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This collection considers how maternal regret, as it is conveyed in remorse, resentment, dissatisfaction, and disappointment, troubles the assumptions and mandates of normative motherhood and how it is explored and critiqued in creative non-fiction, film, literature, and social media. Maternal regret is also examined in relation to the estrangement of mother and child and the remorse and grief felt by both mothers and children caused by the abandonment of moth.

"Theory on mothers, mothering and motherhood has emerged as a distinct body of knowledge within Motherhood Studies and Feminist Theory more generally. This collection, The Second Edition of Maternal Theory: Essential Readings introduces readers to this rich and diverse tradition of maternal theory. Composed of 60 chapters the 2nd edition includes two sections: the first with the classic texts by Adrienne Rich, Nancy Chodorow, Sara Ruddick, Alice Walker, Barbara Katz Rothman, bell hooks, Sharon Hays, Patricia Hill-Collins, Audre Lorde, Daphne de Marneffe, Judith Warner, Patrice diQinizio, Susan Maushart, and many more. The second section includes thirty new chapters on vital and new topics including Trans Parenting, Non-Binary Parenting, Queer Mothering, Matricentric Feminism, Normative Motherhood, Maternal Subjectivity, Maternal Ambivalence, Maternal Regret, Monstrous Mothers, The Migrant Maternal, Reproductive Justice, Feminist Fathering, The Digital Maternal, The Opt-Out Revolution, Black Motherhoods, Motherlines, The Motherhood Memoir, Pandemic Mothering, and many more. Maternal Theory is essential reading for anyone interested in motherhood as experience, ideology, and identity."--

Intro -- Copyright -- Title Page -- Dedication -- TABLE OF CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS -- FOREWORD -- INTRODUCTION -- 1. MATRICENTRIC FEMINISM AS SCHOLARSHIP -- 2. MATRICENTRIC FEMINISM AS ACTIVISM -- 3. MATRICENTRIC FEMINISM AS PRACTICE -- 4. MATRICENTRIC FEMINISM AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO ACADEMIC FEMINISM -- WORKS CITED -- APPENDICES -- About the Author.

To request a free 30-day online trial to this product, visit www.sagepub.com/freetrialIn the last decade the topic of motherhood has emerged as a distinct and established field of scholarly inquiry. A cursory review of motherhood research reveals that hundreds of scholarly articles have been published on almost every motherhood theme imaginable. The first ever on the topic, this Encyclopedia of Motherhood helps to both demarcate motherhood as a scholarly field and an academic discipline and to direct its future development. With more than 700 entries, these three volumes provide informatio

Intro -- From Motherhood to Mothering -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction ANDREA O'REILLY -- PART ONE: Motherhood as Institution Patriarchal Power and Maternal Outrage -- 1. The Supreme Court of Canada and What It Means to Be "Of Woman Born" DIANA GINN -- 2. Of Party-State Born: Motherhood, Reproductive Politics, and the Chinese Nation-State SARAH E. STEVENS -- 3. Murderous Mothers: Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born and Toni Morrison's Beloved EMILY JEREMIAH -- PART TWO: Mothering as Experience: Empowerment and Resistance -- 4. "We Have Mama but No Papa" Motherhood in Women-Centered Societies MARIA-BARBARA WATSON-FRANKE -- 5. Mother as Transformer: Strategic Symbols of Matrilineage Recuperation in Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots DANNABANG KUWABONG -- 6. Of Woman (but Not Man or the Nuclear Family) Born: Motherhood Outside Institutionalized Heterosexuality KATE McCULLOUGH -- 7. Feminist Mothers: Successfully Negotiating the Tension between Motherhood as "Institution" and "Experience" FIONA JOY GREEN -- 8. Immortality and Morality in Contemporary Reworkings of the Demeter/Persephone Myth KARIN VOTH HARMAN -- 9. Mothering against Motherhood and the Possibility of Empowered Maternity for Mothers and Their Children ANDREA O'REILLY -- 10. The Broken Shovel: Looking Back from Postmaternity at Co-Parenting MARGARET MORGANROTH GULLETTE -- PART THREE: Narrating Maternity: Writing as a Mother -- 11. Adrienne Rich's "Clearing in the Imagination": Of Woman Born as Literary Criticism D'ARCY RANDALL -- 12. A "Sense of Drift": Adrienne Rich's Emergence from Mother to Poet JEANNETTE E. RILEY -- 13. Beginning with "I": The Legacy of Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born ANN KENISTON -- Contributors -- INDEX -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.

The central directive of the COVID-19 pandemic has been conveyed in two words: stay home. Yet there has been little media coverage, public policy, or social research on how families are managing under social isolation. Few have acknowledged, let alone sought to support, the crucial work mothers are doing as frontline workers to keep families functioning in these times of increasing uncertainty. Mothers do the bulk of domestic labour and childcare, and with social isolation, the burden of care work has increased exponentially, as mothers are running households with little or no support and under close to impossible conditions. Many mothers are also now engaged in paid labour from home and are responsible for their children's education as schools remain closed indefinitely. Mothers have little to no respite from their 24/7 schedule, since most outdoor activities have been cancelled for children, and no one is allowed into their homes. Add income or employment loss, financial or housing instability, food insecurity, single parenting, abusive situations, or recent experiences of migration and the stress is amplified. The article explores the care and crisis of mothers under COVID-19 through an examination of comments and discussions on the Facebook group Mothers and COVID-19, which I set up over a two-week period in early May 2020. The article considers how mothers are managing the new requirements of motherwork under the destabilizing restraints of this pandemic. It also addresses and asks why the essential and frontline work of mothering in this pandemic has been so discounted, disregarded, and dismissed by governments, media, and the larger society. The article seeks to make visible what has been made invisible and render audible what has been silenced—the labour of motherwork under COVID-19—in order to inform, support, and empower mothers through and after this pandemic.

The aim of this article is to introduce a mother-centred mode of feminism—what I have called "matricentric feminism"—to consider the context and challenges of a mother-centred feminist theory and politics, and to suggest directions for future research. Motherhood, it could be said, is the unfinished business of feminism. Matricentric feminism seeks to make motherhood the business of feminism by positioning mothers' needs and concerns as the starting point for a theory and politics on and for women's empowerment. This repositioning is not to suggest that a matricentric feminism should replace traditional feminist thought; rather, it is to emphasize that the category of mother is distinct from the category of woman and that many of the problems mothers face—social, economic, political, cultural, psychological, and so forth—are specific to women's roles and identity as mothers. Indeed, mothers are oppressed under patriarchy as women and as mothers. Consequently, mothers need a matricentric mode of feminism organized from and for their particular identity and work as mothers. Indeed, a mother-centred feminism is needed because mothers—arguably more so than women in general—remain disempowered despite forty years of feminism. My work does not rationalize or defend the need for a mother-centred feminism, as it takes it as a given. Instead, this article endeavours to describe and discuss this mode of mother-focused feminism, which has emerged as a result of and in response to women's specific identities andwork as mothers.