When Clara's husband dies and leaves her with two children and a farm she can't run on her own, the bank evicts her small family, and she needs to find a new home fast. She answers an advertisement to be a mail order bride, hoping that the agency will find a place where she can not only be useful, but her children can be loved. Recently widowed Montana rancher, Albert, can't raise his children alone, but won't risk loving another woman. Albert is convinced that he'll never love another woman like his deceased wife. When Clara shows up with two children, he's certain he's made a mistake by taking another woman into his home. Can Clara convince him that together they can be a happy family?

A trenchant critique of sexuality in an age of discipline, where bodies and pleasures have become sites of regulatory power.

The newly pregnant woman faces a multitude of changes in her mind, life, and body, some of which are addressed by traditional medical care but many of which are not. In this holistic guide, the expectant mother will find warm and reassuring advice that will help her stay calm, focused, and energized during this exciting time and beyond.Rather than treat the arrival of a baby as strictly a one-moment-in-time medical event, author Karen Salt provides advice and wisdom to "treat" the whole woman-her emotions and her physical changes-and covers the entire year-long experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period. Salt's holistic approach unveils for mothers-to-be the backbone of the doula role-to provide support, information, advocacy, and facilitation to women during pregnancy, labor, and early motherhood-and teaches her the many ways to use the doula philosophy to nurture herself through the process. From meditation and relaxation exercises, to fitness and nutrition advice to tips for achieving "positive energy living," this comprehensive guide puts mothers in control of their pregnancy, their birthing experience, and their approach to this wonderful and life-altering time.

Revealing the maternal as not a core identity but a site of profound psychic and social division, Hansen illuminates recent decades of feminist thought and explores novels by Jane Rule, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, and Fay Weldon. Unlike traditional stories of abandoned children and bad mothers, these narratives refuse to sentimentalize motherhood's losses and impasses. Hansen embraces the larger cultural story of what it means to be a mother and illuminates how motherhood is being reimagined today. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

In the nineteenth century, infants were commonly breast-fed; by the middle of the twentieth century, women typically bottle-fed their babies on the advice of their doctors. In this book, Rima D. Apple discloses and analyzes the complex interactions of science, medicine, economics, and culture that underlie this dramatic shift in infant-care practices and women’s lives. As infant feeding became the keystone of the emerging specialty of pediatrics in the twentieth century, the manufacture of infant food became a lucrative industry. More and more mothers reported difficulty in nursing their babies. While physicians were establishing themselves and the scientific experts and the infant-food industry was hawking the scientific bases of their products, women embraced “scientific motherhood,” believing that science could shape child care practices. The commercialization and medicalization of infant care established an environment that made bottle feeding not only less feared by many mothers, but indeed “natural” and “necessary.” Focusing on the history of infant feeding, this book clarifies the major elements involved in the complex and sometimes contradictory interaction between women and the medical profession, revealing much about the changing roles of mothers and physicians in American society. “The strength of Apple’s book is her ability to indicate how the mutual interests of mothers, doctors, and manufacturers led to the transformation of infant feeding. . . . Historians of science will be impressed with the way she probes the connections between the medical profession and the manufacturers and with her ability to demonstrate how medical theories were translated into medical practice.”—Janet Golden, Isis

Mother Jones is an award-winning national magazine widely respected for its groundbreaking investigative reporting and coverage of sustainability and environmental issues.

In recent decades, popular culture - from television and film to newspapers, magazines, and best-selling fiction - has focused an enormous amount of attention on mothers. Through feminist, psychoanalytic, sociological, literary, and cultural studies perspectives, the twenty chapters in this book examine an array of current and relevant contemporary topics related to maternal identities such as working, stay-at-home, ambivalent, absent, good, bad, single, teen, elder, celebrity, and lesbian mothers; and issues such as the mommy wars, self-care, pregnancy, abortion, contraception, infanticide, adoption, sex and sexuality, breastfeeding, post-partum depression, fertility, genetics, and reproductive technologies. Contributors from Canada, the United States, Britain, and Australia engage critically and theoretically with stereotypes perpetuated by popular culture media, and chart some of the provocative and liberating ways that we can use and interpret this media to encourage and promote alternative and transformative maternal readings, identities, and practices. Mediating Moms looks at mothers as imaged by and in the media; how mothers mediate or negotiate these images according to their historical, corporeal, and lived personhoods; and how scholars mediate the popular and academic discourses of motherhood as a way of registering, strengthening, and alleviating the tensions between representation and reality. Mediating Moms engages critically with stereotypes perpetuated by popular culture, while mapping some of the provocative and liberating ways that mothers can use the media to transform and reaffirm their identities. Contributors include Jennifer Bell (Alberta), H. Louise Davis (Miami), Irene Gammel (Ryerson), Nicola Goc (Tasmania), Fiona Joy Green (Winnipeg), Latham Hunter (Mohawk), Joanne Ella Johnson, Hosu Kim (Staten Island), Beth O'Connor (Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing), Debra Langan (Wilfrid Laurier), Sally Mennill (British Columbia), Stuart J. Murray (Ryerson), Kathryn Pallister (Red Deer), Maud Perrier (Bristol), Lenora Perry (Texas), Dominique Russell, Jocelyn Stitt (Minnesota), Stephanie Wardrop (Western New England), Imelda Whelehan (Tasmania).