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

Hauver James, reviewed by Jennifer

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        177 
Book Reviews
According to Nemzoff, parents need to reconcile their fantasies with the 
reality of their adult children and unearth a new vocabulary for the childhood 
descriptors “parent” and “child.” As she wryly notes, today “Grandmothers 
wear jeans and elementary-school children wear high heels.” 
How, then, should parents build solid relationships with their adult children? 
How can they nurture open discussion of such potentially contentious issues as 
finance, career, relationships, marriage, grandchildren, religion, and ethnicity? 
Nemzoff offers the example of Maggie and Morgan who endured decades of 
Morgan’s mother’s vocal disapproval. Their love endured through separation, 
eventual marriage, and three children. Due to the judgmental attitude of her 
mother-in-law, however, Maggie’s mother is the preferred grandmother by her 
children while Morgan’s mother is repaid for her lack of tact and insight with 
the absence of their affection.
As Nemzoff warns, disapproval—when directly expressed—will alienate 
the adult child. She counsels parents to voice their concern in a gracious, tactful, 
and understated way that shows support for their adult children. Nemzoff ’s 
many years as a relationship coach provide appropriate examples for readers 
to follow. Each chapter concludes with questions to guide our thinking about 
lifelong parenting and to help readers gain insight into themselves, their 
children, and their society.
… I have been invisible,
weird and supernatural.
I want my black dress.
I want my hair
curling wild around me.
I want my broomstick
from the closet where I hid it.
Tonight I meet my sisters
in the graveyard.
Around midnight
if you stop at a red light
in the wet city traffic,
Mother Matters: 
Motherhood as Discourse and Practice
Andrea O’Reilly, ed.  
Toronto: Association for Research on Mothering,  2004.
Reviewed by Jennifer Hauver James
178        Volume 11, Number 2
Book Reviews
watch for us against the moon.
We are screaming,
we are flying,
laughing, and won’t stop.
    —excerpt from Jean Tepperman’s “Witch”
Drawn from a collection of women’s poetry from around the world and 
throughout time, Tepperman’s poem echoes a common refrain: “We are here,” 
she cries, “And we will no longer be mocked, hidden, and hushed.” When read-
ing Mother Matters, edited by Andrea O’Reilly, this same refrain sings loudly 
from page to page. Not unlike Tepperman’s work from decades ago, or the 
words of Sojourner Truth in 1852, who asked, “Ain’t I a woman?” the women 
in this book demand visibility—for the multiplicity of ways womanhood and 
motherhood are constructed, understood, and enacted. O’Reilly describes Mother 
Matters as “an archeology of maternity: playing upon the double entendre of 
the word Matter(s) the book seeks to examine the substance and significance 
of motherhood.” Later she adds, “as it is represented and lived.”
The eighteen essays in Mother Matters were chosen from over 150 articles 
published in the first ten issues of the Journal of the Association for Research on 
Mothering. In part one of the book—Discourse—the authors unveil many of 
the ways motherhood and mothering are discursively constructed in various 
social texts. Analyses of children’s literature, photography, film, and magazines 
reveal the complex ways that discourse serves to essentialize understandings of 
motherhood, legitimizing some experiences while rendering others invisible. 
Qualifiers such as “natural” and “full-time” are examined and revealed as powerful 
myths that can serve to regulate our action and sense of self. The necessity of 
descriptors such as “step” or “adoptive” is questioned in so far as they contribute 
to the othering of mothers who do not fit mythological ideals. 
In part two—Practice—the authors contribute narratives and testimonies 
to the limitations imposed by normative, discursive constructions. Each piece 
offers a new perspective on how motherhood is enacted—collectively talking 
back to normative ideology by shining light on traditionally “othered,” “invis-
ible,” or otherwise marginalized ways of mothering. The voices and experiences 
of lesbian mothers, grandmothers, step mothers, young single mothers, and 
academic mothers push us to reconsider the boundaries of traditional meanings. 
Together, they name themselves, reclaiming our collected matrilineal history, 
and honouring the lived experience of all mothers in our midst. 
The power of this collection lies in its ability to challenge and resist essen-
tialized and dichotomous ways of thinking about mothering and motherhood. 
In each essay, readers are invited into the gray area that is lived experience—to 
embrace female sexuality, express emotion, connect with the past—to refuse 
false titles and representations of female experience. My own reading left me 
feeling anger at the injustices I have encountered, resentful of the ways in 
which my experience has been mis- or un-represented in dominant narratives, 
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        179 
Book Reviews
proud of the eloquent yet powerful ways my sisters have spoken, humbled by 
their experience, and inspired by their passion. Most of all, though, it left me 
with hope—hope that this book and the journal from which it was drawn will 
continue to be a place where mothers’ many voices can be heard, their lives 
and experiences known—a place where writers can continue to “destabilize, 
dismantle, and deconstruct the normative discourse of motherhood that both 
denies the complexity of mothering and demonizes its diversity” (25), where, 
as Tepperman writes in her poem, “We are screaming, / we are flying, / laugh-
ing, and won’t stop.”
Linda Blachman writes of a mother’s worst nightmare—living with cancer 
while raising a child.  This inspirational, emotionally charged, witty, and heart-
wrenching book is based on Blachman’s 70 interviews with mothers living 
with cancer.  While recovering from a back injury, Blachman formed a group 
of remarkable women, Mother’s Living Stories, whose aim was not only to 
support each other through a diagnosis of cancer while raising their children, 
but to also leave a message for their children (www.motherslivingstories.org). 
This book fills a gap in the literature around the darker side of mothering—how 
mothers construct their worlds when facing the possibility of death and how 
they reconstruct the hopes and dreams of their children.  
In each chapter, Blachman describes a mother’s story of her wishes, fears, 
and understanding of her illness and its impact on her family life.  Blachman 
uses narrative not only as a way of telling a story, but also as a way of changing 
the way we think about and understand ourselves.  She refers to such narratives 
as “teaching stories.”  Blachman successfully attempts to preserve the voices of 
the women she writes about.  She writes in the first person so as to maintain the 
truthfulness and meaning of each of the mother’s stories.  Throughout the book, 
Blachman’s reactions and interpretations are printed in italics, so as to easily 
identify her own reflections and thoughts on the stories shared.  In Blachman’s 
words, “The willingness to face what another’s story elicits in us, including the 
fear and pain, is a key requirement of being a good listener” (9).  
Intended for mothers who are living with cancer or are living through a 
difficult time, this book may be a source of comfort and inspiration for those 
experiencing the unpredictability of serious illness, coping with the possibility 
of death, and hoping to leave a legacy for their children.
Another Morning: 
Voices of Truth and Hope from Mothers with Cancer  
Linda Blachman.
Emeryville, ca: Seal Press, 2006.
Reviewed by Kimberly Bonia


