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In this work, the author's detailed readings of birth stories - both literary and medical - reveal deeply embedded assumptions about how women are viewed and view ourselves. The current debates about natural childbirth as advocated by Sheila Kitzinger, Grantly Read Dick and others, are examined alongside key literary works by writers such as Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Fay Weldon and Toni Morrison.
This Giving Birth by Julie Ann Tharp,Susan MacCallum-Whitcomb Pdf
Compelling essays which underline the central place pregnancy and childbirth hold in women's writing. Embracing three centuries of prose and poetry, the anthology traces the evolution of American maternity literature, exploring the difficulties mothers faced as they struggled to transform themselves from objects into maternal subjects. Women as diverse as Anne Bradstreet, Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, Kate Chopin, Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich all labored to reclaim the birthing process by giving voice to experiences and emotions long devalued by a patriarchal culture. Their voices resonate throughout this collection.
Drawing on medical texts, popular advice books, and online birth plans and birth stories, as well as the results of a childbirth writing survey, Owens considers how women's agency in childbirth is sanctioned, and how it is not. She examines how women's rhetorical choices in writing interact with institutionalized medicine and societal norms. Writing Childbirth reveals the contradictory messages women receive about childbirth, their conflicting expectations about it, and how writing and technology contribute to and reconcile these messages and expectations.
Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today's Best Women Writers by Eleanor Henderson,Anna Solomon Pdf
Thirty acclaimed writers share their personal birth stories—the extraordinary, the ordinary, the terrifying, the sublime, the profane It's an elemental, almost animalistic urge—the expectant mother's hunger for birth narratives. Bookstores are filled with month-by-month pregnancy manuals, but the shelves are virtually empty of artful, entertaining, unvarnished accounts of labor and delivery—the stories that new mothers need most. Here is a book that transcends the limits of how-to guides and honors the act of childbirth in the twenty-first century. Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon have gathered true birth stories by women who have made self-expression their business, including Cheryl Strayed, Julia Glass, Lauren Groff, Dani Shapiro, and many other luminaries. In Labor Day, you'll read about women determined to give birth naturally and others begging for epidurals; women who pushed for hours and women whose labors were over practically before they'd started; women giving birth to twins and to ten-pound babies. These women give birth in the hospital, at home, in bathtubs, and, yes, even in the car. Some revel in labor, some fear labor, some feel defeated by labor, some are fulfilled by it—and all are amazed by it. You will laugh, weep, squirm, perhaps groan in recognition, and undoubtedly gasp with surprise. And then you'll call every mother or mother-to-be that you know and say "You MUST read Labor Day." Contributors: Nuar Alsadir Amy Brill Susan Burton Sarah Shun-lien Bynum Lan Samantha Chang Phoebe Damrosch Claire Dederer Jennifer Gilmore Julia Glass Arielle Greenberg Lauren Groff Eleanor Henderson Cristina Henriquez Amy Herzog Ann Hood Sarah Jefferis Heidi Julavits Mary Beth Keane Marie Myung-Ok Lee Edan Lepucki Heidi Pitlor Joanna Rakoff Jane Roper Danzy Senna Dani Shapiro Anna Solomon Cheryl Strayed Sarah A. Strickley Rachel Jamison Webster Gina Zucker
The brave, wry, irresistible journey of a fiercely independent American woman who finds everything she ever wanted in the most unexpected place. Shufu: in Japanese it means “housewife,” and it’s the last thing Tracy Slater ever thought she’d call herself. A writer and academic, Tracy carefully constructed a life she loved in her hometown of Boston. But everything is upended when she falls head over heels for the most unlikely mate: a Japanese salary-man based in Osaka, who barely speaks her language. Deciding to give fate a chance, Tracy builds a life and marriage in Japan, a country both fascinating and profoundly alienating, where she can read neither the language nor the simplest social cues. There, she finds herself dependent on her husband to order her food, answer the phone, and give her money. When she begins to learn Japanese, she discovers the language is inextricably connected with nuanced cultural dynamics that would take a lifetime to absorb. Finally, when Tracy longs for a child, she ends up trying to grow her family with a Petri dish and an army of doctors with whom she can barely communicate. And yet, despite the challenges, Tracy is sustained by her husband’s quiet love, and being with him feels more like “home” than anything ever has. Steadily and surely, she fills her life in Japan with meaningful connections, a loving marriage, and wonder at her adopted country, a place that will never feel natural or easy, but which provides endless opportunities for growth, insight, and sometimes humor. A memoir of travel and romance, The Good Shufu is a celebration of the life least expected: messy, overwhelming, and deeply enriching in its complications.
The Birth House is the story of Dora Rare, the first daughter to be born in five generations of Rares. As a child in an isolated village in Nova Scotia, she is drawn to Miss Babineau, an outspoken Acadian midwife with a gift for healing. Dora becomes Miss B.’s apprentice, and together they help the women of Scots Bay through infertility, difficult labours, breech births, unwanted pregnancies and even unfulfilling sex lives. Filled with details as compelling as they are surprising, The Birth House is an unforgettable tale of the struggles women have faced to have control of their own bodies and to keep the best parts of tradition alive in the world of modern medicine.
