J300: History of Motherhood
Here are some search tips and resources that you may find helpful for your final project, as well as a selection of relevant primary and secondary sources (selected by Professor Knott). If you're stuck in your research at any point, remember that you can get help from the Library--either use our Ask a Librarian service, or email the History Librarian, Celestina Savonius-Wroth (cewroth@indiana.edu), the Gender Studies Librarian, Carrie Donovan (cdonovan@indiana.edu) or the Sociology Librarian, Moira Marsh (molsmith@indiana.edu).
If you got here through Oncourse, please click here to open this page in a new window (some resources won't work inside Oncourse).
On this page: General search tips - Finding secondary sources - Selected secondary sources - Finding primary sources - Selected primary sources - Additional resources
General Search tips
Use IUCAT (IU Libraries online catalog) and WorldCat (giant superdatabase of US library holdings) to find both primary and secondary sources. Both databases depend on Library of Congress subject headings; in IUCAT, use the Advanced Search and try one or more of the following in the subject field:
mothers
motherhood
motherhood history
child rearing
mothers in literature
mother and child in literature
pregnancy
pregnant women
childbirth
For best results, use a general subject heading PLUS more specific keywords. (Sample search: subject=motherhood, keyword=adoption)
Use the language option to limit your results to sources in English.
The keywords sources, correspondence, personal narratives, documents and chronicles may help you find primary sources.
Don't forget that you can often find primary sources simply by limiting by date of publication. (Sample search: subject=abortion, publication date=1900-1950)
To get a quick idea of what might be available on a topic, and to find book reviews, try OneSearch (cross-searches books, journal articles, etc--to weed out non-scholarly secondary sources, limit to scholarly (peer reviewed) journals).
JSTOR may be helpful for primary sources as well as secondary sources (it includes many journals that began publication in the 19th century).
Resources for finding secondary sources
Remember, you may be able to use older materials in some of these databases as primary sources (for example, if you are writing about mothers in the 1970s, a sociological or medical study published in the 1970s might be an interesting primary source.)
America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts - core research databases for scholarly publications about history
Sociological Abstracts - research in sociology
PsycINFO - research in psychology
MedLine (EBSCO) - medical research. See also CINAHL Plus with Full Text (nursing)
Contemporary Women's Issues (CWI), Gender Studies Database and GenderWatch - three sources for research in Gender Studies (these databases contain a mix of scholarly articles, news, advocacy and opinion pieces, so look for markers of a scholarly article --footnotes, use of primary sources, etc.)
Selected secondary sources
General, Motherhood
Ann Taylor Allen , Feminism and motherhood in Western Europe 1890-1970: the maternal dilemma(2005)
Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden (eds.), Mothers & motherhood : readings in American history (1997): essay collection
Angela Davies, Modern motherhood : women and family in England, c. 1945-2000(2012): examines women's experiences of motherhood in England in the years between 1945 and 2000; based on 160 oral history interviews
Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage (2005): on poor single mothers in the contemporary US.
Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and white : race and sex in American liberalism, 1930-1965 / Ruth Feldstein (Cornell UP, 2000): the main commentary on mothering and race in 20th century
Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang and Linda Rennie Forcey (eds.), Mothering : ideology, experience and agency(1994): interdiscplinary feminist collection
Ann C. Hall and Mardia J. Bishop (eds.), Mommy angst : motherhood in American popular culture (2009): explores contemporary cultural anxiety about motherhood from a media studies perspective
Andrea O’Reilly, Twenty-first Century Motherhood: Experience, Identity, Policy, Agency (2010): considers new developments such the Internet, interracial surrogacy, raising transchildren, male mothering, intensive mothering, queer parenting, the applications of new biotechnologies, and mothering in the post-9/11 era; both American and international
Rebecca Jo Plant, Mom : the transformation of motherhood in modern America (2010): academic analysis of “monism”, feminism, and mother love; examines how motherhood came to be viewed as a more private and partial component of modern female identity in the 20th century; includes very thorough and up-to-date bibliography
Ellen Ross, “New Thoughts on ‘the Oldest Vocation’: Mothers and Motherhood in Recent Feminist Scholarship,” Signs 20.2 (1995), 397-413: analysis of historical work on feminism and motherhood in the early 1990s, which extends Ann Snitow’s 1990 essay (on the period since 1963)
Ann Snitow, “Feminism and Motherhood: An American Reading,” Feminist Review 40 (1992), 33-51: examines history of feminist writing about motherhood from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique to Snitow’s 1992 present, as a way of confronting her own ambivalence about motherhood.
