Description
Timely and evergreen, engaging and infuriating, personal and universala necessary reintroduction to some of fiction''s most familiar mothers. Cecile Richards, bestselling author of Make Trouble and former president of Planned Parenthood
A smart and engaging look at fifteen classic novels that have shaped our cultural notions of motherhood.
Sweet, supportive, dependable, selfless. Long before she had children of her own, journalist Carrie Mullins knew how mothers should behave. But how? Where did these expectations come fromand, more importantly, are they serving the mothers whose lives they shape? Carrie''s suspicion, later crystallized while raising two small children, was that our culture's idealization of motherhood was not only painfully limiting but harmful, leaving women to cope with impossible standardsstandards rarely created by mothers themselves.
To discover how we might talk about motherhood in a more realistic, nuanced,