Recommended Reading on Motherhood and Society

To familiarize or learn more about the issues that concern all mothers, we invite you to browse our Recommended Reading list with convenient links to Amazon.com. When you click through to Amazon from Mothers & More, a percentage of your total purchases are credited back to Mothers & More to support our work in improving the lives of mothers through support, education and advocacy.

Contemporary Motherhood and Society

The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued by Ann Crittenden, 2001. Economics journalist Crittenden details how prevailing practices and existing policies undermine the economic well-being of mothers.

Also refer to the following reviews/interviews with Ann Crittenden:

1. Mothers & More FORUM Interview with Ann Crittenden
2. Dunleavey, MP (2002). "Cost of being a stay-at-home mom: $1 million."
3. Bridger, Chet (5/8/2001). "Thank you, mom. You couldn't afford to properly compensate your mother for all the jobs she does-and society doesn't pay her adequately, either." www.buffalonews.com/newslibrary

Unbending Gender: Why Families and Work Conflict and What To Do About It by Joan Williams, 2000. Williams, a legal scholar, explores how and why typical workplace practices and cultural attitudes interfere with balancing paid work and family care.

Mothers & More FORUM interview with Williams

The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values by Nancy Folbre, 2001. Economist Folbre describes the importance of family care in economic terms and envisions a free market that places equal social value on the production of material wealth and caregiving.

Care and Equality: Inventing a New Family Politics by Mona Harrington, 2000. Harrington uses examples of political process and public policy from the Clinton administration as a framework to examine how and why care and caregiving should be placed at the forefront of American political culture.

Taxing Women by Edward J. McCaffery, 1997. Legal scholar McCaffrey identifies a gender bias in the American tax system and details how it impacts women's lives at all levels of the economic scale.

Toward A New Psychology of Women by Jean Baker Miller, PhD, 1986 (second edition). This classic of progressive women's psychology addresses the social and cultural influences on women's experience of identity conflict in their paid work and caregiving roles.

Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-Changed World by Peggy Orenstein, 2001. Orenstein offers insight into the lives of women who have grown up with an unprecedented sense of possibilities yet battling traditional expectations. Interviews with hundreds of women show how women navigate the opportunities and constraints of the personal and the professional lives and come up with unique models for a fulfilling life.

The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren, Amelia Warren Tyagi, 2003. Warren, a business professor, interviewed Americans in bankruptcy, expecting to find irresponsible people with tons of credit card debt. She found people with credit card debt, but usually due to a job loss, a divorce, health problems, or some combination of these. She suggests that families live on one income, a problem for people living in parts of the country where housing is expensive.

Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth by Marilyn Waring, 1999. Also in an out-of-print edition called If Women Counted. Waring, an economist and legislator from New Zealand, has worked to get unpaid work included in the way nations track their economic activity. Surprisingly powerful.

Without a Net: Middle-Class and Homeless (With Kids) in America This young mother of three left her irresponsible husband only to find that while a job as a waitress was not hard to find, an apartment was. All it took to go from married housewife to homeless single mom was a few bad decisions.

Uninsured in America: Life and Death in the Land of Opportunity by Susan Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle, 2005. The authors interviewed more than 120 uninsured people and describe the impact of illness and financial problems on their lives.

Women and their Journey into Motherhood

The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars: Who Decides What Makes a Good Mother? by Miriam Peskowitz, 2005. Parents don't want to fight one another at all; they simply want more options. Moreover, the very sides in this debate don't exist: one third of all mothers work part-time, falling into the vast abyss between full-time careerist and at-home mommy. How does the corporate climate in America force women to claim either a career or a family at any given time? Are the choices women are making -to either adjust careers, "carousel" in and out of the workplace, or quit altogether - really choices at all? And how do we expand the definition of productive worker to include an engaged parent?

Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety by Judith Warner, 2005. Warner's examination of over-involved parenting among 20- to 40-year-old, upper-middle-class, college-educated women living in the East Coast corridor is the mothering book of the season.  Whether shuttling kids to "enriching" after-school activities or worrying about the quality of available child care, the women of Perfect Madness describe a life far out of balance.  Warner argues for a saner society, where everyone would have access to a decent living and enough family time for themselves and their children. Warner spends most of the book explaining how things got to this point, and very briefly suggests a few solutions. Warner explores the nascent "motherhood movement," and is critical of what she perceives to be its early flaws, hastily grouping the varied groups involved together. She does not do justice to the current "movement landscape," leaving out important developments. This movement has deepened since Warner first began writing her book and much of it is left to the reader to discover.