Lauri Umansky, Motherhood Reconceived: Feminism and the Legacies of the Sixties (1996)
Pregnancy and Reproductive Politics
Laura R. Woliver, The political geographies of pregnancy (2002): feminist analysis; emphasizes technology, surrogacy and other contemporary issues
Rickie Solinger, Pregnancy and power: a short history of reproductive politics in America (2005): includes chapters on the rise of choice 1960-1980,how the aftermath of Roe v. Wade affected fetuses, teenage girls, prisoners, and ordinary women, after 1980
Loretta J. Ross, “African-American Women and Abortion, 1800-1970” in Theorizing Black Feminism: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women (1993): on activism of Black women to obtain abortions and reproductive freedom
Childbirth
Françoise Barbara Freedman, “Changing medical birth rites in Britain 1970-2010,” in Fatemeh Ebtehaj et al, Birth rites and rights on behalf of the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group (2011), 29-50: uses anthropological concept of rite to explore experiences of birth
Birgitte Jordan, Birth in Four Cultures: A Cross-Cultural investigation of Childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden and the United States (4th edition, 1992): anthropological investigation
Judith Walzer Leavitt, Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950 (1986): by leading historian of birth
Joan J. Mathews and Kathleen Zadak, “The Alternative Birth Movement in the United States: History and Current Status,” Women and Health 17 (1991), 39-58: traces 1) the historical antecedents and social factors leading to the alternative birthing movement, 2) describes the types of alternative birthing methods, 3) describes ways the obstetrical community has maintained and rationalized dominance over the birthing process.
Christine McCourt (ed.), Childbirth, midwifery and concepts of time (2009): anthropological analysis by British-based professor of maternal health
Jessica Mitford, American Way of Birth (1992), with new foreword: journalistic but historical account
Richard K. Reed, Birthing fathers : the transformation of men in American rites of birth (2005)
Richard W. Wertz and Dorothy C. Wertz, Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America (1977)
Infertility, Miscarriage and Stillbirth
Linda L. Layne, Motherhood lost: a feminist account of pregnancy loss in America (2003)
Margaret Marsh, The Empty Cradle: Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present (1996): long duree account
Elaine Tyler May, Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (1995)
Lactation and Feeding
Janet Golden, A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle
Lynn Y. Weiner, “Reconstructing Motherhood: The La Leche League in Postwar America,” Journal of American History 80 (1994), 1357-81: on the major national organization promoting breastfeeding
Adoption
Barbara Melosh, Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption (2002)
Julie Berebitsky, Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood, 1851-1950 (2000): based on mass circulation magazines.
Child-Rearing Expertise and Experience
Christina Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare Advice from John Locke to Gina Ford (revised edition, 2007): analysis of changing advice, including recent chapters
Peter N. Stearns, Anxious parents : a history of modern childrearing in America (2003): historical analysis of rise of anxiety
Ann Hulbert, Raising America: Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice about Children ((New York: Knopf, 2003): on 20th century
Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English (eds.), For her own good : two centuries of the experts' advice to women (2005): reissue of a 1978 feminist classic, with a 2005 introduction and afterword describing a
Consumerism
Peggy Orenstein, Cinderella ate my daughter : dispatches from the front lines of the new girlie-girl culture (2011): popular analysis of the girlie-girl movement
Janelle S. Taylor, Linda L. Layne, and Danielle F. Wozniak (eds.), Consuming motherhood (2004): essay collection
Ethnicity
Susan Matoba Adler, “Social, Historical, Political and Cultural Settings of Japanese American Motherhood, 1940-1990,” in Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden (eds.), Mothers & motherhood : readings in American history (1997): on Japanese American mothers in the midwest.
Sydney Stahl Weinberg, “Jewish Mothers and immigrant Daughters: Positive and Negative Role Models,” in Mothers and Motherhood, Journal of American Ethnic History 6 (1987), 39-55
History of the Family
Stephanie Coontz, American families : a multicultural reader (2nd edition, 2008): essay collection highlighting range of American family life; including 20th century chapters on a range of ethnic experiences, on immigrant families, and on class
Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American families and the nostalgia trap (1992)
Isabel Heinemann (ed.), Inventing the modern American family : family values and social change in 20th century United States (2012): recent essay collection
Beyond Anglophone Environments
Maithreyi Krishnaraj (ed.), Motherhood in India : glorification without empowerment?
