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

Culik, Jennifer

Jennifer Culik 
Alma Mater 
I steal sleep with her. 
Press my empty belly 
Against her feet 
And curl my legs and 
Arms around her. 
Push my face against the 
Warm tea scent of her neck. 
Capture her in the circle of 
My body once again. 
Her feet kick against me 
And her hands reach up. 
Her b d y  straight and long, 
Her belly full with my milk, 
She turns away, 
Dreaming her own birth. 
44 1 Vo/ume l ,  Number l 


English

Alma Mater

Abbey, Sharon M.

Researching Motherhood as a Feminist: Reflecting on My Own Experiences

Hendrick, Susan

"Carving Tomorrow From a Tombstone": Maternal Grief Following the Death of a Daughter

Garber, Marilyn

Marilyn Garber 
A Mother's Reflections at 
Fifty-Something 
The empty nest is vastly underrated. I t  is cushy, cozy, liberating, a place 
which provides many rooms of one's own. When the children go, perhaps the 
quiet brings on a kind of loneliness. But after a bit, the silences speak. One can 
hear manyvoices, the voices of one's self, one's life, one's possibilities, the souls 
left unfulfied by the decision to commit to a life of child rearing. The lives one 
might have lived are not just fantasies. All around, nieces and nephews, sons 
and daughters are making the choices of freedom and adventure, not marriage 
and offspring. 
It is well those strangers in the house leave, those strangers born of one's 
own body, those strangers seeking to be themselves and grabbing the clay of 
their becoming from the craters of their parents'bared being, from the wells of 
their nurturing cradles. It's hard at first for anyone. The house after all is big, 
too big for a mother and father without their young. 
The manse is quiet, too hushed and still, for lives shaped in the bell tower 
of passionate family debate over the Middle East, and over who has the right 
to leave dirty socks in the living room. But, once they are gone, one gets 
accustomed, as one must. 
And then comes the surprise, when one of them comes home, just for the 
summer, mom, or, just to save a little money, dad. The homestead becomes 
small and crowded, noisy beyond one's choice, a hotel where the proprietors 
begin to wonder why they are in the business. "Give her a little money to get 
a place of her own," says Dad. 
'No, no, I couldn't, I want to be independent," says babe. 
Mom and Dad begin to live externally, noticing the trail of laundry leading 
to the guest bedroom, worrying once again about walking around nude, 
thinking about whether twenty-year-old baby has had her dinner, whether she 
Journal ofthe Associationfor Research on Mothm'ng I 105 
is happy, and why she is home so late. The universal assurance, "I can take care 
of myself" gives no peace, no security. 
"I know she is complaining to her friends that we don't leave her alone," 
says Dad. 
"Why not," says Mom, "I am complaining to mine that I am never alone 
anymore." 
The empty nest is aventure, an enterprise that must be protected, guarded, 
patrolled, shielded. Here at last after twenty and more years of grubbing for 
worms to toss into the demanding beaks, Mamma Robin can look to the state 
ofher own feathers. They need preening, for sure. No matter what else she had 
been doing while the little ones grew, never mind if she was a professional, an 
attorney or teacher or executive, the center was in the fledglings, God's little 
children. Though she might struggle against it, arguing in court, demanding 
justice, grading papers, making "tough" decisions, Johnny's whereabouts, 
Susie's school problems, Annie's doctor's appointment, floated at the core. 
Now alone at home, she has another chance at life, at new adventures, vast 
possibilities. When Mom was young the choices were unfathomable, but the 
hopes formed at her own mother's knee were more limited, less explicit, than 
those of her own children. With them out and gone, she is a young adult once 
again. New career, world travel, study for self development, change of person- 
ality (shall I get an elder's Hell's Angels), live abroad, build a house, get a totally 
new wardrobe, quit my job, and how many other options flaunt themselves. 
Of  course, parenthood cannot be obliterated. Once a parent, always a 
parent. When Paul gets a motorcycle, it doesn't matter if he is living three 
thousand miles away, he needs a call to remind him to wear his helmet. Yet, days 
go by when Mom writes and lives and plans (without a thought of her babies) 
for herself in joy unconnected to her parenthood and in satisfaction for herself 
alone, alone in the nurturing nest. 
106 1 Volume I ,  Number 1 


A Mother's Reflection at Fifty-Something

Ranson, Gillian

Paid Work, Family Work, and the Discourse of "Full-Time" Mother

Zeck, Jeanne-Marie

The Lesbian Family Life Cycle

Bauer, Denise

Gil-Gomez, Ellen M.