A candid, feminist, and personal deep dive into the science and culture of pregnancy and motherhood Like most first-time mothers, Angela Garbes was filled with questions when she became pregnant. What exactly is a placenta and how does it function? How does a body go into labor? Why is breast best? Is wine totally off-limits? But as she soon discovered, it’s not easy to find satisfying answers. Your obstetrician will cautiously quote statistics; online sources will scare you with conflicting and often inaccurate data; and even the most trusted books will offer information with a heavy dose of judgment. To educate herself, the food and culture writer embarked on an intensive journey of exploration, diving into the scientific mysteries and cultural attitudes that surround motherhood to find answers to questions that had only previously been given in the form of advice about what women ought to do—rather than allowing them the freedom to choose the right path for themselves. In Like a Mother, Garbes offers a rigorously researched and compelling look at the physiology, biology, and psychology of pregnancy and motherhood, informed by in-depth reportage and personal experience. With the curiosity of a journalist, the perspective of a feminist, and the intimacy and urgency of a mother, she explores the emerging science behind the pressing questions women have about everything from miscarriage to complicated labors to postpartum changes. The result is a visceral, full-frontal look at what’s really happening during those nine life-altering months, and why women deserve access to better care, support, and information. Infused with humor and born out of awe, appreciation, and understanding of the female body and its strength, Like a Mother debunks common myths and dated assumptions, offering guidance and camaraderie to women navigating one of the biggest and most profound changes in their lives.
In an unusual combination of reflection, autobiography, theory, and criticism, Cristina Mazzoni looks at childbirth and early maternity from the perspective of an academic mother with three young children. Mazzoni draws upon examples ranging from contemporary advice manuals and novels to the work of turn-of-the-century Italian scientists and women writers, as well as fairy tales, religious texts, psychoanalytic accounts, and feminist theory. Throughout her investigations of the various forces that shape cultural views of pregnancy and childbirth, Mazzoni strives to imagine and deploy maternity as a concept and a reality capable of challenging conventional representations of subjectivity. The questions she addresses dwell on relationship and interdependence, the inseparability of the personal and the political, and the connections and interactions between bodies and power. Maternal Impressions is far more than a book of literary criticism and theory. It reveals the multiple bonds and continuities between the contradictory ways in which pregnancy and childbirth were represented a century ago and the manner in which they still haunt feminist experience today. In her conclusion, Mazzoni points toward a possible ethics of maternity.
While classifying the pregnant condition as a state of captivity might elicit negative connotations, Marotte underscores how American women writers have envisioned the condition of captivity as one in which the pregnant woman can realize, perhaps even find power in, a challenging and disturbing loss of subjectivity. In Captive Bodies, Marotte explores the use of the term "captive," locating in it a multivalent meaning. To be captive in pregnancy is to reach a kind of sublime, a rapturous experience that has both negative and positive effects on the experiencing subject. In working with both primary and theoretical texts, Marotte reveals a genre of "pregnancy literature" that will validate this subject as one worthy of continued intellectual study and critical attention.
And Now We Have Everything by Meaghan O'Connell Pdf
Selected as One of the Best Books of the Year by: National Public Radio, Esquire, Bustle, Refinery29, Thrillist, Electric Literature, Powell's, Autostraddle, BookRiot, Women.com "Smart, funny, and true in all the best ways, this book made me ache with recognition." -- Cheryl Strayed A raw, funny, and fiercely honest account of becoming a mother before feeling like a grown up. When Meaghan O'Connell got accidentally pregnant in her twenties and decided to keep the baby, she realized that the book she needed -- a brutally honest, agenda-free reckoning with the emotional and existential impact of motherhood -- didn't exist. So she decided to write it herself. And Now We Have Everything is O'Connell's exploration of the cataclysmic, impossible-to-prepare-for experience of becoming a mother. With her dark humor and hair-trigger B.S. detector, O'Connell addresses the pervasive imposter syndrome that comes with unplanned pregnancy, the fantasies of a "natural" birth experience that erode maternal self-esteem, post-partum body and sex issues, and the fascinating strangeness of stepping into a new, not-yet-comfortable identity. Channeling fears and anxieties that are still taboo and often unspoken, And Now We Have Everything is an unflinchingly frank, funny, and visceral motherhood story for our times, about having a baby and staying, for better or worse, exactly yourself.
Contemporary Women's Writing by Maroula Joannou Pdf
This wide-ranging study provides a historically grounded account of women's fiction in the 1960s and the 1970s, relating changes in the social structure of Britain and the United States to the literary representations of women's experience.
This innovative book uses the lens of cultural history to examine the development of medicine in Qing dynasty China. Focusing on the specialty of "medicine for women"(fuke), Yi-Li Wu explores the material and ideological issues associated with childbearing in the late imperial period. She draws on a rich array of medical writings that circulated in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century China to analyze the points of convergence and contention that shaped people's views of women's reproductive diseases. These points of contention touched on fundamental issues: How different were women's bodies from men's? What drugs were best for promoting conception and preventing miscarriage? Was childbirth inherently dangerous? And who was best qualified to judge? Wu shows that late imperial medicine approached these questions with a new, positive perspective.
Easy Labor by William Camann,Kathryn Alexander Pdf
THE FIRST COMPLETE, COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO PAIN RELIEF DURING LABOR AND DELIVERY Far too many expectant mothers find themselves unprepared when labor begins and natural techniques don’t effectively manage the pain. This indispensable guide provides reassuring, proven approaches to combining medical and natural techniques to ensure the most comfortable pain-free labor possible. In Easy Labor, you’ll discover • what to expect during labor, and key factors that affect your comfort • the facts on epidurals, safety concerns, and how effectively they reduce pain • the pros and cons of pain-relief medications • complementary and alternative methods, including water immersion, acupuncture, hypnosis, massage, and birth balls • how your choice of hospital or birth center affects your pain-management options • techniques to calm and eliminate the specific fears and stresses associated with childbirth So relax and enjoy your pregnancy, with this important book by your side!