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

E. Thomas, Jan

English

Trusting Women, Respecting Birth: Prenatal Care in Sweden

Cooper, Jennifer

A. Walsh, Christine

Smith, Paula

A Part of the Community : Conceptualizing Shelter Design for Young, Pregnant, Homeless Women

Rye, reviewed by Gill

186        Volume 11, Number 2
Book Reviews
Mothers and Death: 
From Procreation to Creation 
Élisabeth Lamothe, Pascale Sardin, and Julie Sauvage, eds. 
Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2008.
Reviewed by Gill Rye
This collection represents one volume of essays drawn from a conference on 
“Mothers and Death” held in Bordeaux, France in December 2005. The edi-
tors are members of a research network on the subject of the maternal based at 
the University of Bordeaux. The essays gathered here explore representations 
of the links between motherhood and death in nineteenth- and twentieth-
century literature (novels, short stories, memoirs, drama, poetry) and, in one 
case, art.
The collection is divided into four parts: “Historicizing Mothers and 
Death,” “Writing between Good and Evil,” “Of Mothers and their Daughters,” 
and “Overcoming Loss.” The contributors analyze literature from Australia, 
Britain, Canada, Ireland, France, South Africa, and the United States, including 
the work of Laure Adler, Kate Atkinson, Margaret Atwood, Samuel Beckett, 
Annie Ernaux, Nancy Huston, Camille Laurens, Somerset Maugham, Toni 
Morrison, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Olive Shreiner, and Virginia Woolf. 
The essay on art considers the work of Salvador Dalí, Robert Smithson, and 
Vincent Van Gogh – each had a sibling who died prior to his own birth – in 
light of psychological work on “replacement” children and survivor guilt syn-
drome. Other topics include abortion, miscarriage, infant death, infanticide, 
matricide, violent, ambivalent, “evil” mothers, and the (literal and figurative) 
death of mothers. Contributors explore how these themes are treated in creative 
work, and, in some cases, how actual experience fosters creativity.
In her essay on the work of Atwood, Huston, and Morrison, Élisabeth 
Lamothe argues that each novelist acknowledges mothers’ evil and ambivalent 
feelings, “exploring the subterranean depths of the maternal unconscious.” Three 
essays in the section on mothers and daughters probe the metaphorical death 
involved in the psychological separation and differentiation of mother and 
daughter. In Lucy Edwards’s study of Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway, the “matricide” 
of a “persecuting mother” is seen as necessary; in Pascale Sardin’s analysis of 
Beckett’s Footfalls triptych, the individuation of “the suffering daughter of a 
deadly mother” is ultimately incomplete and impossible; and in Julie Sauvage’s 
treatment of Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum, both matricide 
and infanticide figure in the severance process.
The death of the mother is particularly poignant in Nicole Ollier’s study 
of Plath and Sexton, both of whom were mothers who committed suicide and 
whose work explored motherhood as a loss of self. The final essay, by Chantal 
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 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        187 
Book Reviews
Lapeyre-Desmaison on Adler, Ernaux, and Laurens and the death of a child 
(by abortion in Ernaux’s case), concerns writing as need and risk in relation to 
the authors’ traumatic experiences of giving birth to “both life and death.”
As with most collections of conference proceedings, the quality of the 
contributions is inconsistent, but this volume contains some interesting essays 
on an important and prevalent theme in contemporary culture. While individual 
essays are suitably theorized, a more substantial, theoretical introduction would 
have given the book more weight, and an index would have been helpful.
The Maternal Is Political: 
Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood 
and Social Change 
Shari MacDonald Strong, ed. 
Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008.
Reviewed by Rachel Epp Buller
Today it goes without saying that motherhood is a political act. Whether or 
not to breastfeed, co-sleep, baby-wear, or send your child to daycare—all of 
these are choices fraught with political implications. While a few of the es-
sayists in The Maternal Is Political discuss politics in terms of these mothering 
life style choices, many more consider their entry into motherhood as a time 
of political awakening. For a majority of the writers, motherhood shifted their 
viewpoints from seeing themselves as individuals unable to make a difference, 
to realizing that mothers have access to a collective well-spring of power, if 
only they work together to tap into that power.
Editor Shari MacDonald Strong divides her collection into three sec-
tions—“Believe,” “Teach,” and “Act”—and she compiles cohesive groupings of 
essays under these headings. Judith Stadtman Tucker’s opening contribution, 
“Motherhood Made Me Do It, Or, How I Became an Activist,” provides a 
strong grounding for the volume. While Strong includes essays by important 
women, including Benazir Bhutto, Barbara Kingsolver, and Nancy Pelosi, 
many of the strongest essays are written by lesser-known writers. Each mother 
reading this compilation will feel drawn to different essays. For this reviewer, 
Jennifer Brisendine’s text on teaching high school English in the era of No 
Child Left Behind and Valerie Weaver-Zercher’s “Peace March Sans Children” 
are especially powerful. 
In her introduction to the book, Strong pinpoints motherhood as a time of 
political awakening but separate from political party allegiance. She asserts that 
she has “tapped into something more primal, more global, more far-reaching 


