Motherhood Studies is a recognized field of study [1] coined by Dr. Andrea O'Reilly. [2] It is related to maternal feminism.
The idea of motherhood studies was influenced by Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution in 1976. It consists of three interconnected categories of inquiry: motherhood as institution, motherhood as experience, and motherhood as identity or subjectivity. [2] Motherhood studies is often referred to as a feminist practice. Feminist mothering critiques the sexist and patriarchal values that contemporary society upholds. [3] Part of feminist mothering is maternal activism. [4] Feminist mothering also involves mothers reinventing or reconstructing their own mothering practice to minimize inequality in the domestic division of labor, to increase their autonomy, leisure, waged work as well as paid and unpaid leave. [5] Like maternal feminism, feminist mothering also involves a feminist politics of birth, breastfeeding and embodied attachment to children. It is the extension of an ethic of care to children and beyond that to society.
Samira Kawash argues that "the marginalization of motherhood in feminist thought was not only a political rejection of maternalist politics construed as a conservative backlash to feminism". [6]
One of the leading portals of mother studies is The m/other voices foundation, a non-profit organization in The Netherlands. It emerged in 2014 from Deirdre M. Donoghue's research project (m)other voices: the maternal as an attitude, maternal thinking and the production of time and knowledge at Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art. The project's purpose was to initiate discourse and the doing of maternal theory within arts and other fields of cultural production and to reflect on the maternal figure as a thinker and a producer of knowledge.
More and more organized initiatives within academic communities are starting such as the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement , a feminist scholarly and activist organization on mothering-motherhood based in Toronto, Canada.
The Journal of the Motherhood Initiative re-launched in 2010 as a continuation of the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering that started in 1999.
Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse". Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities, and valorized what she coined the "lesbian continuum", which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity that impacts and fills women's lives.
A mother is the female parent of a child. A woman may be considered a mother by virtue of having given birth, by raising a child who may or may not be her biological offspring, or by supplying her ovum for fertilisation in the case of gestational surrogacy.
Women's studies is an academic field that draws on feminist and interdisciplinary methods to place women's lives and experiences at the center of study, while examining social and cultural constructs of gender; systems of privilege and oppression; and the relationships between power and gender as they intersect with other identities and social locations such as race, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, and disability.
Third-wave feminism is a feminist movement that began in the early 1990s, prominent in the decades prior to the fourth wave. Grounded in the civil-rights advances of the second wave, Gen X third-wave feminists born in the 1960s and 1970s embraced diversity and individualism in women, and sought to redefine what it meant to be a feminist. The third wave saw the emergence of new feminist currents and theories, such as intersectionality, sex positivity, vegetarian ecofeminism, transfeminism, and postmodern feminism. According to feminist scholar Elizabeth Evans, the "confusion surrounding what constitutes third-wave feminism is in some respects its defining feature."
Lesbian feminism is a cultural movement and critical perspective that encourages women to focus their efforts, attentions, relationships, and activities towards their fellow women rather than men, and often advocates lesbianism as the logical result of feminism. Lesbian feminism was most influential in the 1970s and early 1980s, primarily in North America and Western Europe, but began in the late 1960s and arose out of dissatisfaction with the New Left, the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, sexism within the gay liberation movement, and homophobia within popular women's movements at the time. Many of the supporters of Lesbianism were actually women involved in gay liberation who were tired of the sexism and centering of gay men within the community and lesbian women in the mainstream women's movement who were tired of the homophobia involved in it.
Dorothy Edith Smith was a British-born Canadian ethnographer, feminist studies scholar, sociologist, and writer with research interests in a variety of disciplines. These include women's studies, feminist theory, psychology, and educational studies. Smith was also involved in certain subfields of sociology, such as the sociology of knowledge, family studies, and methodology. She founded the sociological sub-disciplines of feminist standpoint theory and institutional ethnography.
Cultural feminism is a term used to describe a variety of radical feminism that attempts to revalue and redefine attributes culturally ascribed to femaleness. It is also used to describe theories that commend innate differences between women and men.
Nancy Julia Chodorow is an American sociologist and professor. She began her career as a professor of Women's studies at Wellesley College in 1973, and from 1974 on taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, until 1986. She then was a professor in the departments of sociology and clinical psychology at the University of California, Berkeley until she resigned in 1986, after which she taught psychiatry at Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance. Chodorow is often described as a leader in feminist thought, especially in the realms of psychoanalysis and psychology.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society is a peer-reviewed feminist academic journal. It was established in 1975 by Jean W. Sacks, Head of the Journals Division, with Catharine R. Stimpson as its first editor in Chief, and is published quarterly by the University of Chicago Press. Signs publishes essays examining the lives of women, men, and non-binary people around the globe from both historical and contemporary perspectives, as well as theoretical and critical articles addressing processes of gendering, sexualization, and racialization.
Terri Hawkes is a Canadian actress and writer, known for playing Kelly Hennenlotter in the horror film, Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, Adrienne in Beverly Hills 90210, Wendy Masters in General Hospital, and for being the second English dub voice actress of the title character of the Japanese anime Sailor Moon. She is the daughter of politician Jim Hawkes.
Global feminism is a feminist theory closely aligned with post-colonial theory and postcolonial feminism. It concerns itself primarily with the forward movement of women's rights on a global scale. Using different historical lenses from the legacy of colonialism, global feminists adopt global causes and start movements which seek to dismantle what they argue are the currently predominant structures of global patriarchy. Global feminism is also known as world feminism and international feminism.
Feminism is a broad term given to works of those scholars who have sought to bring gender concerns into the academic study of international politics and who have used feminist theory and sometimes queer theory to better understand global politics and international relations as a whole.
Andrea O'Reilly is a writer on women's issues and currently a Professor in the School of Women's Studies at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
An othermother is a woman caring for children who are not biologically her own.
Demeter Press is a not-for-profit feminist academic publisher headquartered in Ontario, Canada. Founded in 2006 by Andrea O'Reilly, it focuses on the topic of motherhood and is partnered with the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI), formerly the Association for Research on Mothering at York University. It is named in honour of the goddess Demeter.
Feminist ethics is an approach to ethics that builds on the belief that traditionally ethical theorizing has undervalued and/or underappreciated women's moral experience, which is largely male-dominated, and it therefore chooses to reimagine ethics through a holistic feminist approach to transform it.
Maternal feminism is the belief of many early feminists that women as mothers and caregivers had an important but distinctive role to play in society and in politics. It incorporates reform ideas from social feminism, and combines the concepts of maternalism and feminism. It was a widespread philosophy among well-to-do women in the British Empire, particularly Canada, from the late 19th century until after World War I (1914–18). The concept was attacked by later feminists as accepting the paternalist view of society and providing an excuse for inequality.
Joanne Schultz Frye is a Professor Emerita of English and Women's Studies at the College of Wooster. Frye is known for her feminist literary criticism and interdisciplinary inquiry into motherhood. She specializes in research on fiction by and about women, such as the work of Virginia Woolf, Tillie Olsen, and Jane Lazarre.
The Australian Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (AMIRCI) is a national not-for-profit advocacy and research group (registered in the state of Queensland) and consists of a network of scholars, writers, activists, policy makers, educators, artists and practitioners whose work explores the experience of women as mothers, mothering and motherhood.
The Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI) is a Canadian scholarly research and advocacy group for mothering-motherhood.