For this assignment, you will:
This page will help you find articles, essays, and speeches. It will also provide resources for secondary sources.
You may be able to find opinion essays by parents in Opposing Viewpoints in Context. To do this, search for a topic and add the term mother*, father* or parent*.
Review only the Viewpoint essays.
Each of the essays include a short introduction about the author and place of publication.
Mothering the Race: Women's Narratives on Reproduction, 1890-1930
From Reconstruction through the Progressive Era, African American and white women were encouraged to view motherhood as a national racial imperative. Tracing the diverse strategies by which women writers and activists responded to this imperative, Mothering the Race examines fictional portrayals of motherhood as they reflect and contribute to broader public debates about race, reproduction, and female agency. Allison Berg argues that the most extended and explicit depictions of motherhood in the early twentieth century seek to present mothers as active agents rather than passive instruments of reproduction. This agency comes at a price, however, and is continually constrained by fixed gender roles and social expectations. Pauline Hopkins reclaims the joys of black motherhood from the brutalizing effects of slavery, while Edith Summers Kelley explores the tensions between artistry and maternity for a Kentucky tenant farmer. Novels of sexual awakening by Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton depict motherhood as personally limiting but racially necessary, while Nella Larsen's bleak picture of maternity reflects the frustrated desires of a biracial New Woman. Berg places these and other fictional representations of maternity in the context of debates over birth control, feminism, and eugenics, revealing motherhood and race as key tropes for discussions of social progress and decline. Beginning with speeches delivered at the 1893 World's Congress of Representative Women, and continuing with close readings of literary and nonliterary texts, Berg shows how the notion of "universal" motherhood fostered cross-racial conversations even as it reinforced racial hierarchy. In an epilogue that brings us to the present moment, Berg demonstrates how two recent films, Beloved and One True Thing, reveal the persistence of racially specific notions of motherhood and the social order they support.
The Voice of the Mother: Embedded Maternal Narratives in Twentieth-Century Women's Autobiographies
Every woman autobiographer is a daughter who writes and establishes her identity through her autobiographical narrative. In" The Voice of the Mother," Jo Malin argues that many twentieth-century autobiographies by women contain an intertext, an embedded narrative, which is a biography of the writer/daughter s mother.Analyzing this narrative practice, Malin examines ten texts by women who seem particularly compelled to tell their mothers stories: Virginia Woolf, Sara Suleri, Kim Chernin, Drusilla Modjeska, Joan Nestle, Carolyn Steedman, Dorothy Allison, Adrienne Rich, Cherrie Moraga, and Audre Lorde. Each author is, in fact, able to write her own autobiography only by using a narrative form that contains her mother s story at its core. These texts raise interesting questions about autobiography as a genre and about a feminist writing practice that resists and subverts the dominant literary tradition.Malin theorizes a hybrid form of autobiographical narrative containing an embedded narrative of the mother. The textual relationship between the two narratives is unique among texts in the auto/biographical canon. This alternative narrative practicein which the daughter attempts to talk both to her mother and about heris equally an autobiography and a biography rather than one or the other. The technique is marked by a breakdown of subject/object categories as well as auto/biographical dichotomies of genre. Each text contains a self that is more plural than singular, yet neither.In addition to being a theoretical and textual analysis, Malin s book is also a mother-daughter autobiography and biography itself. She shares her own story and her mother s story as a way to connect directly with readers and as a way to bridge the gap between theory and practice."
Mothers and Children: Feminist Analyses and Personal Narratives
This feminist exploration of mothers, mothering, and motherhood combines evaluations of empirical and theoretical work with personal narratives by mothers or caregivers. While the authors' analyses yield suggestions for new approaches to motherhood, the narratives vividly demonstrate the relevance of these issues to women's lives. The result is a nuanced picture of the complex realities mothers face, as well as their struggles, joys, and hopes for their children. In the book's first part, "Social Constructions of Motherhood," Chase and Rogers argue that dominant western views of motherhood have been and continue to be detrimental to most mothers and children. In the second part, "Maternal Bodies," the authors attend to the ways that American society and women themselves have regarded the physical aspects of motherhood. Mothers' bodies, the authors contend, have long been objects of cultural and political struggle. The final part, "Mothering in Everyday Life," suggests that only an understanding of the daily realities of mothering will lead to social and political changes promoting the welfare of mothers and children.
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mother* AND rhetoric