Mothers and Death : From Procreation to Creation

Cooley, Nicole

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering          163 
Objects in a Box For Class
Nicole Cooley
i.
Baby teeth I wrapped in plastic.  Jar of play-doh.  A tiny ball,
its rubber skin slit.
Describe, I tell my students. Inhabit. I want you to become your object. 
ii.
At the block party,  alone at the edge of the fence and watching the girls 
scratch at clotted winter grass with a fork, a piece of glass. 
I’m alone, the card table in the yard laid with the children’s gifts:  lensless 
glasses, a Kleenex flower, this junk they’ve dug up from the dirt. 
I’m alone. The other mothers are inside with beer. 
The other mothers aren’t watching and they don’t want to make the 
moment what it’s not—
iii.
I hate you, my daughter whispers from her blue car seat.
iv.
Their crying: beads on a necklace split, spilling, coming undone.
Their crying: beads rolling away from me, under the rug.
The beads roll in the box.  Glass marbles or sleeping pills I won’t take.
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164            Volume 11, Number 2
Nicole Cooley
v.
Five days home with my daughters, five days of fevers, cold baths, wrung-
out washcloths on foreheads, pink bulbed Tylenol to squirt inside cheeks, 
I only want to smoke. To smash the cigarette on the asphalt.
vi.
If you don’t like your object, I tell my class. You still have to write.
You don’t get to choose. The object chose you.
vii.
The other mothers don’t lie down in a web of dirt in the yard and leave 
their daughters inside the house to cry. Don’t leave their four year old to 
snap a rubber band over and over against her wrist while her sister twists 
in a fever sleep.
Don’t leave.
viii.
Object of the gaze.  (Eyes like the bottom of a blue glass bottle.)
Transitional object: breast, bottle, pacifier, my ring finger they sucked 
and chewed.
 “The Inaccessible Object of Desire,” a  French class I took in college.
Objects I collected from their playroom and brought to school on the 
subway.
viv.
The objects sleep in their box.  The girls dig in the dirt. The sky yawns 
white, shuts down. 


Objects in a Box For Class

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering          347 
Folio
Notes
“Primer,” “The Education of Girls,” “Slow Dancing: Beaconsfield 1973,” 
“Reading Amy Lowell,” “Memento Mori,” “Slow Burn,” “Dearest Rachel,” 
and “Somewhere a woman is writing a poem,” were published (sometimes in 
earlier versions) in Reading Like a Girl, Windsor: Black Moss Press, 2004 © 
Rishma Dunlop.
“Cherries in the Snow,”  “Choreography,” “Soundtracks,” “Hush,” “Adagio,” 
were published in White Album, Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2008, © Rishma 
Dunlop.
“Small things,” “Psalm,” “Film Noir,” and “Metropolis” (section 9 of a 12 part 
prose poem sequence), were published in Metropolis, Toronto: Mansfield Press, 
2005, © Rishma Dunlop.
“Psalm,” was written in response to the abduction and murder of Holly Jones, 
May 12, 2003, in Toronto.
Artwork and photography credits (reprinted with permission): 
Page 302: “Throat,” Brett Sillers, 1999.
Page 304: “Graffiti Ange,” 2005.
Page 308: “Reading,” Jyn Meyer <Jyn.meyer.com>.
Page 314: “Girl Reading,” Janice Tiefenbach, 1994.
Page 316: “Lovers,” Suzanne Northcott, 2002.
Page 318: “Winter Bench,” Joe Paczuski, 2005.
Page 322: “I love you Graffiti,” Joe Paczuski, 2003.
Page 325: “Mother and Daughters,” Suzanne Northcott, 2008.
Page 330: “Window,” Joe Paczuski, 2008.
Page 336: “Torn T-shirt,” Joe Paczuski. 
Page 338: “Dressmaker’s Form,” Joe Paczuski.
Page 342: “Suitcases,” Joe Paczuski, 2005.
Page 346: “Tourniquet,” Acrylic, multi-media and phototransfer on 
   wood panel, by Suzanne Northcott, 2002. Collection of Rishma Dunlop.


