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Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother

by Sherry Thurer

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A historical challenge to ideals of the “good mother”

$26.45 USD
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Paperback New English

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AlbakiReads Editorial

A historical challenge to ideals of the “good mother”

Sherry Thurer examines motherhood as a cultural construction rather than a fixed role, tracing changing expectations from the Stone Age through the late twentieth century. Drawing on material that ranges from psychoanalysis to the history of wet nursing, the book places familiar ideals of maternal self-sacrifice in a longer social history. It questions nostalgic accounts of periods such as Classical Greece and the Italian Renaissance, and treats the stay-at-home maternal ideal associated with Dr. Spock as historically unusual rather than timeless. The book’s central concern is how standards for mothers have been shaped—and often imposed—across different eras.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in the social history of motherhood and parenting
  • Those examining cultural expectations, guilt, and ideals surrounding mothers
  • Readers of feminist and sociological studies of family life

Themes

MotherhoodCultural expectationsSocial historyGender rolesParenting ideals

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Book overview

This groundbreaking and irreverent history of motherhood is worth a hundred advice books for any mother who's ever been made to feel guilty or frazzled by society's impossible expectations. Analyzing data from the psychoanalyst's couch to the hidden history of wet nursing, psychologist Shari L. Thurer wends her way from the Stone Age to the age of Hillary Rodham Clinton, painting a vivid, often frightening picture of life for mothers and children in a time when their roles were constructed by men. Along the way, she debunks myth after myth--exposing the not-so-golden ages of Classical Greece and the Italian Renaissance, and revealing the pervasive ideal of Dr. Spock's selfless, stay-at-home mother as the historical aberration it actually was. A work of impassioned scholarship and astonishing range, The Myths of Motherhood does nothing less than recast our conception of good mothering.
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