Search results
This book examines women’s experiences of motherhood in England in the years between 1945 and 2000. Based on a new body of 160 oral history interviews, the book offers the first comprehensive historical study of the experience of motherhood in the second half of the twentieth century. Motherhood is an area where a number of discourses and practices meet. The book therefore forms a thematic study looking at aspects of mothers’ lives such as education, health care, psychology, labour market trends and state intervention. Looking through the prism of motherhood provides a way of understanding the complex social changes that have taken place in the post-war world. This book will be essential reading for students and researchers in the field of twentieth-century British social history. However it will also be of interest to scholars in related fields and a general readership with an interest in British social history, and the history of family and community in modern Britain.
their comment is applicable to Elizabethan history plays in general. 2 Those who are represented in such plays, and, indeed, their sources, referred to by A. P. Rossiter as ‘that long line of women broken in the course of great events’, are mostly mothers. 3 The typological link between mother and state discussed in previous chapters meant that motherhood developed importance as a trope by which the dramatisation of political conflict
. Contemporary conduct books associated good motherhood with wifely duty. Potential tensions between the roles of wife and mother were addressed in such texts by confirming that a woman’s first duty was to her husband, but they also emphasised the importance of mutual love and respect in marriage. Such texts also see the role of the wife and mother in part as acting as a kind of physical signifier of her husband’s wealth, status and piety. This is, they
Most women prosecuted for murder had been accused of killing a child, most commonly an infant. Of 292 women, 258 were charged with the murder of a child, in the great majority of instances their own (220 of the 258 women). 1 That most of the women who stood accused were the mother of the victim raises questions about the meanings of motherhood and strongly implicates the wider context of Irish society in these decades, particularly in cases of ‘illegitimate motherhood’. This chapter explores the cases of women charged
7 Illegitimate motherhood, 1922–60 May I place before you my sorrow and plead of you to do something to help my Eldest Daughter she is Eldest of 14 children … She is 20 years old … in the year of 1933 she had a Baby Girl. She is four year old I then placed the case in Hands of Rev Fr D. cc. failing to get the Boy to marry her she was only 16 years old. I acted on the advice of Fr D. I took the Baby a Brough (sic) it up as one of my own … I let her mother go out to work. She picket (sic) up with another Boy and he would not marry her because she had a child. She
Seing my fleshe and bloude, Against itselfe 1 Gascoigne, Jocasta University plays and politics In the second half of the sixteenth century, a renewed interest in classical drama stimulated the development of new options for dramatising motherhood. Figures such as Medea, Agave and Jocasta offered novel, if alarming, models
, provided an education that prepared girls for marriage and motherhood. 30 With rapid post-war economic development and urbanisation, interventions in colonial gender orders to diffuse discontent through the spread of domesticity were intensified as, in the words of the colonial expert, Margery Perham, ‘raw tribesmen turned proletariat’ and ‘runaway tribal
As its title suggests, Danny Boyle‘s 28 Days Later is a zombie movie about procreation. While this idea – a human menstrual cycle alluding to the multiplication of the undead – may seem at first to be paradoxical, such an idea is hardly a new one in zombie mythology. Boyle‘s film borrows from the traditional Gothic through a number of standard Gothic tropes in order to define the character of the films female protagonist as one necessary for her biological or reproductive role and to ward off possible domestic chaos and invasion through her role as mother. The film acknowledges an idea of woman as objectified and violated in both a postfeminist, but strangely also traditionally Gothic definition of woman as sex object and mother who is necessary for this biological, reproductive role as well as her identity, not as survivor, but as domestic caretaker.
Special Envoy, Jolie has carved out a role for herself in global refugee activism, with many photographs of her visiting refugee camps around the world being visually circulated online. Her refugee activism, moreover, has emerged from her broader pursuits of global motherhood and maternal care of distant other women, ( Bergman Rosamond, 2016 , 2020a , 2020b ; Richey and Brockington, 2020 ). That commitment rests on her subjective
vulnerable per se … ; they are made more vulnerable because of pre-existing inequalities in so-called peaceful societies’ ( 2010 : 176). In certain contexts, some women may take longer to flee a threat (and thus have fewer chances of surviving) because they make efforts to protect their children, as well as the elderly and sick – a behaviour rooted in socially constructed ideas of motherhood and of women’s roles as caretakers ( Pincha, 2008 : 21–2). Some people