Notes

Bird LaChance, reviewed by Nancy

LaChance Adams, and Sarah

350        Volume 11, Number 1
Book Reviews
Wishing: Diaries of a Teen Pregnancy
Kim McLeod
Victoria, BC: Trafford Publishing, 2007
Reviewed by Nancy Bird LaChance and Sarah LaChance Adams
Wishing: Diaries of a Teen Pregnancy by Kim McLeod is a book of diary entries 
written over a period of twenty-eight months. Near the end of the book, read-
ers are spirited forward eight months into the next year, which includes twelve 
entries over five months, followed by an epilogue of sorts. McLeod’s pregnancy 
begins halfway through the book, quite late in a work about expecting a baby. 
Further, the author does not explain how birth control—she obtains birth 
control pills at great effort—fails her. Regrettably, the narrative unfolds in bits 
and pieces, with unwelcome gaps.
Most unsettling is McLeod’s transformation from a loving, caring teen 
mom of deep religious faith into every parent’s nightmare. The entries shift 
abruptly from “She was very quiet in church today she [sic] has been since 
we first brought her. Praise the Lord for all the beauty of Lana. Love Lana’s 
Mommy” to “I have fallen back into partying. I drank beer and smoked too 
much, I can hardly remember. I know I had sex with someone, but I don’t really 
know them.” What follows are eight pages that describe a wild roller-coaster 
ride of four months, ending with McLeod “staying at a friend’s house near the 
mall. They have a cot in the basement I can use…. They let Mack stay over a 
few times. He’s been coming into my bed. I wasn’t able to say no.” As readers, 
we found ourselves identifying more with McLeod’s frustrated parents than 
with McLeod herself.
The book is marked by poor grammar, misspellings, slang, and profanity. 
Scrupulous editing would have ensured the book’s accessibility to all readers, 
including students, tweens, teens, and their parents. Readers are left wishing 
for interpretive depth, struggling to find meaning in the mangled pieces of 
this painful puzzle.
Whatever Floats Your Boat: Perspectives on 
Motherhood 
Maryanne Pope and Shannon Lyons 
Calgary, Alberta: Pink Gazelle Productions
Reviewed by Gisela Norat
Sudden widowhood at age 32 leaves Maryanne Pope without her soul mate 
and husband. At 36, she decides to tackle the nagging “little inner voice” 


