Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother

ISBN: 0140246835

Author: Shari Thurer

Condition: New

This groundbreaking and irreverent history of motherhood is worth a hundred advice books for any mother whos ever been made to feel guilty or frazzled by societys impossible expectations. Analyzing data from the psychoanalysts 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. Spocks 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.