This collection of over 40 essays, stories, poems, cartoons, and drawings focuses on the motherhood experiences of feminists. These pieces, as varied as the backgrounds of the feminist mothers, reveal exhilarating, excruciating, liberating, and restrictive experiences of biological, adoptive, lesbian, heterosexual, privileged, and poor mothers, some of whom are well known, such as Alicia Ostriker, Judith Arcana, Rita Dove, and Maxine Kumin. Rather than a prescription for feminist mothering, this collection offers to a wide audience of readers a variety of experiences, values, and views on motherhood and issues such as personal and political identity, abortion, fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, adoption, raising biracial and foreign-born children, and homosexual parenting. Recommended for general and informed readers. [See also Feminist Parenting, reviewed above.-Ed.]-Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, N.J.
This compilation of art, essays, poetry, and other writings affords a wide range of opinion on the linked issues of feminism and motherhood in the late twentieth century. After the editors' thoughtful prologue on defining "feminist mothering", contributors, including Maxine Kumin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Rita Dove, and Sharon Olds, examine pregnancy, childbirth, abortion, adoption, child raising, political identities, and other aspects of feminist mothering. Nicole Hollander's cartoon portrait of a harried mom who yearns not for romance with Mel Gibson but for some bathroom privacy nicely counterpoints Sarah Bruckner's reflections on lesbian mothering and her struggles to educate institutions and sandbox playmates. Also noteworthy are Shirley Nelson Garner's ponderings on her physical person, regarded by her children as their property to be fought over fiercely, and Sherry Lee's eloquent discourse on the politics of motherhood and poverty, which captures the stress and powerlessness of single parents caught in never-ending financial binds. An important addition for women's studies collections.
