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

MacLellan-Peters, Janis

Aston, Megan

English

Don't Blame Low-Income Mothers! Understanding Low-Income Mothers'Socio-ecological Circumstances in Relation to Health Status

Dunlop, Rishma

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering          345 
Somewhere, a woman is writing a poem
as time spills over. The young woman I was climbs the
moonlit stairs. She tucks her child into
bed, bends over her desk in the yellow lamplight, frees her hand
to write, breaking through the page like that Dorothea Tanning
painting where the artist’s hand gashes through the canvas, fingers and
wrist plunged to the bone. She writes a dark, erotic psalm, an elegy,
a poem to die in, a poem to grow old in.
Somewhere, a woman is writing a poem,
as she gives away the clothes of her dead loved ones,
stretching crumpled wings. Her words rise liquid in the air,
rosaries of prayer for the dying children, for the ones who
have disappeared, the desaparecido, and for the ones who
have been murdered. She writes through the taste of fear and
rage and fury. She writes in milk and blood, her ink fierce and
iridescent. Somewhere, a woman who thought
she could say nothing is writing a poem.
Somewhere, a woman is writing a poem
Rishma Dunlop
346            Volume 11, Number 1


Somewhere, a woman is writing a poem

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering          311 
We learn to recite the Girl Guide promise:
I promise, on my honour, to do my best:
To do my duty to God, the Queen, and my country,
To help other people at all times,
To obey the Guide Law.
We learn the language of semaphore, how to
build campfires and lean-tos and latrines. 
We earn badges, pitch tents, learn how to 
use an axe and chop wood,
how to tie knots and how to survive 
the wilderness. 
We learn to Be Prepared and to Lend a Hand. 
We learn the Guide Law.
A Guide is obedient. You obey orders given you by those
in authority, willingly and quickly. Learn to understand that
orders are given for a reason, and must be carried out without question.
A Guide smiles and sings even under difficulty. You are 
cheerful and willing even when things seem to be going wrong.
A Guide is pure in thought, word and deed. You look for
what is beautiful and good in everything, and try to become strong
enough to discard the ugly and unpleasant.
We become capable girls, soldiers in our uniforms, 
with our companies and patrols and salutes. 
We learn to build nations and 
at the close of the day, 
The Education of Girls
Rishma Dunlop
312            Volume 11, Number 1
Rishma Dunlop
we sing Taps, the soldiers’ bugle call to 
extinguish the lights.
Day is  done, gone the sun
From the hills, from the lake
From the sky
All is well, safely rest
God is nigh.
And our mothers kept house, 
did laundry and 
cooking and ironing,
did volunteer work, refinished furniture, 
watched The Edge of Night and Another World 
took Valium when their lives did
not resemble the glamorous adventures of Rachel 
and Mac Corey, had hysterectomies at forty.
At the close of every day, they had supper ready when
their husbands returned from the city, fresh and slick,
briefcases in hand, polished shoes passing
manicured lawns along the asphalt driveways.


The Education of Girls

Racine, Nicole

Motz, Mary

Leslie, Margaret

Pepler, Debra

Breaking the Cycle Pregnancy Outreach Program: Reaching Out to Improve the Health and Well-being for Pregnant Substance-Involved Mothers

