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Article: Women Writing Childbirth: Modern Discourses of Motherhood.
- Article from:
- College Literature
- Article date:
- June 1, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 West Chester University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Since all of us are "of woman born," many of us assume, quite mistakenly, that we know what it means to become a mother. Yet the word "mother" may be understood as a reference to both childbirth and child care, a conflation of quite different activities. For a number of reasons - the fact, for example, that it is possible for a woman to give birth and yet decide not to mother her child - it is important to differentiate childbirth from child care. Another good reason for such differentiation is that, while childbirth may be instinctive to some extent, competent child care requires a particular kind of thinking, as Sara Ruddick explains in Maternal Thinking (1989). Yet, ...