermont, they can marry. Many are choosing to reproduce. 
Many are deeply embedded in the family versus work dynamic and their family 
arrangements model for the rest of us a more equitable division of domestic 
labour. The book is not about otherness, however; it is about heterosexuals, 
normative types within the professional class, the placeholder for the former 
angel of the house. I t  offers up a collective computing of the costs and benefits 
of feminism for this professional, highly educated class of women. T o  be sure, 
while the volume clearly comes out on the side of the benefits, a generous dose 
oftherapy sessions appears, for some contributors, to be the flip side of choice. 
Angst aside, however, power over the future (over the re/production of the 
species, over family formation, over societal norms) has clearly shifted to these 
women. What they have sacrificed is time-for-self, but as Hanauer writes in her 
preface, she would choose her life again-the stresses ofhaving it all, love, kids, 
and career-in a heartbeat. 
Giving Birth in Canada, 1900-1950 
Wendy Mitchinson 
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002 
Reviewed by Deborah Davidson 
Historian Wendy Mitchinson's Giving Birth in Canada, 1900-1950 inspires 
the sociological imagination. Her book documents the history of giving birth 
in the first half of the twentieth century, a little examined period of childbirth 
history in Canada. During this time, childbirth-at home or in hospital-came 
under the increasing control of the medical professions. Mitchinson acknowl- 
edges feminist arguments that focus on the ill-effects of medicalization and the 
search for women's agency in childbirth. She focuses, however, on the medical 
202 1 Volume 6,  Number 1 
Book Reviews 
professions in Canada and recognizes that "reproduction was (and is) in part 
socially constructed and that it tells us much about the culture in which it 
occurred" (7). She seeks to analyze "the structure of medicine rather than the 
motivation of individual physicians" (10), and to identify and elucidate the ways 
in which "medical practitioners examined issues, saw problems, and described 
what they did" (10). Through incisive analysis, Mitchinson records the history 
of childbirth in Canada. 
Mitchinson situates women and obstetric practice in historical context 
and describes how women in childbirth were treated by physicians. Her data 
includes document analysis and interviews with women who gave birth and 
the physicians who practiced in the first half of the twentieth century. 
Although Mitchinson recognizes that the women and their physicians were 
unequal in power, she reminds the reader that women were not without 
agency. Women regularly did not comply with the medical view that prenatal 
visits were necessary, and often they sought information from experts other 
than their physicians. Mitchinson attributes women's resourcefulness to the 
exigencies of their responsibilities. Moreover, as physicians were subject to 
legal and normative constraints, neither were they completely autonomous. 
Yet it was women's organizations, Mitchinson tells us, that favoured 
medicalized childbirth as it represented safety in the face of high maternal 
mortality during the first forty years of the twentieth century. Awed by 
modern medicine rather than individual physicians, women sought the rela- 
tive safety offered by modern obstetrics. 
Giving Birth in Canada is accessible and thoroughly researched. In linking 
childbirth as experience with the medical profession as institution, Mitchinson's 
historical account provides fertile ground for what C. W. Mills calls the socio- 
logical imagination, a place where biography and history meet. 
Nursing Mother, Working Mother: 
The Essential Guide for Breastfeeding and 
Staying Close to Your Baby After You Return to 
Work 
Gale Pryor 
Boston: Harvard Common Press, 1997 
Reviewed by Rachel Westfall 
Nursing Mother, Working Mother reminds readers that breastfeeding is the 
healthiest, simplest, and most economical way to nourish a baby. In Western 
societies, many women take time off from their careers to give birth, and must 
soon find a balance between mothering and work. Through confession and 
Journal ofthe Association for Research on Mothering 203 


Giving Birth in Canada, 1900-1950

Contributor Notes

Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering
Fall/Winter 2004, Vol 6, No 2, 212 pages

