This “essential read” (Gretchen Rubin) from the author of Savvy Auntie tells the funny, sexy, and sometimes heartbreaking stories of today's well-educated, successful women who expected love, marriage, and children, but instead find themselves in the “Otherhood” as their fertile years wane. More American women are childless than ever before—nearly half those of childbearing age don’t have children. While our society often assumes these women are “childfree by choice,” that’s not always true. In reality, many of them expected to marry and have children, but it simply hasn’t happened. Wrongly judged as picky or career-obsessed, they make up the “Otherhood,” a growing demographic that has gone without definition or visibility until now. In Otherhood, author Melanie Notkin reveals her own story as well as the honest, poignant, humorous, and occasionally heartbreaking stories of women in her generation—women who expected love, marriage, and parenthood, but instead found themselves facing a different reality. She addresses the reasons for this shift, the social and emotional impact it has on our collective culture, and how the “new normal” will affect our society in the decades to come. Notkin aims to reassure women that they are not alone and encourages them to find happiness and fulfillment no matter what the future holds. A groundbreaking exploration of an essential contemporary issue, Otherhood inspires thought-provoking conversation and gets at the heart of our cultural assumptions about single women and childlessness.

The essays in the volume consider the significance of nation and gender in the context of post-1989 transitions in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and in the context of post-partition India. The texts critique the ways in which narratives of nationhood and womanhood naturalize and essentialize difference and hierarchy. The authors explore uses of sexualized/gendered imagery in defining the space of the nation and sexualized/gendered metaphors of state fatherhood and motherhood in defining the distribution of power within that space. of the nation (e.g. feminized landscapes and battlefields) and sexualized /gendered metaphors of state fatherhood and motherhood in defining the distribution of power within that space. The particular histories of nationalism and partition are different in the countries involved, but commonalities in the narrative structures, state ad nation-building strategies, patriarchal patterns of control, and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are striking. This is particularly so with respect to the ways in which exclusive national identities are constituted through gendered representations of the nation and its members.

Extremely open in its honesty and meticulously researched, (M)otherhood probes themes of infertility, childbirth and reproductive justice, and makes a powerful and urgent argument for the need to tackle society’s obsession with women’s bodies and fertility.

Written in the spaces between otherness and brotherhood, Otherhood combines traditional lyricism with experimentalism, passionate engagement with cold-eyed investigation, and personal details with a depersonalized distance to create a new poetic synthesis.

A lively and provocative look at the modern culture of motherhood and at the social, economic, and political forces that shaped current ideas about parenting What is wrong with this picture? That's the question Judith Warner asks in this national bestseller after taking a good, hard look at the world of modern parenting--at anxious women at work and at home and in bed with unhappy husbands. When Warner had her first child, she was living in Paris, where parents routinely left their children home, with state-subsidized nannies, to join friends in the evening for dinner or to go on dates with their husbands. When she returned to the States, she was stunned by the cultural differences she found toward how people think about effective parenting--in particular, assumptions about motherhood. None of the mothers she met seemed happy; instead, they worried about the possibility of not having the perfect child, panicking as each developmental benchmark approached. Combining close readings of mainstream magazines, TV shows, and pop culture with a thorough command of dominant ideas in recent psychological, social, and economic theory, Perfect Madness addresses our cultural assumptions, and examines the forces that have shaped them. Working in the tradition of classics like Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism, and with an awareness of a readership that turned recent hits like The Bitch in the House and Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It into bestsellers, Warner offers a context in which to understand parenting culture and the way we live, as well as ways of imagining alternatives--actual concrete changes--that might better our lives.

International Public Relations: Perspectives from deeply divided societies is positioned at the intersection of public relations (PR) practice with socio-political environments in divided, conflict and post-conflict societies. While most studies of PR focus on the activity as it is practiced within stable democratic societies, this book explores perspectives from contexts that have tended to be marginalized or uncharted. Presenting research from a diverse range of societies still deeply divided along racial, ethnic, religious or linguistic lines, this collection engages with a variety of questions including how PR practice in these societies may contribute to our understanding of PR theory building. Importantly, it highlights the role of communication strategies for actors that still deploy political violence to achieve their goals, as well as those that use it in building peace, resolving conflict, and assisting in the development of civil society. Featuring a uniquely wide range of original empirical research, including studies from Israel/Palestine, Mozambique, Northern Ireland, former Yugoslavia, former Czechoslovakia, Spain, Malaysia and Turkey, this groundbreaking book will be of interest not only to scholars of public relations, but also political communication, international relations, and peace and conflict studies. With a Foreword by Krishnamurthy Sriramesh, Editor of The Global Public Relations Handbook

It may take a village to raise a child, but increasingly that means a virtual village. While the media may focus on the so-called “mommy wars,” and babyrazzi follow every move of celebrity moms, millions of mothers world-wide are creating online communities. These mommy groups provide an alternative context for understanding how women construct modern motherhood together. Motherhood Online explores the mutifaceted lives that moms live online. Ranging from longitudinal studies to focused explorations of identity, and the newest community context, mommy blogs, this book documents the millions of mommies who have found an outlet online. Whether centered on region, religion, race, or something else altogether, these communities of mothers are creating a new space for mom and allowing many women to maintain a grasp, however tenuous, on sanity in this crazy-making world of modern motherhood.

Annotation Methods and Nationscritiques one of the primary deployments of twentieth-century social science: comparative politics whose major focus has been "nation-building" in the "Third World," often attempting to universalize and render self-evident its own practices. International relations theorists, unable to resist the "cognitive imperialism" of a state-centric social science, have allowed themselves to become colonized. Michael Shapiro seeks to bring recognition to forms of political expression-alternative modes of intelligibility for things, people, and spaces-that have existed on the margins of the nationhood practices of states and the complicit nation-sustaining conceits of social science

John W. Meyer's work broke new grounds in institutional thought in sociology and made him a central thinker for the emerging interdisciplinary field of neoinstitutionalism, while at the same time establishing institutional thought's comparative variant, world society theory. His scholarship plays a prominent role in contemporary social theory, and has shaped research areas such as international relations and globalization, organization theory, and management studies. One of the results of Meyer's wide-ranging and interdisciplinary influence is that his work has appeared in a diverse range of outlets. This book brings together some of John W. Meyer's widely-scattered work, reviewing four decades of scholarship, and adding several original pieces from Meyer's current work. It gathers substantive commentary on social processes, from stratification to globalization to socialization, as well as on key social institutions, from science to religion to law to education. In its expansive review, this book is both about neoinstitutional thought in general and world society theory in particular. This book is both by John W. Meyer and about John W. Meyer: to the compilation of Meyer's canonized and current work, Georg Krücken and Gili S. Drori add an essay on the theoretical and empirical contribution of Meyer's institutional theory, placing it within the broader context of contemporary social theory, globalization research, and organizational studies in both in the United States and Europe.