English

Mother Matters: Motherhood as Discourse and Practice

Satterfield, Jane

Folio
arm 2008/09 photography contest. Second prize winner: 
“Sourire D’Amour.” Photo: Gerard Jouffray.
154            Volume 11, Number 2
Editor’s Notes
It’s a great pleasure to feature new poems by Nicole Cooley in this issue of Folio. 
In this selection from Milk Dress, the lived experience of mothering is viewed 
against Harry F. Harlow’s controversial maternal separation/ surrogate mother 
experiments designed and conducted in the late ’50s to explore the development 
of the child/mother bond.  Poetry, of course, makes no pretense of being objec-
tive study, yet Cooley approaches her art with a dedicated researcher’s passion 
and care, following her own line of questioning to its disjuncting conclusions. 
“Which mother,” she asks, “will lie awake all night, wishing for solitude, yet 
wishing for her daughters’ small bodies/wound into hers, while the radiator 
hisses, the dull gray color of a knife?”  
Throughout this formally inventive sequence, Harlow’s borrowed lan-
guage, clinical and assertive, forms a dramatic contrast to the poet’s own 
voice and sparks compelling lyrical deliberations on the nature of maternal 
love.  Harlow’s description of infant attachment as “a sacred or mystical force, 
an instinct incapable of analysis” is weighed against the poet’s knowledge of 
these complex bonds.  When her child is sick, the mother can “feel the heat 
rise/in my own skin,” the child’s “fever leaking into me.”  The demands of 
giving comfort and the need for separation compel Cooley’s notice.  When 
her daughter is in hospital, the mother must put on a “lead dress” if she wants 
to stay with her child.  Medical intervention, however necessary, thwarts a 
natural impulse:  “I was not allowed to hold her,” Cooley observes, “I tried to 
soothe her but/the lead collar choked my voice out of my throat.”  Elsewhere, 
she captures the sheer emotional exhaustion of mothering.  After “five days of 
fevers, cold baths, wrung-out washcloths on foreheads, pink bulbed Tylenol 
to squirt inside cheeks,” she observes, “I only want to smoke.  To smash the 
cigarette on the asphalt.”
In these cannily precise poems, grounded in urban and suburban settings 
unsettled by “America’s new war,” we encounter a writer who, in speaking as 
a mother, is less interested in tracking the ways a woman feels pulled between 
mother work and other work than she is in transcribing the ways that moth-
ering shifts our temporal and linguistic constructions.  A nursing mother 
and child are “one body,” the mother “an instrument, this body/my daughter 
knows.”  The mother’s body, as the poet shows, is ultimately a landscape all 
its own: “like fabric turned inside out.” 
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering          155 
Putting on and taking off motherhood, shucking the “dress” of conven-
tion, poetic or otherwise—this is Cooley’s great theme, carefully documented 
as it plays out in the classroom, hospital, neighborhood block party, or the 
Harvard Club where the poet nurses her baby under the gaze of Eliot and his 
first wife, Vivian, who would, of course, have used the “Woman’s Entrance.” 
While brunch continues and the child feeds, the poet/mother muses on her 
vocation: “I’d like to write about kept silence. I’d like/to flip on searchlights to 
sweep the elegant drawing room,/and set every corner burning.” 
The author of two books of poems on lsu Press, Resurrection (1996), 
The Afflicted Girls (2004) and the forthcoming Breach, a collection of poems 
about Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast, Cooley has published writ-
ing on mothering in the anthologies Toddler (Seal Press, 2003), The Best of 
Literary Mama (Seal Press, 2005), Not For Mothers Only (Fence, 2007), and 
Mama PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life (Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, 2008). With Pamela Stone, she co-edited the “Mother” issue of 
Women’s Studies Quarterly.
Art, like the mother, may give comfort, but this poet insists it provide 
no easy escape.  Waking with her husband and baby in the aftermath of the 
September 2001 terrorist attacks, where “each day is a gasp” and a “jaundiced 
yellow smell” filled the bedroom with “fear/of the future,” this poet will “pray 
for the world outside our bed to disappear,” and in the next breath acknowl-
edge, “It won’t.  But then it shouldn’t.”  
                          —Jane Satterfield


