Feminist scholars of motherhood distinguish between mothering and motherhood, and argue that the latter is a patriarchal institution that is oppressive to women. Few scholars, however, have considered how mothering, as a female defined and centred experience, may be a site of empowerment for women. This collection is the first to do so. Mother Outlaws examines how mothers imagine and implement theories and practices of mothering that are empowering to women. Central to this inquiry is the recognition that mothers and children benefit when the mother lives her life, and practices mothering, from a position of agency, authority, authenticity and autonomy.

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SEATTLE TIMES This groundbreaking dual biography brings to life a pioneering English feminist and the daughter she never knew. Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley have each been the subject of numerous biographies, yet no one has ever examined their lives in one book—until now. In Romantic Outlaws, Charlotte Gordon reunites the trailblazing author who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the Romantic visionary who gave the world Frankenstein—two courageous women who should have shared their lives, but instead shared a powerful literary and feminist legacy. In 1797, less than two weeks after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft died, and a remarkable life spent pushing against the boundaries of society’s expectations for women came to an end. But another was just beginning. Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary was to follow a similarly audacious path. Both women had passionate relationships with several men, bore children out of wedlock, and chose to live in exile outside their native country. Each in her own time fought against the injustices women faced and wrote books that changed literary history. The private lives of both Marys were nothing less than the stuff of great Romantic drama, providing fabulous material for Charlotte Gordon, an accomplished historian and a gifted storyteller. Taking readers on a vivid journey across revolutionary France and Victorian England, she seamlessly interweaves the lives of her two protagonists in alternating chapters, creating a book that reads like a richly textured historical novel. Gordon also paints unforgettable portraits of the men in their lives, including the mercurial genius Percy Shelley, the unbridled libertine Lord Byron, and the brilliant radical William Godwin. “Brave, passionate, and visionary, they broke almost every rule there was to break,” Gordon writes of Wollstonecraft and Shelley. A truly revelatory biography, Romantic Outlaws reveals the defiant, creative lives of this daring mother-daughter pair who refused to be confined by the rigid conventions of their era. Praise for Romantic Outlaws “[An] impassioned dual biography . . . Gordon, alternating between the two chapter by chapter, binds their lives into a fascinating whole. She shows, in vivid detail, how mother influenced daughter, and how the daughter’s struggles mirrored the mother’s.”—The Boston Globe

Essays explore a wide range of contemporary feminist mothering practices.

Tracing Route 66 through Missouri represents one of America's favorite exercises in nostalgia, but a discerning glance among the roadside weeds reveals the kind of sordid history that doesn't appear on postcards. Along with vintage cars and picnic baskets, Route 66 was a conduit humming with contraband and crackling with the gunplay of folks like Bonnie and Clyde, Jesse James and the Young brothers. It was also the preferred byway of lynch mobs, murderous hitchhikers and mad scientists. Stop in at places like the Devil's Elbow and the Steffleback Bordello on this trip through the more treacherous twists of the Mother Road.

Matricentric feminism seeks to make motherhood the business of feminism by positioning mothers' needs and concerns as the starting point for a theory and politic on and for the empowerment of women as mothers. Based on the conviction that mothering is a verb, it understands that becoming and being a mother is not limited to biological mothers or cisgender women but rather to anyone who does the work of mothering as a central part of their life. The Mother Wave, the first-ever book on the topic, compellingly explores how mothers need a matricentric mode of feminism organized from and for their particular identity and work as mothers, and because mothers remain disempowered despite sixty years of feminism. The anthology makes visible the power of matricentric feminism as it is theorized, enacted, and represented to realize and achieve the subversive potential of mothers and their contributions to feminist theory and activism. Contributors share the impact and influence of matricentric feminism on families and children, culture, art/literature, education, public policy, social media, and workplace practices through personal reflections, scholarly essays, memoir, creative non-fiction, poetry, and photography. The mother wave of matricentric feminism invites conversations with others and offers a praxis of feminism that aims to coexist, overlap, and intersect with others.

