Motherhood Studies

Any mom who has tried to create a godly home for her family knows it doesn't happen automatically. Through books, blogs, and Instagram accounts, culture asserts that good moms must follow certain standards and abide by certain rules if she want what's best for her children. She must do everything she can — and she must do it all just right.

You're a caring mother of boys, part of the "boy mom" phenomenon - now learn how to raise your son to be compassionate, empathetic, and emotionally intelligent with this parenting guide made just for you.

In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women. In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self-proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African-American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write.

Women are constantly being told that it's simply too difficult to balance work and family, so if they don't really "have to" work, it's better for their families if they stay home. Not only is this untrue, Leslie Bennetts says, but the arguments in favor of stay-at-home motherhood fail to consider the surprising benefits of work and the unexpected toll of giving it up. It's time, she says, to get the message across: combining work and family really is the best choice for most women.

We worry putting our family first means we'll be forced to abandon our careers. We're afraid if we pause our careers, we'll be forever off track. This thinking is outdated - forget what you've heard about how pauses are career limiting, about how those who pause lack ambition, or that if you do pause you won't be able to reenter the paid workforce. That's a flawed reality, one that doesn't reflect the truth of the careers of some of the most successful women in this country. Author Lisen Stromberg knows this success firsthand.

Mothers are the breadwinners in two-thirds of American families, yet the American workplace is uniquely hostile to the needs of parents. Weaving in surprising research about the dysfunction between the careers and home lives of working mothers, as well as the consequences to women's health, Alcorn tells a deeply personal story about "having it all,” failing miserably, and what comes after. Ultimately, she offers readers a vision for a healthier, happier, and more productive way to live and work.

Claudia Garcia crossed the border because her toddler, Natalia, could not hear. Leaving behind everything she knew in Mexico, Claudia recounts the terror of migrating alone with her toddler and the incredible challenges she faced advocating for her daughter’s health in the United States. When she arrived in Texas, Claudia discovered that being undocumented would mean more than just an immigration status—it would be a way of living, of mothering, and of being discarded by even those institutions we count on to care.

When we talk about motherhood and politics together, we usually talk about isolated moments - the policing of breastfeeding, or the cost of childcare. But this is not enough: we need to understand motherhood itself as an inherently political state, one that has the potential to pose a serious challenge to the status quo. In Mother State, Helen Charman uses this provocative insight to write a new history of Britain and Northern Ireland. Beginning with Women's Liberation and ending with austerity, the book follows mothers' fights for an alternative future.

The intersection of motherhood and creative life is explored in these writings on mothering that turn the spotlight from the child to the mother herself. Here, in memoirs, testimonials, diaries, essays, and fiction, mothers describe firsthand the changes brought to their lives by pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering.

Mothering is as old as human existence. But how has this most essential experience changed over time and cultures? What is the history of maternity - the history of pregnancy, birth, the encounter with an infant? Can one capture the historical trail of mothers? How? In Mother Is a Verb, the historian Sarah Knott creates a genre all her own in order to craft a new kind of historical interpretation. Blending memoir and history and building from anecdote, her audiobook brings the past and the present viscerally alive.

When Christine Armstrong became a mother, it never occurred to her that she would want to stop work or even work part-time. But the truth is, combining work and small kids is hard. From the broken breast pumps on business trips, to hiding chicken pox from the nursery, to the heartbreak when you come home and realise your baby smells of the childminder. When Christine Armstrong tried it, she found herself desolate with misery. Determined to make it work, she looked for answers by interviewing other working mums and found that she wasn't alone.

Marlene, is trying to protect her family and fine a safe place to live. A Coronal Mass Ejection triggered geomagnetic storms which caused massive destruction and the breakdown of society. Marlene and her family have taken shelter with other survivors; under the protection of a small group of soldiers. As winter is approaching, other bands of survivors turn violent, and desperation grows. Marlene must make tough decisions and face many dangers to keep her children safe.

What if Augustine's Confessions had been written not by a man, but by a mother? How might her tales of desire, temptation, and transformation differ from his? In this memoir, Natalie Carnes describes giving birth to a daughter and beginning a story of conversion strikingly unlike Augustine's - even as his journey becomes a surprising companion to her own. The challenges Carnes recounts will be familiar to many parents. She wonders what and how much she should ask her daughter to suffer in resisting racism, patriarchy, and injustice.

Joyful. Graceful. Blessed. Strong. Anxious. Depressed. Stigmatized. Stereotyped. What happens when motherhood isn’t what you expected—and when you reach out for support, you are met with judgment and prejudice? Sandra Igwe shares her journey as a young Black mother, coping with sleepless nights, anxiety, and loneliness after the birth of her first daughter. Burdened by cultural expectations of the “good mother” and the “strong Black woman” trope, her mental health struggles became an uphill battle.

With insight and compassion, Pamela Stone shows convincingly that, far from representing a return to tradition, the decision of some women to relinquish high-powered careers is a reluctant and conflict-ridden response to the growing mismatch between privatized families and time-demanding jobs.

We believe that family life is beautiful and that motherhood is a privilege. But we also believe it is often really hard to see all that beauty when we’re in the midst of mothering. Power of Moms is an online community of deliberate mothers. Since 2007, millions of mothers from all backgrounds who are striving to be the best they can be have gathered to our website to learn and grow together. We've selected dozens of our most popular posts and compiled them neatly into this audiobook - just for you.

Melissa Hogenboom examines how the suite of changes we experience during pregnancy and motherhood influence our sense of self, both physically and from the wider world. From the way our brain changes during pregnancy and the psychological impact of our changing body, to the true cost of the motherhood workplace penalty and the intrusion of technology on family life, Hogenboom reveals how external events and society at large shape the way we see ourselves and impacts upon the choices we make.

Sweet, supportive, dependable, selfless. Long before she had children of her own, journalist Carrie Mullins knew how mothers should behave. But how? Where did these expectations come from—and, more importantly, are they serving the mothers whose lives they shape? Carrie's suspicion, later crystallized while raising two small children, was that our culture’s idealization of motherhood was not only painfully limiting but harmful, leaving women to cope with impossible standards—standards rarely created by mothers themselves.

In the first six weeks after her son was born, Jamila Rizvi felt isolated, exhausted and frustrated - as if the world she knew had disappeared forever. Then her salvation came in the form of a letter. A dear friend - who had been there herself - wrote to tell her that she would get through this. That she was seen and supported. That she was not alone. Now Jamila wants to pay it forward to other new mothers.

More than a decade after the New York Times best-selling anthology The Bitch in the House spoke up loud and clear for a generation of young women, nine of the original contributors are back - along with 16 captivating new voices - sharing their ruminations from an older, stronger, and wiser perspective about love, sex, work, family, independence, body image, health, and aging: the critical flash points of women's lives today.