Davidson, reviewed by Deborah

356        Volume 11, Number 1
Book Reviews
offers a portrait of a complex personality. This is what makes her feminism so 
twenty-first century—a refusal to settle for simple answers.
Valenti is at her best when discussing the “pornification of pop culture.” 
Dealing with the recent media frenzy that has been packaged for profit as 
“Girls Gone Wild,” for instance, she is careful not to come down either on the 
anti-sex or pro-porn side. She mulls over the ramifications of stripping for the 
cameras with a lot of hard questions about power politics. Admitting to her own 
youthful indiscretions helps support her sisterly perspective, so after surveying 
a number of viewpoints, she concludes “I guess what I’ve come to—and is what 
works for me—is that you have to find your own middle ground. There has to 
be space for young women to figure shit out on their own. And I think most 
times young women do figure it out” (48). Valenti is also very persuasive on 
sex education campaigns in the United States, her main audience, and the rise 
of “abstinence” programs and virginity pledges or chastity balls. She provides 
sources for these disturbing trends (many stories are found online) to ground 
her anger in current statistics. This is eye-opening stuff for mom/profs who 
do not have time to watch much television or surf the web.
Valenti also discusses abortion rights, politics, the U.S. women’s movement, 
the wedding industry, women and politics and the “third wave,” or multiple 
identity positions within feminism. Perhaps because of my own position, I found 
these chapters to be a bit thin. But in some ways, this book is an antidote to 
academic feminism/feminists, as chapter titles like “I promise I won’t call ‘Her-
story’” suggest. Nevertheless, I read it with admiration for Valenti’s websurfing 
research skills and punchy style. Valenti makes her case for feminism with a 
compelling mix of girl-talk and up-to-date indignation. I think I’ll recommend 
her book to my students—and in a few years, to my daughters.
Obsession, with Intent: Violence against Women 
Lee Lakeman 
Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2005
Reviewed by Deborah Davidson
I received my review copy of Lee Lakeman’s Obsession, with Intent: Violence 
against Women just as Aqsa Parvez was murdered, allegedly at the hands of 
her father and brother in what has been called “an honour killing,” since the 
15-year-old Aqsa was said to have refused to wear her head covering and to 
be engaged in behaviours typical of teenagers in the Western world. Debates 
emerged as to the place of culture in this teen’s murder. I would argue that 
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        357 
Book Reviews
culture played the key role in her murder—the cross-culture of violence 
against women—and I suspect Lee Lakeman would agree. In a cross-culture 
of violence, women are sexually assaulted, degraded, battered, and murdered 
at the hands of their partners and relatives because they are women. As Lake-
man reshapes national discourse on violence against women, she shows it to 
be rooted in gender inequality, where men and patriarchal institutions have 
power over women. 
Lakeman avoids degendered, neutralizing terms such as “domestic 
violence,” “intimate partner violence,” or, even worse “IPV.” She understands 
violence against women as physical violence, as well as “broken psyches” and 
the “willful destruction of bodies and minds,” involving “cruelty quick and 
vicious and … cruelty to captives, especially wives and daughters, carefully 
maintained over years” (vii). 
How is it that Lakeman can speak so passionately and knowledgeably 
about violence against women? She writes out of her long association with the 
women’s movement and extensive experience (since 1973) as an anti-violence 
worker in Canada. She also describes the book’s long herstory. Obsession, with 
Intent, which began as “a story of a group of women over five years who try to 
enlist the Canadian government … to aid women … to face down, restrain, 
escape, and correct the violent abuses of power inflicted by the men in their 
lives,” became thirty years of work to “develop and experiment with strategies 
to end sexist violence that involved the state” (x). Thus, violence against women 
is exposed not only as individual acts by individual men, but as institutional 
and systemic. 
Through her work with the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault 
Centres and interviews with one hundred women who sought help from the 
criminal justice system, Lakeman shows the perpetuation rather than preven-
tion of violence against women. She describes the mishandling of emergency 
telephone calls, charges not laid, charges dropped, pleas bargained, bail granted, 
limited sentences, low rates of conviction, and high rates of attrition. She also 
describes race and class bias in policing and the courts, and the relationship 
between violence against women, poverty, and welfare erosion. She shows men 
getting away with violence and women abused and murdered.
Lakeman looks at violence against women through the lens of globalization 
and economic distribution as a function of the state. She tells of coalition and 
collaboration of women from various groups who work together against gender-
based violence and in theory building. We hear her call for the criminal justice 
system to be aware of its practices and policies and to institute change.
This is an important and powerful book written for a general audience. 
I will introduce it to my students and share it with friends and colleagues. 
Anyone wanting to take part in an anti-violence against women initiative 
might want to send a copy to their elected officials—and don’t forget your 
local prosecutor.


Obsession, with Intent: Violence Against Women

Warburton-Brown, Chris

Poor Mother? A Critical Review of Current Measures of Materal Poverty and Their Limitations

