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How did mothers transform from parents of secondary importance in the colonies to having their multiple and complex roles connected to the well-being of the nation? In the first comprehensive history of motherhood in the United States, Jodi Vandenberg-Daves explores how tensions over the maternal role have been part and parcel of the development of American society. Modern Motherhood travels through redefinitions of motherhood over time, as mothers encountered a growing cadre of medical and psychological experts, increased their labor force participation, gained the right to vote, agitated for more resources to perform their maternal duties, and demonstrated their vast resourcefulness in pro...
More than eighty designs--iconic, archaic, quotidian, and taboo--that have defined the arc of human reproduction. While birth often brings great joy, making babies is a knotty enterprise. The designed objects that surround us when it comes to menstruation, birth control, conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood vary as oddly, messily, and dramatically as the stereotypes suggest. This smart, image-rich, fashion-forward, and design-driven book explores more than eighty designs--iconic, conceptual, archaic, titillating, emotionally charged, or just plain strange--that have defined the relationships between people and babies during the past century. Each object tells a story. In s...
As the major national biracial women's organization, the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) provided a unique venue for women to respond to American race relations during the first half of the twentieth century. In Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906-46, Nancy Marie Robertson shows how women of both races employed different understandings of "Christian sisterhood" in their responses. Although the YWCA was segregated at the local level, African American women were able to effectively challenge white women over YWCA racial policies and practices. Robertson argues that from 1906 through 1946, many white women in the association went from seeing segregation as compat...
The YMCA and the YWCA have been an integral part of America's urban landscape since their emergence almost 150 years ago. Yet the significant influence these organizations had on American society has been largely overlooked. Men and Women Adrift explores the role of the YMCA and YWCA in shaping the identities of America's urban population. Examining the urban experiences of the single young men and women who came to the cities in search of employment and personal freedom, these essays trace the role of the YMCA and the YWCA in urban America from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The contributors detail the YMCA's early competition with churches and other urban institutions, the associations' unique architectural style, their services for members of the working class, African Americans, and immigrants, and their role in defining gender and sexual identities. The volume includes contributions by Michelle Busby, Jessica Elfenbein, Sarah Heath, Adrienne Lash Jones, Paula Lupkin, Raymond A. Mohl, Elizabeth Norris, Cliff Putney, Nancy Robertson, Thomas Winter, and John D. Wrathall.
The book aims to broaden understanding of the diverse positions and meanings of motherhood by investigating understudied and marginalized mothers (rural itinerant, African American, and Irish Catholic American) between 1920 and 1960. Fuelled by anxieties around feminism, a perception of men’s loss of status and masculinity, racial tensions, and fears about immigration, "antimaternalism" discourse blamed mothers for a wide range of social ills in the first half of the 20th Century. Mothering, Time, and Antimaternalism considers the ideas, practices, and depictions of antimaternalism, and the ways that mothers responded. Religion, class, race, ethnicity, gender, and immigration status are all analysed as factors shaping maternal experience. The book develops the historical context of American motherhood between 1920 and 1960, examining how changing ideas – scientific motherhood, time efficiency, devaluation of domesticity, racial and religious bias - influenced the construction and experiences of motherhood. This is a fascinating and important book suitable for students and scholars in history, gender studies, cultural studies and sociology.
From Gone with the Wind to Designing Women, images of southern females that emerge from fiction and film tend to obscure the diversity of American women from below the Mason-Dixon line. In a work that deftly lays bare a myriad of myths and stereotypes while presenting true stories of ambition, grit, and endurance, Margaret Ripley Wolfe offers the first professional historical synthesis of southern women's experiences across the centuries. In telling their story, she considers many ordinary lives—those of Native-American, African-American, and white women from the Tidewater region and Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta to the Gulf Coastal Plain, women whose varied economic and social circu...
Despite years of propaganda attempting to convince us otherwise, popular media is beginning to catch on to the idea that the home is one of the most dangerous and difficult places for a woman to be. This book examines emergent trends in popular media, which increasingly takes on the realities of domestic violence, toxic home lives and the impossibility of "having it all." While many narratives still fall back on outmoded and limiting narratives about gender--the pursuit of romance, children, and a life dedicated to the domestic--this book makes the case that some texts introduce complexity and a challenge to the status quo, pointing us toward a feminist future in which women's voices and concerns are amplified and respected.
Over the last thirty years, issues of gender have been creatively explored within the field of mission studies. Whereas the life and work of female missionaries have been fruitfully reflected upon, male gender identity has often been understood as an unchanging category. This book offers a pioneering account of the relationship between missionary work and masculinity. By examining four individual men this study explores how self-making occurred within foreign missions, but also how conceptions of male gender informed missionary work. Changes that occurred in the lives of these men are placed within the broader context of how issues of gender were renegotiated within the contemporary missionary movement.
Childbirth defines families, communities, and nations. In Birthing the West, Jennifer J. Hill fills the silences around historical reproduction with copious new evidence and an enticing narrative, describing a process of settlement in the American West that depended on the nurturing connections of reproductive caregivers and the authority of mothers over birth. Economic and cultural development depended on childbirth. Hill’s expanded vision suggests that the mantra of cattle drives and military campaigns leaves out essential events and falls far short of an accurate representation of American expansion. The picture that emerges in Birthing the West presents a more complete understanding of...
This book examines ancient generative theories, physiological understandings of breast milk, and presentations of prominent mothers to analyze these themes in the New Testament and several early Christian writings. Identifying themselves as members of God's household, ancient Christians utilized motherhood as a theological category and a contested ideal for women disciples.