Mommy Guilt: Learn To Worry Less, Focus On What Matters Most, And Raise Happier Kids by Julie Bort, Aviva Pflock, Devra Renner, 2005. The authors of Mommy Guilt wanted to know what causes "mommy guilt" (a feeling that your family is suffering because you can’t do everything). They performed a thorough survey of more than 1,300 parents, and the results point to many factors, some of the most common being yelling, lack of family time, work choices, and tension over school and extracurricular issues. Mommy Guilt explores these factors and many others and offers seven straightforward principles for turning our hectic, stressed, guilt-inducing ways of life into more nurturing, healthful experiences for ourselves and our families.

A Potent Spell: Mother Love and the Power of Fear by Janna Malamud Smith, 2003. Using references that include classic literature, historic sources, recent academic research and personal interviews, the author demonstrates a strong link between cultural ideologies that limit women's social and political power and the manipulation of mothers' sense of emotional attachment to their children. Smith, a psychologist, accurately and eloquently describes the invisible, mental work that places a constant burden of responsibility on contemporary mothers.

Fruitful: A Real Mother in the Modern World by Ann Roiphe, 1999. Roiphe writes in a highly personal and evocative style about her experience of being a mother, wife, and feminist.

Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another by Lauren Slater, 2002. This pregnancy journal offers a strikingly honest portrait of one woman's ambivalence to the approach of motherhood. Slater copes with mental illness, mood-altering medication, and the upheaval of her marriage and identity as she struggles to find meaning in motherhood while honoring her personal ambitions and limitations.

Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood by Naomi Wolf, 2001. Based on Wolf's frustrating experience with prenatal care and a difficult childbirth, the author condemns the standards of contemporary obstetrical practice and proposes reforms. While Wolf ties the demeaning treatment women receive during pregnancy and childbirth to the larger social and economic problems that impact mothers, the book is best read as an account of one woman's journey into motherhood.

The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Our Lives and Why We Never Talk about It by Susan Maushart, 2000. Maushart investigates the personal, psychological and practical conflicts women commonly experience when they enter the realm of motherhood.

Mothers & More FORUM interview with Maushart

The Mother Dance: How Children Change Your Life by Harriet Lerner, PhD, 1998. Lerner, a psychologist, offers a supportive and practical perspective on the life-altering nature of motherhood and practical advice on coping with transitions throughout the course of active motherhood.

Mother Shock: Loving Every (Other) Minute of It by Andrea J. Buchanan, 2003. Buchanan details the unimaginably difficult and unbelievably rewarding process of becoming a mother. Spanning the first three years of her daughter's life, these amusing ruminations on mothering will strike a chord with every new mother.

Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life : Or How I Learned to Love the House, the Man, the Child by Faulkner Fox, 2004. In Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life, her provocative, brutally honest, and often hilarious memoir of motherhood, Faulkner explores the causes of her unhappiness, as well as the societal and cultural forces that American mothers have to contend with.

Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life by Daphne de Marneffe, 2004. De Marneffe brings her experiences and perspectives as a psychologist, feminist, and mother to this absorbing look at the enormous personal pleasure that women derive from mothering.

Historical Perspectives on American Family Life

The Mommy Myth : The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women by Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, 2004. The authors examine the past 30 years of television, radio, movies, magazines and advertising to show that the bar has been increasingly raised for "the standards of good motherhood while singling out and condemning those we were supposed to see as dreadful mothers".

Brave New Families: Studies of Domestic Upheaval in late Twentieth Century America by Judith Stacey, 2000 (second edition). Professor of sociology and women's studies, Stacey examines the family structure of two families living in California's Silicon Valley. She documents the different paths that both families take to create their unique familial structure, which is far removed from the much heralded traditional model.

Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life by Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, 1988. The American family has undergone a series of transformations from its socially sanctified role as the center of society to today's private, independent unit. The authors explain just how the family has adapted and endured these changes.

Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era by Elaine Tyler May, 1988. May, a noted historian, uncovers startling connections between the Cold War and family life and challenges assumptions of the "happy days" of the 1950s.

