Ideology Of Motherhood Quotes

This idealization of motherhood is essentially a means of keeping women from developing a sexual consciousness and from breaking through the barriers of sexual repression, of keeping alive their sexual anxieties and guilt feelings. The very existence of woman as a sexual being would threaten authoritarian ideology; her recognition and social affirmation would mean its collapse.

Mother is in herself a concrete denial of the idea of sexual pleasure since her sexuality has been placed at the service of reproductive function alone. She is the perpetually violated passive principle; her autonomy has been sufficiently eroded by the presence within her of the embryo she brought to term. Her unthinking ability to reproduce, which is her pride, is, since it is beyond choice, not a specific virtue of her own.

[The ideology of beauty] has grown strong to take over the work of social coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity, no longer can manage. It is seeking right now to undo psychologically and covertly all the good things that feminism did for women materially and overtly.

If they [the mothers] use different vocabularies, they may share a postmodern feminist "body politics" - in this instance an awareness that maternal breastfeeding carries no inherent, "natural" meaning, that it is always located where historically specific, culturally articulated interests and power relations collide with the recalcitrance of the body.

More than economic dependency of the wife and children on the husband and father is needed to preserve the institution of the authoritarian family [and its support of the authoritarian state]. For the suppressed classes, this dependency is endurable only on condition that the consciousness of being a sexual being is suspended as completely as possible in women and in children. The wife must not figure as a sexual being, but solely as a child-bearer. Essentially, the idealization and deification of motherhood, which are so flagrantly at variance with the brutality with which the mothers of the toiling masses are actually treated, serve as means of preventing women from gaining a sexual consciousness, of preventing the imposed sexual repression from breaking through and of preventing sexual anxiety and sexual guilt-feelings from losing their hold. Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of the authoritarian ideology. Conservative sexual reform has always made the mistake of merely making a slogan of "the right of woman to her own body," and not clearly and unmistakably regarding and defending woman as a sexual being, at least as much as it regards and defends her as a mother. Furthermore, conservative sexual reform based its sexual policies predominantly on the function of procreation, instead of undermining the reactionary view that equates sexuality and procreation.

The sociologist Sharon Hays coined the term intensive mothering in 1996 when she detailed the unreasonable, gendered demands society had increasingly placed on mothers since the 1980s. In the 1980s and 1990s, as more women in North America became educated and began entering the labor force, the intensive-mothering ideology arose as a means to redomesticate women through motherhood.

To be critical of pronatalism is not equivalent to condemning parenthood; it is to shed light on its prescriptive nature and propose that it would be socially and ecologically desirable that parenthood cease to be considered as a natural instinct and/or a religious or a social duty. The ‘biological clock’ that some women claim to hear ticking is also a ‘social clock’ reminding them that whatever else may be going on in their lives, motherhood is their destiny, the road to social acceptance and integration. It is because parenthood is not a natural instinct, but socially and prescriptively imposed, that many people unsuited for family formation bear or adopt children; domestic violence and child abuse result from the often deadly interaction between sexual inequality and pronatalism. Today, pronatalist ideologies and social pressures continue to curtail women’s opportunities and ability to shape their future, and place them in a disadvantaged position relative to men, thus sustaining the inequality between men and women despite considerable gains in sexual liberation, civil rights, and economic opportunities for women.

Regardless of the structure a society has, certain consequences exist as a result of biological sex. Women's bodies tell them when they are going to be mothers, while men become aware they are going to be fathers when a woman informs them. No mother can doubt her motherhood, while a father can never be fully sure. Men can abandon a foetus by walking out the door, women require a doctor and abortion rights. Men can have hundreds of babies a month, women can have one baby a year. Becoming a mother involves physical pain, becoming a father does not. Being a mother alters one's body, being a father does not. Women can feed babies with their bodies, men cannot. Women bleed every month, men do not. A penis can injure a vagina, a vagina cannot injure a penis.

AstroMama is a motherhood brand that was formed on the ideologies of astrology. It's a lifestyle movement that accompanies parents, particularly mothers, in their parenting journey. AstroMama shares tips on how to nurture and water the offspring based on what the Planets originally intended.

AstroMama is a motherhood brand that has been formed on the ideologies of astrology. It's a lifestyle movement that accompanies parents, particularly mothers, in their parenting journey. AstroMama shares tips on how to nurture and water the offspring based on what the Planets originally intended.

ZodiacMama is a motherhood brand that has been formed on the ideologies of astrology. It's a lifestyle movement that accompanies parents, particularly mothers, in their parenting journey. AstroMama shares tips on how to nurture and water the offspring based on what the Planets originally intended.

ZodiacMama is a parenthood brand that has been formed on the ideologies of astrology. It's a lifestyle movement that accompanies parents, particularly mothers, in their parenting journey. ZodiacMama shares tips on how to nurture and water the offspring based on what the Planets originally intended.

ZodiacMama is a parenthood brand that's based on the ideologies of astrology. It's a lifestyle movement that accompanies parents, particularly mothers, in their parenting journey. ZodiacMama shares tips on how to nurture and water the offspring based on what the Planets originally intended.

Let us question why we are losing so many teenage girls and young women to an ideology that encourages them to discard all things that represent womanhood and motherhood. Moms are often thrown out, along with the young women’s healthy breast tissue. Being a woman is a gift if not rejected.

What I do articulate throughout Back to the Breast is that the ideology of natural motherhood shaped the path of breast-feeding’s return to popularity in every way. The marriage of breastfeeding to the ideology of natural motherhood was an important component in the early back-to-the-breast movement and this fact has continued to have meaningful implications for breastfeeding practice up through today. While it has competed with other ideological constructions in shaping ideas and practices surrounding breastfeeding over much of the last century, natural motherhood has fundamentally influenced how Americans today have come to think about breastfeeding. In the chapters that follow, I focus on the persistence in the belief by countless Americans over the past century that breastfeeding holds value and meaning that transcends nutritional adequacy and infant survival. I trace the efforts, science, struggles, triumphs, and failures of the people and ideas behind the back-to-the-breast movement over much of the last century so that we might better imagine a society in which all mothers receive the support they need to make their experiences as mothers personally rewarding and fulfilling.

Because she is the channel of life, woman as mythic mother lives at one remove from life. A woman who defines herself through her fertility has no other option. So a woman who feels she has been deprived of motherhood is trebly deprived—of children; of the value of herself as mother; and of her own self, as autonomous being.

A dominant ideology represents the view of a dominant group, often by making the existing order seem inevitable. Thus, by depicting motherhood as natural, a patriarchal ideology of mothering locks women into biological reproduction, and denies them identities and selfhood outside mothering.