When we imagine life behind the high walls of the fortress-like prisons that were built and modified as the modern prison system was created in the mid-nineteenth century, we conjure up scenes where strict regulation prevailed to control people in body and in mind. An image that poses something of a paradox is that of mothers and their babies living in this carceral environment. This book looks behind the cell doors of these institutions to illuminate the experiences of this group of prisoners. The management of their health alongside the management of penal discipline posed complex conundrums to the prison system. Although rarely fully considered at policy level, this balancing act was negotiated by those who lived and worked in prisons on a daily basis.

How did mothers transform from parents of secondary importance in the colonies to having their multiple and complex roles connected to the well-being of the nation? In the first comprehensive history of motherhood in the United States, Jodi Vandenberg-Daves explores how tensions over the maternal role have been part and parcel of the development of American society. Modern Motherhood travels through redefinitions of motherhood over time, as mothers encountered a growing cadre of medical and psychological experts, increased their labor force participation, gained the right to vote, agitated for more resources to perform their maternal duties, and demonstrated their vast resourcefulness in providing for and nurturing their families. Navigating rigid gender role prescriptions and a crescendo of mother-blame by the middle of the twentieth century, mothers continued to innovate new ways to combine labor force participation and domestic responsibilities. By the 1960s, they were poised to challenge male expertise, in areas ranging from welfare and abortion rights to childbirth practices and the confinement of women to maternal roles. In the twenty-first century, Americans continue to struggle with maternal contradictions, as we pit an idealized role for mothers in children’s development against the social and economic realities of privatized caregiving, a paltry public policy structure, and mothers’ extensive employment outside the home. Building on decades of scholarship and spanning a wide range of topics, Vandenberg-Daves tells an inclusive tale of African American, Native American, Asian American, working class, rural, and other hitherto ignored families, exploring sources ranging from sermons, medical advice, diaries and letters to the speeches of impassioned maternal activists. Chapter topics include: inventing a new role for mothers; contradictions of moral motherhood; medicalizing the maternal body; science, expertise, and advice to mothers; uplifting and controlling mothers; modern reproduction; mothers’ resilience and adaptation; the middle-class wife and mother; mother power and mother angst; and mothers’ changing lives and continuous caregiving. While the discussion has been part of all eras of American history, the discussion of the meaning of modern motherhood is far from over.

This dissertation examines American motherhood in twenty-first century film, particularly as motherhood intersects with the cultural meanings and experiences of blackness, whiteness, and class status. Through textual analysis of select mainstream and independent films, contextualized within an historical, cultural studies, feminist, and critical race theoretical framework, I build on the matricentric feminist scholarship that has long pointed out that motherhood is one of the most intimate forms of women's oppression. Working within the framework I establish, I argue that the role of motherhood has often shifted in order to reflect and perpetuate white supremacist, patriarchal, and capitalist power structures. The result of these shifts at particular social, cultural, and political moments is that layers of meaning have been added to the role of motherhood, but these meanings have never liberated the role. Thus, mothers remain confined within a system that values their work only to the extent that it upholds the status quo. Ultimately, I argue that these films are, in various implicit and explicit ways, pulling back the proverbial curtain to reveal the mechanisms of control within American mothers' lives. I acknowledge that the ubiquitous range of representations of motherhood within twenty-first film will in no way act as liberator for mothers. However, I contend that these films offer a glimpse into the layers of social, cultural, political, and economic constraints that perpetuate motherhood as a practice in ideological confinement.

A warm, wise, and urgent guide to parenting in uncertain times, from a longtime reporter on race, reproductive health, and politics In We Live for the We, first-time mother Dani McClain sets out to understand how to raise her daughter in what she, as a black woman, knows to be an unjust--even hostile--society. Black women are more likely to die during pregnancy or birth than any other race; black mothers must stand before television cameras telling the world that their slain children were human beings. What, then, is the best way to keep fear at bay and raise a child so she lives with dignity and joy? McClain spoke with mothers on the frontlines of movements for social, political, and cultural change who are grappling with the same questions. Following a child's development from infancy to the teenage years, We Live for the We touches on everything from the importance of creativity to building a mutually supportive community to navigating one's relationship with power and authority. It is an essential handbook to help us imagine the society we build for the next generation.

Incorporating the authentic voices and real-life experiences of women, this ground-breaking book focuses on pregnancy and new motherhood in UK prisons. The book delves critically and poignantly into the criminal justice system's response to pregnant and new mothers, shedding light on the tragedies of stillborn babies and the deaths of traumatised mothers in prison. Based on lived realities, it passionately argues the case for enhancing the experiences of pregnant and new mothers involved with the criminal justice system. Aiming to catalyse policy and practice, the book is key reading for criminology and midwifery students and researchers as well as policy makers and practitioners.

The influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 took the lives of between 50 and 100 million people worldwide, and the United States suffered more casualties than in all the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries combined. Yet despite these catastrophic death tolls, the pandemic faded from historical and cultural memory in the United States and throughout Europe, overshadowed by World War One and the turmoil of the interwar period. In Viral Modernism, Elizabeth Outka reveals the literary and cultural impact of one of the deadliest plagues in history, bringing to light how it shaped canonical works of fiction and poetry. Outka shows how and why the contours of modernism shift when we account for the pandemic’s hidden but widespread presence. She investigates the miasmic manifestations of the pandemic and its spectral dead in interwar Anglo-American literature, uncovering the traces of an outbreak that brought a nonhuman, invisible horror into every community. Viral Modernism examines how literature and culture represented the virus’s deathly fecundity, as writers wrestled with the scope of mass death in the domestic sphere amid fears of wider social collapse. Outka analyzes overt treatments of the pandemic by authors like Katherine Anne Porter and Thomas Wolfe and its subtle presence in works by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and W. B. Yeats. She uncovers links to the disease in popular culture, from early zombie resurrection to the resurgence of spiritualism. Viral Modernism brings the pandemic to the center of the era, revealing a vast tragedy that has hidden in plain sight.