Tina Phillips Johnson, Childbirth in republican China : delivering modernity (2011): on reproduction in twentieth-century China; examines treatment of women and children; connects their lives to egislation regarding reproduction and birth, maternal and child health
Resources for finding primary sources
Magazines: Readers Guide Retrospective 1890-1982 (US popular magazines--for post-1982, use Readers Guide Full Text Mega), Academic Search (EBSCO) (limit results to "magazines")
Newspaper collections: LexisNexis Academic (for major and regional US papers, 1980s-present), ProQuest Historical Newspapers (selection of prominent US papers, 1800s-present), many more on the Library's Old News page.
Other digitized primary sources of possible interest: British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries and North American Women's Letters and Diaries, Defining Gender Online (advice literature for women, 1450-1910), Mass Observation Online (massive database of field observations of every day life in Britain, 1937 - 1965).
Selected primary sources
Blogs and websites:
http://thefeministbreeder.com/ (“where edgy feminismfinds modern motherhood”)
http://www.mumsnet.com/(mainstream British parenting site)
http://www.mothersmovement.org/(“for mothers and others who think about social change”)
http://www.theunnecesarean.com/blog/“pulling back the curtain on the unnecessary cesarean section epidemic”
http://www.askdrsears.com/ (attachment parenting guru)
http://armymomstrong.com/ (blog by mother of an American soldier)
http://www.momsrising.org/ (“where moms and people who love them go to change our world”; leftist)
http://www.christianmom.com (“online fellowship and friendship for moms of all ages”; Christian)
http://www.hipmama.com/ (independent online ‘zine)
Personal Writings
Patricia Bell-Scott et al (eds.), Double Stitch: Black Women Write About Mothers and Daughters (1991): collection of black female writing, mainly daughters writing about mothers (not mothers writing about themselves)
Peter Carey, “A Letter to Our Son, “Jill Dawson and Margo Daly (eds.), Gas and Air: Tales of Pregnancy and Beyond (London, 2002), 36-56: birth story penned bythe Australian novelist, aged 44, composed with his 8 month old son asleep in the next room
Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001): thematizes pregnancy, birth, early weeks of babyhood, colic, lactation, how-to books, household chaos, sleep
Moyra Davey (ed), Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood (2001): strong collection of writings, composed 1930s to 2001 and chronologically arranged, in a variety of genres: journals, memoir, essays (typically literary analysis), then fiction.
Joanne S. Frye, Biting the moon : a memoir of feminism and motherhood(2012): academic memoir partly set in Bloomington
Jane Lazarre, The Mother Knot (1976): 1970s memoir of early motherhood by white feminist and writer, and mother to a biracial son
Shari MacDonald Strong(ed.), The maternal is political : women writers at the intersection of motherhood and social change(2008): collection of commissioned writings by American and other women on politicking and mothering
Anne Mavor, Strong hearts, inspired minds: 21 artists who are mothers tell their stories (1996): short accounts by mothers who are artists
Cherríe Moraga, Waiting in the wings: portrait of a queer motherhood (1997): memoir thematizing lesbian, Hispanic American and older motherhood; discusses artificial insemination
Mary Thomas (ed.), Post-war mothers: childbirth letters to Grantly Dick-Read, 1946-1956 (Rochester, 1997): collection of letters from mothers to natural childbirth guru
Anne Tyler, Digging to America (2007): novel thematizing international adoption in a multicultural America
Susan T. Viguers, With Child: One Couple’s Journey to Their Adopted Children (1989): one of the best memoirs on infertility and adoption; Viguers and her husband grapple with infertility and undertake a private US and an international Colombian adoption within a few months of one another.
Ayelet Waldman, Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (2009): memoir by Berkeley-based writer and mother of four
Miscellaneous Further Primary Sources
Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (1975, New York, 1997): influential anthropological study of black welfare mothers in the 1960s, which built on their activism in that decade; can be read as a direct source for 1960-75
Additional resources
last updated 3/17/13