Wishing: Diaries of a Teen Pregnancy

Hill Butler, reviewed by Deidre

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        361 
Book Reviews
highlights the formidable task of giving up one’s emotional and familial safety to 
allow for mutual growth. In this case, the road leads both mother and daughter 
to acceptance and hope.
The Pearl of the Antilles
Andrea O’Reilly Herrera 
Tempe, az: Bilingual Review Press, 2001
Reviewed by Gillian M. E. Albans
In this powerful semi-autobiographical memoir of a survivor of Cuba’s dias-
pora, Andrea O’Reilly Herrera deftly explores inter-generational and -sexual 
tensions within pre-communist Cuba, a country splintered by revolution and 
death. The second part of the memoir continues in exile in Alabama and 
reaches back to the Spanish heritage of the Cuban colonists. The work moves 
across three generations of women—Rosa, her daughter Margarita, and her 
granddaughter Lilly—as well as the old family retainer Tata, Rosa’s husband 
Pedro, and the original colonist Paolo.
The memoir opens as Tata experiences a mountain-top vision of the July 
festival of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the Virgin, on her hieratic journey 
to the sea. The vision transforms into a nightmarish view of the priest taking 
children from their mothers and stripping the men of their virility. It is this view 
that hovers ominously over the memoir. In this patriarchal society, the absolute 
value of the male is reinforced by the family’s failure over three generations to 
produce legitimate male offspring. An illegitimate son has no familial value 
and becomes a source of shame. In a stifling atmosphere transported from the 
old world, societal inequalities are perpetuated as much by women as men. A 
daughter-in-law, for example, is complete disregarded by her mother-in-law, 
despite the fact that her son is transformed as a husband, father, and inheritor 
of his wife’s plantation.
Conversations in drawing rooms and servants’ kitchens dominate these 
leisured women’s lives. The default language between sexes and generations is 
silence, however. Marital partners use silence as a weapon against one another, 
for example. Yet communication occurs between Rosa and Pedro, at times 
between the mother who revisits her daughter Rosa from beyond the grave, 
or when Rosa refuses to explain the facts of life to her daughter Margarita, but 
joins her in spirit as a shared look offers them a secret tryst.
There are also strikingly rebellious female figures in this traditional society. 
The feisty Tia Marta on her quinceañera, for instance, parades down the stairs 
362        Volume 11, Number 1
Book Reviews
naked, wearing pearls and her father’s riding boots, and thereby achieves her 
intended aim of escaping marriage. Only the nunnery offers escape from the 
inevitable fate of a loveless marriage and the risks of childbirth.
Passing through the landmarks of birth, first periods and first loves, com-
munions, weddings and death, the family home is the rich base from which 
characters step out into the street, cathedral, or plantation. The pearls threading 
through their lives are the stories woven into the fabric of this compelling family 
saga. The protagonist Rosa is herself the eponymous pearl of the Antilles. It is 
the servant Tata who gives Rosa the notebook in which she records stories for 
her children, in order to retain more than “a heap of broken images and songs 
and a path of unhewn stones” (145). These stories will eventually link Rosa’s life 
to that of her daughter and her granddaughter—even if Spanish, the language 
in which she writes, will later create a barrier to understanding. 
By the time the young Margarita leaves for the United States—at ex-
traordinary personal cost—she has learned too well the lessons of silence and 
endurance. It takes years before her lonely suffering subsides and she opens 
to a future of exciting possibilities for herself and her daughter. Despite her 
own suffering, however, she does not regard her daughter as highly as her son. 
Sadly, the memoir suggests that women do not value one another as much as 
they value men.
 History looms behind the human drama of this memoir. Andrea O’Reilly 
Herrera examines lives spent in the service of an inimicable ideology; she exposes 
the tantalizing hold of the ever-receding past and the shaping power of sorrow 
and love. This is a book to be valued for its portrayal of both the ephemeral 
and the eternal, for its rich collage of a too readily forgotten past.
The End of Second Class 
Nancy Nicol
© 2006 Intervention Video Inc. (90 min., dvd)
Reviewed by Deidre Hill Butler
Same-sex marriage was legalized in Canada as a result of provincial court 
rulings that deemed unconstitutional existing bans on same-sex marriage. In 
fact, the legal status of same-sex marriage was unclear until 19 March 2004 
when the Court of Appeal of Quebec ruled similarly to the Ontario and British 
Columbia courts by upholding Hendricks and Leboeuf v. Quebec, the first case 
in Quebec concerning the marriage of a same-sex couple.
In The End of Second Class, filmmaker Nancy Nicol brings a human rights 
and social justice perspective to her chronicle of the struggle for full equality for 
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        363 
Book Reviews
same-sex unions in Canada. In-depth interviews with Hendricks and Leboeuf 
explore how their relationship was a traditional marriage in every way, shedding 
light on the need for same-sex unions to be legally recognized. This couple 
of thirty-plus years became the poster couple for an ongoing movement to 
shatter the invisible status of same-sex couples. While other lawsuits loomed, 
Hendricks and Leboeuf set the legal tide in motion. 
Nicol’s film is candid and detailed about the challenges gay and lesbian 
couples faced while battling for legal recognition. Through interviews with 
legal advisors and clergy, the viewer learns about the intermingling of church 
and state politics from macro and micro perspectives. Nicol highlights a wide 
range of individuals, including feminists, life-long activists, and granny lesbians, 
who combated legal obstacles as they worked toward their goal of legalizing 
same-sex marriage. Although the film lacks depth, it is informative and well 
suited to an upper-level undergraduate or graduate course in sociology of the 
family, for example. Community groups may also be interested in utilizing the 
documentary as an instructive model for building multi-layered alliances. 


