Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother

By Sherry Thurer and Shari L. Thurer

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."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140246835
• ISBN13: 9780140246834
• Release Date: May 1995
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

None of that feminist hogwash

Being a woman against political correctness also does not make me a big fan of many feministic studies, so I was a bit relunctant to pick up this book at my college bookstore. The Myths of Motherhood is a fascinating read and not written by the usual feminist fare of male-hating/bashing writers. Shari L. Thurer is a mother herself and she writes with confident prose of the "maternal" perception throughout areas of history. Even with convincing speculation on what may have gone on through the minds of women in their respective eras. This book is an excellent reference on several levels and will lead one to re-evaluate just how much society's changes have affected what we *think* is a proper "mother".

I Recommend this Book

I found this book to be a fascinating, couldn't-put-it-down retrospective of motherhood seen in a historical and cultural perspective. Not only was the subject matter interesting, but it was written in a fresh and accessible manner for the non-historian.