In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in a Postmodern Age by Judith Stacey, 1996. In a collection of essays, Judith Stacey illustrates the many different types of family structures that are far from being examples of failure or despair, but models of ingenuity and flexibility.

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, 1963. Sections of Friedan's classic work on gender and equality remain highly relevant to the experience of women and mothers in a half-changed world.

The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz, 2000 (second edition). Coontz, a work-family researcher, dispels cultural myths about the norms of "ideal" family life.

No Turning Back. The History of Feminism and the Future of Women by Estelle Friedman, 2002. Stanford professor Estelle Friedman argues in her book that the women's movement has become a global movement which has never been more vibrant. She analyzes what feminism means and how it took root in the United States at the end of the eighteenth century and continue on to today.

Work Life Balance

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich, 2001. Journalist Ehrenreich reports on her first-hand experience of how difficult it is to make ends meet for full-time workers in low-wage jobs.

Take Back Your Time: Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America by John De Graaf (Editor), 2003. This book shows how wide-ranging the impacts of time famine in our society are, and what ordinary citizens can do to turn things around and win a more balanced life for themselves and their children.

The End of Work as We Know It by Nadine Mockler, 2002. A comprehensive guide to using flexible staffing at the professional level to attract the best and the brightest talent and create the most productive workforce possible.

The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure by Juliet Schor, 1992. The author, an economist, presents an excellent discussion of the evolution of the American culture of work and consumerism. Even though our society has doubled its productivity in the past 50 years, we do not have more leisure in our lives. Schor makes compelling arguments for restructuring our work to spend more time on living.

The Second Shift by Arlie Russell Hochschild, 1989. Hochschild examines the dual-earner family and its impact on the traditional family structure.

The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work by Arlie Russell Hochschild, 1997. Hochschild exposes the time bind of American families: parents putting in more hours at work to support their families, which creates more stress at home and a time crunch in both places. In the last chapters, Hochschild proposes that parents unite to liberate themselves from the tyranny of work.

What's Happening to Home: Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in the Information Age by Maggie Jackson, 2002. Not a book exhorting families to return to another time, this is instead a provocative look at work and family that challenges us to examine our lives and find our own solutions. Jackson, a workplace columnist for the Associated Press, shows how work is creeping into the home and asks whether we need a home and what it provides us. From there, she examines what we can do to create a haven. She believes that everyone (woman, man, or child) can contribute to the creation of a home.

Mothers & More FORUM article with Jackson

When Work Doesn't Work Anymore: Women, Work, and Identity by Elizabeth Perle McKenna, 1998. McKenna offers interviews and commentary that address personal and professional conflicts experienced by women trying to balance a rewarding personal or family life with a successful career.

Mothers & More FORUM interview with Perle McKenna

The Mom Economy: The Mothers' Guide to Getting Family-Friendly Work by Elizabeth Wilcox. Wilcox tells moms how to negotiate terms of employment that suit their lifestyles and allow them to meet their kid's needs. This practical volume helps moms get what they need most from the workplace-and find the work that works for them.

The Naked Truth : A Working Woman's Manifesto on Business and What Really Matters by Margaret A. Heffernan, 2004. It's a collection of stories from women about their experience in the workplace with Ms Heffernan tying it all together along the way. She talks a lot about motherhood (she has two kids herself) and about our desire to bring our whole selves to work and how workplaces don't work for women and mothers. At the same time, it's a very uplifting book about the paths many women are forging for themselves and how women are changing the workplace in a way that's better for workplaces too.

Magazine for Mothers

Brain, Child Magazine: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers (www.brainchildmag.com) This award-winning quarterly is devoted to exploring the experience of contemporary motherhood from varied and original perspectives. High quality features include commentary, essays, reviews and fiction.

Mothers & More Keynote Speeches Annual Conference, Chicago, 2001

Note that these are all PDF files. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view and print these documents. When the document opens, click the small menu button that looks like a disk and it will allow you to save the document to your computer.

Pam Hainlin (Mothers & More, Immediate Past President) “Mothers & More: Coming Into Our Own”

Joanne Brundage (Mothers & More-Founder, Executive Director) “Motherhood is Powerful”

Ann Crittenden (Author of The Price of Motherhood) “Unrealized and Unrecognized: The Paradox of Maternal Power”

Joan Williams (Author of Unbending Gender: Why Families and Work Conflict and What to Do About It.) “Celebrating Mothers' Choices: Making New Ones”