Editor's Notes

Dombroski, reviewed by Kelly

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        181 
Book Reviews
The Changing Realities of Work and Family
Amy Marcus-Newhall, Diane F. Halpern, and Sherylle J. Tan, eds. 
Hoboken, nj: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.
Reviewed by Kelly Dombroski
The Changing Realities of Work and Family is an edited collection of essays that 
collectively explores “the dynamics at the intersection of work and family” and 
seeks “to better understand the relationship between work and families” in a 
multidisciplinary way. The volume does not specifically set out to investigate 
mothering, but many of the essays deal with maternal employment and the 
work-family balances made by women in particular. The book takes the form 
of fifteen essays, with separate introductions for each themed section: Em-
ployment and Children; Culture, Age and Sexual Orientation; Work, Stress, 
and Health Linkages; and Politics, Business, and the Legal System. The book 
boasts of its “multidisciplinary approach” (it is edited by three social psycholo-
gists, and includes contributions by at least 14 psychologists), yet the general 
research approaches and “starting points” of all contributors are similar – most 
rely heavily on the social psychologists’ toolbox of survey methods and quan-
titative data analysis, and do not seek to problematize key research concepts 
such as work, family, employment, etc. The taken-for-granted nature of these 
key terms means that proposed “solutions” to the problem of “work-family 
balance” are limited to the usual recommendations: we should recognize that 
maternal employment is here to stay; there should be more flexibility in the 
workplace; and there should be more research into working-class and ethnic 
minority families.
For non-social psychologist readers of this Journal, some of the most 
interesting essays will be those written by non-academic authors. Jane Swift’s 
essay entitled “Politics, Motherhood, and Madame President” gives some in-
sight into the beliefs that drive her political career. Donna Klein of Corporate 
Voices for Working Families documents the research conducted by this non-
governmental organization into the business impacts of increased flexibility 
in the workplace, findings that confirm that flexible workplace practices have 
a positive financial impact on companies. V. Sue Molina, retired partner from 
the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche, offers insight into potential changes 
in firms by describing the policies and programs of her former employer. 
With eight out of 10 workers wanting greater flexibility in the workplace, she 
insists that the issue of work-family balance is not limited to mothers with 
small children, despite having been stigmatized as such. These three essays in 
particular provide relevant real-life examples that add colour to the statistical 
analysis that dominates the rest of the book. 
182        Volume 11, Number 2
Book Reviews
Another fascinating contribution is Darby E. Saxbe and Rena L. Repetti’s 
“Taking the Temperature of Family Life: Preliminary Results from an Obser-
vational Study.” This essay cites results from an exciting real-life observational 
study of dual-income families using videos, interviews, and self-reporting 
techniques. Although the data is limited to dual income families above a 
certain income level and with a mortgage, it brings to light some interesting 
characteristics of these middle-class families. For example, although most 
families report that they value family time and their landscaped outdoor spaces, 
they rarely spend time together either inside or outside their homes. In fact, 
most family members spend large amounts of time watching television or us-
ing other electronic equipment. There are also strong indications that these 
employed women still shoulder the bulk of domestic labour in their homes, 
with little contribution from their male partners or children. Many women in 
the study report very negative feelings in the evenings, when they often find 
themselves alone in the kitchen completing household chores. This finding 
adds impetus to Joan C. Williams’s assertion in her essay “What Psycholo-
gists Need to Know about Family Responsibilities Discrimination”: that we 
need to do away with the conscious/unconscious dichotomy in thinking about 
gender and maternal discrimination, as it provides an excuse for gender bias 
in many settings. That the more powerful members of society can get away 
with ignoring the perspectives and experiences of the less powerful facilitates 
unconscious discrimination.
The aim of this collection is to focus on the intersection of work and fam-
ily, and to chart the “changing realities” of this nexus for mainstream America. 
Despite the inclusion of a section that focuses on diversity, the volume does 
not challenge the work/family preoccupations of the middle class. For instance, 
by vigorously defending maternal employment in terms of child development 
and the business bottom line, the contributions on maternal employment 
implicitly uphold the idea that mothers can only be employed as long as their 
employment does not negatively affect a child or a business. Does this mean 
that maternal employment would otherwise not be supported? On the other 
hand, this lack of radical critique could be one of the book’s strengths, as it 
is likely to be well-received by policy makers—corporate, public, and politi-
cal—who are looking for “hard data” (rather than new conceptualizations of 
family and work) to support decisions about work/family policies for middle-
class Americans. 