The Newly-Formed "Feminist Mothers and their Allies Task Force" of the National Women's Studies Association

Book Reviews 
centerpiece, ifitweren't stylistically divergent from the rest of thevolume which 
is more scholarly in tone and depth. Less familiar names were chosen, 
undoubtably, for both their readability and the rigors of their research claims. 
Elizabeth Rose's historical analysis of Day Care and Nursery Schools, for 
example, is an excellent preview for her own upcoming book. Here she explains 
the class-based distinctions in the 1920s and 30s that influence perceptions of 
the "bad" mother, the working mother who is forced to "neglectn her child and 
the affluent mother who "smothers" her child with attention. 
While many ofthe articles approach the politics ofblame in important but 
predictable ways, citing the tension between "experts" with power andvoiceless 
mothers, Annalee Newitz confronts women who speak out, act out and even 
resort to murder to upset motherhood as a defining category. She uses recent 
examples of frlicide to "begin thinking about the kind ofwoman who does not 
need violent crime in order to choose childlessness, and who does not think of 
childlessness as a violent crime." Newitz's piece works well beside articles like 
Umansys on the Karen Carter breastfeeding case, and Annette R. Appell's on 
contemporary child welfare which also feature mothers "out of controln on 
some level. 
None of the authors "mean to downplay real violations of parental duty," 
as the editors put it, but all work to illustrate how a system of power and control 
over the domain of motherhood can prevent some healthy choices and enable 
destructive alternatives. Exploring how and why we evaluate women as 
mothers in this century, can help to unpack the ever- contentious debate around 
the American family and the role of women in the next--some old issues for 
a new century. 
When Mothers Work: 
Loving Our Children Without Sacrificing Ourselves 
Joan K. Peters 
Addison-Wesley, 1997 
Reviewed by Denise Bauer 
This book's subtitle is what attracted me; its promise was fulfied. Joan 
Peters, a doctoral candidate, journalist, novelist and college teacher of writing 
and literature, persuasively and for me, reassuringly argues that working 
mothers shouIdwork. Working and having an identity and life independent of 
familial responsibilities, she claims, creates "freer mothers, stronger marriages 
(and) happier children (131)." 
Journal ofthe Association for Research on Mothm'ng 1 207 
Book Reviews 
In a penetrating cultural analysis, Peters reveals the ways that motherhood 
is romanticized and mythologized in contemporary society and outlines the 
psychological and social effects these often institutionalized myths have on 
women and their families. For example, she points out that one of the central 
reasons for the divorce rate reaching 50% is the "tendency for partners to 
backslide into traditional roles" after having children (131). Fathers must take 
on more responsibility for chiidcare, although she admits that often when 
couples can afford help, mothers wind up coparenting with their daycare 
providers and nannies instead of their husbands. Peters claims that in order to 
effect serious social and political change, mothers must insist that fathers share 
equal responsibility for raising children. She provides portraits of real life 
families that demonstrate what some of these cultural problems and ideals look 
like and how traditional families can successfdy be restructured. 
At the heart of the conflict between workingand motheringis a powerful 
"sacrificial mothern ideal which Peters describes as an outdated social artifact 
that needs to be radically revised. The cultural value of the "sacrificial mother 
ideal" creates conflicts for today's working mothers who have been raised to 
participate m y  in public life and contribute economically to the family. Peter 
writes, "the nuclear family, in which mother is the linchpin offamily life.. .rarely 
works anyrnore" (137). Instead she argues for equitable parenting, "extending 
family" so that parents are not isolated and alone caring for their children and 
that mothers replace traditional motherhood with "self-nourishing mother- 
hoodn as a way of caring most completely for themselves and their families. 