How writing and motherhood influence one another.

Mothers and Sons: Centering Mother Knowledge makes a case for the need to de-gender the framing and study of parental legacy. The actualization of an entire collection on this dyad foregrounding motherhood without particularizing the absence of fatherhood is in itself revolutionary. This assemblage of analytical, narrative and creative renderings offers cross-disciplinary conceptualizations of maternal experiences across difference and mothering sons at intersections. The authors’ mother knowledge, or that of their subjects, delivers new insights into the appellations mother, son, motherhood and sonhood.

In the years since the publication of Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born, the topic of motherhood has emerged as a central issue in feminist scholarship. Arguably still the best feminist book on mothering and motherhood, Of Woman Born is not only a wide-ranging, far-reaching meditation on the meaning and experience of motherhood that draws from the disciplines of anthropology, feminist theory, psychology, and literature, but it also narrates Rich's personal reflections on her experiences of mothering. Andrea O'Reilly gathers feminist scholars from diverse disciplines such as literature, women's studies, law, sociology, anthropology, creative writing, and critical theory and examines how Of Woman Born has informed and influenced the way feminist scholarship "thinks and talks" about motherhood. The contributors explore the many ways in which Rich provides the analytical tools to study and report upon the meaning and experience of motherhood.

Interdisciplinary and intersectional in emphasis, the Routledge Companion to Motherhood brings together essays on current intellectual themes, issues, and debates, while also creating a foundation for future scholarship and study as the field of Motherhood Studies continues to develop globally. This Routledge Companion is the first extensive collection on the wide-ranging topics, themes, issues, and debates that ground the intellectual work being done on motherhood. Global in scope and including a range of disciplinary perspectives, including anthropology, literature, communication studies, sociology, women’s and gender studies, history, and economics, this volume introduces the foundational topics and ideas in motherhood, delineates the diversity and complexity of mothering, and also stimulates dialogue among scholars and students approaching from divergent backgrounds and intellectual perspectives. This will become a foundational text for academics in Women's and Gender Studies and interdisciplinary researchers interested in this important, complex and rapidly growing topic. Scholars of psychology, sociology or public policy, and activists in both university and workplace settings interested in motherhood and mothering will find it an invaluable guide.

Mothers, Sex, and Sexuality talks about things not normally dared spoken out loud—the interconnectedness and conflict between our parental and sexual selves, the taboo of the sexual mother, and why it matters so much to shatter it. What is it about the sexual mother that is incompatible, and at times even disturbing? Why are we threatened by maternal sexuality? And what does this tell us about the structures of gender and power that govern our bodies? Mothers, Sex, and Sexuality presents a rigorous academic analysis of the myriad ways in which the sexual/maternal divide affects women, birthing people, and those of us who assume or are ascribed the title "mother". We examine the way we as mothers talk to our daughters about sex, the way we talk about sex in a cultural context, and the deafening silence around sex in a medical system that overlooks maternal sexuality. We return repeatedly to the impact of both Christianity and Hinduism on the mother as someone to be revered but tightly controlled. We embrace the lost eroticism of mothering and hail breastfeeding as a sexual maternal practice, arguing for a new, broader, feminist understanding of sexuality. We discuss the way fat mothers destabalise the heteronormative maternal model, the way kinky queers are reconfiguring the sexual/maternal divide through erotic role-play, and we explore the strange, intense, and romantic domestic relationship that springs up between mothers and nannies—two heterosexual women trapped together in a homoerotic triangulation of need and desire. In a titillating climax we revel in the sexual maternal as embodied through performance art, poetry, installations, and comedy, disrupting queer readings of bodies as we are invited to both fuck, and fuck with, the maternal. This book boldly provides both a challenge to the patriarchal constraints of motherhood and a racy road-map escape route out of the sexual-maternal dichotomy.