The Changing Realities of Work and Family

Cuomo, reviewed by Amya

352        Volume 11, Number 1
Book Reviews
Like Our Very Own: 
Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood, 
1851-1950 
Julie Berebitsky 
Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2001 
Reviewed by Amy Cuomo
The history of adoption in the United States is an expansive topic that could 
prove daunting for a less able historian than Julie Berebitsky. In Like Our Very 
Own, Berebitsky offers a carefully wrought picture of the changing ideology 
that surrounded adoption in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The 
author summarizes her book’s purpose: “Rather than providing a historical 
survey of adoption practices, this work examines adoption for what it can tell 
us about Americans’ changing understanding of the family.” In order to ac-
complish her mission, however, Berebitsky gives her reader excellent insight 
into adoption practice. The author’s historical research is meticulous; she cites 
records from orphanages, social workers’ case files, and correspondence from 
prospective adoptive parents, as well as those relinquishing a child for adoption. 
Closed adoption records required the author to search for additional material 
to understand the meaning of adoption. As a result, Berebitsky also considers 
material found in popular magazines of the day. 
Divided into five chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue, the book 
analyzes the United States’ changing perspective on adopted children, adop-
tive parents, and what these changes reveal about cultural understandings 
of family. Chapter one explores the foundations of early adoption laws and 
takes the reader through the early history of U.S. adoption, using specific case 
studies of orphanages such as the Washington City Orphan Asylum and the 
Board of Children’s Guardians. Reproductions of adoption contracts and 
orphanages are included and serve as historical backdrop to adoption in the 
nineteenth century. In addition to developing a legal analysis of early adop-
tion procedures in the United States, Berebitsky examines eugenic concerns 
regarding “tainted blood.” She notes that while many parents legally adopted 
their children, others chose to raise children without adopting them because 
they were daunted not only by the legal quagmire attached to adoption, but 
also by its cost. Thus, the author explores cultural attitudes that questioned 
the ability of the law to make a family.
Chapter two studies a specific adoption campaign launched by the popu-
lar magazine, The Delineator. Berebitsky’s analysis of the campaign, which 
endorsed “rescuing” children through adoption, shows how the magazine 
sought to sway public perception of adoption as less a personal choice than a 
public service. In her third chapter, Berebitsky examines the cultural stigma 
brought to you by COREView metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
provided by Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and...
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        353 
Book Reviews
of childlessness in the first half of the twentieth century and the growing 
concept of what constitutes a “real mother.” The author notes the contradic-
tion that women who adopted children were often denied the “status” of 
biological mothers but could be considered “superior citizens.” Chapter four 
depicts a growing prejudice against single mothers who wished to adopt and 
notes that this change of attitude became pervasive by the 1940s. The author 
summarizes her research succinctly: “Single women still adopted after 1920; 
however, there was no longer popular support for their motherhood. And by 
the 1950s, it appears that virtually no single women adopted.” Chapter five 
considers the divide between public adoption agencies that employed social 
workers and philanthropic women who worked with private adoption agencies 
to find adoptive homes for children.
Berebitsky’s study reveals that “[t]hroughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, 
the demand for children greatly exceeded the supply of adoptable infants.” 
This demand for infants also spurred social workers to expand their notion 
of an “adoptable infant.” The epilogue cites current debates surrounding the 
institution of adoption, including the fear of racial genocide expressed by the 
National Association of Black Social Workers, which tried to prevent the 
adoption of black children by white families. Berebitsky further recognizes the 
effect of Roe vs. Wade on adoption, as there are now fewer children available 
for adoption. 
Like Our Very Own is clear, accessible, and thoroughly researched. The 
book will appeal to readers who are interested in the history of the family 
and adoption. 
A Mother Apart: How to Let Go of Guilt and Find 
Happiness Living Apart from Your Child
 