L. Broeder, Jennifer

Mothers' Early Embodied and Relational Responses to their Preterm Infants

Takseva, reviewed by Tatjana

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        173 
Book Reviews
Mothering in the Third Wave
Amber E. Kinser, ed. 
Toronto: Demeter Press, 2008.
Reviewed by Tatjana Takševa 
In its resistance to narrow definitions of feminist living, its consideration of 
globalism, technology and popular culture, and its view that mothering is messy 
and complicated and always more complex than it seems, this edited volume will 
easily find its place among important third-wave feminist texts. This collection 
(which includes two poems) addresses a key question: What does it mean to 
be a mother in this particular historical moment? The essays are free of jargon, 
written in language that easily traverses the genres of academic prose, creative 
and personal narrative in an accessible, unselfconscious way. The introduction to 
the volume, written by Amber Kinser, models this mode of writing by weaving 
into its structure two poignant but aptly placed letters to her two children, in 
which she bravely reveals the tensions and contradictions inherent in her own 
feminist mothering. This method of writing demonstrates the intersections of 
feminism and mothering, of academic training, creativity, and lived experience, 
and serves to “put experiential flesh on these cognitive bones” (6).
The volume is divided into four parts. In part one, “Motherhood Transform-
ing,” writers “explore how definitions of mothering and motherhood modify 
to accommodate the changing cultural landscape of the family” (9). The four 
essays in this section “explore the reciprocally transformative dimensions” of 
mothering and the larger political, socio-cultural sphere (9). Here, readers learn 
about a third-wave white woman who forges a life as a feminist, a mother, and 
a writer by reading fiction and non-fiction by black women writers (Hewett); 
about the fighting of “infrastructures and symbolic boundaries that keep queer 
women from having children” (Ryan 6); about mothering through the disaster 
of Hurricane Katrina, remembering that feminism should accommodate am-
biguities and women’s multiple personalities and recognize the “limited nature 
of ‘women’s issues’, particularly those of the white bourgeois variety” (Tuley, 
47); and about mothering during first-hand experience of global conflict and 
174        Volume 11, Number 2
Book Reviews
terrorist attacks in the Middle East, the United Kingdom, and the United 
States (Lengel, Birzescu, and Minda). 
The three essays and one poem in part two, “Mothering Resistance,” show 
how mothering can serve as a site of resistance and can teach principles of 
revolution that can “nurture others toward self-liberation” (Kinser 10). Mercado-
Lopez, a Chicana mother-scholar, reconceptualizes Chicana motherhood as a 
site of cultural contradiction where nothing is stable and the maternal, “brown 
body is acknowledged as a body of knowledge” within a “third-space Chicana 
motherhood praxis” (75, 76). Fine, a woman raised in the second wave who is 
now raising children in the third wave, and a proud lesbian soccer mom, reclaims 
mothering as an instrument of resistance in an attempt to negotiate multiple 
identities. Fechner’s poem addresses the feelings of doubt, anger, and love she 
experiences as an adoptive white mother of biracial, special needs children 
and contests cultural images of motherhood as Utopia. Adomako Ampofo’s 
essay focuses on her experience of growing up in Ghana among trans-racial 
families; she argues that “mothers who classify themselves as members of a 
social category that is presumed to be distinct from that of their children can 
contest and disrupt hierarchies of inequality by challenging racist ideologies 
and constructions” (100). 
The writers in “Mothering Contradictions,” part three of this collection, 
confront the inconsistencies and ambivalence in their own lives and explore the 
“ambiguity, tension, contradiction and personal struggle in feminist mother-
ing” (Kinser 11). Drawing on her own struggle with motherhood as a form of 
feminist identity, O’Brien Hallstein argues that the tension between intensive 
and empowered mothering—a “postfeminist” third wave phenomenon—can 
be located in the second wave’s emphasis on giving birth to oneself, which 
leaves a problematic silence about giving birth to one’s children. Kinser’s essay 
counters the cultural split between the maternal and the erotic, proposing that 
we locate mothering on a sexual continuum to “help us make sense of and work 
through its emotional intensity and offer safe haven to our children” (125). 
While Jones Nakanishi discusses her struggles to reconcile the complexities of 
feminist living with family-entrenched cultural traditions in Japan, Dorgan’s 
essay argues for embracing “militancy” when mothering a special needs child, 
as part of the “breadth and depth of femaleness” and all that is within “the 
Mother: anger, disappointment, kindness, rage, sacrifice, vulnerability” (145). 
Arnold’s poem explores eating disorders, mothering, and empowerment in 
ways that stretch the limits of feminism. 
Part four, “Representing Motherhood,” investigates the representation 
of mothering practices in a variety of cultural contexts. Driver engages with 
the poetic life writings of Cherrie Moraga, a Chicana lesbian mother whose 
representations of queer mothering defy binary sexual, racial, and gender ideolo-
gies. Ferguson and King’s essay examines the values of Gangsta Rap Hip Hop 
music and life style and its scarring, traumatic effect on Black girls and women 
in general, and African American teen mothers in particular. Bullier reads the 
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        175 
Book Reviews
representations of the maternal body in contemporary art, specifically in the 
context of second and third wave feminism. Investigating the representation 
of motherhood and its practices in Cyberspace, Stadtman Tucker suggests 
that “third wave mothers may cultivate an online persona to restore their self-
concept as cultural citizens and to relieve (or complain about) their sense of 
displacement” (201). Interestingly, she points out that “the most surprising 
parallel between second-wave feminists and third-wave mother bloggers is the 
accusation that some women are exploiting the strengths and vulnerabilities 
of the collective project to increase their personal status” (206). 
The real strength of this collection is that it does not seek to define, clas-
sify, or explain; rather, it explores, through variety and contradiction, the messy 
but often affirming practices of motherhood in the third wave. An important 
third-wave feminist text, the book is a significant contribution to the study 
of mothering.
Ready examines the phenomenon of later motherhood. Author Elizabeth 
Gregory analyzes the experiences of 113 American women who became 
first-time mothers after the age of 35, through either natural birth or adop-
tion. Gregory, an older mother herself, considers the new later motherhood a 
positive phenomenon. Her book follows the personal stories of women who 
chose to postpone motherhood and considers the effects of that decision on 
their lives.
Although her book is based on the personal experiences of women, Gregory 
considers the wider social context of the phenomenon of later motherhood. 
For instance, Gregory argues that the availability of birth control and infertility 
treatments allows women to choose when they wish to start a family. Similarly, 
changing social attitudes toward career women, working mothers, older moth-
ers, and single mothers influence women’s decisions to postpone pregnancy. 
Such trends contribute to the emergence of later motherhood: “over the past 
thirty years, the number of U.S. women who had their first child between the 
ages of 35 and 39 has multiplied by ten … and there are now thirteen times as 
Ready: Why Women Are Embracing the New Later 
Motherhood
Elizabeth Gregory. 
New York: Basic Books, 2007.
Reviewed by Elena Neiterman


Mothering in the Third Wave

Kediye, Fatima

Valeo, Angela

C. Berman, Rachel

Somali-Canadian Mothers' Experiences In Parenting a Child with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Grace, Marty

Gandolfo, Enza

Candy, Chelsea

Crafting Quality of Life: Creativity and Well-Being