Maternal Desire
On Children, Love, and He Inner Life
Description:... Handle: As groundbreaking as The Second Sex and as controversial as Backlash, Maternal Desire will transform forever our thinking about the place of childrearing in women's lives and our culture. Description: Until this moment, women with children have been stranded, either at home ("50s moms") or at work ("super moms"). Many people left out any profound talk about how the desire to parent can be one of the most powerful, joyous, self-actualizing experiences of a woman's life. Maternal Desire creates a new vocabulary for the desire to mother--both for the woman who is at home with her children and for the woman who works. De Marneffe writes with a poetic, vivid, and immediate voice about why the concept of wanting to mother feels so psychologically regressive to us. For too long society has had conservatives on one side, painting a sentimental and coercive picture of motherhood, and progressives on the other, emphasizing the penalties of motherhood: the professional sacrifices, the loss of status, the burden of childcare, etc. De Marneffe's book effectively tramples the political boundaries and celebrates the pleasures of motherhood as a feminist issue, and by doing so, empowers women to "tap into the roots, and fruits, of their own human happiness." She unearths the ideas that have unwittingly shaped the landscape of our inner lives, and in doing so, liberates us from them. Philosophical, accessible, and groundbreaking--Daphne de Marneffe has written a book that finally embraces the contradictions of being a mother. While never discounting the very real losses that motherhood can entail, her book stresses "the pleasures, the self-expression and the moral fulfillment that motheringaffords." This is a revolutionary, joyous, and transforming book.
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