In her final chapter, "Mothering, Growth of Self and Soul: A Philosophi- 
cal Conclusion" Peters offers further inspiring reasons why mothers should 
work and not exclusively care for their children. Whiie acknowledging that 
most middle class women are loath to leave their children in someone else's care, 
she argues that the overwhelmingly positive results show that working mothers 
live more balanced lives and "more fully experience how much children enrich 
life" (204). "It mayeven be that the psychological and socialwealth ofawoman's 
life contributes rather than detracts from the jubilance of motheringn (Peters 
208). 
While these truisms might be applicable to educated middle class women 
who have had the opportunity to find satisfying, not to mention adequately 
paying work, it remains less true for working class, less educated and single 
parent mothers. For example when Peters writes, "The most hndamental 
maternal tenderness often exists in inverse proportion to the amount of 
motherwork a mother must don (209) she provides a good argument for why 
childcare should not be the province of one person, but does not acknowledge 
the fact that for many women this is not an option. Many poor and working 
class women cannot afford to pay for child care, many mothers are distanced 
from family andlor are isolated in inhospitable neighborhoods and communi- 
ties. Similarly, the availability and quality of childcare is a huge variable that 
colors these solutions and complicates the attainment of these ideals. While 
208 1 Volume l ,  Number l 
Book Reviews 
Peters addresses many of these caveats, the overall focus of the book is on 
middle class mothers. Ultimately, as Peters consistently point out, the final 
solution to the problems facing all mothers today is radical social and political 
change in the workplace and in business and government responsibility towards 
families. 
Mothering and Ambivalence 
Wendy Hollway and Brid Featherstone, Eds. 
London: Routledge, 1997. 
Reviewed by Astrid Henry 
Motherhood, it is often noted, poses a problem for feminists. From the 
repudiation of motherhood found in early second wave texts such as Shulamith 
Firestone's The Dialectic ofsex, to the celebration ofit that followed only shortly 
thereafter in books like Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born, feminists have 
struggled with how to theorize the experience of mothering. As these earlier 
works suggest, feminism has not escaped the tendency toward either denigrat- 
ing or idealizing motherhood that characterizes so much of popular discourse 
about mothers. Mothering andilmbivalence, edited by Wendy Hollway and 
Brid Featherstone, forcemy argues that both the impulse to denigrate mothers 
and the desire to idealize them spring from the same source: an inability to 
recognize ambivalence, whether the mother's ambivalence about her child, the 
child's ambivalence about her mother, or society's ambivalence about mother- 
hood generally. As Featherstone writes in her introduction to this anthology, 
"Mothering is not all joy, but it is not all sorrow either. Let us hold on to both; 
let us not deny the ambivalence, either in practice or in theory" (1997: 12). 
The eleven new essays which make up this volume address a wide range of 
issues pertaining to mothering, including: mother-daughter relations; the role 
of fathers; the ways in which race, class, and nationality reflect the experience 
of mothering, single parenting; mothers who are violent and abusive; and the 
psychodynamics of divorce. Written primarily by therapists and social workers 
about their clinical experience, these writers persuasively argue that psychoa- 
nalysis-and by that they mean primarily object-relations theory-is the one 
theory that can help us get beyond the cultural and psychological impasses 
blocking a more complete and complex understanding of motherhood. One of 
the most interesting aspects of this book, in fact, is its insistence that we must, 
as feminists, reclaim psychoanalysis in order to transcend the polarization that 
typifies so much of the debate about mothering. 
The theorist whose work is perhaps most central to this volume is the 
American psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin, whose writing on maternal subjec- 
Journal oftheAssociation)r Research on Mothering 1 209 