Gombay, Brydon

Book Reviews 
Mothers, Young People and Chronic Illness 
Clare Williams 
Burlington: Ashgate, 2002 
Reviewed by Brydon Gombay 
Mothers, Young People and Chronic Illness reads too much like the doctoral 
dissertation on which it is based. Few concessions have been made to non- 
academic readers, although parents of adolescents with diabetes or asthma will 
find much of interest here, as will health care professionals who recognize the 
need to respect the coping mechanisms of young diabetics, asthmatics, and 
their mothers. 
For this study, author Clare Williams interviewed people between the ages 
of 15 and 18,20 with diabetes and 20 with asthma (ten males and ten females 
in each group), as well as their mothers. In one case she interviewed a father who 
was responsible for the care of his daughter. Wiams ' s  conclusions cast light 
on the ways in which chronic health conditions during adolescence are 
gendered and how health affects gender development. In addition, she shows 
how the socialization of mothers of diabetics and asthmatics reinforce the 
stereotypical expectations of motherhood which continue to pervade our 
culture. 
Adolescence is a time when peer approval is of primary importance to all 
young people, yet mothers continue to be blamed for non-compliance with 
medical regimens on the part of their children. Mothers also are blamed for 
"mollycoddling" their sons (there is an undertone here of homophobia on the 
part of health care professionals), and "nagging" their daughters (who feel 
constrained by their mothers' care). Ironically, encouraged to promote adoles- 
cent independence, mothers are blamed whenever illness erupts in the lives of 
their sons or daughters. 
Boys tend to hide their condition and ignore the extent to which their 
mothers play the role o f  alert assistant," enabling them to take part in the sports 
culture which is so important to their developing identities. Girls, however, 
soon take charge oftheir medical regimens and thereby spare their mothers that 
responsibility. Boys, who usually disregard their mothers' invisible interven- 
tions, often overestimate the extent to which they take responsibility for 
themselves. Although diet issues which form part of the diabetic regimen often 
lead to eating disorders, girls usually adapt by sharing their experiences and 
seeking help from friends. 
Chronic illness, with the medical visits and treatments it entails, dimin- 
ishes a mother's career options, except in the case of middle-class mothers who 
may enjoy flexible working conditions. Williams does not explain how single 
mothers deal with a child's chronic illness, although she describes the experi- 
Journal ofthe Associationfor Research on Mothering 1 207 
Book Reviews 
ences of four fathers (out of the 40 parents) who share in their children's care. 
Interestingly, she shows how health care professionals reinforce gender expec- 
tations by emphasizing mother and daughter competence in managing chronic 
illness. 
Parenting Your Parents: 
Support Strategies for Meeting the Challenges 
of Aging in the Family 
Bart Mindszenthy and Michael Gordon 
Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2002 
Reviewed by Sheila Martel 
The realistic vignettes included in Parenting Your Parents describe probable 
situations and offer resolutions for adult chidren (an unsatisfactory term) 
caring for aging parents. Among the family situations presented, many are 
neither easy nor do they end happily. Chapter three, for example, illustrates the 
need to carefully consider all ramifications of encouraging elderly parents to 
relocate. 
The book is enhanced by the authors' own stories of caring for elderly 
parents. A Personal Parenting Planner poses many key questions and a resource 
guide that follows is excellent. It offers a complete list of resources at both 
national and provincial levels. 
Elderly divorced parents are missing from the family compositions pre- 
sented. Certainly, our chidren will be dealing with elderly parents who are 
divorced, and who might live at great distances from one another. Moreover, 
differing viewpoints and attitudes toward the very issue of caring for elderly 
parents requires further discussion. Some adults simply will not accept respon- 
sibility for their elderly parents. This is undoubtedly rocky terrain for siblings 
who disagree over their individual and collective obligations toward their 
aging/ill parents. 
It would seem that reversing the roles-turning grown children into 
"parents"-is simplistic and unrealistic. Although the authors did not invent 
this paradigm, it begs reassessment. The authors recognize, for example, that 
the need to take time off from work can be costly to careers. (The issue of 
sacrificing career achievement and leisure time in order to care for loved ones 
is hardly new terrain for mothers, however.) Further, the book does not live up 
to the promise of its subtitle, Support Strategiesfor Meeting the Challenges of 
Aging in the Family, since explicit support for caregivers is not provided. 
Nonetheless, Mindszenthy and Gordon have succeeded in creating a reader- 
friendly primer for parent care. Parenting Your Parents is an excellent starting 
point for those beginning to undertake this important and complicatedjourney. 
208 1 Volume 6, Number 1 