The End of Second Class

Simon-Kumar, Rachel

"Productive" Reproducers : The Political Identity of Mothering in Contemporary India

L. F. Rippeyoung, Phyllis

Feeding the State: Breastfeeding and Women's Well-Being in Context

Epp Buller, reviewed by Rachel

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        187 
Book Reviews
Lapeyre-Desmaison on Adler, Ernaux, and Laurens and the death of a child 
(by abortion in Ernaux’s case), concerns writing as need and risk in relation to 
the authors’ traumatic experiences of giving birth to “both life and death.”
As with most collections of conference proceedings, the quality of the 
contributions is inconsistent, but this volume contains some interesting essays 
on an important and prevalent theme in contemporary culture. While individual 
essays are suitably theorized, a more substantial, theoretical introduction would 
have given the book more weight, and an index would have been helpful.
The Maternal Is Political: 
Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood 
and Social Change 
Shari MacDonald Strong, ed. 
Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008.
Reviewed by Rachel Epp Buller
Today it goes without saying that motherhood is a political act. Whether or 
not to breastfeed, co-sleep, baby-wear, or send your child to daycare—all of 
these are choices fraught with political implications. While a few of the es-
sayists in The Maternal Is Political discuss politics in terms of these mothering 
life style choices, many more consider their entry into motherhood as a time 
of political awakening. For a majority of the writers, motherhood shifted their 
viewpoints from seeing themselves as individuals unable to make a difference, 
to realizing that mothers have access to a collective well-spring of power, if 
only they work together to tap into that power.
Editor Shari MacDonald Strong divides her collection into three sec-
tions—“Believe,” “Teach,” and “Act”—and she compiles cohesive groupings of 
essays under these headings. Judith Stadtman Tucker’s opening contribution, 
“Motherhood Made Me Do It, Or, How I Became an Activist,” provides a 
strong grounding for the volume. While Strong includes essays by important 
women, including Benazir Bhutto, Barbara Kingsolver, and Nancy Pelosi, 
many of the strongest essays are written by lesser-known writers. Each mother 
reading this compilation will feel drawn to different essays. For this reviewer, 
Jennifer Brisendine’s text on teaching high school English in the era of No 
Child Left Behind and Valerie Weaver-Zercher’s “Peace March Sans Children” 
are especially powerful. 
In her introduction to the book, Strong pinpoints motherhood as a time of 
political awakening but separate from political party allegiance. She asserts that 
she has “tapped into something more primal, more global, more far-reaching 
188        Volume 11, Number 2
Book Reviews
and intuitive, than a political loyalty. [...] Call us members of the Mothering 
Party” (5). Despite this intended separation, however, the overwhelming major-
ity of the collection’s essayists are, in fact, left-leaning mamas who announce 
their political affiliations. Again and again, for example, we read of the writ-
ers’ disappointments regarding the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. As a 
left-leaning mama myself, I identify with their sentiments. And yet, I wonder 
about the absence of maternal voices from the “other side” of the fence. Sarah 
Werthan Buttenwieser’s “The Secret Lives of Babysitters”—albeit indirectly—is 
one such essay. Framing her contribution around the backdrop of the 2004 
election, Buttenwieser describes her struggle to make sense of the discovery that 
one of their family’s favourite babysitters is also the vice-president of the Young 
Republicans club. While diatribes from women whose motherhood inspired 
them to become anti-abortion activists would be out of place in this volume, 
surely there could have been a way to include the middle ground and thereby 
add a little diversity to challenge the reader and strengthen the collection. 
Diary for a Daughter: August 1969 - August 1970 
Katherine Dickson. 
United States: Xlibris Corporation, 2006. 
Reviewed by Margaret Machara
Katherine Dickson’s Diary for a Daughter is an intriguing peek inside the mental 
journey of a mother after the birth of her second child. Present throughout the 
challenges and doldrums of everyday life is the author’s family: husband, son, 
and especially her new daughter. As she seeks to define herself as a woman, 
a mother, and a writer, tension rises between Dickson and the members of 
her family.
Dickson’s book begins with change: relocation to a new home and the 
impending birth of her second child. Overwhelmed by a sense of euphoria she 
states, “everything seems so beautiful, and the whole atmosphere is swathed 
in mysterious expectation. I love the house. I love Frank. I hope to God this 
doesn’t all change after the baby is born. Everything I could possibly want is 
right here” (18). 
Not long after the birth of her daughter, however, the new mother begins 
to fear losing herself. Throughout her daughter’s first year, she is troubled by 
an inability to write. In addition, although she loves her husband Frank, her 
doubts about her own role and personal aspirations manifest as resentment 
and anger towards him. She invites Frank to help define her goals but soon 
interprets his interaction as controlling: “I need lines like in the coloring 
book. Frank offered ‘lines,’ then slowly blurred the picture” (64). Issues of 


The Maternal Is Political : Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change