When Mothers Work: Loving Our Children Without Sacrificing Ourselves

MacDonald, Erin E.

tivity is cited in many ofthese essays. The dificulty of articulatingthis maternal 
subjectivity, whether in the therapeutic setting orwithin feminist discourse, has 
left the experience ofmothering and all its contradictions in the hands ofothers, 
to be described, yet again, in the most idealistic or denigrated terms. As these 
writers argue, it is only by recognizing the mother's subjectivity-her au- 
tonomy, her sexuality, her ambivalence-that the institution of motherhood 
will ever change. I t  is imperative that feminists rejoin the debate about the 
changing institutions of motherhood and the family. As Susie Orbach argues 
in an interview compiled in this volume, W e  ought not to keep relinquishing 
ground and letting the Right run the debate on this" (91). At a time when 
conservatives on the Right seem to have all but taken over contemporary 
discourse on the family, this book provides a useful intervention. 
Engendering Motherhood: 
Identity and Self-Transformation in Women's Lives 
Martha McMahon 
New York: Guilford Press, 1995 
Reviewed by Erin E. MacDonald 
Martha McMahonJs book is based on her Ph.D. research as a feminist 
sociologist. Using a social interactionist approach that emphasizes qualitative 
data, her findings are based on what participants told her about theirlives. From 
1988 to 1989, she recorded both on paper and on microcassette the experiences 
of 59 full-time working Toronto mothers of preschool-aged children, both 
those with and those without partners. Although her original intention was to 
explore the balance ofwork and childcare in these working- and middle-class 
mothers' lives, McMahon focused her attention instead on the identity- 
transforming influence of having children, because the mother-child relation- 
ship was considered of the greatest value to the participants. Including a wealth 
ofcharts and statistics to support her findings, the author presents a convincing 
and thought-provoking new study of an old theme. While past feminists 
tended to concentrate on the oppression ofwomen as housewives, she turns her 
attention to the symbolic and real importance of the mother-child relationship 
in these women's lives. Her book moves through an analysis of "the social 
processes through which women became pregnant and sustained their preg- 
nancies through to motherhoodn (McMahon, 1995: 15) to an analysis in the 
final chapters of "the processes whereby these women developed conceptions 
of themselves as mothers" (McMahon, 1995: 15). 
210 1 Volume l, Number l 
Book Reviews 
McMahon found that in spite of the non-traditional situations of the mo- 
thers and the fact that each woman experienced her transformation to moth- 
erhood differently, "what emerges from this study is that women, pursuing 
what they experienced as their private and personal choices and decisions, 
reproduced many of the gendered patterns of their culturen (McMahon, 1995: 
16). Even though "womanliness" and "motherhoodn are today recognized as 
socially constructed roles rather than essential identities, the experience of 
raising a chiid seems to reinforce many of society's naturalized conceptions of 
these roles. However, McMahon also stresses that factors such as race and class 
play an equally important part in the process, and cannot be separated from the 
experience of mothering. Using modern gender and sociological theories and 
comparing them to the psychologically based theories of the past, McMahon 
successfully applies theory to her research in clear, revealing ways. 
Her detailed descriptions of the reactions of working- and middle-class 
women to motherhood demonstrate her point that " the personal and political 
in motherhood cannot really be separatedn (McMahon, 1995: 29). In  an 
interview setting, McMahon discovered that whiie numerous similarities 
existed between the experiences of both groups of women, class did make a 
significant difference. With less financial constraints on their lives, middle- 
class women tended to wait to have children until they felt they had achieved 
the 'rightn relationship, career, and personal sense of self. In contrast, 
"working-class women's accounts suggest that many of them saw themselves as 
achieving maturity through having a chiidn (McMahon, 1995: 91). While in 
both cases, women's own lives and identities were dramatically transformed 
after giving birth, middle-class women seemed to be far more surprised by the 
changes. Contraryto common belief, alone mothers saw their new identities as 
redemptive even though the culture of liberal individualism "carries the 
historical class and gender priorities of liberal democracies and is empirically 
unachievable by many women and minority personsn (McMahon, 1995: 127). 
As one middle-class mother, Anna, puts it "I think [without a child] I would 
have viewed myself as an administratorlteacher instead of"now I view myself 
as a humann (McMahon, 1995: 147). In general, when asked questions about 
the daily realities of having children, most women responded in terms of 
feelings, suggesting further the deeply rooted connection of motherhood to 
self-transformation. 
In the end, McMahon stresses that we must learn to see social relation- 
ships, not biology, as the primary cause of cultural experience. Motherhood 
represents a fascinating opportunity for researchers and enthusiasts alike to 
explore the complex political, social, and personal phenomenon of identity 
transformation in the modern woman's life. According to the author, "Social 
transformation is the responsibility of everyonen (McMahon, 1995: 277), not 
just mothers. 
Journal ofthe Association for Research on Mothm'ng 1 21 1 


Engendering Motherhood: Identity and Self-Transformation in Women's Lives

Shanahan, Noreen

Childhood in Shadow