Mothers, Young People and Chronic Illness

Scott, Jill

Book Reviews 
While the preface speaks of the fear and uncertainty involved in surviving 
cancer, and the introduction by Carrie Fisher speaks of the tensions, flamma- 
bility, flaws and intermittent difficulties in her relationship with her mother 
Debbie Reynolds, this is soon passed over in favour of the honeyed imagery of 
mother and daughter stars. Like a Hollywood production, this imagery 
contributes to the fantasy that there is a perfect relationship we are all seeking. 
There is a lot of blonde, white and lace; everyone is smiling, many of the 
mothers have their eyes closed or half closed in an expression ofbliss; sunshine 
often comes streaming through the background so that the warm fuzziness of 
mother and daughter love is woven into the photographic technique. Why are 
there no photos of mothers and daughters in cold environments, being icy to 
each other, or in wild, disgraceful positions? Because this is an extension of 
Hollywood and the reputation ofits stars as mothers and daughters. Mothering 
and daughtering, however, involves much more than this book represents, as 
it once again reminds us mere mortals how inadequate our relationships are in 
comparison to those offered by Hollywood. 
Writing in the Feminine in French and English 
Canada: A Question of Ethics 
Marie Carritre 
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002 
Reviewed by Jill Scott 
In Writing in the Feminine in French and English Canada:A Question ofEthics, 
Marie Carritre invites her readers to imagine an ethical space of intersubjectivity 
and, guided by five poets, dares us to dream alternative material possibilities and 
negotiate new ways of being beyond the limitations of fured notions of gender 
and sexual difference. In this beautifully written and exquisitely crafted book, 
Carribe fills a significant scholarly lacuna by treating the experimental poetry 
known as "writing in the feminine" or "ecriture au ftminin" by writers in both 
English and French Canada: Nicole Brossard, France Thtoret, Di Brandt, 
Erin Moure, and Lola Lemire Tostevin. The project transcends the barriers of 
languistic and cultural differences to chart a much-needed literary history of a 
particularly charged period for feminist poetic production from the seventies to 
the early nineties. 
Much more than a critical introduction to these poets' works, Writing in 
the Feminine proposes a theory of relational ethics based on the philosophy of 
Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, and Luce Irigaray. Carritre is justified in her 
choice of theorists since the poets in question have all been informed by post- 
structural thought and often self-consciously invoke their influences, which 
Journal ofthe Association for Research on Mothering ( 197 
Book Reviews 
also include Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida. At times challenging in its 
dense philosophical analysis, the chapter entitled 'Writing (as) a Feminist 
Ethics" teases out the intricate conceptual links between the theorists in 
question, and demonstrates how Lkvinas's challenge to metaphysical ontology 
and his ethics of alterity finds resonance in Ricoeur's relational ethics and 
Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference. 
With this frameworkin place, Carriere embarks on sophisticated readings 
of her poets' works, beginning with the concept of the maternal and mother- 
daughter relations in Brossard and Brandt. The maternal implies not just 
motherhoodperse, but a signiflmg and socializing space where differentiation 
between same and other first takes place, the starting point for a model of 
relational ethics based on intersubjectivity. Writings in the feminine go beyond 
the essentialism of biology and show the constructed nature of the body in its 
socialized materiality. Carrikre achieves a rare balance here between patient, 
close readings ofpoetic texts and a constant awareness ofthe larger implications 
of these works in the political and social, but also literary historical arena. 
Significantly, the author recognizes the importance of "respecting the 
undecidability and openness of texts," and resists the temptation to tie up the 
loose ends her poets have so carefully left dangling. 
Other chapters treat the themes of hysteria, mimicry, language, and 
corporeality, but Carribre is perhaps at her best in the final chapter entitled "An 
Ethics of Love," where Brandt's, MourC's, and Brossard's poetry affords an 
opportunity to ponder love, friendship, and spirituality as part of an ethical 
experiment. While this foray into the mystical nature ofbonds between women 
is arguably the most inspiring toward a feminist ethics, this is where Carriere 
is most concerned to question the utopianism of her poets' endeavours. She 
stresses the "material possibility" ofethical exchange (quoting Jessica Benjamin) 
but cautions against predetermined realization. Recognition of the other is 
where ethics starts, but this recognition should include the notion of break- 
down. The failure of relationships, be they mother-daughter bonds, friend- 
ships, or other relations, is inevitable. What is important, says Carriere, is that 
in spite of these tensions, conflicts, and disappointments we dare to wish for a 
veritable ethics. 
Mothering the Self: 
Mothers. Daughters, Subjects 
Steph Lawler 
New York: Routledge, 2000 
Reviewed by Nancy Gerber 
In Mothering the Set$ Steph Lawler poses the following questions: What does 
198 / Volume 6, Number I 


Writing in the Feminine in French and English Canada: A Question of Ethics

Bobel, Chris

When Good Enough Isn’t: Mother Blame in the Continuum Concept