Sarah Hart 
Bancyfelin, Carmarthen, Wales: Crown House Publishing, 2008
Reviewed by Diana L. Gustafson
Self-help books for mothers line the shelves of bookstores and libraries. The 
numbers have grown since the latter-day assertions of Dr. Spock to the current-
day pronouncements of Dr. Phil. Many of these books tell mothers how to love, 
protect, and care for their children at various stages of growth and development. 
For some women, these books can be a valuable source of information about 
how best to negotiate new terrain (what is normal and what is not; when to 
relax and when to seek help)—after all, there is nothing instinctual or natural 


Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood, 1851-1950

Dunlop, Rishma

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering          323 
You believe small things keep you safe:
prayers like the Japanese tie to trees, 
clasp of your child’s hand,
angels at the gates of your city,
schedules of commuter trains.
Until the blasted church,
machete massacres, 
the rush hour bombs on subways,
carnage that is the failure of love.
Clothed in our convictions,
we feel our brains slip,
in every bone the fossil of murder,
illness we cannot vomit up,
a hurt so fierce it takes more than
all human grief to beat it down.
We see the exact perspective of 
loss as a fading pencil study,
loved one’s features blur, smudged detail,
clouds of centuries pass over the image,
through cross-hatched strokes
only a wrist in forced memory remains,
a hand caressing.
In the archives of accusations,
vengeance and the unforgiven,
we are nailed together, flying the black
flag of ourselves.
The farmer continues to till his fields.
In the city we awaken, turn off alarm clocks,
Small things
Rishma Dunlop
324            Volume 11, Number 1
Rishma Dunlop
drink our coffee, kiss our lovers and children,
begin again at the train stations, at bus stops,
briefcases in hand. 
In deafness to political speech
the eye permits change. 
You imagine words fit for a newborn.
Touch me. In the burned city,
we have become beautiful. 
Love’s no secret now.
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering          325 


Small Things

Knaak, Stephanie

"Having a Tough Time:" Towards an Understanding of the Psycho-social Causes of Postpartum Emotional Stress

334            Volume 11, Number 1
Rishma Dunlop
My robe is lined with crimson silk for you. Love will kill us. Love will 
   save us.
   Love and the words from beneath the earth
When we are kneed to the ground
   tempted to stop-out
Remember     battle of the red cells      shattered fragments of hell
   prayer smoke wreckage     starred flesh
Whir of monarch butterflies, orange-gold dust of thousands of wings.
Listen to the earth’s prayer which has the perfume of newborns.
The right word can send you breathless.
    
Everything is speaking and singing. We are here.
   This life. Long, slow burn of a struck match.


Slow Burn

M. E. Albans, reviewed by Gillian

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

Not a member yet

Mother Matters: Motherhood as Discourse and Practice

Editor's Notes

The Changing Realities of Work and Family

Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood, 1851-1950

Small Things

"Having a Tough Time:" Towards an Understanding of the Psycho-social Causes of Postpartum Emotional Stress

Slow Burn

The Pearl of the Antilles

Empowered Mothering Among Poor Latina Women in Abusive Relationships

Intensive Mothering, Intensive visiting: How Mothers View Prenatal Care Schedules

1,574

1,824