Article: Constructing and contesting motherhood, 1750-1950.(feminism)

In some ways, motherhood is one of the most unnatural conceptions on earth. The idea that femininity is, in essence, motherhood, and that mothering means tending our own biological children in a full-time way at home, is an historical construction which came to dominance across the Western world only from the mid-nineteenth century onward. And yet this identity has penetrated deeply into our psyches, as the 2004 ABC television programme Missed Conceptions has poignantly shown, so that women who remain childless often feel desperately incomplete. This article will explore how an earlier prescriptive model of femininity--the good woman as an obedient and productive ...

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